Healing Loop

(Enemy deals a critical hit) "I think we're done. I think we're f**ked already. Okay... restore some HP... more HP... resurrection, water, fish."
(Playable character recovers. Enemy deals another critical hit) "Are... we going to be caught in a healing loop?"

— Jim Sterling, Jesus Christ RPG

The boss monster hits you down to 5 HP. You take your turn off to heal. The boss hits you down to 5 HP again. Repeat forever. Battles are supposed to have two directions, two outcomes: win or loss. What's happening is much worse: you are now haplessly caught in a Healing Loop.

This can work both ways; often you find the battle is stuck in a loop because your enemy has the ability to recover and bring themselves back from the brink. You can't stop them from healing themselves. No matter what strategy you employ, you can't seem to stop them from returning. All you can do is hope you can keep on damaging it faster than it can heal itself long enough for it to finally die.

A healing loop is usually not eternal, however. More often than not, it's actually a miserable downward spiral into a slower, agonizing, more humiliating defeat, whereupon you run out of health items, reaching Critical Existence Failure. The brawl has now become an arduous cycle; your only alternative is to switch the game off, or allow the enemy to defeat you.

Not to be confused with an Endless Game.

Compare Padded Sumo Gameplay.

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Examples of individual Healing Loops

• Bloodborne has Vicar Amelia, a monster who heal loops the battle again and again, giving some players a lot of trouble trying to shut her down. This is the point where many find themselves under-leveled or under-geared, because if they don't have the proper Damage Per Second, or a weapon that can stun lock her... she will heal indefinitely. Nothing else you do in the fight matters, because once she gets into her healing loop the fight will just go on and on.
• The Bonus Boss in Bravely Default is a Dual Boss against Adventurer and Comrade. While they don't generally heal, killing Comrade (who only has the HP of a common enemy at that point) simply causes Adventurer to bring him back next turn, forcing you to focus on Adventurer instead lest you get caught in this. As it turns out, though, blowing through Adventurer's massive HP pool simply causes Comrade to bring Adventurer back, meaning you have to kill them both on the same turn to avoid this.
• Buckshot Roulette: A combination of horrible item luck and poor memory can see you and the dealer getting caught in one with the cigarettes which recover health. Turns can be wasted if you keep racking the shotgun with beers.
• Dragon Quest II has this with its final two bosses, Hargon and Malroth, but only in the original NES version. Hargon casts Fullheal to get himself to full health if it ever gets low, and can keep doing this until you do enough damage to finish him off before he can get to that point. Malroth is much worse, as he uses Fullheal completely at random, turning the fight into a Luck-Based Mission.
• EarthBound (1994) has the Clumsy Robot boss fight, where the robot every so often heals itself to full. Except it's a lie: Despite the message, its actual HP don't go up, and the cutscene where you're saved by the Runaway Five is triggered by its HP dropping down to zero.
• Ecco the Dolphin: If you get consumed by the alien Vortex Queen, which can easily happen, you are forced to play through the previous level, The Machine, just to return to the fight, where her health resets. You don't want or need this loop, as The Machine is a five-minute-long autoscrolling monstrosity of a level. The later Japanese version of the game is more merciful than the English one, and instead sends the player to an easier level called The Stomach which is unique to that version; the healing loop still exists, but is slightly less brutal.
• Elden Ring: Fighting Malenia with a shield is generally unviable because of her ability to heal herself whenever she lands a hit. This includes hits that are blocked. Even if you can block her flurry of attacks without having your guard broken, you won't be able to deal much damage in-between her attacks because you spent your stamina blocking them. The only way to reasonably beat Malenia with a shield build is to go all in: get the heaviest shield in the game, bulk up your stamina, and use a weapon that can attack while guarding.
• Elsword: The fight with the Alterasia Type-H can be this, especially on harder difficulty. Aside from having loads of HP, the boss can regenerate his health by touching any of the Alterasia Spores spawned in the boss room. So unless the player party consistently does damage on him (using upgraded late-game equipment is pretty much a requisite here) and can prevent him from touching the spores, the fight will take forever and you will have to burn through your potions just to survive and/or quickly deal damage. The fact that the stage has a "time limit" and your HP will drain once you go past that limit only makes it more urgent to come to the boss room and defeat him quicker.
• Tech Mages from EpicDuel were this. One of their skills was 'reroute', which together with 'assimilation', causes a healing loop taken from any damage sustained. Combined with their other formidable abilities in the skill tree, gamers kept on complaining that Tech Mages were simply overpowered, until a recent patch removed the reroute skill.
• This is fairly common in the earlier Final Fantasy games (most notably Final Fantasy VI), where sudden difficulty spikes can leave players stuck in these loops, if they didn't prepare heavily before moving into a new area of the game.
• Golden Sun: The Lost Age has one with the Serpent boss around midgame. The Serpent is very easy to find, but if you fight it right there, it regenerates 200 HP per turn (only the nightmarish Bonus Boss Dullahan gets that much, and it's fought at the endgame), far more than the party can hope to inflict without completely neglecting healing or defense. The solution to the loop is to explore the dungeon and let light into the Serpent's lair, weakening it until it recovers a much more reasonable 30 HP per turn.
