About stamina/health and an idea how to fix it

[mutonizer]

At least in beta there is abilities that stun/lock character/monsters out of the combat for long enough to make them useless in that fight.

 

Like for example Hold Person spell that priest have and Crippling Strike that rogues have, and petrification that at least some of those spiders have.

 

 

Cool, good to hear.

[Razsius]

 

 

At least in beta there is abilities that stun/lock character/monsters out of the combat for long enough to make them useless in that fight.

 

Like for example Hold Person spell that priest have and Crippling Strike that rogues have, and petrification that at least some of those spiders have.

 

Crippling Strike is a slow + debuff. Halt person is only a root i believe not a stun and i believe Petrify is simply a stats debuff + massive health pool ownage (200% health damage).  The only class i've seen with an AoE stun is the Chanter but then again i haven't tried all the classes.  Priest has AoE knockdown but it never seems to actually work for me.  I'd say most of the cc is pretty short duration as well.  Certainly no 2 minute stun like Josh said.

[Elerond]

 

At least in beta there is abilities that stun/lock character/monsters out of the combat for long enough to make them useless in that fight.

 

Like for example Hold Person spell that priest have and Crippling Strike that rogues have, and petrification that at least some of those spiders have.

 

Crippling Strike is a slow + debuff. Halt person is only a root i believe not a stun and i believe Petrify is simply a stats debuff + massive health pool ownage (200% health damage).  The only class i've seen with an AoE stun is the Chanter but then again i haven't tried all the classes.  Priest has AoE knockdown but it never seems to actually work for me.  I'd say most of the cc is pretty short duration as well.  Certainly no 2 minute stun like Josh said.

 

 

I said that they make character/monster useless in fight, not that they stun. Petrify locks character on it place and all damage goes directly against health (although this is my understanding bug and it should not be so punishing). Monks have stunning blow that stuns character/monster. But there aren't many abilities that do AoE status effects.

 

With duration of effects it should also noted that most fights are over in under half of the minute. So effects that last 10 second or longer usually last most of the fight.

[Danathion]

Why not just reverse the whole thing. Health can be healed and stamina is something that ticks down for all characters however long your in combat. Once your stamana is depleted you reserve large debuffs that hamper you accuracy and such. That makes more sense to me. When your tired you would fight horribly and make mistakes. This system seems counter intuitive.

 

I suggested a name change along those lines:

 

Rename Health as Endurance, rename Stamina as Health. The 1:4 ratio relationship remains the same. Endurance should be expressed as a percentage and health as a number of HP.

 

In combat Health is lost and recovered by use of spells, potions etc. However Endurance is recovered only by resting.

 

Healing by magical means addresses only the wound, allowing you to continue to fight, but not the long term effects of battle. Serious wounds (being maimed after falling unconscious) and the physical/mental/spiritual etc fatigue of prolonged combat are only overcome by rest.

 

I believe that is the idea, but for some, the current naming is a stumbling block.

 

Having thought more about it I'd still suggest renaming but also getting rid of the 'Endurance/Health' relationship, so that:

 

When 'Health' falls to 0 you are rendered unconscious and 'maimed' - causing penalties. Each time you fall unconscious you accumulate another 'serious wound' and associated penalty, which you can only get rid of by resting. The longer you put off resting the less effective your party will be, but it's up to you. 

 

Talents/Abilities/Spells have a cost (per encounter abilities are obviously less taxing than per rest ones), when you're physically/mentally fatigued -  'Endurance' falls to 0 - you have to rest to recuperate your 'Endurance'. That could be over one encounter or however many encounters, depending on how many abilities you choose to use.

 

That way it doesn't have to always be your battered 'tank' that forces you to rest. Also, you can be tactical about how effective 'maimed' party members are and how often you use, even per encounter, abilities.

[Zansatsu]

 

Why not just reverse the whole thing. Health can be healed and stamina is something that ticks down for all characters however long your in combat. Once your stamana is depleted you reserve large debuffs that hamper you accuracy and such. That makes more sense to me. When your tired you would fight horribly and make mistakes. This system seems counter intuitive.

