0010113: Health/Ammo drops from enemies need fine tuning - Arcen Idea Tracker (Bugs and Features)

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0010113	Valley 2	Suggestion - Gameplay		Dec 22, 2012 1:17 am	Dec 28, 2012 9:48 am

Reporter	Gemzo	Assigned To
Status	considering	Resolution	open
Product Version	0.706

Summary	0010113: Health/Ammo drops from enemies need fine tuning
Description	Let's face it. The fact that enemies don't really do less damage on lower difficulties is kind of weird. Instead, they drop more health. On higher difficulties, they drop barely any health at all. Truth is... This doesn't play perfectly. It needs fine tuning. So let's discuss that and decide on what needs to be done about pickups specifically. One thing is that perhaps too much health drops on lower difficulties. You don't have to dodge because they'll just heal you for more damage than they deal. Combat just becomes an affair of hitting the enemy and not actually trying to dodge. Another thing is that too little health drops on high difficulties. While too much causes the above behavior of not caring about getting hit, too little just makes it take ridiculously long to farm enough health to stand a chance against a boss or something. Making the low and high ends of health drops less extreme is an option, or tuning them down overall and adding in other ways to get your health back is also an option. Ammo drops. These things feel like they're just there to troll you. Need health, gonna die next hit? Lolnope that guy dropped ammo and not health! 1 ammo is just so little that it's basically pointless. I think that they should give a more random amount of ammo, like 1-3 or something. Scale it off of other factors like difficulty or whatever, sure, but just 1 ammo? Come on. Adding pickups that don't just come from dead enemies is an option. They would restore an amount of health or ammo depending on the size of the pickup. They would be put into slices like enemies, platforms and coins are. They wouldn't come back from re-entering the room after a few seconds, but would come back if no player has been in the entire tile for that amount of time (like, restarting the whole level essentially). Definitely put these before a boss room! Maybe make them affect every player in the room for multiplayer. Besides all that stuff, one big overarching problem seems to be that health drops do not scale as enemy damage/player HP does. This means HP will be unforgivingly hard to recover later in the game, while earlygame health drops are incredibly potent by contrast. Perhaps make the healing somewhat percent based? Especially for the suggested pickups... Perhaps even add in perks that increase how effective health/ammo drops/pickups are.
Tags	No tags attached.

Internal Weight	Feature Suggestion

madcow Dec 22, 2012 3:03 am reporter ~0029264 Last edited: Dec 22, 2012 3:06 am	I'm not sure about this. My experience has been (while playing on skilled/hero) that if I'm low on health, I can typically nuke several enemies at once with an ammo spell and get a fairly decent return on health. I'm very cautious about ideas to make the game easier - those higher difficulties should be hard! I haven't played above hero difficulty yet though. But hero is quite doable - with boss fights being a bit of an exception.

Gemzo Dec 22, 2012 3:31 am reporter ~0029267	Yes I agree that higher difficulties should be hard, but increasing how long you have to farm for HP before taking on a boss isn't really how I'd scale difficulty. That's why I suggested pickups, so that you could place them sparingly/right before bosses and such.

MouldyK Dec 22, 2012 4:33 am reporter ~0029272	Gemzo, would you prefer if they added something like a health box or something just before or in a boss room, something which gives a guaranteed +5 health or something?

Gemzo Dec 22, 2012 4:53 am reporter ~0029273 Last edited: Dec 22, 2012 5:03 am	That's essentially what I suggested, although my suggestion was more broad. A health/ammo pickup that could be used in other locations, like in place of treasure or whatever. But that's the core reason for my suggestion, yeah. Edit: Even with that, though, health drops don't scale whatsoever as enemy damage/player HP does. I'm not saying it should scale up linearly, but without even a little bit of scaling the amount the pickup heal quickly starts to make you feel like you're playing on a much higher difficulty.

Nanashi Dec 22, 2012 8:27 am reporter ~0029276	Just change health drops to restore a percentage of max health. 10% per drop would be fine.

