Since healing is limited in Final Fantasy 8, your best method of surviving is using the Junction system to increase the defense of your characters instead of just spamming healing abilities.
>>3986748 In most RPGs the support characters are healers, and the emphasis is on undoing damage through healing. I'm more interested in RPGs where instead of healing your goal is to avoid damage altogether.
>>3986767 No one cares about your completely baseless bullshit opinions. You're inexperienced and you think that gives you a right to just say what the fuck ever. "Most" my fucking ass. Shut the fuck up.
Wide variety of damage mitigation methods and strategies from simple to complex for all sorts of scenarios. There's some interesting healing skills too but generally it's secondary to avoiding damage
>>3986776 He's right, thoughever. Final Fantasy emphasizes White Mages, D&D emphasizes Clerics. A fair number of RPGs rely more on healing than mitigation. Mostly the ones that rely more on mitigation are the ones where damage outweighs healing thoroughput or healing is too weak to cover up for the damage.
>>3986692 The damage formula in lad iw is busted. If you have one level more than you enemy and gulped like 8 permanent def drinks, even enemies on the highest difficulty do scratch damage. Beats junction and draw x100 for rare spells. Especially as the def drinks lie around town free to farm.
>>3986881 >D&D emphasizes Clerics In the D&D games I played healing with spells was kind of bad (not a lot of spells per day and meh healing) you were better of pumping AC or using stuff like stoneskin
>>3986635 basically all tabletop rpgs and similar are like that
healing in combat is almost always a waste of an action in those games unless you get a key member downed that absolutely must return to the fight or you lose. combat in those games is far more about preparation and information than reaction. >>3986881 clerics only heal after action in dnd, casting heals in combat is a waste of a turn unless you are "healing" undead lmao
>>3986924 heal is an ok spell but it's a lategame spell and only good if a character is downed but not killed, or to remove effects. in ttrpgs offense is better than defense and even when defending, preventing damage is better than healing.
>>3986940 >ttrpgs offense is better than defense and even when defending, preventing damage is better than healing. They rarely are combat heavy. Played wotr solo and was like wtf when I played the game. There are hordes of demons in the game and the adventure has fights here and there. One of the many reasons why ttrpg systems have no reason to be used in vidya.
>>3986635 I think many players go for the healing approach unnecessarily, and that's a design problem to be fixed before the option for that approach is taken away.
Of course there has been games where healing was pretty much the only option, but probably mostly left in the 80-90s games.
>>3986635 Lightning Returns for sure! You were only alotted 10 healing items at the end of the game, so damage mitigation and ending battles quickly was your best strategy. Mediguard is a joke in this game.
Majority of the end strategies on youtube require one to use quiet guardian spell set up in order to mitigate damage altogether for the sueprbosses.
This is literally just how Armor Rating works universally in all RPGs. It's a form of Damage Mitigation at the cost of some sort of encumbrance or quickness. Pillars of Eternity tried to solve this by giving you a free once-per-encounter "heal" on your endurance if you level at least one point in a skill which scales from it. That way, everyone just has a "heal", removing much of the need to build a healer and focus more on immunizing and/or removing debuffs.
>>3986881 Agree. In Baldur's Gate 2, having a single Cleric or Druid to heal all 6 people in some of those difficult fights is nearly impossible. The Heal spell (the high level one which restores all HP) is very late to get, and no Cleric is going to be able to heal a Korgan at low HP in the middle of a battle without that. It's better to stop him from getting low in the first place with Defensive Harmony or any number of buffs. I can't imagine memorizing enough Cure spells to heal an entire party repeatedly unless you're playing a run with no rest/no reload except on death.
>>3986635 There is PS1 jrpg called Ecsaform, in which you mitigate all the damage using your passive shielding which is tied to your action points. However, this battle system is absolutely retarded, because the only viable strategy is to stand in place and wait for your enemy to come to you, as moving would waste your action points reserved for your shield.
>>3986767 This is Dragon Age Inquisition they removed all healing except for an ultimate and mages can only cast barriers that absorb damage to support allies. It's a slog game for other reasons.
>>3986635 If you count MMORPGs, city of heroes was on the extreme end of it. Healing in that game was basically a backup sustain even to the class that was supposed to be about wolverine-like healing factor. Unless you were crowd control(and even then you could and should dip into it,) it was all about getting as much resist and/or evasion as you could, and then your own heal/regen or support would fill the leftover gaps when those were overwhelmed.
>>3986674 They split it in CS between magic and phys reflect for the CS games then recombine them in Kuro as temporary HP buffers which are pretty mandatory and can be added by arts or crafts
The Winter Voice games are basically that. In fact you literally can't attack, everything is defense and every fight is some kind of survival scenario.
>>3988407 Good example actually. This can be missable too if you don't spent points (forgot what they're called) wisely. I imagine the game would be a lot more challenging without them (I think they were accessary equips of some kind)