About stamina/health and an idea how to fix it

[mutonizer]

You gotta keep in mind though, while I agree on the principle, that this whole part is completely out of whack balance wise. I mean, I agree because it shows the end result and flaws of the system but from all videos I've seen, that poison is completely crazy

[Mayama]

Yes, yes that's all fine and grand and all but my question was never actually addressed.  Here, let me put it another way.  With the current implementation of the health/stamina ratio, fights on a non-trivial difficulty level devolve into doing the most possible damage while preventing the most possible damage you can for EVERY fight.  If a wood beetle is headed toward your fighter and he's already tanking 4 beetles and your mage still has spells there is no choice involved on whether you should throw out a big spell to nuke it.  The "choice" is 1) use resource or 2) pay consequences (ie shorter adventuring day.. or worse).  Instead, "choice" involves rotating out characters who aren't built for or probably shouldn't be tanking in order to spread out health damage because it's beneficial to do so.  Not only does this break every single form of game and rl logic but it also rewards bad play.  So not only does this system not do what it was originally stated to do which was allow a longer adventuring day while still setting a hard cap on how far you could go, but it instead rewards terrible play(ers) with additional benefit.  That's not "strategic" by any stretch of the imagination.

 

So you basicaly saying, my strategy that worked in game A doesnt work in game B. That means game B must be broken because I am not willing to adapt in any way to a different system. I also think it breaks real life logic if I try to spread out hits to get my people through a fight because in reality one guy usually trys to get hit as much as possible while everyone else does not get hit once. It also breaks game logics because I highly insist that the logic and mechanic's of game A are the epitome of gaming, basicaly a law so everything that does not use equal rules is therefore wrong and illogical. I almost forgot to mention it does also reward bad play because any type of gameplay that differs from what I personaly like is bad.

 

Seriously, people and arguments on this forum sometimes...

 

Also you need to rest way less often than in BG, if you **** up and lose tons of stamina because you couldnt controle the flow of the battle, well you get punished for it.

[mutonizer]

1) Even Mr. Sawyer and everyone else in all demos/shows/trailers/PR videos/etc displayed this exact same basic, normal, casual, logical and expected tactic: tank in big armor and huge defenses up front taking the brunt of the assaults, while others move to side and clean up.
2) The entire Fighter class is designed around this and only this role. The way it's framed, if you have any fighter in your party, every second during a fight where the fighter is NOT standing still and taking as much of the attacks as possible and locking down as much enemies as possible on himself is basically a fail. That's by design (I mean, with the current classes design we've seen. It could of course change).
3) The entire engagement system is set up to allow melee tanky classes (especially fighters) to lock down as many enemies in melee as possible.

You can of course, just like in IE games and others, go for more "exotic" routes and party composition, but they are meant to be "exotic" and unlike IE games (and D&D system as a whole), if you have a fighter, he cannot do **** but this single thing: lock down enemies and tank. Anything else he'll try to do will be subpar compared to any other class and basically a wasted space.

I mean, nobody's advocating for ONE way to do things: Tank'n spank. Instead, it seems that Tank'n spank may not be the most logical, normal way to do things and instead will actually punish you because of how the Health system is framed.


Edit:
As a note, and to get away a bit from the purely "battle" issue about Health, you cannot tell me there is not a problem with this.

The guy loses 90% of his Health (and stamina, but that's ok) on something that could be a simple miss-click, or failed perception check or something and there is nothing you can do but Rest, even if you actually JUST rested. Now of course, this could change (and I'm guessing they'll just make all trap not do any Health damage whatsoever because of....reasons) but this can only lead to frustration I'm sorry.

Edited September 2, 2014 by mutonizer

[Elerond]

Melee engagement system is to way give crowd control abilities to your melee characters. Which will lessen importance of pure crowd control classes like wizards and druids. Obsidian didn't want to go agro threat system route that many MMOs use to do same thing, but instead create system where positioning your melee characters has much more importance.

 

Default build for fighter in PoE is low maintenance front line melee tank that is best in passive crowd control from the all the melee classes, but in final version of the game this should not be only build that you can make of them, because one purpose of backer beta is to determine what kind talents fighters need to work in other roles. 

