Stamina Regeneration

[J.E. Sawyer]

I've always envisioned the health/stamina mechanic to be a difference between strategy/tactics.  From my understanding, health is the determining factor in how long you can go without resting, whereas stamina is a combat-based resource that needs managing.  So, health is the thing that determines how far you want to stray from home, sort of like "injuries" in DA:O or, maybe, the way health and stamina were done in Betrayal at Krondor (both decent systems, in my view).

 

I think calling it "health" is giving some people the vapors. It seems some people are equating health with hit points.

 

Question for Josh: Do you guys refer to anything as "hit points"?  Or is that term just not used?

 

Yeah, that's pretty much the idea.  If a character were to lose 400% of his or her total Stamina over any number of battles (without resting), his or her Health should be at 0% (unless the character is a barbarian).  I've seen unlucky characters get to about 30% Health in one fight due to being healed (Stamina healing) and having Reviving Exhortation used on them after dropping without adequate protection.  Going into subsequent fights, those characters typically get put way in the back or with someone protecting them.  Otherwise it's really easy for them to get maimed/killed.

 

e: And no, we don't use hit points, just Stamina and Health.

[Nonek]

Always liked this division since it was first announced, brings with it a healthy dose of danger and strategic management. Personally I hope there's no mechanic such as DA:O's injury kits though, carrying around a few dozen of these made injuries in that game a triviality barely noticed. One had the impression of slight discomfort while the description read broken leg or somesuch, a little jarring to say the least.

[ambrusynev]

I quite happy about this dual approach to health, especially after reading Sawyer's explanations above. It seems it offers a decent amount of strategic choice when deciding whether to engage in a fight or not. I have almost always hated the way hit points are used in IE games, especially when weaker characters had no chance of seriously hurting me when they were able to hit me.

[Lephys]

Always liked this division since it was first announced, brings with it a healthy dose of danger and strategic management.

 

I see what you did there...

 

Yeah, really though, most games just use one resource: hitpoints (aka "health"). You get hit, you take damage. You don't get hit, you don't take damage. It gets too low, you die. Of course, that health usually has to be balanced in two different ways, simultaneously:

 

1) You want to make sure it's not too high, so that reaching 0 health is actually a possible threat in a given combat encounter.

2) You want to make sure it's not too low, because, if it is, then you'll NEVER come out of any kind of tough combat situation with the ability to continue on without first healing. Enter oodles of healing potions that you're supposed to use every minute, and/or mana-based healing spells, etc, and/or rest-spamming.

 

So, the idea is, how about 2 different resources? So you can worry about not-"dying" during a bout of combat, but, making it through that, not feel the immediate need to heal up or be at some severe disadvantage.

 

Imagine BG. You're Level 2, and instead of 10 hitpoints, you have 10 Stamina, and 40 Health (I realize the ratios in P:E are actually 1:1, but I'd rather make a simpler example with whole numbers instead of resorting to taking fractional damage, since that didn't happen in BG.)

 

So, if you take 9 damage in one combat, then achieve victory, you've still got 31 health. And your Stamina comes back up to 10, for free. No management necessary. So, if you do that too many times, you'll die or need to go find a place to rest, etc. But, otherwise, you're good to go, and there's still a need to be cautious. Just like actual BG, you still have to worry about not-taking 10-or-more damage in one bout of combat. AND, you still can only recover so much until you need to go rest somewhere. But you get more leeway now.

 

It's deceptively simple, yet elegant.

[Mor]

Yeah, that's pretty much the idea.  If a character were to lose 400% of his or her total Stamina over any number of battles (without resting), his or her Health should be at 0% (unless the character is a barbarian).  I've seen unlucky characters get to about 30% Health in one fight due to being healed (Stamina healing) and having Reviving Exhortation used on them after dropping without adequate protection.

Can you confirm if character can be attacked while unconscious?

 

Because right now it seem that even in expert mode, the only way to loose a party member after resting is by being very stupid with excessive healing or by loosing the whole party/game. So if i am to rest after each encounter, party members would never be able to die, which seem like an odd concept.

 

However, Considering that you always take health damage, which you can't heal outside of Restpoints, which are presumably spread many encounters apart. Basically you removed death, which annoyed a lot of people and lead to instant reloads. At the same time you ramped up the difficulty and introduced a reward/punishment mechanic, since health damage continues to accumulate, each encounter counts, and those who can't cut it, will have to backtrack before they can finish it.

 

Which is very very nice, I just hope that you don't mess the rest("check") points.

[Lephys]

I'm still not getting why everyone's perfectly fine with plain-and-simple finite hitpoints (in PoE's case, "Stamina"), so that if you can't kill stuff before everyone runs out of hitpoints, you just straight-up die/lose/HAVE to reload the game and try again. But then, you simply add in a "Hey, you're going to get all your hitpoints (again, "Stamina" in PoE terms) back approximately 4 times before you actually have to worry about dying! 8D!", and suddenly there's some giant issue.

 

"OMG, why would you let me go beyond immediate-encounter hitpoint restrictions in such a nice fashion, and yet limit me eventually to some kind of 'you're going to have to go out of your way to heal some, or you're going to die' scenario? *GASP*"

 

I just... I don't know. I'm not comprehending how that's not a paradox. Are people just looking at this in a vaccuum? Imagining some ridiculous scenarios that will somehow force them to begrudgingly run backwards (every single time, of course... it's somehow statistically impossible that you'll ever get low on health when you're near the "next" rest site) to campfires every 3 seconds, instead of just "Hey, you can only go so long before you're going to have to heal," which is true of almost any game in the entire universe that utilizes finite hitpoints?

 

I have this feeling people are doing something like imagining BG, but without rest-anywhere capabilities. As if they're not building this game from the ground up around the very idea of Stamina, Health, and specified rest spots. And you're actually going to need Health every 3 fights, but the rest points are all going to be 17-fights apart.

Edited December 12, 2013 by Lephys

[Mor]

I'm still not getting why everyone's perfectly fine with plain-and-simple finite hitpoints (in PoE's case, "Stamina"), so that if you can't kill stuff before everyone runs out of hitpoints, you just straight-up die/lose/HAVE to reload the game and try again.

But we have a finite hitpoints(health), and if you can't kill stuff before anyone runs out of health, you just straight-up die.(or maimed depending on the mode you play)

 

As I noted in the comment above, how stamina works is hard to rationalize. But in its way it makes more sense, instead of shrugging off being raped with spiked club and your entrails leaking from your body, with couple of a "health" potions. Now you have to return to camp and being treated and get rest to allow your body to regenerate.(It also ties up with your inventory/stash mechanic)

 

BTW Stamina has been described as resistance to short-term injury.

Edited December 12, 2013 by Mor