• The Zelda games:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: The boss Moldorm can knock Link out of the raised arena. Link then needs to climb back up from the floor below (or two floors if he kicked Link down the center hole in his platform); but he also regains his full health in the process, effectively resetting the match. There's no strategy to break this cycle, either, other than fighting him over and over until one gets enough reflexes (or enough luck) to dodge him for the whole fight.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The boxing mini boss Blaino's uppercut not only resets the combat (and thus, Blaino's health to full), it also knocks Link not only out of the room, but the entire dungeon. Turtle Rock is not a fun trek. This is one loop you don't want to get stuck in. The Switch version, meanwhile, just knocks Link out of the room.
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has two examples:
  • The Mario & Luigi fight between Bowser's memories of the brothers, requires you to defeat Memory L first, otherwise Memory L will simply revive Memory M over and over again. The fight drags on forever, though, because Memory L often runs off-screen, where you can't attack him, and will likely not return until Memory M is defeated. Get ready for the pain.
  • Facing off Bowser X in the Challenge Node in Bowser's body is grueling; he's the hardest optional boss in the game, but you can't even challenge him until you defeat all the other X bosses in a row before finally confronting him. And when you do, getting yourself in a healing loop is just the pits — you need both brothers standing to pull off those special attacks, but all of Bowser X's attacks hit like a train, so be prepared to have Mario taking hits while he revives a fainted Luigi... and then Luigi getting pummeled while reviving a KO-ed Mario.
• This is pretty much all you can do against the final boss of Mother 3; you can't attack him, so you've got to keep healing yourself again and again until the story kicks in. Pray to God he doesn't use PK Love against you too many times or your HP will nosedive.
• In Path of Exile, regular Rare monsters can be even harder to kill than bosses if it gets the right set of mods. Mods that give regen scale with maximum life, so combining that with other mods that gives boatloads of life will make it regenerate much more health, and if it also gets other defensive mods like block chance or resistance or immunity to damage types or debuffs, killing it becomes almost impossible if you don't have enough DPS for it. This problem is more noticable early game when characters don't have their build properly set up yet. Anti-regen exists, but the only easy source of it is a spell, and only cuts it down by 75%.
• Paper Mario: Color Splash has its loop with the Larry boss fight on the Sunset Express. No skill is required to win here, but if you haven't equipped enough of the right cards, you'll get trapped in a loop. Your ally in the battle is the Toad engineer trying to prevent a Shy Guy giving Larry an endless supply of healing items. But the train's engineer can be taken out by Larry's minions. You need to have multiple-enemy-hitting attack cards to KO Larry's minions in one turn. You can't even run away from the fight if you run out of cards, forcing the player to reset.
• Planet Side 2: A stubborn concentration of medics healing and reviving their fellow medics can be very difficult to uproot. Under heavy enough fire and lacking the sense to redeploy elsewhere, they could theoretically constantly revive each other, but be unable to make any progress in the fight due to being stuck using their medigun on one another.
• The Pokémon games:
  • Generation I features Mt. Moon, a large cave with many floors and connectors. A common recurring enemy here is Zubat which spams its Supersonic move, causing your monsters to become confused. You're trying your best to cure these ailments, only for Zubat to follow it up with another Supersonic. So, in frustration, you have your Pokémon simply attack Zubat, only for your creature to hurt itself in the confusion. You heal it, so it can hurt itself in the confusion. And it goes on and on, and on.
  • Any opponent trainer, in a long drawn-out battle where neither Pokémon is dealing anything super effective to the other, using a Max/Hyper Potion or Full Restore at the very end, is a cheap enough tactic to make a gamer's blood boil. And they can do this several times in a row.
  • An especially unfortunate loop is triggered by using Rage against an NPC opponent, who keeps using Rest or Recover over and over again to negate any and all damage done by Rage. If the opponent's AI becomes convinced that the healing move is its best option, it will use it every turn it can. In the original games, not only was the AI easily convinced to spam such moves when they appeared to have elemental advantages (as the AI couldn't tell the difference between attacks and status moves), but Rage also locked the user into using Rage until it or its opponent fainted, and the AI had no limit on how many times it could use its moves; thus, this results in an endless fight you can't stop unless you reset the game. Making things worse, this can happen with the Elite Four member Lorelei, whose Dewgong knows Rest, and if you save the game in her room while your only Pokémon are weak to Psychic and are only able to use Rage, your entire save file will be ruined because you can't leave the room without fighting her and attempting to to fight her will lead to this healing loop. In Yellow, the game uses different AI for Lorelei's Dewgong which prevents it from spamming Rest endlessly, specifically to avert this situation.
