How do Enemy Health Adjustments for Difficulty Level Work?

[Enoch]

Like, what are they (the internet is surprisingly unhelpful on this), when are they applied, and to what?

If you look at the in-game Bestiary, you see that enemies have Base Health, a default level, and a CON score.  Their health is also adjusted by the Difficulty that the player has chosen.  In what order are these modifiers applied? 

I assume that enemy base health is their health at their default level, and that any scaling applied can alter this.  My guess is that this also incorporates their default CON score, rather than representing their health at 10 CON, before the 5%-per-point modifications are made.  (Right?)  But does the Bestiary incorporate difficulty-level adjustment?  Are difficulty level adjustments applied to the final total, or somewhere prior to that?  (That is, before the scaling modification and/or before the effect of CON is calculated?)

 

If you want the full story, I started thinking about this in the context of CON afflictions.  It struck me that -5 CON can be a significant reduction in enemy health, and because current health shifts with max-health changes on a percentage basis, damage done to an enemy while they're afflicted is functionally magnified.  (That is, even if the affliction expires, they enemy's health will be reduced by all the damage taken while afflicted, plus the % by which their total health was reduced-- a really nice 25% "lash" on all damage for an 10-CON opponent.)  But it occurred to me that the health changes based on difficulty were a complicating factor that I didn't know how to figure out.  The afflictions might be more or less good on PotD than they are on a difficulty without an enemy health adjustment.

Edited July 30, 2019 by Enoch