 

 

I suggested a name change along those lines:

 

Rename Health as Endurance, rename Stamina as Health. The 1:4 ratio relationship remains the same. Endurance should be expressed as a percentage and health as a number of HP.

 

In combat Health is lost and recovered by use of spells, potions etc. However Endurance is recovered only by resting.

 

Healing by magical means addresses only the wound, allowing you to continue to fight, but not the long term effects of battle. Serious wounds (being maimed after falling unconscious) and the physical/mental/spiritual etc fatigue of prolonged combat are only overcome by rest.

 

I believe that is the idea, but for some, the current naming is a stumbling block.

 

 

Having thought more about it I'd still suggest renaming but also getting rid of the 'Endurance/Health' relationship, so that:

 

When 'Health' falls to 0 you are rendered unconscious and 'maimed' - causing penalties. Each time you fall unconscious you accumulate another 'serious wound' and associated penalty, which you can only get rid of by resting. The longer you put off resting the less effective your party will be, but it's up to you. 

 

Talents/Abilities/Spells have a cost (per encounter abilities are obviously less taxing than per rest ones), when you're physically/mentally fatigued -  'Endurance' falls to 0 - you have to rest to recuperate your 'Endurance'. That could be over one encounter or however many encounters, depending on how many abilities you choose to use.

 

That way it doesn't have to always be your battered 'tank' that forces you to rest. Also, you can be tactical about how effective 'maimed' party members are and how often you use, even per encounter, abilities.

That makes a lot more sense and yes getting rid of their relationship would be better. I would prefer more of a combat clock that sort of estimated your fatigue over just ability use because you will need to rest anyway once your per rest abilities are used up or not, if you weren't fatigued yet you could soldier on a bit. Well I don't have it all thought out but I like your design much better.

Edited September 3, 2014 by Zansatsu

[Freshock]

 

Stunning opponents before they reach me have been working out great

 

Interesting. I haven't tried that tactic but I assume that all the stun spells / abilities are on a "per encounter" setup? Then you just mow down the entire mook party while they are stunlocked?

 

 

Some of them are per encounter, while others are per rest, just have to figure out a party combination with enough per encounter/rest to keep you from camping for a while. Adding more duration to spell effects should be effective as well, then just - as you said - mow them down while stunlocked. 

[Volourn]

I'll say this: Stamina curing spells are useless. All it does is hurt your chances to survive. Quite frankly, I'd rather just let the character get knocked down but come back up with lots of health left then heal the stamina damage and they be killed outright. The ratio  just seems off to me. Either that should be changed or you should have more health per level than stamina since health is supposed to long term. I'd rather not need to rest every 1 or 2 battles. Also, way too many stamina healing spells/abilities when it's just not needed.

[Shevek]

The health/stamina system is fine. They just need to tweak the ratios.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Shevek

[Volourn]

Maybe. But, as it stands the system is poor. The fact I'd rather let my character fall down than heal them is insane.

[Matt516]

The fact I'd rather let my character fall down than heal them is insane.

 

I think that's the crux of it. The game as currently designed has really odd incentives (like letting characters fall instead of healing them).

[mutonizer]

 

The fact I'd rather let my character fall down than heal them is insane.

 

I think that's the crux of it. The game as currently designed has really odd incentives (like letting characters fall instead of healing them).

 

 

Welcome to the Enlighted, brothers. Hallelujah!

Edited September 4, 2014 by mutonizer

[Elerond]

Maybe. But, as it stands the system is poor. The fact I'd rather let my character fall down than heal them is insane.

 

I think this factors for couple things

 

Stamina recover after battle with very fast rate

 

Casting is slow, which limits number of spells that you can do, and buffs, debuffs, offensive spells or attacking with weapon are in most cases more effective in fight than recovering stamina to one or two characters.