 

Same default role ideology goes for all the classes in PoE and same idea that player should be able to change role that class plays by picking talents.

[Matt516]

Mutonizer, you keep excusing the existence of exploits because "players don't have to use them". That is true, but a player choosing not to use an exploit is doing so to mitigate a problem with the game design. The better designed a game is, the less artificial limitations a player has to enforce to have a rewarding experience. The goal should always be not to have exploits in the first place. Those who want to play to win and use every tool at their disposal while still having a challenging experience (like myself) get left out in the cold when games are designed with easily exploitable mechanics (like rest-spamming).

 

Obviously it's impossible to completely remove all exploits from even the best game system - but the ability of a player to limit themselves is not a valid excuse for exploitable mechanics. It's not part of the ideal that a designer should be striving towards.

[Razsius]

 

Yes, yes that's all fine and grand and all but my question was never actually addressed.  Here, let me put it another way.  With the current implementation of the health/stamina ratio, fights on a non-trivial difficulty level devolve into doing the most possible damage while preventing the most possible damage you can for EVERY fight.  If a wood beetle is headed toward your fighter and he's already tanking 4 beetles and your mage still has spells there is no choice involved on whether you should throw out a big spell to nuke it.  The "choice" is 1) use resource or 2) pay consequences (ie shorter adventuring day.. or worse).  Instead, "choice" involves rotating out characters who aren't built for or probably shouldn't be tanking in order to spread out health damage because it's beneficial to do so.  Not only does this break every single form of game and rl logic but it also rewards bad play.  So not only does this system not do what it was originally stated to do which was allow a longer adventuring day while still setting a hard cap on how far you could go, but it instead rewards terrible play(ers) with additional benefit.  That's not "strategic" by any stretch of the imagination.

 

So you basicaly saying, my strategy that worked in game A doesnt work in game B. That means game B must be broken because I am not willing to adapt in any way to a different system. I also think it breaks real life logic if I try to spread out hits to get my people through a fight because in reality one guy usually trys to get hit as much as possible while everyone else does not get hit once. It also breaks game logics because I highly insist that the logic and mechanic's of game A are the epitome of gaming, basicaly a law so everything that does not use equal rules is therefore wrong and illogical. I almost forgot to mention it does also reward bad play because any type of gameplay that differs from what I personaly like is bad.

 

Seriously, people and arguments on this forum sometimes...

 

Also you need to rest way less often than in BG, if you **** up and lose tons of stamina because you couldnt controle the flow of the battle, well you get punished for it.

 

 

Let me tell you a little story my friend because it seems quite a few missed what I originally stated.  On January 14 of the year 2014 Stoic released the single player aspect of the kickstarter funded game The Banner Saga.  The Banner Saga has a completely new and "innovative" system in regards to how a turn based strategy is played.  First off, there are armor and strength values with the former being protection against attacks and the latter being both the health total and the max damage the unit can deal.  Here's the kicker rounds always move at a 1 player to 1 enemy turn ratio which means that if you move your archer then the next turn would be the computer moving a varl (large tank-like unit) forward.  The one turn to one enemy turn ratio is *always* true (with one exception).  Over the course of the battle if you had played this game as you play a normal tbs you might've found yourself in for a world of hurt.  Why?  Because the system design allowed for the side that was losing to get "more turns" as the roster of units who needed to be rotated in was less.  Remember that one exception i was just talking about?  Yea that was the pillage mechanic that activated when there was only one enemy unit left you had to deal with.  There was only one reason why pillage was added in and that was to stop a single ranged unit from being able to devastate the rest of your remaining army.  Without it, for every one time you had to move a unit forward you would be on the receiving end of a move and potential attack from the remaining enemy unit.  This massive "speed increase" was perhaps the worst mechanic I have seen in a game to date.  Now, of course, there were certainly ways to play "around" the mechanic.  Namely, that you would rarely finish off units and instead damage their strength down to 1 so they would do inconsequential damage but the more i played The Banner Saga the less fun I was having in general.  It became a "game" of me trying to meta my way out of the crappy game mechanics.  I might meta game on occasion but being forced to is anything but fun and it's even less so when there's no basic logic to even back it up.

