Reusable (and painful) deep 'surgury' kit RENDers mushroom beer redundant

[karadoc]

I just discovered that a wand of rending is very useful tool for restoring lost health.

Using the wand on one of the gals tends to do low damage, but creates lots of open wounds. The wounds can then be fixed up with a a field surgery kit or a nano surgery kit to restore significantly more health than the wand took away. (Just be careful to test it on someone with plenty of health first to bit sure that you're not going to kill someone!)

[ohartenstein23]

Wow, morbid and dangerous, but I can see it getting the job done. Smart thinking, but you may have just invoked the nerf bat.

[legionof1]

Sounds like my explode myself with stasis grenades method. Both make sense only in viedogames. 

[CaptainCorkscrew]

I guess shotguns can be used to the same effect.

[BetaSpectre]

This could be nerfed by having X (I.E. 6+) wounds result in your gals getting the surrender debuff. Where if they get enough wounds in a map they'll surrender.

[legionof1]

Wounds are unfortunately an unreasonable metric for surrender. Any hit that does even 1 dmg can cause up to 3 wounds. Imagine units surrendering for a mere 2 hp lost.

[karadoc]

I wouldn't want the player team to ever automatically surrender, for any reason. I think that would be a kind of anti-climatic loss. I wouldn't enjoy that kind of gameplay.

As for nerfing the rend & heal exploit - there are many ways. I do think it's powerful enough in 0.99E to justify a nerf; because it essentially removes the need for mushroom beer, mutant meat, medbays / other base healing facilities, and anything else related to that kind of stuff. It's just too cheap / fast / easy to restore gals to full heath. As I understand it, the current WIP version of xpiratez has nerfed the wand to produce fewer wounds; and so the strategy doesn't reliably work anymore. So that's good enough for now, but I don't think it has been finalised. Here are a few options that come to mind:

• Change the game mechanics so that friendly fire never creates wounds. (This fixes other similar exploits as well.)
• Change the wand to produce fewer wounds. Try to average 1 wound per 8 damage, or something like that - so that nano surgery isn't good enough to get a net gain in health. (But bear in mind that the magical medkit might still do better than 8 health per wound...)
• Change the game mechanics so that health restored from medkits cannot go above a certain level. eg. Have each wound reduce the characters effective max health by 1 point (for that mission).

I don't know what the best way is; but those are a few ideas.

[just_dont]

We might also adopt the system from Firaxis XCOMs: on the mission you can patch yourself up however you want, but the resulting recovery time will be based on the minimal health level during the mission, not the final health level.

Obviously it will require an engine patch, but it's quite a nice approach - also with it, medkit items may be rebalanced to restore meaningful amount of health, as it won't be prone to abuse any more.

[BTAxis]

Keep in mind that healing wounds is also one way to train Bravery, so there's yet another incentive to do it.

[Dioxine]

We might also adopt the system from Firaxis XCOMs: on the mission you can patch yourself up however you want, but the resulting recovery time will be based on the minimal health level during the mission, not the final health level.

Bleh. No. It's not stupid, just such a drastic change would destroy too much work that has already been done - everything would have to be rebalanced again.

[Starving Poet]

Not to mention that the Firaxis Xcom treated armor damage no different than HP damage.

[Solarius Scorch]

Not to mention that the Firaxis Xcom treated armor damage no different than HP damage.

[just_dont]

Bleh. No. It's not stupid, just such a drastic change would destroy too much work that has already been done - everything would have to be rebalanced again.

I know, just mentioned it as a possible way out. In my personal opinion, though, it's not even a particularly great problem so that it doesn't necessarily need attention. UFO Defense game rules (and subsequently, OpenXCOM's) were always quite prone to all sorts of abuse from a clever player. Patching out the most glaring holes in mechanics is fine, but trying to address all the possible issues likely isn't even possible without rewriting most of the game's rules.

So in this case if there's a loophole caused by a single item, the smallest practical approach, if it is necessary, would be to change that item (and not the rules themselves).

[Dioxine]

Keep in mind that the item was introduced with full knowledge of its implications - it was only unclear how un/balanced it is.