  • You're in for a miserable battle against any same-level Pokémon that knows the move Roost, allowing it to recover HP over and over. Photosynthesis and Moonlight aren't much better, but are at least influenced by weather conditions, so you can force them to become less effective... if you have weather-changing moves, which is unlikely since they're only situationally useful.
  • There are three ways the game prevents this from happening (usually): the existence of Critical Hits, which will usually take their victim down below healing level; misses, which will allow the other Pokémon to do something else; and PP, so players can only use a move a certain number of times before they have to pick something else. (However, in Generation 1, AI trainers did not have PP, so they could repeat the same move indefinitely.) Healing items are also restricted — AI trainers almost never have more than two, and while a player could stock up on enough Full Restores to keep this going for hours, there's no in-game reason to buy this many. There is one perfect situation which bypasses all of these restrictions and allows two players to be locked in battle eternally: two Wobbuffet holding Leftovers (which restores 1/16 of the holder's health every turn) will never be able to attack one another as the species' entire gimmick is only being able to Counter-Attack, in early generations would also prevent one another from switching, and once all of their PP was reduced to 0, the desperation move Struggle wouldn't be able to do enough damage to overcome the healing effects of the Leftovers due to Wobbuffet's humongous HP and miserable Attack stat, even with critical hits factored in. This was fixed by making Struggle's recoil damage equal to 1/4 of the user's HP, which is far more than Leftovers recovers per turn; however, during the first generation where this was possible, Wobbuffet had to be banned from holding Leftovers in official events specifically to prevent this from happening.
• In Spectromancer, only one card is played per turn, allowing skilled players to deduce the opponent's maximum damage potential on any given turn from the few direct-damage spells like Lightning Bolt and Armageddon. Since those two spells also get stronger with each additional point of hoarded mana, a player can easily be caught in a "heal or die" state for several turns in a row. Here's a video of a player using a healing spell five turns in a row, but it's not entirely rare for loops to go even longer.
• Spore, for its strategies, can be a complicated game. Colonizing planets, getting that sought-after spice, to the point where it can all get horribly imbalanced. Setting up trade routes, amassing the necessary funds for upgrading, the list goes on. But Spore has a beginner's trap, and that's your own homeworld. It's a useless dead-weight that'll never yield much spice production. It cannot be taken over by hostiles. Many don't realize it can be ignored to start with. Devoting time and resources to it results in a vicious circle of invading, defending, spending, and rebuilding... over and over until bankruptcy.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Generally speaking, these situations are de-emphasized by the various subseries' Extra Turn mechanics. Striking a weakness allows getting an attack in for free before healing, while healing first just consumes the turn without getting anywhere. The games are balanced on the assumption the player will exploit this.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne: This is the gimmick of Mara's Optional Boss fight. He has a rather pathetic amount of HP, but will fully heal himself with Diarahan if he's taken any damage at all. The solution is just to buff yourself, debuff him, and annihilate him in one round.
• A notorious glitch during the boss fight with Silver in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) forces this trope upon the player. If Sonic is thrown against a wall by Silver while he’s still within range, Silver will attack Sonic again before the player can get away, trapping Sonic in a loop of losing and picking up the same ring over and over again. This can potentially softlock the game depending on the angle Sonic is standing against the wall at.
• A popular troll level choice of an Anti-softlock in Super Mario Maker is to trap the player in an otherwise inescapable room where death is the only way out, except power-ups keep spawning in the room with the player, preventing them from dying.
• Tales of Vesperia has the fight with Alexei. Around half HP he'll begin to absolutely spam Guardian Frost, which heals him quite a bit. However, the move is *also* an Area of Effect attack that hits around him, making it impossible to get close, and another problem with the fight is him randomly ignoring hitstun, making it virtually impossible to actually stop him from using the move with projectiles or spells (or your own Iron Stance). Your only hope is outdamaging his pace of healing — otherwise, you might as well load your save and equip damage boosting skills before trying again. It should be noted he's the only boss with a healing move to exhibit this issue.
• Undertale. The final boss of the Genocide Route has some all-round insane attacks that'll force you to heal yourself to avoid death. But as you soon discover, the battle cannot progress unless you actually attack and miss him. Unfortunately, he's a magnitude stronger than any other enemy in the game, requiring you to heal yourself often in order to just survive. According to Word of God, this is intentional.
• The Brief and Meaningless Adventure of Hero Man: At low enough levels and if there's only manaless mages left, the Player Party can't hit Medic Oozies hard enough and/or consistently enough to stop them from surviving 40-ish turns by healing themselvesband impairing the accuracy of the party. The loop ends at that point because then their own mana runs out and they're a Harmless Enemy by themselves.

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