 

The pillars of eternity health/stamina mechanic is on it's way to becoming as crappy as Stoic's turn based "logic".  Now before you throw the "Razsius must be a terrible player" argument at me.  I almost religiously play games at hard or above and that includes betas if they allow me.  Yea that 2 spider pull Rose had to deal with in the cave is like a 6 spider pull complete with a mature Crystal Eater Spider on hard.  Yea have fun not taking a crapton of health damage with petrify on you.  But oh no i'm sure you can rotate out your fighter and make him ranged with all those ranged talents and abilities of his (oh wait).

 

I swear only in America would we think the wheel needs to be square to allow for a quicker stopping car.

 

Edit: It should be noted that unless you are terrible you don't have to rest nearly as much in BG as you do in the current PoE beta iteration.  You simply can't "prevent" nearly as much damage.

Edited September 2, 2014 by Razsius

[Zansatsu]

 

 

I swear only in America would we think the wheel needs to be square to allow for quicker stopping car.

 

I agree with all your points but ouch low blow lol!

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

 

Instead, "choice" involves rotating out characters who aren't built for or probably shouldn't be tanking in order to spread out health damage because it's beneficial to do so.  Not only does this break every single form of game and rl logic but it also rewards bad play.  So not only does this system not do what it was originally stated to do which was allow a longer adventuring day while still setting a hard cap on how far you could go, but it instead rewards terrible play(ers) with additional benefit.  That's not "strategic" by any stretch of the imagination.

 

This makes me think of something else entirely: the adventurer's hall, and Josh saying something to the effect of "For people who want more combat/xp (He used weird words for it), we encourage people to use the adventurer's hall for swapping out characters in the later part of the game" -something like that. And I just realized, it would be cool if they game rewarded you for sticking with your party members more. I really disliked the vanilla OC in NWN2, where you even had to swap out companions several times. I'd love to see some frequent flier bonus for those that stick to my bandwagon, as it were.

[Zwiebelchen]

In resource-based healing mechanics, like it was in the IE games (healing spells healing a set amount of points and with limited use per day), this problem wasn't existing, because the game didn't care about who you put your heals onto.

 

You could burn all your heals on one character or you could spread them out evenly, depending on who took damage over the last battles.

This means that only the amount of total party damage mattered in terms of health resources. Your resources allowed you to accumulate up to X amount of total party damage before you had to rest.

 

In PoE, the design is totally reversed: only individual character damage matters. The game doesn't differentiate if only one character is wounded or all. Rest and all characters get topped. But this also completely destroys tanking-based combat mechanics. The idea behind tank-based combat is, that one character soaks up all party damage. Mostly a character with high armor rating and health. As the amount of health resources to draw from are almost evenly spread out over all character and can not be transferred or focused (like it would with a healing mechanic), you are often forced to rest just because the game decided you've fought enough battles, no matter how easy they were.

Or you just move on and let weaker characters soak up damage until all characters are heavily damaged before doing the ultimate rest. Imho, this is a total immersion breaker.

 

 

When thinking about this, there's actually another way to fix this issue:

 

Limited health recovery on rests. Let's say that when resting, you are allowed to use a limited amount of healing tokens (depending on the inn quality and the quality of the camping supplies). Each token (let's just call them bandages) heals X health. You can distribute those bandages freely between all characters, depending on who took the most damage or who is most critical for your further gameplay.

 

So if, for example, your tank and your mage took severe damage during the last battle, but you only have resting supplies to heal one character back to full, obviously, you can use your supplies on the tank and leave the mage wounded and go on adventuring with that penalty.

 

 

So what would a change like this do?

1) A resource-based healing mechanic on rests allows you to play more tactically and makes resting less "overpowered".

