Gradual Regeneration

An item or ability used in recovering a small amount of some stat, that has been decreased, per a certain amount of time, or just increasing the effects of an already-existing regeneration mechanic. In games that are turn-based or have the passage of time marked by actions performed by the player, health or mana may recover based on turns or steps taken rather than in real time.

Most Roguelikes let you recover HP and MP gradually over time without needing to do anything special, due to Hyperactive Metabolism.

May overlap with Regenerating Health and Regenerating Mana, if it's Hit Points or Mana, respectively, that restore slowly.

May also overlap with Healing Factor, a dramatic rather than a gameplay ability, when there is Gameplay and Story Integration.

---

Examples:

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Ring of Regeneration, which heals one Hit Point of damage per minute (10 turns).
  • The Regenerate Light Wounds spell in Dragon magazine #134. Heals 1 Hit Point per minute for 2-5 minutes. 5th Edition’s Regenerate spell does the same thing, but the effect lasts for 1 hour instead and it also gives some direct healing.
  • In 2nd Edition rules, having a Constitution score of 20 or higher would cause a character to heal hitpoints at a very slow rate (one per minute, speeding up with higher Con scores). However, it was impossible to get a Constitution score that high without powerful magic involved.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: The standard health item, 'Stim Shots' and the later 'Digitalin', provide a regeneration effect upon use.
• In Baldur's Gate, if a character has a constitution of at least 20, they gain a healing factor, allowing them to regenerate to full health within several (in-game) hours.
• The plant-based parts of Overgrowth from Chippy periodically grow back. This is one of the things that prove the importance of attacking bosses quickly to players.
• Danganronpa RPG: The 'Another Hope' item revives a knocked out party member with 30% of their total HP and then gradually restores more.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Most games of the franchise implement gradual health regeneration in the form of the Regen spell. Depending on the game, it may be time-based or turn-based.
  • In Final Fantasy VII, Regen is time-based, and the rate of regeneration is doubled while under the effects of a Haste spell, making this combination a borderline Game-Breaker.
  • In Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, the Genji Armor raises Zack's HP limit to 99999 while providing Endure and Regen buffs.
  • Final Fantasy XII has abilities to get MP when losing health, killing an enemy, and hitting an enemy with a physical or magical attack. MP also regenerates gradually if you walk around. Justified in that magic in XII comes in the form of Mist, which can be absorbed via inhalation, and is often released by striking magical monsters. It even regenerates more quickly in highly magical areas!
• The Refresh buff in Granblue Fantasy will recover a party member's HP for a fixed amount every turn. The Revitalize buff does the same, but in addition, if a party member's HP is already at full, it instead grants them a small amount of charge bar.
• Hades: Stubborn Roots, the Duo Boon of Athena (who specializes in defensive buffs) and Demeter (who specializes in cold-themed buffs), gives Zagreus life regeneration if he has no Death/Stubborn Defiances remaining.
• Pokémon: All Regenerating Health on a per-turn basis:
  • The Leftovers item restors a bit of HP after every turn for all Pokemon. Poison-types can hold Black Sludge for the same effect.
  • The moves Ingrain and Aqua Ring restore health for a number of turns after use.
  • The abilities Rain Dish, Dry Skin and Ice Body rely on weather conditions. The former two restore HP when it rains; the latter, when it's hailing.
  • The ability Poison Heal means the Pokemon heals gradually when poisoned, rather than taking damage. This applies even to the 'badly poisoned' effect from Toxic.
  • The Grassy Terrain field effect heals Pokemon that touch the ground.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable, the cast can regenerate their health and magic by walking it off, but there are items available to restore set amounts of health.
• The RPG-influenced Tower Defense game Cursed Treasure has both Mana Pools, which speed MP regen if you build on them, and the Mana Extraction skill, which does the same thing without requiring any particular building pattern. The two effects can be stacked.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:
  • The Healing Sprout item constantly heals off your damage as long as you are holding it. However, it can be thrown, and it can be transferred to other fighters on contact or knocked off if you take enough damage or are thrown.
  • Some Support Spirits give the "Autoheal" Skill, which heals you for a small amount of damage every 5 seconds. The "Great Autoheal" Ability exclusive to Celebi does the same, but heals in much greater amounts.
