Spiral Knights - Revive Mechanics

Revive Mechanics

24 replies [Last post]

Sat, 04/16/2016 - 16:46

Blue-Dude

I just started playing this game again after a LONG break following a few changes which I disagreed with. In an update about 3 years ago OOO changed the monetization scheme from Mist + Crystal Energy to the more standard free to play system we have now. For the most part the new system is alright, however you have to jump through hoops to heat your gear and the cost of buying the materials needed to upgrade a weapon more than tripled (to be fair under this system it is Possible to be a true free to play player where it was not before however the amount of grinding needed is INSANE). I'd love to see this reconsidered, though I can live with the way it works now. However I feel this game lost a great deal more with the other change. Players can no longer share HP to revive their allies. This change was the worst mistake I've seen any game company ever make. A great deal of the fun to be had in this game was juggling those last 2 or three hits between players while tackling the hardest content. That's not the extent of what was lost here though. This change alienates newer and less skillful players since you only get one chance at the level before you're out, where before if you ran with some more experienced friends they could carry you though levels and give tips on how to get better at the game. It's just sad playing in a public lobby on tier 3 people seam to join then die twice and leave in frustration. I sincerely hope that we can share HP to revive again sometime -> the game just lost too much when it was taken away.

Just figured I'd post my thoughts since coming back. I wonder if anyone else feels the same way...

Sat, 04/16/2016 - 17:19

Bopp

many players

The update that you're talking about is 2013-07-30. We've had many threads lamenting the loss of the HP revive. So, yes, other players feel the same way. Cheers.

Sat, 04/16/2016 - 17:33

Sipsy

I don't mind the crafting costs as I can actually play the game now (no more elevator costs) so orb drops and upgrades are just an after-effect of playing the game for fun.
- Which is the main reason you're playing, right? F is for friends that do stuff together U is f ...

But yes, I do agree that being able to revive people again would make the game a lot more fun. I could probably convince some of my friends from school to play if it was a co op game again.

Sat, 04/16/2016 - 18:13

Blue-Dude

Shame.

I guess there is no hope of it ever coming back then? Such a shame the game just feels dry without it.

Sat, 04/16/2016 - 19:06

Sipsy

Probably not, but the IP got handed to Grey Havens so there might be changes.

Sat, 04/16/2016 - 19:10

Veridiandynamics

I actually liked almost every

I actually liked almost every single changes in this game. This one is a great exception tho'. Have to agree, would be more fun if it was still possible to share HP.

Sat, 04/16/2016 - 21:20

Sweet-Hope

The only excuse that "most players" use agaisnt share HP revive its "a bad player would drain off your life so no, Not to the return of shared HP to revive players" but i always see that excuse really pathetic. i was able to keep myself alive even with 1 bar of life, heck i even remember ghost in the machine where i used my last pip to give half of pip to my friend and still able to defeat the boss.

If people dont like share HP to revive players then they should do the same thing as they do with spark of lifes: Dont revive such player if it wasting your life, or even better dont revive anyone if you dont like to lose health. Simple as that.

For myself, i really would appreciate the return of revive with HP, because thats was what i enjoyed from the game, being able to keep the party up and show the good CooP times the game used to have thanks to that.

Sun, 04/17/2016 - 02:57

Theirillusion

Shared hp would bring back the reason to do pve again.

Sun, 04/17/2016 - 15:47

Gaidal

I just recently game back as

I just recently game back as well after about 3 years away! Yeah, the no revive friends change makes me sad. However, they did remove elevator fees and that was a HUGE criticism from many people. Seriously, it seemed like half the threads back in the day were about people hating the elevator fees. But that revive system was a CORE part of the game IMO. I know I wouldn't have made it through a SL without that old revive system! That is what made it FUN to play with friends. The tradeoff for no elevator fees is almost ok.

What I really hate though is the forge. It's REALLY bad. Luckily I already had most of the 5* gear that I really cared about. If I was starting over from new I think I'd give up because of the forge. Do people remember being able to go on a single run and heat a single item multiple levels? Now, if you're in the middle of a run you have to go back to Haven just to TRY to level it up. Tried the middle 75% option and it failed twice in a row, there go all my forge mats.

Tue, 04/19/2016 - 10:07

Fangel

Welp

I'm gonna do a quick overview of the two systems.

