Health System: How to manage player health, hits and heals?
Most MMO's use a simple health-bar systems for tracking the player's status in combat. This leads to player's health often often jumping from sub-50% values up to +90% in seconds, with enemies doing absurdly high damage and healers semi-instantly healing all that damage as if nothing happened.
This is not a good system because of several reasons:
- Players get bored: Since any damage is healed instantly, players stop fearing enemies. Fear is an important part of immersion and fun. If players don't fear the dragon, the dragon becomes a joke, and the encounter stops giving players the adrenaline rush they are looking for when playing.
- From a gameplay perspective, it forces healing classes to focus solely on healing, ending up playing like heal-spammers instead of adventurers.
- From an immersion/lore/fantasy perspective, it breaks the fantasy of playing an epic hero if that hero keeps getting slapped around by every small enemy he encounters. An epic hero should be able to dodge an attack or block it and not keep getting damaged by every small enemy. It also does not make sense that an almost dead hero can be healed back up in a matter of seconds.
This is another system built on old games, when graphics where bad and there was no way to visually display combat. In a 2D fight or a tabletop RPG, "health points" were the only measurement of how the fight was doing, and the rest was kept to the player's imagination. The success of games like WoW segmented this and other games still copy the approach.
To solve these issues, and keeping in mind our core principle n.6: Give every player a chance to shine: To play as a hero, one must feel like a hero
We should use a system in which:
- Players have a reduced chance of taking damage so that, when they take damage, it really matters.
- We also want to have healing be harder to cast, so that when healers use healing spells it really matters.
- Why: If healers cast heals all the time, no one cares about them anymore and they are only called out when they FAIL to heal. However, if healing is something that happens rarely, then players will be positively surprised when a heal arrives, giving the healer his time to shine during the fight.
Check the comments bellow for the proposed solutions to these issues and upvote the ideas you like best!
Linked from:
@Mr.NobodyFirst break defense, then break health
[draft]
This is my current favorite approach. To avoid the need for heals cast after every attack, the obvious approach is to not have the hero get damaged by every attack.
The idea comes from imagining that an experienced warrior, even when he makes a mistake, should still be able to soften the blow, use his shield or do some other action that avoids him from taking mortal damage (most of the time). It does not come across very heroic if the warrior gets wounded by every goblin he meets in the world.So instead of every attack instantly chipping away at the hero's health, we implement a system in which first the enemy's have to break through the hero's defense, similar to how games like HALO have a "shield" that has to be taken down before the player actually takes damage. So instead of having on every attack a % chance of block/dodging, the hero would automatically block/dodge every attack until his defense bar is used up.
This defense bar meter can be a stand-alone indicator or be shared with the stamina meter. So, when the warrior uses a special attack, he would be sacrificing stamina that he might need to defend himself later, creating a game of trade-off in which, those who attack too much leave themselves open to incoming damage.
So in practice:
- The warrior first automatically dodges an attack.
- On the second attack, he might fail the block test, which might result in the blow knocking him off his feet, throwing him against the wall or something similar.
- The result would be that he spent all his defense/stamina and is now in a staggered state, unable to further defend himself and open to incoming damage.
- However, this is also the point where allies can step in and "save" the hero from dangerous damage. (read more under [raise your hand system] ).
This allows for a type of combat in which heroes exchange blows, blocks, stuns and throws, but in which heroes only take damage when they make a mistake, and not after every single skill or attack. This would feel much better for players, and would make the heroes come across as more heroic.
It also allows enemies to do much higher damage when they actually hit, making players respect enemies and take them more seriously.
Healing spells can have slower cast times, forcing the team to help "buy time" for the healer to get the warrior back up.How to implement:
@Mr.NobodyOption1: give the hero a second HP bar, called [the defense bar]
- the defense bar takes damage first, for blocking mistakes, and recovers slowly over time (similar to stamina)
- as the hero takes hits, it drains his stamina bar.
- it regenerates very slowly, so he can only make a handful of mistakes depending on the enemy's strength.
- some attacks break through the stamina all at once (like a dragon's tail swipe, throwing the enemy against the wall regardless of remaining stamina)
- In reply toMr.Nobody⬆:@Mr.Nobody
Option2: use the stamina bar as a separate health meter for blocking damage:
- similar to option 1, but shares the same bar as stamina used for sprint and other abilities.
- would have the advantage that heroes have to think about spending stamina. A rogue would have to think "is it worth trading my stamina now for a backstab, but then staying more open for incoming attacks?"