Since some people are talking about a possible hardcoe mode, what′s your opinion on this matter?

Through sleep (as far as I'm concerned, it should take several days to fully regenerate), spells (as far as I'm concerned, magicka should also regenerate over the course of several days) and potions (which should be rare, expensive, have side-effects when overused and should be more limited in the amount you can carry, should take time to drink, and could break if you get hit in combat, fall off something, swim, or generally do things that aren't that good for fragile stuff you carry around).

They've made things way too goofy and gamey by having everyone heal instantly with anything that heals you, even an hour of waiting in place. All things should work over time, except upper level spells. Some upper level spells should heal you small amounts instantly, but not the kind of thing you can spam in combat.

Also about altars, cut those out as healing sources. It's the temple staff that should heal you.

Magic should heal you instantly. I guess if you eat something or drink a potion for health it could have timed health recovery. I have no issue with this as long as the world is not overflowing with potions and healing spells etc. That was my issue with New Vegas there was just so much food, water and sunset saspirilla's in game that hardcoe mode was a joke. In Fallout 3 there was much less food and water and if you wanted water to heal you......you ended up drinking from a toilet for health.

Healing can be instantaneous so long as it's through spells or potions.

Anything could be instantaneous, but I don't want our character to regain HP by waiting. Magicka (although it regenerates over time), shouldn't be regain either when waiting, because an easy way of always having full everything before going firther in a cave is to simply wait 1 hour, this needs to go away.

Sleeping should heal everything to 100%, with some exeptions like the atronarch birthsign etc. Also some minor deseases or illnesses could be auto cured by sleeping resting enough, like 6 hours or something.

HELL NO I DONT WANA SPEND SEVERAL MINUTES WAITING FOR THE TIMER TO GET TO 0

Instead If it cant stay like Oblivion, then they should make it like Fable where you get Hp to full by: Potions, sleeping(6h is enough) diffrent kind of weapons with ability to leach healts and the oldschool eating food.

Oh i forgot to mention that only potions heal you instantly others will heal you in time like 2-5 min

I'd like it if opening the inventory didn't pause the game so you couldn't just quaff enough food or whatever to heal yourself mid-combat and for the game to be balanced to take that into account. I hated doing that in OB and FO3 but i felt the game was made that way and i was left with little choice but to roll with it. I'm fine having insta-heal potions/spells but they should be at a premium in magicka and money/ingredients respectively.

Totally agree, waiting shouldn′t make the character regain health or magicka, although if sleeping would, people would just fast travel to a bed and quicly regain it. But there is always the option to wait while magicka regenerates to cast restoration spells...

First aid, surgery and "classical" potions should also help healing.
In fact, I think sleeping should only restore fatigue, not HP. But if they remove the "magical" autohealing system, they really have to give alernatives.

If people could heal from wounds with just a night of sleep, there would be no more adventure, because adventure is all about risk. Until now TES only proposed to kill characters with hordes of gobelins, as if hostile creatures were the only possible source of accelerated death. If most wounds can't be healed so easily, it wont be necessary to expose characters to such frequent fights to make the player thrill for his characters life. It may drive most players to think twice before entering a fight.

No heal through wait (like in Morrowind), but I'd like to heal from potions, spells, altars and sleeping.

To play the devil's advocate here.........why can't people be healed by sleeping? Why can't a potion heal you instantly? This is a fantasy game where the rules of the real world do not always apply. If everything is made realistic then why even have saves? Why not have one hit kills? This is more realistc......if you are hit with a sword multiple times you are dead and need to start the game over. Is it really more realistic to get hit multiple times with a sword and still be alive?

I think this world survival thing and realism thing is starting to get a bit extreeme. I agree with some points but this is not a survival game or even a real world simulator. It is a fantasy game that take place in a world where the rules of our world do not apply so to me it makes sense that sleeping can heal you and magic can slowly regenerate.

Magic affects your body's cells directly so that should be the only instantaneous healing taking place in game.
Potions rely on your digestive system to do their work so it should take time.
Sleeping only speeds your body's healing nominally because although your body can concentrate it's efforts more all systems are slowed down during sleep.
Waiting does practically nothing for your wounds so naturally it shouldn't heal you at all.

Also agreeing that alters shouldn't heal and that temple staff should.

Altars should remain to heal you instantly, after all the nine are the ones healing you, are they not? Aedra would be more than able to cure you instantly.
Potions and spells should take time. And resting(Not waiting) should heal you over time(one hour heals very little, compared to 8 hours)

Part of what make oblivion and Morrowind good games is your ability to heal through rest or sleep. For example you’re in the middle of nowhere you’re surrounded my various monster which you’ve been killing all day but you’re at very low health, so with no potions on you you’d only be able to slowly migrate back to town to be healed hoping nothing pops out and kills you. Now this is bad in two ways first it makes the game annoying as you have to spend almost an hour just trying to get healed and half the time something is going to pop out and kill you at which point you’d have to start all over again from your last save point. The second being that a healing system without re-gen through sleep gives the feeling that you’re on a leash so to speak and you can never stray too far from any town.

I think the divine's blessings are enough coming from alters. Leave the HP recovery elsewhere.

Some compromise between the current instant healing and more realistic healing over time is needed, because there are totally different styles of play involved.

What I'd like to see is at least two different forms of healing, with different rates and costs. One would be a short-term "Healing" potion or spell to get a few points back fast (maximum of 1 point per second), at a high cost in magicka or coin. The other would trigger longer-term "Regeneration" to recover greater damage over the course of a night's sleep. Either of the two forms of healing could be available in potion, scroll, or enchantment form. The point is that the first would still take a few seconds or minutes, the other would require a night's sleep; neither would allow you to spam them in order to become invincible in combat.

