What is the role of the Health bar?

[Kabyk]

(Warning: wall of text. tl;dr at bottom)

 

I’ve played so far about 2-3 hours, so I’m no expert yet. However, after going through a couple of the wilderness zones after Vale, I’ve come to a bit of a comprehension issue with the health mechanics. Unless I’m missing something, Endurance and Health are redundant; there doesn’t seem to be a point to having both. Neither one mitigates or affects the other, plus they both receive the same amount of damage points, with the only difference being Health has a much higher numerical value. [When I first read about the two bars, I assumed Endurance would work as some kind of “shield” for Health, so keeping Endurance high would decrease the amount of Health damage I take. This does not appear to be the case.] Additionally, all the “healing” I’ve run into so far (I made a Moon Paladin) including heal spells and heal items just affect Endurance. So, for all intents and purposes, Endurance is your hp bar for each instance of combat. (This would make sense, as numerically, Endurance is much more in line with the hp numbers from Baldur’s Gate, where characters have a few dozen hit points rather than the couple hundred that Health has.)

 

Where does that leave the Health bar? Well, it essentially serves as Fatigue (and as we know, there already is a Fatigue system). With no way to recover Health (except for the reason I’m about to mention), after finishing 3 out of the 4 groups of enemies on the map, I had full Endurance of course but only 30 or so Health left. This, above all else, determined when I Rested / Camped (as resting is the only way to recover Health), and declared that I cannot fight that 4^th group of monsters without resting first. While that seems, at first, to be fine, it is actually doing the job of the Fatigue system; which is supposed to temper and pace your exploration and combat per day.

 

So what do we end up with? Well, we have three “meters” to track character wellness. Endurance and Fatigue do their separate jobs; and then we have the third, Health, which basically overlaps and muscles in on both.

 

Again, this is based off early levels and early playing. For all I know, Health may increase enough where it stops doing Fatigue’s job for it, but then I worry about what purpose it has other than simply being an arbitrary, extra bar of points to watch without providing or filling an actual role. And if I'm wholly missing the point and way that I'm supposed to meter my combat usage, by all means let me know.

 

TL;DR = Health is a redundancy that overlaps what Endurance and Fatigue are meant to do.

[Davos]

Endurance is your short-term 'battle health' whilst your health is your long-term 'real health'. In battle your endurance will be primarily attacked but some of that damage will go through to your actual health. If you run out of endurance your character will simply be knocked out and can be revived during combat with various abilities or spells, but run out of health and your character will be dead. No revivals, no resurrections, dead as dead gets.

 

While endurance can be healed in various ways in combat and always restores fully after combat, health can only be healed by resting. Thus while low endurance may prove your defeat in a single fight, health is the long-term limiting factor of your adventuring as you must return to town to rest periodically let a character be completely killed.

[Bazy]

Welcome to issues that were debated ad nauseam 2 years ago.

[Kabyk]

@Davos Yes, i understand all that. You just described what each bar does, it doesn't really solve the problem of WHY those bars do what they do. As you said, low Health means you need to rest, but that's supposed to be the domain of Fatigue. Additionally, i don't think Endurance is being "primarily" attacked. As the tooltips in-game and the wiki say, BOTH Endurance and Health take damage when you are hit. Endurance is not an overshield, just a second bar that goes down the same as Health. it only seems like Endurance takes most of the damage because the numerical value of Endurance is much lower than Health. When you take 50 damage, thats most of Endurance but only a chunk of Health.

 

@Bazy, and why is that? Complaining that this issue has been discussed (and apparently never solved, it seems) doesn't help the discussion. I suppose i'm supposed to apologize for not being part of a game forum for a game I hadn't yet played or was capable of playing (as i was not in the beta).

[slogger]

 

 

@Bazy, and why is that? Complaining that this issue has been discussed (and apparently never solved, it seems) doesn't help the discussion. I suppose i'm supposed to apologize for not being part of a game forum for a game I hadn't yet played or was capable of playing (as i was not in the beta).

It seems you're being unnecessarily defensive and confrontational. I think Bazy was merely pointing out that it is a longstanding issue. If that is the case, perhaps you could delve deeper into old threads and find whatever it is youre looking for. Though if you're searching for a fix, it sounds like you're SOL.

[Cantousent]

The important thing is to address each others' arguments and not take things personally.  Kind of tough sometimes, especially when we get emotionally invested, but try to keep some perspective.  After all, you could be fighting tooth and nail one day and allies on the next.

[Grawbad]

So, I was watching the pax east video on youtube and they explained it very nicely.

