Health & Stamina, failed design?

[Tartantyco]

Why are you people trying to create artificial reasons for ranged characters to wear armor?

[Zansatsu]

 

Wait, ranged? I thought we were talking about wizards in close range/melee.

Not to my knowledge. Armor is valuable in close range because you're constantly getting hit. Perhaps the DT to Attack Speed penalties are not right yet but for ranged it's just pointless atm.

 

It's going to be a tough nut to crack, and may never be changed, I don't know.

 

And yeah I think allowing for more character archetypes to be viable is a reason to try and figure it out.

 

I agree with this to a point, but I still prefer having classes separated by what they are good at. Because if mages and Ciphers can cast spells very effectively and tank at the same time(I'm not suggesting this is your point) then they sure as hell need to make Fighters and Paladins Lethal as hell in other areas as well.

[Elerond]

 

Any spell caster wearing heavy armor is going to have to wait 9 seconds after every spell before they can do anything again, seems like they aren't meant to be up there because they are designed to help the party with their spells.

This is bad design to me.

 

 

I think that spell casters need armored caster talent that negates most of the casting time penalty from armor.

 

And I think casting time is currently bit too long, because spells aren't currently that effective overall, especially damage spells are quite weak in beta because most of enemies have so high DT's against elemental damage. In previous build situation wasn't as bad, but as they rose those elemental DTs amd fixed bugs which caused that DT don't work, it is most cases best only buff you party and debuff enemies.

[Sensuki]

It's the recovery time, the actual cast times are fine. Recovery times as a whole are too long.

 

I agree with your statement about enemy DTs as well.

Edited September 6, 2014 by Sensuki

[Shevek]

I personally love this mechanic. It makes sense and it promotes strategic play. All it takes is a few small changes to lengthen the adventuring day. Once they get everything working right (DT, enemy AI, etc) and they tweak the ratios, I am pretty sure the whining will stop. In other words, this is not a core design issue, it is a set of small technical issues that can be addressed without shifting core design.

[Seari]

Health & stamina design sucks!

[Elerond]

Health & stamina system works fine in purpose which is was designed, although amount of health may be bit low considering how much damage enemies do, as currently you can go average 3-6 encounters before rest.  

[Fiebras]

I dont know why people are saying wizards need armor when they already have Arcane Veil.

Not to mention even in fullplate and with Arcane Veil up the Wizard still dies extremely quickly to a single enemy due to low health pool.

 

This may sound like a joke but so far the class that I think is the most balanced regarding the hp/stamina thing is the ranger as their animal companion helps spread out the damage while the ranger does dps. 5 ranger party anyone? Or 4 ranger + chanter?

[mutonizer]

 

Not to mention even in fullplate and with Arcane Veil up the Wizard still dies extremely quickly to a single enemy due to low health pool.

Mainly it's because of very, very low DEF, which mean they get hit/critted all the frikkin time.

[Elerond]

I dont know why people are saying wizards need armor when they already have Arcane Veil.

Not to mention even in fullplate and with Arcane Veil up the Wizard still dies extremely quickly to a single enemy due to low health pool.

 

This may sound like a joke but so far the class that I think is the most balanced regarding the hp/stamina thing is the ranger as their animal companion helps spread out the damage while the ranger does dps. 5 ranger party anyone? Or 4 ranger + chanter?

 

Party of 6 Chanters are currently very OP. Ability constantly summon help without any real limit gives them ability clear any group of enemies without any long time cost.

[Void3dge]

It's also a question from someone not in beta and therefore posting from what he's noticed so far without first hand experience with it. And so far, I've mainly seen comments about "moderating" it, while I find the concept itself to be flawed at it's core.

 

What exactly does it add to your experience? Why is it even there?

 

Answers to that so far have been

1) Lore: "there is no healing magic, injuries and disease matter"

This is the easiest to disprove: you can go from "1 inch of total death" to "completely fine" in 8 hours and nobody even bothered to provide any "lore" reason as to why camping supplies are limited in any way shape or form and time is clearly not something that matters from what we can see now. It's cool in theory, but that's just a silly excuse in practice.

 

2) To prevent abuse: "no more rest-spamming abuse"

Also very easy to disprove: You can still spam-rest, it's just more frustrating to do so. The entire game system still pushes you to spam-rest if you want to, still based on per rest abilities. Heck, it's even worse now because that's the ONLY way to actually heal...