 

To me this seems to be some what deliberate design decision, as it devalues healing, making healing classes not necessary for the party. And it also seems to work towards combat ideology where it is OK let your characters take damage and even fall. Front line classes especially seems to be build around this idea, fighters with their constant stamina recovery and ability to get 50% of stamina back, barbarians with their frenzy and carnage and  monks with their wound resources and abilities powered by them. They all seems to be designed so that they can do front lining without healer helping them.

 

Currently healing is more safe net that you can use if your tactic seems fail miserably, as then it can offer you way to rectify your mistakes.

 

Maybe casting healing spell should take only half of the time what casting other spells take, which could lessen efficiency deficit that casting healing spells causes.  

[Zed]

best way to fix it would be to only have one health bar and add a three-stage fatigue system or something, like in IE. instead of "a little tired", "tired" and "dead tired", we could have "fatigued", "heavily fatigues" and "dead".

so basically the fatigue that we know from IE games, except it would be applied when knocked down in battle. if already fatigued and knocked down in battle again, you deeeed.

 

islam infinity engine has all the answers.

[Elerond]

best way to fix it would be to only have one health bar and add a three-stage fatigue system or something, like in IE. instead of "a little tired", "tired" and "dead tired", we could have "fatigued", "heavily fatigues" and "dead".

so basically the fatigue that we know from IE games, except it would be applied when knocked down in battle. if already fatigued and knocked down in battle again, you deeeed.

 

islam infinity engine has all the answers.

 

One bar health system would need quite lot rework with abilities, spells, etc.. And such rework would not lead to better game IMO.

 

Game also already has fatigue system that you described, with exception that I don't think that final state of fatigue is dead.  

[Zwiebelchen]

I think having stamina and health as resources the way they are would be okay - if we get a way to heal health damage or prevent excessive health damage, like the bandage mechanic on resting I suggested. Combine that with a rule that makes health drop to 1 as soon as the character falls in battle and reduce the rate at which health damage is dealt to the character and the system would probably work exactly like it was intended in the first place:

A resource based health system that allows mistakes in battles (characters can go unconscious) without trivializing health (auto regen after combat like in Dragon Age) and allowing permanent character death.

 

 

Jagged Alliance 2 also had a very interesting health mechanic that is very similar to how it works in PoE, just with a few perks like stamina and health combined in one bar:

- Characters have an ordinary health bar

- taking damage causes the bar to shrink (yellow indicates health lost) and causes stats to drop at the same time

- using bandages and medikits turned the yellow parts of the health bar into orange, indicating that damage has been bandaged; stat losses get recovered (partly, but that could and should be simplified)

- any further damage subtracts only from the red parts of the bar, causing the same stamina/stat drop as if the character had health equal to the amount of current health + bandaged health

- if there is only very few "true red" health left, the character goes unconscious and will die if not treated (losing the remaining health over time)

- using a medikit now, again, heals all yellow parts of the health and turns them orange, "stabilizing" the character, so that it doesn't lose health anymore

- orange health can be turned into red health again by waiting several ingame hours/days (there was a fast-forward function in that game) or bringing the character to the hospital

- as the healing took from some hours up to an entire week depending on the damage, there is no "group resting", but you actually have to leave that character behind until it is healed enough to fight again.

 

The last two points wouldn't make sense for PoE, obviously, as the reason they worked so well in JA2 was, that the entire game was heavily time-based and you couldn't just fast-forward the time too much to wait for all the wounds to be healed, or you'd have lost all your towns by then.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Zwiebelchen

[Fiebras]

@Zwiebelchen

That works in JA and in things like X-COM because those are squad-based games were none of your teamates are truly indispensable and can be replaced with some ease. I cant see a CRPG were you go ahead without your main tank to let it rest (though the idea is interesting).

 

Of course the same could be said of PoE due to stronghold companions and tavern custom adventurers. Plus, it could be a way to get you to switch your party composition or interact with diferent companions.

But I dont think a system overhaul is necesary to make Health/Stamina feel right and understadnable