New Vitality Damage-to-Healing Ability

[hipdip]

In effect, an item which can be imbued into an ability, and causes that ability to instead either target teammates, or just heal them when they are caught in its area of effect. There are plenty of support characters whom you can build into offense, but it's very rare that one gets to build out a non-support as a support. An item like this would open massive possibilities for some truly unique builds on weirdo characters whom otherwise occupy very specific roles.

Examples: Lash slam from downtown giving a massive heal to all allies in its area, Victor aura turning him into a beating heart of some ridiculous deathball, or Infernus creating a path of regeneration for his allies.

In the context of game balance, the base item would probably need to either be a T2 or T3, and imbue into one ability, though a T4 version which applies to all abilities (similar to Compress Cooldown & its upgrades) would also make sense. The amount of healing relative to the spirit damage would also need to be carefully tuned as some of the listed above examples could be pretty ridiculously strong, but I still think it could work. I haven't played many MOBAs before, so maybe this is commonly-trodden ground, would love to hear community thoughts on this.

 

[AleksiyFlek$$iy]

It is an excellent suggestion. Why ideas like these are so rare?

Personally I think, that items like that can exist for both gun and ability versions. The best solution for these items is making them toggleable. If we would just transform all damage to healing, how would we fight back? On top of that there should be some trade-offs, because having both abilities to damage and heal would be too good.

Different tiers of items could be have different stats or abilities. Like Tier 4 version could reverse negative effects to their positive counterpart.

 

[Rosgath]

I like the concept, but I think I would divide it into 3 separate tiers. The reason being that if you are planning to have a player become a support player, it's important to give them access to that capacity early.

Anyway, with regards to the tiers:

The first would be a T1 imbued Item. It can be either Vitality or Spirit, but given that most healing support items are Vitality, it should probably be support (which also makes it unique in that there are NO imbued Vitality items currently) It should reduce the damage dealt by a damage dealing ability by 50%, but also grants causes the ability to heal an ally in the affected area/target for the same amount of damage it now deals.

The second is a T3 item which applies a similar effect to all of your abilities, but reduced the damage/healing penalty to 40%.

The Third item is a T4 item which further reduces the damage/healing penalty to 20%, and it can be activated to increase all healing and barrier effects on allies affected by your abilities in this way by an additional 30% (this is in addition to being amplified by Healing Booster/Healing Tempo).