Health revives
Pros:

Free
Good players can carry teams
Makes combat more advanced and strategic figuring out if and when you should revive a teammate
Faster heating

Cons:

Wears down on overall team health
Less skilled players will affect the overall health of the team
Accidentally can revive players in combat, draining half your health and potentially causing you to go down
New players were unaware of this mechanic, and therefore revived with energy immediately
Lose heat to other players when you might need it, and if they revive you before you revive yourself there's nothing you can do about it

Sparks of Life
Pros:

A single revive item with a single cost - 2000 crowns in bulk, 5000 crowns backup
Forces players to get better in order to progress. If all you do is fight until you die and revive, then you won't survive the end game anyways.
Knocks enemies back and stuns them, and gives an attack boost to make every revive give you a fighting chance.
All players see exactly how many revives they have remaining when they go down
Introduced the emergency revive, allowing all players to go down once per floor with no penalty

Cons:

Item doesn't drop enough for the difficulties that need them more (lower difficulty should make revives drop more, not less)
Doesn't encourage teamwork - every battle is you fighting enemies with other knights, not a squad of knights fighting their way through a level
Awkward to use on teammates - only mouse and keyboard users can quickly revive players, and even then you may accidentally ignore them in the heat of battle
Encourages begging for a revive and paying to be revived

So both types have good and bad things about them. Personally I think the worst part about sparks of life could be overlooked if we had a rarity that could revive teammates like an emergency revive, but can only be used on teammates. By doing this you could make sparks of life rarer and have these things drop more frequently than our current spark numbers. Have them be activated by attacking twice over a downed player.

By doing this you make teamwork come back while not sacrificing solo play. If you don't have any of these "life essence" rarities, then you can always revive yourself or others with a spark of life. Since rarities in the clockworks are bound to you, you literally have no use for them other than reviving other players, but if your entire team does go down then someone will have to use a spark of life anyways.

Tue, 04/19/2016 - 13:46

#10

Veridiandynamics

Yeah.

A lot of people seem to forget that emergency revive also came in with the spark of life system...
Scott free +1 life each floor.
Not taking sides, just saying.

Would be actually a cool mechanics to use that to revive allies :)
The name "emergency revive" suits this idea pretty well.

Tue, 04/19/2016 - 11:37

#11

Fangel

mhmm

I would be fine with dropping emergency revives for health revives any day. However, the biggest problems with health revives would remain if we brought them back as-is. While this trade off would be amazing for players coming into the game, I truly do believe that the "emergency revive you can only use on other players" would be the best way to bring back a team-based revive system.

If they could drop more on normal, and sparks of life could drop more on elite, that would be great.

Tue, 04/19/2016 - 11:55

#12

Random-Remark

It might also make the game

It might also make the game even easier with health revives, considering health vials are instanced now. It really seems to come as a package.

Tue, 04/19/2016 - 13:28

#13

Fangel

Yup

In the past health revives were good because you shared everything - loot, materials, consumables... Hell, you could even share energy for people but putting them on your tab.

Now we have everything instanced. The game is about holding yourself well enough, but if you can't hold your own some backup running in to help is good. While in the past we were a team, now we are individuals working towards the same goal.

The balancing act is all over the place in this way. We should look for a solution that matches what we have right now rather than what we've had before.

Tue, 04/19/2016 - 18:45

#14

Rekishi

Why not both?

How about we get to pick systems? that way if you have a cohesive team that can work together u pick hp revives, and if u are going in with randoms and dont trust em pick life essence and if u are going solo?

Or maybe hp revives for teams of 2+ and life essence for solo'ing?

Or keep the system and allow for hp revives but with a limit of 2 times per floor or something? just brainstorming ideas.

Tue, 04/19/2016 - 22:10

#15

Sipsy

@ Fangel, "Forces players to get better in order to progress. If all you do is fight until you die and revive, then you won't survive the end game anyways."

Well, so does the revive system. The best way to improve is, like most things, to practise, right? It won't do you any good to be dead the whole time with the spark system. All you really have to do is charge your weapon anyway if you want to be efficient in the clockworks, IMHO.

The main difference I've experienced between the two is that the clockworks is actually fun with the revival system. It makes the game compelling to play with a bunch of mates, not caring about whether or not anyone is bad or good and just having good, plain fun. If you just wanted the crowns/energy and stuff, being bored farming FSC all day ( most efficient unless you stalk the AH ), wouldn't it make more sense to get a job and even at minimum wage, make more energy/crowns by buying it straight out?

This is the way I see things

Health Revival
Pros:
Clockworks is fun

Cons:
If you want to be a robot in FSC all day, you won't be as efficient with a team

Sparks
Pros:
You can spend all your time in LD now that PvE is obsolete as games are meant to be played for fun

Cons:
You can spend all your time in LD now that PvE is obsolete as games are meant to be played for fun

A system we could use instead? Anything with the revival system..
I'd rather have no emergency revive and when everybody's dead, it costs a spark to rev that grows exponentially ( just like with the 2 CE before ) as long as it came with the revival system.

Tue, 04/19/2016 - 22:21

#16

Imorri

@Fangel

What do you think of the idea of having a free second emergency revive? Perhaps you could implement it in certain difficulty modes only, putting more twists to choosing your difficulty level.

