balancing healing formulas

[perkeyone]

so i want to make several healing spells in my map, but to make things interesting i want them to all be fundamentally different.

• a: provides the best healing for critically damaged units
• b: provides average healing in any scenario
• c: provides the best healing for noncritically damaged units

i came up with 3 formulas to calculate how much hp is healed by each one
(i am disregarding the spell level for the time being. i will incorporate it into the formula later)

these lines can be described with the following formulas (starting with the tallest) x is the unit's remaining health as a percent

a=[U](100-x)²[/U]
    200
b=[U](100-x)[/U]
     3
c=10x^.5-x

i already did calculations and found that these three lines all have the same area under their curves from 0 to 100. that means that on average they are all equally good for healing given a target with a random %hp... but in game, players usually wait to heal when a unit is really hurt, so they may not be balanced from a gameplay standpoint.

so how could i better balance these healing formulas?

 

[Sjaakje]

You could just make the spell that heals best on non critically healed units heal very little but cost very little mana as well (and optionally also have very low cooldown compared to the others), that would seem the only way for people to use that spell.

Just an idea though, who knows it may turn out very different.