2) It makes the "meatshield" tactics more viable, while still allowing for parties without a healer to succeed in the game

3) It removes the incentive for players to "tactically sacrifice" the health of other characters in order to prevent resting

4) It allows for some interesting balancing opportunities, like having different tiers of camping supplies, for example a camping supply item that only recovers spells used, but doesn't award any healing (and takes less ingame-time for resting)

 

 

With the current mechanics, there is a clear advantage in stacking tanks in heavy armor. A party that consists of mostly fighters will be able to adventure much longer before having to rest than a party that only has one tank (because there's more than one character that can soak up individual damage in a rotation, not just one, but both get healed equally at each rest). If the idea of the stamina/health system was to allow unusual party compositions, then PoE clearly failed with that mechanic. Yes, you don't need a healer anymore if you want fewer resting, but instead, you just stack up on tanks.

Edited September 3, 2014 by Zwiebelchen

[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.

[mutonizer]

You can turn this on it's head as much as you want, add more things to it, remove some of it and whatnot. At the end of the day, it's just flawed.

1. Non-magic based healing for lore issues is great, but only matters when time actually matters. If time doesn't matter, it's completely useless. So far, there doesn't seem to be anything that indicates that time is a factor in anything.
2. Serious injuries as a game mechanic is great, but only when it's actually fitting with the rest of the entire game, otherwise it's just artificial. There is no medicine concept whatsoever anywhere (ie: add healing kits with charges that allow to heal Health based on Lore or something) nor any permanent injuries or anything relevant. Basically, it's just a flat out: "magic cannot heal serious injuries" from the lore (which is cool) combined with "but 8 hours resting with camping supplies will fix everything" and "difficulty level limits the amount of supplies you can carry" mechanics (which are completely stupid). Lore reason is made cheap because of it, game mechanic is made totally artificial because of it. I'm sorry but this is just ****ty game design, especially for a mature PC cRPG.
3. If you use a resource based system, it should have a fluidity to it and everything should be integrated within it: Lack in one resource for a given role (ie:HP for tanks) means other roles need to be used (CC/Heals from casters) then others (front-loading DPS via spells) until, as an average for the entire team, it becomes too risky to continue because all roles lacks resources (soak, dps, control, mend, buff), at which point you indeed rest. Any mechanic that makes it possible to need a rest because one of the roles is out of resources and nobody else can link with it to compensate (even though they still have all their resources), is problematic (to stay polite) in my mind. And if you think there are no "roles", then let's just end the discussion right here...

It needs to go, period. It adds NOTHING and can only cause frustration at best...

 

edit: though it'll be modded out on day 1 probably so...that makes things less important I guess

Edited September 3, 2014 by mutonizer

[Matt516]

Here my idea to fix it:

 

- Keep the limited camping supply

 

- Scrap the health system as it is AND replace it by a fix number of time you can go down in a fight relate to your class. example: fighters could be 5 times and Mages would be 2.

 

-You have to rest to get your point back.

 

See! so simple!

 

This is actually really nice. Couple that with a serious injury every time a character goes down in a fight (a la Dragon Age) and I'm sold!

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Since a lot of designs with PoE are being taken from systems like 4th ed, I suggested something to Josh a while back concerning healing and how we do it in our pnp session when we're low on healing. In 4th ed pnp, it's usually the damage dealing class like the Rogue and not the tank who usually gets targeted unless the tank can lock down those enemies. And the damage dealing classes like the Rogue have less healing than the tank. The way to keep wounded players in the game like the Rogue when you're low on healing is you can transfer healing from one player to another with a ritual called Comrade's Succor. This keeps wounded players in the game, back up to near or full health and eliminates the need for an extended rest.

 

You could do something similar in PoE where you could transfer some health from one or more players to another with this type of ritual. The cost of the ritual would be a small amount of health but then you can redistribute the party's health from one or more players to any other player including the tank in your party. This is what I would like to see. The Mage casts the ritual, then I can select different characters and transfer a portion of one or more characters health to the Tank. Such as some health from the Rogue, Mage and Priest and get the Fighter back up to full health.