  • Madama Butterfly from Bayonetta gives the unique Ability "Poison Heals", which inverts the effects of the Poison status effect, Poison Floors, and poison clouds, causing them to rapidly heal off damage. While it costs three slots, this Ability can make you effectively invincible in certain fights.
• Hero RPG has hats which speed point regeneration: the Hearty Hat (HP), the Sisters Eyes (MP), and the Arkavian Helm (both).
• Wizardry: Wearing the Ring of Healing or Lord's Garb slowly healed lost Hit Points.
• South Park: Phone Destroyer: The Regeneration spell grants this to all the player's units for a limited amount of time. Friar Jimmy emits an aura that constantly regenerates his own health along with any allies close to him. Priest Maxi has the same ability, with slightly stronger effects.
• Recovery-over-time is the modus operandi of healing druids in World of Warcraft who have no fewer than five different spells that heal over time. There's also several elixirs a character can drink that restore health over time, and warlocks have a self-buff that restores their health over time as well.
• In Death Stranding, as a repatriate, all of Sam's lethal wounds heal over time, but only if he has enough blood in his circulatory system. If Sam loses too much blood, he dies and must return to life by finding his body through the Seam, after which his blood will have regenerated itself to stable levels.
• In NieR: Automata, with an Auto-Heal chip equipped, HP recovers when 2B hasn't been damaged for six seconds, the rate dependent on the rank and/or number of chips she has equipped. A single level 6 version can regenerate the entire health bar in about ten seconds, making it one of the most powerful chips available on any difficulty except Very Hard.
• In The Legend of Dragoon, the Defend Command also recovers 10% of a character's max HP whenever it is used, making it a vital combat tactic throughout the game, especially since the number of healing items that can be carried is very small.
• zOMG!: The Healing Halo and Divinity rings greatly increase the amount of Hit Points and Stamina restored respectively, and the Fitness ring does both by a small amount. The Demon and Shaman ringsets do the same respectively. Sitting down restores more than standing up as well.
• Runescape: the Rapid Heal and Rapid Renewal prayer abilities double and quintuples the amount of Hit Points restored.
• IkenFell: Petronella's "Aura" and Ima's "Rainbow" can be used on party members to increase their HP over several of their turns, as can specific items.
• Roguelike Dungeon Crawl lets most species heal a fraction of their health and MP by every N:th turn. For mummies this is very convenient, because they don't need any food to survive, but any living species must carefully consider whether it's better to wait and heal, and become hungry, or risk an encounter with low health.
  • In addition to this natural regeneration (which is heavily race dependent, from ultra-fast and ultra hungry Trolls on one edge of the scale and non-regenerating-at-all Deep Dwarves and bloodless Vampires on the other), there are several sources that boost (or slow) player's regeneration rate, including mutations (these affect regeneration permanently), rings of regeneration, random artifacts with Regen property and a Regeneration spell (this one, oddly enough, falls into Necromancy school, and as such is not available for followers of good gods).
• Browser-based RPG NeoQuest II lets the characters heal 1% of their total for the first ten moves after a battle.
• There are a few items and weapons in Demon's Souls that slowly regenerate HP or MP. You're going to need them.
• The Mother series: The rolling HP meter mechanic works for recovery items or PSI (Which is the name given to 'magic' in this game) too: they do not instantly recover all of your HP, even though they heal a predetermined amount of hit points, instead the points keep going up until they reach how much the item/spell heals.
  • Mother 3 has a traditional example of this in Lucas' PK Refresh, which regenerates 1/8 of the party's HP every turn for five turns. While very useful, it's unfortunately learned at such a high level that you might not even have it by the time you reach the final boss.
• Last Scenario has two spells, one that slowly regenerates HP and one that regenerates MP.
• Alter AILA Genesis has Status Buffs that increase the amount of AP or EX you gain per turn, as well as one that regenerates 10% of your HP each round. There are also field effects that do the same, but for all combatants.
• Dot Hack has both HP and MP regenerating buffs.
• From Tales of Symphonia on, TP can be regained in the Tales Series by attacking enemies physically. Watch in horror as your Squishy Wizard runs up to punch the Giga Dragon in the face after blowing his load on Meteor Swarm spells. There are also equippable items that give characters regeneration, that inexplicably only works while in battle.