The current system is like putting "camping supplies" in the IE engine, artificially limit how many are available to the player based on arbitrary reasons (difficulty setting? really?), and say: problem solved.

Nothing's solved really. People who liked using it will keep using it and just be more frustrated because they have to "zooom" through maps back to the inn at max speed then come back. People who didn't like using it will be frustrated because of that completely abstract and illogical mechanic punishes them at the slightest mistake! Who is the winner here exactly?

 

3) To make the game more challenging

Challenging for what? for who? how? You do not make things more challenging with completely arbitrary game mechanics but by actually designing proper challenges then let the players tailor their own reaction to these challenges.

In single player games, all challenges are a compromise by the player between his belief of "fairness" and his desire to "overcome" a given challenge. Some, like myself, rarely spam-rest in IE games for example, or max/dump stats. Others dump stats and bee-line for easy to get magical items. Others just hack save games to give infinite gold or XP or whatever. There is no "good" or "bad" way in a single player game. Each of us make that compromise to some extent, each of us adapt to a given challenge differently and there is no right or wrong way!

That said, there is the "intent", the "vision" of the people who designed the challenges in the first place. That's what matters on their side: what is their intent in a given challenge, what do they want to focus on. Going the other way around and designing on what they want to limit or prevent is completely wasted I think.

Someone who makes crappy challenges and then makes them more difficult because of completely artificial mechanics isn't making good challenges, they're still just making crappy ones.

 

I mean, sure you can tweak the system all you want, but at the end of the day, it adds nothing of value at best and makes things frustrating otherwise and all that tweaking is just wasted manpower on nothing.

 

 

I agree with much of mutonizer said, yet I think that the system is tweakable. I kie the idea of separating exhaustion from fighting and light wounds and scratch (represented by stamina) and more serious injuries (represented by health). However, the main issue right now is that rest is mostly driven by front liners, while the rest of the party is taking almost no damage. Chaning the stamina to health ratio as Sensuki proposed could make frontliners lasts longer, but do not really fix core flwas.

Here are my suggestions :

 

1) STAMINA

- The max stamina stays related to CON

- CON gives in fight stamina regeneration.

- Deflection score account for parrying / blocking / dodging an attack. If the target of the attack uses a shield, the deflection costs no stamina. If the target uses a melee weapon, it costs a small amount of stamina based on the attack dmg (for instance, 20% of the damage), If the target use a ranged weapon, it costs a higher amount of stamina.

- If the attack is not deflected, damage is reduced accoring to armor DT. If the hit is critical, damage is done directly on health (no damage bonus). If the hit is not critical, damage is inflicted on stamina.

- Add a stamina cost to some actions as runing, spellcasting ...

- If stamina goes to 0, the regeneration stops and the character fall on ground as usual, losing 20% of health.

 

2) HEALTH

- Turn back might into strenght. put the magic damage eleswhere.

- The max health is now related to STR. more muscle mass, more damage taken.

- xx% of health is also regained after an encounter.

- Every time 20% of hp is lost dutring a fight, add a severe wound (-2 to a random stats). wounds can stack, and have a long duration (3 rests for instance = 24h)

- If a character stacks 10 severe wounds, he dies.

 

EXPLANATIONS :

With this system, defenders should be able to hold the line much longer, thanks to deflection mecanics costing no stamina + stamina regeneration.

Other melee fighters will be able to hold head more eeffectively. Since many spells and ability using cost stamina, they have to be used more wisely / strategically. Rest will be less necessary. Critical hits will not one-shot characters, but cause severes wounds => rest.

[Shadenuat]

Wizards can be tough with right buffs applied, but without pre-buffing those spells would be last thing on players list to do in combat.

[Sensuki]

The logic that prevents pre-buffing is pretty lolz. The combat state is triggered by you targeting an enemy with an attack, so you can actually start a buff before you've made any hits.

 

However if you change your target to say a move command near an enemy, the spell goes off but the buff is not applied, due to the combat state having ended because you stopped targeting.

 

I can see situations where you can accidentally screw yourself out of a daily spell because of it too.

[archangel979]

Maybe.

 

I also had an idea for Stamina and Health as well.

 

What about if Health was not damaged during combat, and when combat was over, your Health heals your Stamina. So Health values would need to be a lot higher, once you have no Health left, you've got your Stamina and that's it.

 

Healing spells heal out of your health pool.

 

You probably don't need a Health bar then, just a number, which could be displayed under the portrait.