 

At the moment, the current system of one party member tanking and taking the damage and the other 5 party members on full health and then all party members having to take an extended rest for that one party member seems out of whack to me. Otherwise if you want to continue, you then have to move your tank back and have other members of your party fill that tank role and take damage which goes against their roles.

[Matt516]

In resource-based healing mechanics, like it was in the IE games (healing spells healing a set amount of points and with limited use per day), this problem wasn't existing, because the game didn't care about who you put your heals onto.

 

You could burn all your heals on one character or you could spread them out evenly, depending on who took damage over the last battles.

This means that only the amount of total party damage mattered in terms of health resources. Your resources allowed you to accumulate up to X amount of total party damage before you had to rest.

 

In PoE, the design is totally reversed: only individual character damage matters. The game doesn't differentiate if only one character is wounded or all. Rest and all characters get topped. But this also completely destroys tanking-based combat mechanics. The idea behind tank-based combat is, that one character soaks up all party damage. Mostly a character with high armor rating and health. As the amount of health resources to draw from are almost evenly spread out over all character and can not be transferred or focused (like it would with a healing mechanic), you are often forced to rest just because the game decided you've fought enough battles, no matter how easy they were.

Or you just move on and let weaker characters soak up damage until all characters are heavily damaged before doing the ultimate rest. Imho, this is a total immersion breaker.

 

 

When thinking about this, there's actually another way to fix this issue:

 

Limited health recovery on rests. Let's say that when resting, you are allowed to use a limited amount of healing tokens (depending on the inn quality and the quality of the camping supplies). Each token (let's just call them bandages) heals X health. You can distribute those bandages freely between all characters, depending on who took the most damage or who is most critical for your further gameplay.

 

So if, for example, your tank and your mage took severe damage during the last battle, but you only have resting supplies to heal one character back to full, obviously, you can use your supplies on the tank and leave the mage wounded and go on adventuring with that penalty.

 

 

So what would a change like this do?

1) A resource-based healing mechanic on rests allows you to play more tactically and makes resting less "overpowered".

2) It makes the "meatshield" tactics more viable, while still allowing for parties without a healer to succeed in the game

3) It removes the incentive for players to "tactically sacrifice" the health of other characters in order to prevent resting

4) It allows for some interesting balancing opportunities, like having different tiers of camping supplies, for example a camping supply item that only recovers spells used, but doesn't award any healing (and takes less ingame-time for resting)

 

 

With the current mechanics, there is a clear advantage in stacking tanks in heavy armor. A party that consists of mostly fighters will be able to adventure much longer before having to rest than a party that only has one tank (because there's more than one character that can soak up individual damage in a rotation, not just one, but both get healed equally at each rest). If the idea of the stamina/health system was to allow unusual party compositions, then PoE clearly failed with that mechanic. Yes, you don't need a healer anymore if you want fewer resting, but instead, you just stack up on tanks.

 

This is also a great idea, and one that would be much easier to implement (and probably make OE more likely to implement since it keeps the health system in place) than the one I praised above. They're both great, but I really hope OE sees this suggestion - right here, this is the way to fix it. Because a system in which you're incentivized to send your wizard in to tank for your fighter is unintuitive and (IMO) bad game design. This suggestion would fix all that while preserving the (admittedly interesting and unique) health system OE has designed.

[Elerond]

You can turn this on it's head as much as you want, add more things to it, remove some of it and whatnot. At the end of the day, it's just flawed.

1. Non-magic based healing for lore issues is great, but only matters when time actually matters. If time doesn't matter, it's completely useless. So far, there doesn't seem to be anything that indicates that time is a factor in anything.

 

It matters when one tries to explain why you can't carry Gorion's body to Candlekeep to be resurrected by Gorion's friends.

 

And currently time backer beta area is cut out from rest of the game, and quest that would have interaction outside of backer beta have removed or altered so that player don't ever come with situation that they should have knowledge outside of the backer beta. Although timed quests were something that got lot of objection from backers, so there is high change that there are only couple if any in the game. 

[lobotomy42]

As much as I like the stamina/health dichotomy on paper, it seems to be just one-more-thing-to-keep-track-of in practice.  Health plus injuries seems simpler and more intuitive. 