Wed, 04/20/2016 - 00:41

#17

Fangel

Responses:

if you have a cohesive team that can work together u pick hp revives, and if u are going in with randoms and dont trust em pick life essence and if u are going solo?

The thing with life essences is that you would gain them by playing the game, and not feel bad using them on people. Health revives has the problem of you immediately hurting from using the revive. Spark revive has the problem that they have a value to the player using them.

Health keeps you alive in the dungeon, but is easily earned back. However, losing all your health means you may leave a profitable dungeon early. This leads to teams falling apart because of one weak link.

Sparks allow you to go down in a dungeon, but are very difficult to find. If you lose all your sparks of life you have to earn more before you can reliably do missions that are at or above your skill level. This turns into boring grinding quickly.

The solution that I see is that you have an item that has no value to you personally, that you cannot sell, thus you are encouraged to use them whenever you have the chance. Perhaps there's a limit on how many life essences you can hold at one time, making players want to use them. Could have higher spark of life drop rates if your life essences are under a certain amount, meaning you're encouraged to use them.

What do you think of the idea of having a free second emergency revive?

I think that would be terrible as the single emergency revive is already more than enough for a player per level. Perhaps you could have a secondary revive that kicks in on normal difficulty, heals you for half health, but can only be used once per tier.
Two free revives per floor? That is overkill.

Wed, 04/20/2016 - 07:08

#18

Putkisen-Seta

Hmm.

Even one free revive is already too much and made the abundant sparks accumulate. I have hundreds. Not to mention being able to die for free per level trivialized the level of difficulty. So here's an idea:

1. Return Spark of Life drop rates back to where they were when first implemented and disentangle them from the difficulty setting.

2. Place a hard cap on them. For instance, 2 from drops, 2 purchased. That's it. Have more than that right now? Bound ones go poof. Unbound ones are either converted into something you can break down into more sparks in secure locations (towns, clockwork terminals) or turned into an equivalent amount of energy and mailed to you.

3. Emergency Revive is only recharged in towns and clockwork terminals. It does not heal you at the end of the level anymore since that stuff was only implemented to get around a suicide-to-heal exploit.

4. Emergency Revive only heals you for your base health. Trinkets, armor, none of it does anything. You'll be as weak as you were the day you emerged from that pod.

5. If you still have it, you can use a part of it to revive others. A slider (set to 2 by default, can be adjusted 1-5 via some menu) decides how much health you give them.

There you go. If you're good, you can carry your team quite a bit but aren't completely crippled when soloing and the game goes up in difficulty to where it used to be. "But 2 health is nothing!" That's what you used to give them, remember? Those damn idiots drained you to nothing in no time at all. 2 pips allows them to survive a hit before going down thanks to the Sonic rule this game employs. And if you don't want to help/drained your revives so you can't, they still have Sparks to work with which return them to full health. Two of those sparks being free makes dying less of a disaster for a poor player so they'll be less likely to quit. They used to drop just all the time so hunting a couple before tackling something harder should be a breeze. And if you're feeling generous, you could share your own bound ones since you won't be needing them. If all that isn't enough, well, they're clearly just not cut out for the content they're attempting. There comes a time in a child's life when he simply has to "git gud" with no way around it.

Wed, 04/20/2016 - 10:00

#19

Fehzor

@Fangel

As the person carrying my team that's not a pro, it's a con. Now it makes sense for me to not revive them whereas before it made me look incredibly greedy.

@Putkis

I don't like your suggestion because it means I can't hoard sparks of life, which is about 30% of the enjoyment I glean from playing the game. They look like delicious snowflakes and I want to eat them. Other than that cap I'm largely in agreement.

Ok real talk. Having a bunch of sparks saved for something like winterfest can elevate sub-optimal players to a position where they can practice as if they were "good enough". Hemorrhaging sparks of life everywhere to me represents the potential for quick improvement at the game. Yes it also lets you just drill your way through and get the prize but there's only so much of that you can do before you run out of sparks because they're costing you.

The other good aspect spark hoarding brings about is that it gives some incentive for players to take risks. Lets say I'm a 4* player but T3 is too hard for me so I play in T2, where I don't die so much. I get to a good 20-30 sparks of life and I know in the back of my head that I need to figure out that T3 content at some point.. so now when I do I'm able to get a foothold. Progression becomes a mix of staying in your safe zone and stepping out of it, as dictated by the number of sparks you have. When you reach the end... well, sparks just kind of build up but there are events to use them on at some point, and I'd love to see some kind of armor or costume that requires 1,000 bound sparks of life to attain.

Wed, 04/20/2016 - 12:00

#20

Fangel

Well sure

As the person carrying my team that's not a pro, it's a con.

