Greetings fellow Edainers !
I would like to talk about one of the mechanics present in Edain, which is the healing well, and the fact that it causes some problems.
Gameplay in fashion puts great emphasis on protecting your troops from death, which is associated with reduced power of spellbook abilites, or overall slower gameplay. Because of that there are certain problems occuring with capabilities of wells:
-Economy is slower, thus healing troops has an increased relevance in comparison to 4.4.1
-Banners are more expensive, and for some factions, locked behind other upgrades, which is another reason to prefer wells in current version.
-Heal works even during combat, which allows player to easily defend himself against larger forces without risking anything.
In result any fight near a well gives a huge advantage to the benefited player. In siege scenarios or similar, the defender can heal after every fight, boosting the cost-efficience of his units (it can be exemplified as equivalent to buying new battalions for free, but with higher levels). In other scenarios (outposts, assembly points for Rohan, Lorien blessed trees) the defensive bonus is similar. Wells not only benefit players in too much in defensive gameplay. They highly increase effectiveness of cavalry harrasments, especially with factions like Gondor or Imladris ( who have access to powerfull elite cavalry ). That leads to scenarios when player doesn't care if his cav units got greatly harmed by pikes , as he can quickly heal them up , without major consequences of his mistakes.
In addition, wells are mostly available in bases or outposts, and encourage a campy, clumpy style which helps the defender to survive longer (not necessarly to win the game).
In this case, I wanted to suggest an idea for a possible solution to the above problems, which includes reworking the way in how wells work right now. For this I have prepared two concepts, which are pretty similar , mainly due to simplisity of well mechanic. Nevertheless they serve two different ways of solving above mentioned issues:
1. To deprive wells of the possibility of replenish units - in my opinion, the ability to heal alone is a sufficient reason for someone to build a well, and would not lead significantly to the situations I mentioned above. moreover, the role of a banner carrier would increase, which as an upgrade is definitely less frequently bought than in the case of the others upgrades.
I might understand that some of you will say that kind of downgrade is too much. In that case I suggest that the wells would have an additional ability:
healing waters - all battalions around the well replenish their units once. This power has cooldown and can be used once per (insert balanced amount of time) .
Thanks to that solution, wells could retain their ability to renew units, without exaggerating the use of this mechanic in an unpleasant way from the gameplay point of view.
2. the well does not heal or renew units around - instead, it has the following ability:
healing waters - all battalions around the well are healed and replenish their units for a short period of time. The ability has reasonable long cooldown.
Thanks to this idea, the healing properties of the well are preserved. In addition to that, situations where defending player is just camping near well or fountain and is basicaly untouchable have gone since wells no longer provides passive healing. The power of the active one can be adjusted so wells should be still worth to build to quickly heal smaller wounds.
Overall both concepts can be enhanced with some additional ways of balancing the healing abilities. For example , for factions which require more healing than others there is always an option of adding upgrade do wells which is decrease cooldown of abilities listened above.
Thanks for reading it all, I hope to hear some feedback from you so we could discuss healing wells and come with proper answer.
And great thanks to Max_Power for helping me with this idea xD