Healthy Offering and Shrew Offering can kill a player

[Toirealach]

A Nightblade casting Healthy Offering or Shrew Offering on themselves when they have very low health can actually cause the player to kill themselves because your combat system is applying the health drain DoT to the player BEFORE the actual heal is applied to the target - which is frequently the player themselves - using the ability as intended, as a self-heal.

Instead the game should calculate and apply the heal first and then apply the self-DoT to the caster.

The DoT applied to the caster as part of a healing ability is silly in the first place, but if you are going to keep it in the game then please apply the DoT to the caster AFTER you apply the heal to the target, whether it be the caster themselves or their target.

[Baertram]

Skills always consume the ressource first and afterwards are casted.
At least all skills behave like that, as far as I noticed?

If you do not have enough ressources it warns you and stops being casted.
Unfortunately the health ressources are not considered to be checked that way (maybe on purpose), so you won't get a warning and can kill yourself.

I guess that works as designed.

[ZOS_DanBatson]

I've passed the feedback along to the combat team.

Edit: So we just looked and tested it and it does apply the heal first. Are you sure it didn't smart heal someone else and you just thought it was going to heal yourself? Sometimes the smart heal doesn't pick who you'd expect it to pick.

[Toirealach]

Thanks for testing it out and verifying that the heal happens first, but maybe put more intelligence into the ability?

If a player is low enough health that the DoT from this heal will kill them, why is the combat system ever picking another player as the heal target?

In PvP things can get very chaotic - with far more players in proximity than anything that would happen in PvE - so to try to guarantee that the ability is a self-heal, a player must push the view forward and basically be looking at a top down view of the ground and combat in order to maximise the chance that the heal will target themself rather than another player.

This tendency for the ability to target other players in such situations could be the reason I'm getting reports of people saying they are dying to the heal's DoT.

It'd be simple IMHO for that heal ability to add a line of code that says: If player's health < 1000 then target = player.

Just a thought.