Altars might grant blessings, including divine instant healing to full health if you're in good graces (AND for a price, unless you're a ranking member), otherwise they'd only grant either partial healing or accellerated healing.

The net effect would be that potions and spells would allow you to get a few points back on the fly, for a price in coin, ingredients, magicka, or casting charges, and without being all that useful during combat itself. Sleep and long-term boosts to its effects would allow you to bring a character back from the brink of death over the course of a couple of days, without breaking the budget of a starting character. Having potions and spells as instant god-like "fix alls" whenever it suits you is likely one of the major causes of complaints with the game becoming "too easy".

I think it'd be cool if you didn't really have a "health bar", instead, certain races/builds can have slightly more threshold for pain/damage, but it's more about dodging/blocking/armor (but only strong people can wear heavy armor and still function, so the balance isn't broken!). Damage should be injuries, IE, stab wounds, gashes, that bleed and apply global dampers on how well your character functions and will eventually kill you if untreated and sever enough, and broken bones, which won't kill you, but restrict greatly what you can do. Spells and potions should basically instantly (1-2 seconds) re-grow/align broken bones and fuse the skin on wounds, but there should be a very small penalty (1-5% maybe, depending on race bonus and endurance stat) that remains after an injury has been healed, that will go away after a day or two, this penalty would affect things like agility, strength, etc. globally if the injury was a stab or gash, and would affect individual limbs if it was broken bones. If dismemberment is included (I'd only want it if it was rare and a lot more precise (IE not everyone's body is divisible into only 5 large chunks like in FO3)), then healing the wound should be do-able with a simple healing potion or spell, but you'd be left with a stump until you could solicit some more powerful magic, and once again there would be a penalty on that limb's stats (maybe 5-10% for this) for a day or two afterward.

You and i have a very different definition of good. Finding myself in that situation with the tension and drama it would create turns it into an experience and a story worth relating. Going to sleep isn't my idea of a saga for the ages.

I'd say that there should be both spells that heal over time and ones that heal instantly. Heal over time spells could be if you want regeneration over time, while instant healing spells are used if you just need to quickly restore health.

Potions, I'd say, should always heal over time, though some could heal more quickly than others. In general, quicker healing potions should be more expensive and less common than once that heal more slowly, thus making them best saved emergencies, which is where you'd most need them anyway. By ensuring that potions heal over time, they can hopefully introduce some distinction between healing potions and spells, as opposed to having potions just be spells in a bottle. Although home-made potions already do heal over time, which is nice, but I'd like to see some longer lasting, slower healing premade potions too. I also wouldn't mind having control over the duration of the potions made using alchemy, with the catch being that potions with a longer duration have less strength, though if such a system were limited, there should probably be a lower limit to prevent players from creating potions that are effectively instantanious.

Sleeping should heal you over time like in Morrowind, because it was kind of silly that you can fully heal all wounds with one hour of sleep in Oblivion.

If there is something like hardcoe mode in Skyrim, I'd say it shouldn't effect healing at all, except for maybe how sleep factors into the equation as sleeping would be mandatory with it active, so the game would not need to rely on healing you when you sleep to encourage players to sleep on occassion in the game. It's always annoyed me in New Vegas that I can't have my stimpaks heal over time without needing to deal with the need to eat and drink. Healing over time instead of instantly could actually add some meaningful challenge and strategy to the game. Needing to eat and drink is just boring and adds nothing except an annoying, tedious chore I already have to deal with every day in real life to the game.



No, that wouldn't be "cool", I'd say it would be pointless. Sometimes, if a system works fine, you should just stick to it, unless you can come up with something better, and there's already too many shooters trying to do away with health bars, I don't want my RPGs to to it too.

instant heal is lame, unless your a master healer.

Potions should not heal you instantly however, the best potions are typically the potions you make through alchemy. Those potions work over time so as long as the better potions heal you over time I'm find with that.

It might also drive most players to think twice before buying Skyrim. There is a lot of talk about how people want to cut back on the amount of fast travel there is available in the game. That mostly stems from the fact that a large portion of the population thinks that instant, free fast traveling to basically anywhere in the universe is somewhat broken. I'd never heard a single complaint about the healing system in any of the Elder Srolls games before I read this thread.

You are all talking about killing off an entire school of magic. What else do you use restoration for besides healing? I'm sure you all use absorb fatigue and resist poison, right? Spells must stay how they are. If you are fighting a truly superior enemy then you will get your head bashed in while you cast your puny spells. Alchemy is the same way, except that there do need to be limits on potions per minute.

I always chuckle when people complain about fast travel. It's optional, you don't NEED to use it. I for one don't have all day to play a game by walking to my destination.

If they're keeping restoration, it needs some major reform. I think you'd agree either way that the whole system of healing yourself needs something done to reform.

In the suggestions thread over these past few years since Oblivion came out, I've seen some good arguments against having a restoration skill. You can't think of it as a one off deal, you should consider the whole system of how you heal yourself. Consider returning the medical skill to the game.

If there's a potion for curing disease and a spell for curing disease, can't there be something more specific? A specific potion for curing the disease and perhaps no general spell for curing disease? How would that affect gameplay? You'd have to be prepared ahead of time to have that potion on hand, and if you weren't, that disease might pose more difficulty than the current setup with the catch-all routines.

I wouldn't consider it much of a loss to nix the restoration if versions of the healing spells were placed into schools like Necromancy for the body knowledge, Thaumaturgy or Daedric for healing blessings, Enchant can help when you make something to heal yourself, and of course the Medical skill for people without magical talent. The game shouldn't be a frozen picture of Oblivion's skill set, don't dismiss ideas just for that.