Split Health/Stamina

[Osvir]

The injury stuff sounds interesting...

 

But, passively regenerating health out of combat, is it true?

[anameforobsidian]

I was quite a fan of health / stamina.  It encouraged me to rest far more than losing spells did, and combined with limited resting supplies, it encouraged me to get that really good dungeon experience where my beaten up characters had to face one last fight before they could sleep.

[Hemmer]

The injury stuff sounds interesting...

 

But, passively regenerating health out of combat, is it true?

 

No, someone must be trolling.

 

 

They said they're still experimenting so fortunately nothing's set in stone just yet.

 

Would be pretty stupid though to throw a, imho perfectly working and quite innovative "gamified" representation of a character's vitality over board. Especially if it'd be for some people's lack of willingness to invest some time to understand and get the hang of things. There isn't anything hard or particularly difficult to understand about POE's health/endurance system to begin with.

 

I hope Sawyer's preference for the POE approach (which apparently he also proposed and pushed for) prevails in the end.

 

Exactly.

Never touch a running system.

[Aramintai]

Never liked this split health/stamina feature, but I understand that it was there to make injuries feature viable. If they go with simple health bar personally I'd be glad.

[Ninjamestari]

I didn't really like the whole Endurance concept from the original game. I think that if a character falls in combat, it should die and not just be knocked out.

[desel]

 

The injury stuff sounds interesting...

 

But, passively regenerating health out of combat, is it true?

 

No, someone must be trolling.

 

 

They said they're still experimenting so fortunately nothing's set in stone just yet.

 

Would be pretty stupid though to throw a, imho perfectly working and quite innovative "gamified" representation of a character's vitality over board. Especially if it'd be for some people's lack of willingness to invest some time to understand and get the hang of things. There isn't anything hard or particularly difficult to understand about POE's health/endurance system to begin with.

 

I hope Sawyer's preference for the POE approach (which apparently he also proposed and pushed for) prevails in the end.

 

Exactly.

Never touch a running system.

 

 

Like eisenschwein said, they're still experimenting and trying out things, and the CURRENT iteration is just using Stamina, but that's still subject to change.

 

No idea how people are coming up with nonsense like "regenerating health" when there's no mention of anything like that in Josh's answer from the Q&A?:

 

Q: Is a characters vitality still split into Health and Stamina, are multiple stages fatigue, injuries, afflictions and different "death" states still a thing in Pillars of Eternity 2, and are those negative statuses still only removable/curable by resting?

 

A: Right now, what we are experimenting with is a system that uses injuries as the main way of gating players needing to rest. At least in terms of damage taken. We're not using the Health system, we're using just the—well, we now have, whether you want to call it hit points or health, we have essentially what was Stamina in the first game. If you get knocked out you'll get injuries, and injuries are a thing you want to rest to get rid of. We're keeping all the injuries. Fatigue can be one of those injuries, we abandoned the sort of time-based fatigue a long time ago. The idea is that when you rest that's how you get rid of those things. You can also get injuries from things like scripted interactions, if you miss a check when you do a jump or something like that; you can hurt your knee or your elbow or your shoulder. Things like that. All that stuff is still in place. We're experimenting with a healthless system using injuries primarily as the gating mechanism for it.

Personally, I really liked the Health mechanic. A lot of people found it confusing. We tried various ways of communicating it...I think that injuries do a pretty good job, and so I'd like to experiment at least with using injuries as the primary means for driving resting.

We'll see. Like I said, I was the person who proposed and pushed for that mechanic, but I also don't want a bunch of people to not really understand what the hell is going on.

Edited February 3, 2017 by desel

[Osvir]

 

The injury stuff sounds interesting...

 

But, passively regenerating health out of combat, is it true?

No, someone must be trolling.

anameforobsidian (link where I read it) isn't trolling or trying to misinform. Maybe just a case of "misunderstanding" or "assumptions". Edited February 3, 2017 by Osvir

[MaxQuest]

ii.jpg

Thank god. Getting injuries just because you dropped to low hp, was a bit annoying in Tyranny's early-mid game. 

It's like: I have 50% hp left, decide to save that 100% restore potion for a little bit later use. Boom, a hostile spell hits you through improved Energy Shield and you get an injury to the face.

Edited February 3, 2017 by MaxQuest

[mothra]

I admit I didn't really understand the split mechanic first time I played but as ppl above pointed out it was more that my preconceived notion of "what health is" was wrong and I failed to connect the dots. But I didn't go to the internet to cry about it because I also thought "there must be something I am missing". Later it dawned on me and I actually started to like it.

(this was in the first 1-1.5 hours of playing mind you where I had to refresh my knowledge of attack/defense/accuracy/interrupt etc as well)

 

The best example for me where it totally made sense was the "spike room" in Caed Nua level 8 or 9 ???. You send someone through a room full of spikes and while he could regain health by stopping movement the constant pain of the spikes drained his endurance steadily. Such a scenario at the start of the game (tutorial dungeon) would have helped alot to explain that feature by "showing", not "telling". So I agree that the game could have done a better job of "showing" how it works instead of just "telling".