• In Mega Man ZX Advent, your Weapon Energy is always regenerating.
• There are item that slowly regenerate health in combat and after an adventure (one "turn") in Kingdom of Loathing, ranging from the Ring of Half-Assed Regeneration (occasionally regain a few hit points) to the Heart Of The Volcano (20 HP and MP per adventure).
• Prayer of the Faithless: One of the effects of the Miasma Charge buff, as said in the Guide:
  they regenerate HP each turn,
• River City Girls: The meter to wait for a Recruit's attack to become available again reactivates the attack once it's full and it regenerates over time.
• Star Wars video games in which the player controls a Jedi often allow him/her to learn a variation of "Force Heal", which allows the player to heal themselves with their regenerating Force pool instead of a one-use medkit.
  • Star Wars: Battlefront features this as a passive ability for the "Pilot" class - when they are at the controls of a vehicle, it will automatically repair itself at a slow rate. The sequel allows players to unlock this as a reward for any class in singleplayer modes.
  • Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords includes gradual healing in combat (though it's slower than out of combat) and a feat to increase regeneration rate. Certain items and upgrades also include this. In the first game, Canderous has a regeneration "implant" (also in the second, though he can use it to increase stats as well).
• Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days uses regeneration for its Cura and Curaga abilities. Cura has health recover temporarily every few seconds, while Curaga has a similar effect, except it creates an area in which all allies receive the health recovery
• League of Legends has a number of items that increase natural health regeneration. Some champions also have an enhanced ability to do this through their abilities (such as Garen, whose passive ability lets him slowly regenerate health as long as he's not taking damage from turrets or enemy champions).
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel: Elliot's Echoes/Resonance Beat grants this to all allies in range, along with a DEF boost. At 200 CP, his second S-Craft, Remedy Oratorium also gets this effect as an added bonus, at 50% per turn.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The Medic has passive health regeneration. It can be decreased or increased depending on the weapons in his loadout.
  • The Cozy Camper heals 1 HP per second when worn by the Sniper.
  • The Concheror grants a 2 HP per second healing buff to the Soldier when worn.
  • The Engineer can regenerate metal over time as an upgrade in Mann vs Machine mode.
  • All classes can purchase +2 Health Regeneration in Mann vs Machine mode, up to +10 Health.
• In Temtem, the regenerated status heals 10% of a Temtem's health at the end of each turn until it runs out.
• Independence War is a very unusual space sim example in that as opposed to the usual Regenerating Shields, Static Health, Deflector Shields are of limited effectiveness and most damage goes straight to the hull, which is automatically repaired at roughly one percent per second.
• Dark Souls features Sanctus, a shield which provides gradual health regeneration. The Replenishment and Bountiful Sunlight Miracles also do this.
• In Command & Conquer, one of the special features of the Mammoth tank is that it gradually self-repairs to up to 50% of its full hit points, when it has been damaged to less than that. In later installments of the series some other units also get such an ability, particularly when at elite status starting from Red Alert 2.
• The regeneration ability in Sol Forge causes the creature that has it to regain some amount of health each turn.
• One of the effects of Hardcore mode in Fallout: New Vegas is to make Stimpaks and RadAway work this way instead of the instant healing and radiation-reduction they provide in the vanilla game. Food and drink also work this way at all times.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. always has a tree of artifacts that regenerates health when equipped, with certain downsides. In Shadow of Chernobyl, they decrease resistance to all kinds of physical damage by 50%, which makes them bad choices for fighting but allow the Marked One to hide in a peaceful spot to let his health recharge. In the other two games, however, the healing comes at the cost of radiation, which forces the stalker interested in their effects to use a radiation-eliminating artifact, but such a combo grants considerable regeneration. A stalker armed with three Koloboks and a Bubble to disperse the radiation is Nigh-Invulnerable to mutant attacks, though bullets are still a big threat. Outside of the use of artifacts, there is gradual regeneration of your health provided that you're not bleeding or starving, but it's so slow as to be effectively impractical.
• The Elder Scrolls series:
  • In Daggerfall, you can customize your character to regenerate Health or Magicka in sunlight or darkness.
