Always playing a lot of Gauntlet and healing just really irritates me. I love running healing in games! Why is it so frustrating here? Having some healing is absolutely required to make it up into the Gauntlet beyond level 6 and healing is extremely unreliable at present. Here are my general opinions and suggestions to make healing not feel so bad for players. Apologies if my ramblings seem ingracious, I really am trying to be constructive in my criticism!
Siphon Scratch: The staple of most decent healing units, but given it heals a random injured unit. It often misses the most necessary target and you end up giving a heal to a barely damaged party member instead of the one about to be knocked out. This is very frustrating to see in match after match. Especially since bringing in MORE healing isn't a solution, as Gauntlet runs fail if the player times-out from too many turns, favoring the computer and making tank/healing builds completely unviable.
Siphon Scratch should always heal your lowest health unit, then it might actually do the intended job. If it needed to be reduced healing to make this more balanced, that's fine, but don't undertune it so much it just becomes pointless.
Festive Feels: Basically useless as is and very frustrating to have on any unit. Needs a similar target priority (maybe targeting poisoned/bleeding units over non-DOTed units?) as well as a flat buff. The current numbers make it a complete waste of a turn (for players, like most things, the computer is greatly advantaged in using it) as 10% health over two turns barely mitigates bleeds and only effects two units (the caster and a random). This should at *least* mitigate a dot worth of poison, which absolutely chews through units at present. Poison feels as strong as it was back in EA, when it was literally bugged. I would think healing exists to counter poison, but it seems like it is the other way around... and healing isn't good enough to need a counter at all, so poison just eats everything alive.
Blossom Maul: Another VERY frustrating ability in action. This misses or fizzles out SO often it's absurd to watch. It would be one thing if it could just miss, but it will also heal for 0 if it hits a shield, making it very unreliable. Would feel better if this always healed at least *something* worth on misses or when hitting a shield. At present it's very obnoxious to see three Jocol specials all get dodged or hit a shield giving no healing when it's basically always needed because every companion unit hits like an absolute truck compared to wolves. Making this do less damage, but heal more reliably would be best, imo.
Healing Synergy: I actually think this is in a pretty good spot, it feels decent at 3 and strong at 6 when it can ACTUALLY keep up with a few turns of poison. Has the reasonable downside of lacking damage to build. Would be more viable if players didn't default loss time-outs and tank builds could be a real thing outside of computer comps.
A lot of this plays into my general feelings that Gauntlet needs more individual mechanics of its own. At present, it feels like it is not the forgotten element when things are being rebalanced for Campaign/Arena.
I'll probably make another suggestion later about further Gauntlet specific ideas, because I LOVE Gauntlet, it is my favorite feature on the site. However, it's in a very frustrating state at the moment and I think very alienating to the average player with present difficulty and high barrier of entry for it to be rewarding.
Fixing up healing would be a big first step to making it not feel so harsh. Thanks for reading!!