 

The new mechanic may be more intuitive because most players know what health/HP is but on the other hand if you tie death now to amount of injuries you got a new system you would have to "tell about" AND "show". One knockout and 2 failed scripted interactions later a player goes to 0 health and dies and proceeds to cry on the internet.

[Osvir]

I think the tutorial dungeon does just that, or... I don't know, I actually never stepped on the glyph trap at the very start.

[Fluffle]

"Personally, I really liked the Health mechanic. A lot of people found it confusing. We tried various ways of communicating it..."

 

I dislike the reason, really.

 

I mean, obviously, as this health system was new for many players they would get "confused" in the beginning. Everyone has to learn new things at one point. I think it's a very bad reason. He is going to change the health system even though he likes it.
And if he thinks people find the old health system confusing then just wait until multi classing comes with PoE2.

 

He said they tried various ways of communicating. I still believe it is a matter of communication and of course training. The player has to get used to that health system if he has never experienced something similar before.That is only natural. That should not be a reason to scratch it in my opinion.

[Fluffle]

On the other hand it shows he is a developer who is ready to change game mechanisms that he is in favor of for the sake of the players.

[mothra]

I think the tutorial dungeon does just that, or... I don't know, I actually never stepped on the glyph trap at the very start.

 

I think the glyph traps were there to teach the player about scouting mode, disabling traps and that you can circumvent it by solving puzzles or exploration.

There was no room that forced you to walk through a hazard and show you the drain on endurance.

[virgi26]

so if you get injuries only when you are KOed, doesn't that mean that fighters with really good regen will be basically immortal? IN POE1 there is a limit for regen.

[Insidous]

This topic finally pushed me to make an account here, so hello everybody!

 

So let me start by saying that I personally tried to avoid resting as much as possible and really only did it when it made sense. Like I thought resting just outside the los of the final dungeon boss was pretty dumb. But even if you were more liberal, one thing that always stood out for me in PoE was the strategic element the health/endurance system introduced.

 

In all the easy and medium encounters you had to make the choice: Do I use some per rest abilities or do I rather lose some more health? Even without vancian casting, now every class has per rest abilities. Without health/endurance though, this choice only matters when someone could get knocked out -  only in the more difficult encounters.

 

Yes we will probably have less trash mops and better encounters, but lets not kid our self: There will be a lot of easy fights. Can I now fight dozens of xaurip groups with my characters staying fresh and blank? No careful approach about losing health or spending spells etc. could make most fights pretty meaningless I fear.

[morhilane]

The injury stuff sounds interesting...

 

But, passively regenerating health out of combat, is it true?

Considering the new system they are playing with has no health, it can't be regenerating.

 

It also doesn't mean that Stamina will regenerate even if it did in POE1.

[Zaraxx]

As someone more or less new to the genre (only played a little bit of BG and BGII back in the day) I can ensure you that there's nothing too confusing about the health mechanic in Pillars. The separation into long-term health (at 0 = dead or optionally maimed) and short-term endurance (at 0 = just KO-ed) may seem somewhat strange on paper first but once you take it to practice it makes a whole lot of sense. Took me exactly the first two fights (vs. the 2 Young Wolfs and vs. the 2 Glanfathans that killed poor Sparfel) to get a grip of it.
And after 3 and a half playthroughs I'm now so used to it that it'd be sad to see it replaced with something simplified or streamlined.

OP and a few others got it right: Instead of tinkering and trying to improve (for the worse) on an already improved mechanic you (Obsidian) should try to come up with an "idiot-proof" tutorial to cover all kinds of player demographics. The overwhelming majority of the core audience already is familiar with the split mechanic from Pillars anyway.

[MaxQuest]

The separation into long-term health (at 0 = dead or optionally maimed) and short-term endurance (at 0 = just KO-ed) may seem somewhat strange on paper first but once you take it to practice it makes a whole lot of sense.

Watching an NPC hitting a warrior being insta-healed back by a priest, was always making me wonder, how could a character suffer such health-swings without any consequences. Endlessly.

Edited February 6, 2017 by MaxQuest

[HoopleDoople]

Of all the proposed changes for PoE2 the injury system makes the least amount of sense to me. I always thought the health/endurance system was pretty ingenious and improved the game in multiple ways.

 

• Healing could have a much larger impact without being overpowered. No amount of healing will prevent a character from eventually running out of health.
• Constitution delivered a lot more value when you didn't just need enough endurance to avoid being knocked out before healing. High Constitution really made a difference for front line characters and dumping Constitution had a real penalty even for backline characters (at least after the attribute rebalance).
• Easier fights were much more compelling when taking the effort to beat them efficiently provided real value.
• The limitation of a health pool provided much needed encouragement to fully utilize per rest abilities. I personally struggle with the "too awesome to use" syndrome and tend to avoid using any limited resources outside of the toughest fights because I might need it later. Health bars were a convenient way for me to estimate the time until rest and properly utilize the per rest abilities.
• One of my favorite self-imposed challenges is to require all party members to survive a battle for it to count as a victory. Another challenge I often use (sometimes alongside the first one) is strict resting limitations. In both cases the health/endurance system enhances the difficulty and enjoyment of the challenge.