 

Quick not even trying mspaint mock up

 

this is just a double health pool and a needlessly more complicated that in IE while being same in the end.

The whole point of new system is that there is a unhealable resource that will eventually force you to rest and use camping supplies.

Check out my suggestions topic for a better version.

[Sensuki]

The whole point of new system is that there is a unhealable resource that will eventually force you to rest and use camping supplies.

You must not have read my posts properly if you quoted me and then said that.

 

Your solution is also a lot worse than mine and is effectively HP with two pools.

 

However as I have already said (many times) that I don't mind the current system. D&D 4E Healing Surges was one of the good things that 4E did though, so healing your stamina from Health wouldn't be too bad either I don't think.

[mutonizer]

 

D&D 4E Healing Surges was one of the good things that 4E did though[..]

Heretic!

[Elerond]

 

The whole point of new system is that there is a unhealable resource that will eventually force you to rest and use camping supplies.

You must not have read my posts properly if you quoted me and then said that.

 

Your solution is also a lot worse than mine and is effectively HP with two pools.

 

However as I have already said (many times) that I don't mind the current system. D&D 4E Healing Surges was one of the good things that 4E did though, so healing your stamina from Health wouldn't be too bad either I don't think.

 

 

In your system should one health point heal give multiple points of stamina (like for example 4) or should health pool be just multiple (like for example four) times larger what it is now. 

 

In any case your system isn't big change from current system, even though healing spells become bit worse, by automatically decreasing health instead of after damage is done, but I can see how it could make system more clearer for the player.

[Sensuki]

Well Healing spells atm technically do the same, because once your Health gets down so low, doesn't matter how high your stamina is, you're still going to die - which is why I thought that idea might possibly be clearer.

 

It would be a much larger number I'd say

Edited September 6, 2014 by Sensuki

[archangel979]

 

The whole point of new system is that there is a unhealable resource that will eventually force you to rest and use camping supplies.

You must not have read my posts properly if you quoted me and then said that.

 

Your solution is also a lot worse than mine and is effectively HP with two pools.

 

However as I have already said (many times) that I don't mind the current system. D&D 4E Healing Surges was one of the good things that 4E did though, so healing your stamina from Health wouldn't be too bad either I don't think.

OK I read it again and yes, I misunderstood it. I read it that you will be healing Health pool with spells while Stamina will be healed automatically from available health. It makes more sense now but it is not a better system than mine if you cannot heal stamina during combat.

My suggestions is also implemented more easily into what we have now. For your suggestions they would need to change spells and high DT armors would be even more valuable as you don't have another way to replenish Stamina.

[Sensuki]

You can heal stamina during combat, it heals your stamina from your health pool

[archangel979]

You can heal stamina during combat, it heals your stamina from your health pool

that is bad. It is also against their goal to have fast regenerating stamina out of combat. Or do you plan to keep that as well?

[Sensuki]

Same as it is now. All healing would come from your health pool. Once you run out, that's when you're in danger of dying permanently.

Edited September 6, 2014 by Sensuki

[archangel979]

How is that different than just giving everyone bigger health pools or just giving everyone 1/8 health/stamina damage ratio?

 

My suggestion lets you keep you health pool intact if you play well. Losing health pool and/or needing to rest is purely result of playing bad or using up all daily abilities.

[Sensuki]

It's not, but I think it's more intuitive.

 

I personally enjoy the current system, but the ratios are out. Part of the goal is to make the system more intuitive, so that would be one way of doing it. It was listed in the "Known Issues" that Health is not intuitive until explained by someone else.

[Racker]

Honestly it seems like the main problem most people have with the health/stamina system is just the frequency in which it forces you to rest, which is something fixable simply by increasing the amount of health characters have (among other potential solutions, like Sensuki's).  

 

Personally, upon further reflection I've decided that the system is interesting but should be something that you bump up against rarely, not after a handful of encounters with trash mobs.  Preferably, usually only having to rest after large battles or encounters with heavy hitting boss mobs.  So while fighting through hordes of field rats or whatever would rarely scratch your fighter's health, getting walloped by a giant ogre would take a chunk out of his health and make a rest a good idea.  

 

Poisons and diseases could also become a larger threat than the mere DoT/status effect that they've classically been in RPG games, if they chip away at your usually-not-effected health pool instead of your stamina.  It would make areas infested with spiders or undead much more challenging.