What happened to Kirito's healing every 10 sec when he battled Heathcliff?


In _Sword Art Online_ after the episode "The Black Swordsman", Kirito does not
get any HP back during his fights with Heathcliff.

What happened to Kirito's healing?




It's a fairly small amount of healing compared to his overall health-bar. If
we go back to the episode where he talks about his "Battle Healing" skill
(Episode 4), Kirito states that he has 14,500 HP, and that his skill
regenerates 600 HP every 10 seconds. That's 4% every 10 second tick, but most
attacks we actually see players take from similarly leveled enemies do WAY
more damage than 4%.

Practically speaking, the skill is mostly for getting rid of accumulated minor
damage, either from status effects (weak poisons), trash mobs or other damage-
over-time (DOT) attacks, so a player doesn't die from a thousand stings.
Passive healing like this in MMOs tends to be fairly weak like this, mostly
serving to save you some health potions, and in fact this skill is basically
oriented towards solo players, because they wouldn't be able to take healing
potions mid-fight (as they have to be manually drunk), unlike players with
party members you can switch with. The downside of course is that SAO has a
limited number of skill slots (expanded on more in the Light Novels,
especially SAO Progressive), so most (non-solo) players likely woulda just
settled for using some weak potions HOT (heal-over-time) once in a while, and
saved the skill slot for something useful.

As it so happened, in Episode 4 Kirito was visiting the lower floors, and as
such the players that attacked him were all low-to-mid level players that were
basically trash mobs that Kirito simply out-leveled by a wide margin—and trash
mobs are one of the exact sorts of things the skill was meant to counter.

On the other hand, other players that were of similar level, like Asuna,
Klein, and of course Heathcliff, would barely notice the passive healing
unless he could avoid enough hits long enough for it to make a difference.