  • Morrowind: The Necromancer's Amulet has a powerful Constant Effect enchantment which boosts the wearer's Intelligence by 25 points, adds a 25% "normal weapons" resistance, restores 1pt of Health per second, and gives a 25% chance to absorb incoming spells.
• In Legend of Grimrock, your health and stamina very slowly refills over time, but really slowly. To truly heal you must "rest" having your party sleep where it will gradually fill up but at a much faster rate than normal. The downside is that enemies are still free to attack you so you better be sure you're in a safe place.
• This is one of the magical effects that can be applied to loot in Diablo III; at late levels, it tends not to be as good for most builds as Life Per hit, which synergizes with high Attack Speed to offer more healing while in combat (which is when you need it the most anyway). It does, however, increase the utility of certain skills.
• In Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Fuuka's Healing Breeze restores a small amount of health for all surviving party members at the end of each round.
• Two characters in Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass have this as an intrinsic trait:
  • Lars' laziness gives him Regenerating Health over time.
  • Andrew's erudition gives him passive Regenerating Mana.
• Luxaren Allure: For skills and items:
  • Chisa's 'Pearl Breeze' Impulse Skill gives health regeneration.
  • The Angelic Ring grants health regeneration to the character that has it equipped.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: The Lifeblood Necklace gives back a small percentage of HP per turn.
• Nocturne: Rebirth has passives that increase HP and MP regeneration. Additionally, HP regen items/spells tend to be more MP efficient and heal more in the long run than traditional instant healing items/spells.
• In Ghost 1.0, repair kits gradually restore Ghost’s health over time at a rate of 10 hit points per second.
• In Crying Suns, there is an officer ability which lets your battleship recover 0.5 hit points per second, and another ability which gives each squadron in your deployment zone 10 seconds of gradual healing every 15 seconds. There is also a battleship weapon which gives the targeted squadron several seconds of gradual healing in addition to a hefty dose of direct healing.
• Eternal Darkness has the Magick Pool spell. Casting it with Chattur'gha's rune replenishes your health, Ulyaoth's rune replenishes the Mana Meter, Xel'lotath's replenishes the Sanity Meter, and Mantorok replenishes all three. Your Mana Meter also gradually replenishes naturally, if slowly, as an innate property.
• Eternal Senia: Hydrangea After The Rain: Senia has Regenerating Health that happens slowly while in battle, at some base amount that is below 1%, but can be increased with passive skills from companion cards.
• The Borderlands series does this with multiple stats:
  • Regenerating Shield, Static Health, which always passively regenerate, starting a good few seconds after the last bit of damage was dealt. Some character abilities like Quick Charge will force shield regeneration upon an enemy kill.
  • None of the Vault Hunters has it available by default, but there's a variety of skills or class mods (or the odd piece of gear) that provide passive regeneration of health or, less commonly, ammo, giving Regenerating Health, and effectively Bottomless Magazines, every game:
  • Borderlands:
    • The Tediore legendary weapons such as "Unending Firepower", regenerate ammo.
    • Tediore's Shields
    • "Wee Wee's Super Booster", with "Very quick Health Regeneration!", but The Computer Is a Lying Bastard. It's only as fast as the fastest always Regenerating Health, Tediore Shields, the Panacea.
    • Each class has its own way to gradually regenerate health.
    • Healing Kits work this way. For example, the Greater ones heal 300 HP over 10 seconds.
  • Borderlands 2: There are some shields that restore your health over time, but there are more ways to gain regeneration, like abilities that grant it through action skill use or killing an enemy, or certain class mods.
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!:
    • Class Mods that grant Regenerating Health do it as a fixed number of Hit Points a second.
    • By The Computer Is a Lying Bastard, Nurse Nina's "Health Now!". It says "Instantly heals you to full health.", but looking closely shows it as very-not-gradual Regenerating Health.
• This Starry Midnight We Make: Star seeds have a cap on the number available at any one time, and slowly replenish the stock over time if space is available.
• Parameters: When Hit Points hit 0, all stats beyond Experience Points, ACT, RCV, and Character Level go to 0 and recover over time based on RCV, a.k.a Recovery.
• Transistor: Flood() as a passive, heals 5 Hit Points a second, stopping when Red has 50% of her max health left.
• ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal: Water and Light fairies have passive spells that can heal a small amount of HP every few seconds.

---