I can sort of see it both ways. It's good because with one good player on your team, they can fight off all the hard content then revive everyone, granted they keep enough health. It's just that that pro is immediately affected by the cons, in that if you have one good player and 3 terrible players, the good player will be the one who suffers, not the terrible players.

One thing about back in those days however was that revives were more costly, and therefore we had more incentive not to die. Now a days, revives are just a slap on the wrist, not "well you can't go one floor deeper now because your team wiped". There's a lot less risk involved, and I think that's what people miss more. We aren't penalized for failure anymore, but instead of that exciting feeling of "oh the last knight standing could pull through and save all of us!" it's more "oh well i died, i guess i'll just be sitting this one out until the next floor".

Wed, 04/20/2016 - 14:15

#21

Fehzor

No Fangle it's about who takes the fall when you die it used to be on the group whereas now it's on the individual the change penalizes us more now that's a bad change from a lets be a group but a good change because players already aren't groups they are individuals and they act like it because before they just flat out didn't care about dying as long as there was some try hard in the group and you didn't need heat k If we get heat sharing back you can be my try hard and carry me and I'll goof off k

Wed, 04/20/2016 - 16:00

#22

Fangel

See I know you're trying to be funny, but I'm not laughing.

Reliance on teamwork means a weak link brings the team down. This is fun until you get a terrible player. Luckily, that doesn't happy too often.

Reliance on self means players who are a weak link don't bring the team down, but are dead weight. Unfortunately, it's easier to come across these players now-a-days.

Really, the middle ground needs to be helping other people get up without hurting yourself, but many players assume giving away wealth/sparks of life as hurting themselves. Making a spark of life that is worthless to them and has the same activation mechanics as old health revives would be the perfect middle ground.

Wed, 04/20/2016 - 17:20

#23

Fehzor

No fangle it happens all the time you just have friends and stuff to go with some of us dont have access to that kind of community because we're blacklisted from society im not trying to be funny this is no laughing matter i agree with everything you say in post 22 except sometimes it isnt one player bringing the party down it is an entire party of bad and one player trying to save them in the current system that player gets to go on and succeed in the past they would occasionally die but would boost the overall partys abilities as you had a bunch of people watching this one guy fight while they occasionally got revived and allowed to play thats really the argument and i think that we are on the sam epage with this what we need is something like a

Defibrillator

New pick up, like pills, remedies, stun vials etc.

Same rarity as pills

Can only hold one at a time!

When used near a dead knight, revives them to half health

Possibly occupies a fifth, dedicated, pill slot

im not saying that its perfect or that its the best way to go but its the collective idea of me you and about ten other people that all read and talked about twenty of these topics so it deserves a good mention since its the inbetween of the two systems that makes the most sense the other being something like a battle sprite revive ability but this is a much better idea in general and id really like to commend this idea above others ive read unless someone has a better idea and even then probably this one ok bai i will miss you pls repsond soon

Wed, 04/20/2016 - 20:06

#24

Blue-Dude

@ Fangel

"The solution that I see is that you have an item that has no value to you personally, that you cannot sell, thus you are encouraged to use them whenever you have the chance. Perhaps there's a limit on how many life essences you can hold at one time, making players want to use them. Could have higher spark of life drop rates if your life essences are under a certain amount, meaning you're encouraged to use them."

This is solution to a problem that doesn't exist and isn't what I'm talking about. The single best thing about the HP revival system is that it equalized the party, the best player in the group ends up with less HP meaning that it takes fewer screw ups for him to get killed. With the Revive system the way it is now, I'm almost always above 75% HP, and nothing is truly a threat. It also meant that going down had a meaningful cost to the hole team, the player who went down isn't revived at full HP and the Reviver lost half of their HP to get their buddy back. It's no fun for anyone when a player has to quit a floor because they've died. those who carry on lose an ally and the guy who died is supper bummed that he'll not get to see the rest of the level. When a team's fate is bound to each other they cheer each other on, as it is now everyone just looks out for themselves.

Also with the old system if you were a dick, and just left people dead on the ground, it's no different from the current system where people just have to leave after they die.

@ Fehzor

YES, you understand <3

I don't want another consumable to bring people back though. That just doesn't bring what we had before and besides I can already do that with sparks of life.

The problem I see is that PVE is currently designed to be played solo. That way your enemies are more predictable (they are all after you and not getting bounced around) AND they have about 1/4 the HP as they have in a group. So it's safer to play solo now where before it was always better to go it as a group (just in case). Honestly a large part of the problem is that free resurrection once per floor, it's what makes solo so safe in a lot of ways. Playing solo in a game like this is less fun for me. But playing with friends is just a sad experience now.

Search

Revive Mechanics