 

Your endurance is what you can take in a fight.  

HP can be considered long term wounds, things like broken fingers and what have you that require actual rest to heal. 

 

 

Because you do not die when downed and get back up after a fight it really wouldn't make sense for your HP to be gone right, you didn't die.

So the endurance is basically your hp readout as other games would have it, they took it one step further here.  I like the idea.

 

 

So think of it like this.  You and your friend are fighting these guys.  Your friend strains a muscle and gets popped in nose and it breaks right.  So, he is on the ground, unable to fight right now, but you finish the fight.  Now his endurance for another fight will come back up rather quickly, however, to get rid of the muscle strain and let the pain from his nose die down he needs actual rest.  Now, he could fight another fight, but he will be somewhat impaired in said fight. (Thus the stat modifiers for not having full HP.)  So you guys camp and rest up and get him back to full form before carrying on.

 

This system also works rather well when playing expert with permanent death.  

 

EDIT: The flow of it works like this.  You have a cap on how many camping supplies you get.  So you head out, get in some battles and each battle your endurance goes down and afterwards comes right back up.  Over the course of a few battles you get banged up as mentioned above.  You use a set of camping supplies and rest up and move on.  The harder the difficulty the lower the amount of camping supplies you can take with you.  Basically making it more difficult to get through a some areas on top of the harder enemies.  So you must strategically use them in some harder areas of the game, and also really use the pause function a lot and strategize on how minimize the damage your taking in the fights thereby extending out how often you need to use the camping supplies.  

Edited March 29, 2015 by Grawbad

[Hiro Protagonist II]

@Bazy, and why is that? Complaining that this issue has been discussed (and apparently never solved, it seems) doesn't help the discussion. I suppose i'm supposed to apologize for not being part of a game forum for a game I hadn't yet played or was capable of playing (as i was not in the beta)

 

You'll have people declaring it was solved while others say it wasn't. There's a lot of controversial design decisions in the game with the endurance/health mechanic being one. But welcome to the 2 year old debate anyway.

[Lohi]

it doesn't really solve the problem of WHY those bars do what they do.

 

Remember that all RPGs tend to be incredibly unrealistic with seemingly arbitrary rules about damage and such.  We just take one method for granted after 30 years of one game dominating all other RPGs.  In real life, one dagger to Conan's oiled chest will kill him, but that's a boring fantasy...

 

I remember very early on where D&D had hand waving explanations that hit points were not actual health but more like wearing down the opponent.  So that's sort of what Endurance is.  Except that unlike D&D, it builds back up after a fight and the character regains their breath, etc.  The WHY here is that this makes the fights more fun perhaps, I kind of like it.  If you end the battle with only one person standing you're not forced to drag everyone off to a distant camp to rest up before you can see what's behind the next door. 

 

Whereas the Health is the actual damage you take in a way; with some fantasy thrown in because a good nap cures it.  That Health does not come back just by stretching the kinks out and catching a second breath, it will need bandages and time.  The WHY here is that this prevents you from ignoring your own safety because it all just magically reappears in a few seconds, and it prevents the player from endlessly moving forward wtithout rest.

 

The WHY of both of them together is that it makes for a more fun game, especially a computer game.  No one enjoys having to head back to a safe location just to take a nap before someone can be healed or spells relearned.  I remember that in BG; cast all heal spells; rest 8 hours; cast all heal spells; rest 8 hours.  Ugh...  A mechanic that works for a pen-and-paper game where the players explore only one small cave each weekend is not necessarily good for a computer RPG game.

 

Maybe think of it like boxing.  Both opponents taking lots of hit, wearing each other out.  Then the bell rings, they drink some water, get a back rub from the trainer, and they're a lot more fresh for the next round.  But not as fresh as they once were, they have been taking some damage that needs a bit more time to recover from.  They won't be able to go 10 rounds without a real rest in between.  So Endurance used up each round, Health used up over time.

[jsonaut]

Maybe think of it like boxing.  Both opponents taking lots of hit, wearing each other out.  Then the bell rings, they drink some water, get a back rub from the trainer, and they're a lot more fresh for the next round.  But not as fresh as they once were, they have been taking some damage that needs a bit more time to recover from.  They won't be able to go 10 rounds without a real rest in between.  So Endurance used up each round, Health used up over time.

 

 

I was having trouble with this concept as well but this analogy really worked to clear things up.  Cheers.  

Also, fatigue seems to me to be more the need to sleep after a long journey.  You can fight along the way but even if your health is still ok eventually you need to catch a few z's.