[mutonizer]

It matters when one tries to explain why you can't carry Gorion's body to Candlekeep to be resurrected by Gorion's friends.

Really?

Ao doesn't want interference on that scale? Gorion's just too powerful? Stars not aligned properly? Who cares, especially during what is basically still the narrative exposition segment of the introduction of the game. I mean, accepting somewhat unbelievable things during plot exposition is something we all must accept to some extent in cRPGs and I'm sure PoE will be full of it since there's already dozens of such examples in the 10 mins demo they usually do at 'cons.

 

Don't get me wrong though, I LOVE hardcore healing game systems with no resurrection/etc. But if you do that and it's a major part of your lore (what with souls, reincarnation and all that) and then go and give me a 8 hours rest mechanic that voids everything in the lore on that front, then make it artificially limited based on difficulty and some virtual "camping supplies", I just call it bull**** cheap design, I'm sorry.

Edited September 3, 2014 by mutonizer

[Freshock]

I feel like it's perfect like it is, I don't feel like I have to spam the camp supply and if I do I have to think about how to attack differently. It's a challenge sure, but that's a good thing. 

[Gfted1]

95% of incoming attacks will cause some damage, of which 25% is Health damage. How are you attacking differently to prevent that?

[Freshock]

Stunning opponents before they reach me have been working out great

[Elerond]

 

It matters when one tries to explain why you can't carry Gorion's body to Candlekeep to be resurrected by Gorion's friends.

Really?

Ao doesn't want interference on that scale? Gorion's just too powerful? Stars not aligned properly? Who cares, especially during what is basically still the narrative exposition segment of the introduction of the game. I mean, accepting somewhat unbelievable things during plot exposition is something we all must accept to some extent in cRPGs and I'm sure PoE will be full of it since there's already dozens of such examples in the 10 mins demo they usually do at 'cons.

 

Don't get me wrong though, I LOVE hardcore healing game systems with no resurrection/etc. But if you do that and it's a major part of your lore (what with souls, reincarnation and all that) and then go and give me a 8 hours rest mechanic that voids everything in the lore on that front, then make it artificially limited based on difficulty and some virtual "camping supplies", I just call it bull**** cheap design, I'm sorry.

 

 

If you put resurrect spell in system then you should give player option to use them in story wise and not only way to recover from mistakes that they do in fights.

 

I take every day 8 hour rest healing over resurrect spells that rest of the world conveniently forgot to use/existing.

Edited September 3, 2014 by Elerond

[Gfted1]

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?

[mutonizer]

Ok then...

 

 

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?

 

Mr. Sawyer commented that he found D&D crowd control system stupid  silly and wanted a more DOTA oriented system so I doubt you'll be able to "stun-lock" or CC efficiently, just do very short term status to counter something. Could be wrong but I really doubt there is anything anywhere close to something such as "sleep" for example, or "hold person" or "flesh to stone" and the like. What you'll find is probably twitchy abilities that need to be timed exactly right to counter something (spell cast, ability, etc) and basically lasts for nanoseconds to a couple seconds at best, very much following the "push button = awesome happens" philosophy of modern cRPGs.

 

Lots of people like that, some hate it (me included), but that's a design choice and you can't please everyone really.

Edited September 3, 2014 by mutonizer

[Elerond]

Ok then...

 

 

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?

 

Mr. Sawyer commented that he found D&D crowd control system stupid  silly and wanted a more DOTA oriented system so I doubt you'll be able to "stun-lock" or CC efficiently, just do very short term status to counter something. Could be wrong but I really doubt there is anything anywhere close to something such as "sleep" for example, or "hold person" or "flesh to stone" and the like. What you'll find is probably twitchy abilities that need to be timed exactly right to counter something (spell cast, ability, etc) and basically lasts for nanoseconds to a couple seconds at best, very much following the "push button = awesome happens" philosophy of modern cRPGs.

 

Lots of people like that, some hate it (me included), but that's a design choice and you can't please everyone really.

 

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.

[Skipperro]

IMHO - great idea