I honestly found the injuries present in PoE to be annoying and would if anything like to see them scaled back rather than expanded in PoE2. Whereas the penalty associated with losing health started out minimal and scaled smoothly up to massively debilitating, the penalty of being injured was pretty binary (have injuries or not) and somewhat random (how often or not is your lowered reflex, for example, going to be targeted?). Injuries via scripted events always felt very unfair, especially when paired with the loss of acquiring a favorable outcome (e.g. obtain an item). It's not like it wasn't super easy to get around this by utilizing reloading and/or a walkthrough.

[dukeisaac]

 

• Easier fights were much more compelling when taking the effort to beat them efficiently provided real value.

+1

[draego]

i actually really liked the health system also in POE1 however one drawback that i did see was traps. Traps ended up have to be twisted all up because they couldnt really hurt the player since they really only caused health damage and not endurance damage (since endurance went right back up). So you ended up with traps that would cause you huge amounts of damage but only a tiny bit of damage if you laid the same trap. But even with that you were fine for the next fight. 

[Madscientist]

I liked the system of PoE1. For me it worked as intended. You could do several simple fights in a row and even clear an entire dungeon without resting if you were a good player. But hard battles forced you to manage your resources, so you do not run out of health. So running around with a passive regeneration or drinking potions like crazy was not the ultimate way to defeat a dragon.

 

about the wound system:

- In tyranny it was confusing because you did not know when exactly will you get a wound (I made a suggestion in the tyranny forums). It would be easy to understand if you get a wound only if you get knocked out or in some scripted interactions (like you miss the skill check for climbing a wall).

- I dislike regenerating HP out of combat in a classic RPG. The way how the IE games did it was simple enough for me.

- One of the better examples for a wound system is drakensang. If a char gets more damage than his constitution score he must make a saving throw or get a wound. Each wound lowers your stats and you die if you get more than 4 wounds, no matter how many HP you had left. Some weapons or special attacks had a higher chance to inflict wounds. It was an effective way to kill some enemies with many HP (like ogres), but some enemies were immun to wounds (most bosses plus some others). In combat you should avoid getting wounds, because each wound makes it more likely to get another wound and you are busy removing your wounds (with spells or herbs) wich means you are not busy attacking the enemy.

[demeisen]

I also liked the dual-mode system.  There were times I felt it wasn't quite balanced well between classes, but that's a detail.  The core of it is a good idea, and I had more fun with it than I'd have had without.

​

​I won't try to claim it's the best possible system though, so if Ob can work out a better one, cool.  The important concept to me is to have a mechanic requiring consideration of resources over significant time, rather than just per battle.  (I hate insta-regen mechanics.  Leave that to the Diablos of the RPG world).  I want my party to get ground down in the process of exploring a dungeon, with few or no ways to regenerate or even escape early, so that before you can get home again, your backs are up against the wall and you need to fight tooth and nail to survive.  The first part of WM1 was nice in that way, especially if you did it as soon as you could so you weren't over-leveled for it.  I want a broader scope of resource consideration than a single fight.  It's something that's gone missing from many modern RPGs in the endless push for simplified experiences, so I was glad to see at least a partial restoration of the idea in PoE1.

​

​I'm not a huge fan of wound-based systems: "you broke your knee; sorry, all fights from here are with a broken knee ... but it's just fine after a night's sleep".  It might work if wounds can be healed by some class and that ability comes out of a fixed resource pool that's depleted over the course of a dungeon area.  Generally, I prefer a more resource based scheme: a fixed pool of spells, special melee abilities, perhaps consumables, whatever else, and I need to work out how to get out of this place alive with what's on my back.  I need to be careful even with the "trash fights" to not over-spend resources, because I'll need those resources for the much harder fight I'm about to encounter.  Of course that's hard to balance when people can encounter content at radically different levels.  Not saying it's easy .

​

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[Evolk]

No experimenting needed here as far as I'm concerned.
The split system perfectly serves the purpose and I thought, and still think that its duality is quite ingenious and unique.
Splitting vitality into endurance and health also is an arguably better abstraction of reality than just a single health bar.

There's nothing hard or difficult to understand about it as well. Deadfire just needs a similar "training ground" intro like the caravan encampment/Cilant Lis prologue in POE with (optional ofc) tutorials popping up accordingly at the appropriate time and place, and all should be well.

[PugPug]

My theory immediately upon seeing the health/stamina system was that they wanted to include regenerating health without going full-blown regenerating health.

 

Game design is moving toward it for a good reason: A saved game should never be locked in a no-win scenario. On the other hand, regeneration removes a level of resource management, so a lot of players feel it dumbs down the strategy. So Obsidian came up with the health/stamina compromise.

 

I think whatever they do should be another form of compromise. I haven't followed all of the details trickling out so I'm not sure what the plan is, but if it's injury debuffs replacing depleting health, that actually sounds pretty good to me. It's much easier to see exactly how the battle has been wearing down your characters. Even understanding the health/stamina system, exact information wasn't really conveyed well. It also might make it a little easier to keep going than it is right now when 1 character has very low health and everyone else is doing pretty well.