Health/Endurance ratio

[PrimeJunta]

I understand that the Health/Endurance ratio is fixed at 1:1, with damage ratio at 1:4 or 1:8 for barbarians. I also understand that this wasn't always so.

 

I think it would be a good idea to unlink the ratio, for example by associating health with Might and endurance with Willpower (or some other abilities).

 

Partly because of the heavy health costs of the standard fighter tactic (as discussed here) but mostly because it would make it possible to weight your characters differently. You could pump Endurance to make a character that's tough to take down but needs to rest more frequently, or Health to make one who's a bit more fragile in a fight but gets up to fight again more times without having to rest. 

 

I believe this would be a simple way to add more variety to party-building.

[Sacred_Path]

judging from J.E.'s earlier posts it seemed that preserving health was all about defenses. In which case it would make sense that it's not yet working quite right on the fighter as that needs a lot of fine tuning.

[Caerdon]

I understand that the Health/Endurance ratio is fixed at 1:1, with damage ratio at 1:4 or 1:8 for barbarians. I also understand that this wasn't always so.

 

I think it would be a good idea to unlink the ratio, for example by associating health with Might and endurance with Willpower (or some other abilities).

 

Partly because of the heavy health costs of the standard fighter tactic (as discussed here) but mostly because it would make it possible to weight your characters differently. You could pump Endurance to make a character that's tough to take down but needs to rest more frequently, or Health to make one who's a bit more fragile in a fight but gets up to fight again more times without having to rest. 

 

I believe this would be a simple way to add more variety to party-building.

 

I definitely like the idea that you could adjust the balance between stamina and health, but tying them to specific attributes might be a bad idea, or at least it'd require some heavy balance adjustments to make sure all the attributes are equally worthwhile again.

 

Here's an idea:

 

Have a slider in character creation that you can freely adjust. One end of the slider represents a character that has low stamina but high health, the middle represents the current, balanced approach and the other end would be a character with high stamina but low health. The slider would then just interpolate between these three points, which the developers could adjust separately to make sure the system is balanced as a whole.

 

After character creation, every time you level up you could, if you wanted to, adjust that slider one notch to either direction, just to fine-tune your character.

[Pray]

thematically it doesn't make sense to split the two - 

[PrimeJunta]

@Pray why not?

[Iucounu]

Wasn't the original complaint in the other thread that a fighter loses disproportional much health when he has to use his stamina regeneration, so that you'd have to hold him in reserve after a while? Rather than solving this issue, enabling different ratios seems to enforce it. A character with high stamina and low health will become like a maimed character after a few fights, so you could barely use him, either that or the whole party would need to rest more often, even if most of them are still fit to fight. 

[PrimeJunta]

@Iucounu Yes, a high stam/low health fighter would have even less strategic endurance, but a low stam/high health fighter be the contrary -- wouldn't last as long in an individual fight, but could get through more of them before depleting the health reserve. Giving the player a measure of control over the ratio would let us decide whether we favor strategic or tactical staying power.

[Iucounu]

Understood, but if you look at it that way, the whole issue in the other thread that fighters might have not enough health doesn't seem as problematic either. If you want your fighter fit for several battles, you don't rely so much on stamina regeneration, and if you put especially much weight on him in one fight and use stamina regeneration, you suffer for it later. 

[PrimeJunta]

@Iucounu true, but beside the point.

[Lephys]

I remember discussing this some time back, and I thought it was a pretty good idea. You've got to think... you'd have to adjust your Health ALL the way down to 1/4th of your Stamina before you'd hit the floor of pointlessness. I'm just talking conceptually, there. Nothing says you can't place restrictions on the adjustments. But, it would be interesting to have someone with 80 Health and 60 Stamina, or 60 Health and 80 Stamina, methinks. That seems like a very good dynamic to play off of, if you ask me.