Chris_McElligottPark Dec 27, 2012 9:12 am administrator ~0029325	Enemies do not drop more or less health on given difficulties -- not frequency, anyhow. However, the amount restored per blob of health-restorative goes up or down based on the difficulty. Lower difficulties get more, obviously. Making it based on a percentage of your max health is not something that I think would be a good idea; that just further encourages hoarding more health. Enemy damage does vary by difficulty, quite a bit actually, especially in terms of how fast the damage ramps up from turn counts. However, that may need some more tuning; I would not claim the balance on any of this is final, however the general knobs and dials are all in place. Changing the knobs to do different things like giving more health drops as you get further into the game isn't something that's really on my mind, though. The game is supposed to get harder as you go along, yeah? Farming for HP really isn't something that I'd encourage in general; I think that if you're having to do that, you're playing on a difficulty that is too hard. These are meant to be endurance runs, so to speak. Potentially what I need to do is make it so that the health and ammo drops off of enemies actually go away; that would take away any encouragement for farming, and restore the proper encouragement for not taking damage. However, given that you fully heal and so forth on the world map, I'd worry that would lead to backtracking after each boss or similar in places like the overlord's keep. In short, I don't think there's any way that we can prevent all people from annoying self-destructive practices at all times. If someone is grinding for health, they are probably playing on too hard of a difficulty level, to be honest. Maybe there's some solution where after a certain number of health drops are absorbed in one region without your leaving the region, it stops letting you absorb them. A lot of those sorts of things feel rather artificial, though. I'll have to think on it more.

zaaq Dec 27, 2012 10:02 am reporter ~0029326	> If someone is grinding for health, they are probably playing on too hard of a difficulty level, to be honest. Perhaps add a "soft cap" that displays a screen offering to lower the difficulty if the player loses too much health/exhibits farming behavior? ("It looks like you're farming HP a lot. You may have more fun if you drop the difficulty. Drop now? Y/N" or something similar. * To minimize interference, it should only show up after "sustained farming" is detected (say, look for a run of HP farming). * If the player rejects, the message goes away permanently for the world. Wrt the health vs ammo drops, I also find it frustrating when the RNG drops health when I'm full or ammo when I'm not. I understand that this is good from a conservation angle (need to manage it), but the screen often gets cluttered up w/ unusable health drops (luckily ammo explodes). Perhaps add a bias based on the player's needs? Say the base distribution is 40/40/20 for health/ammo/no drop. Apply the following checks in order: * If the player is below 50% health, transfer 10% chance from no drop to health. * If the player is below 50% mana, transfer 10% chance from no drop to ammo. * If any no-drop is left and the player is below 1/4 health, transfer an additional 10% from no drop to health.

Gemzo Dec 27, 2012 2:06 pm reporter ~0029329 Last edited: Dec 27, 2012 2:08 pm	If you want to remove health drops/not make them scale up, you're going to have to make dodging actually reasonable (issue 10126). And if you were to do that, health pickups that could be placed in slices makes even more sense... Edit: Also what about the ammo drop comments? On the subject of enemy damage scaling up too fast (at least on high/mid high difficultes)... Yeah the damage scales up too quickly compared to their health. Although their health is another issue completely; the ludicrous perk damage bonuses (varrying from like, +40% to +100%!) make pretty much everything a 1-2 hit kill. That needs a lot of work. Also... "Further encourages hoarding more health?" Yeah, there's no reason to pick anything besides HP, even without percentage healing. You could make the other options grant you global insta-kill (which they pretty much already do) and you still would need all the HP you can get unless you're playing on super easy mode. Really I don't see why the perk damage%+ numbers need to be so huge. Yes I know it was to compete with HP but as I already said, there's no contest when it comes to picking HP or not. Either way I wouldn't call HP "overpowered, but rather "essential." Perhaps you should just get HP on level ups rather than from perks?

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Dec 22, 2012 1:17 am	Gemzo	New Issue
Dec 22, 2012 3:03 am	madcow	Note Added: 0029264
Dec 22, 2012 3:06 am	madcow	Note Edited: 0029264
Dec 22, 2012 3:31 am	Gemzo	Note Added: 0029267
Dec 22, 2012 4:33 am	MouldyK	Note Added: 0029272
Dec 22, 2012 4:53 am	Gemzo	Note Added: 0029273
Dec 22, 2012 5:00 am	Gemzo	Note Edited: 0029273
Dec 22, 2012 5:02 am	Gemzo	Note Edited: 0029273
Dec 22, 2012 5:03 am	Gemzo	Note Edited: 0029273
Dec 22, 2012 8:27 am	Nanashi	Note Added: 0029276
Dec 26, 2012 9:03 pm	tigersfan	Internal Weight	=> Feature Suggestion
Dec 26, 2012 9:03 pm	tigersfan	Status	new => considering
Dec 27, 2012 9:12 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Note Added: 0029325
Dec 27, 2012 10:02 am	zaaq	Note Added: 0029326
Dec 27, 2012 2:06 pm	Gemzo	Note Added: 0029329
Dec 27, 2012 2:08 pm	Gemzo	Note Edited: 0029329
Dec 28, 2012 9:48 am	zaaq	Relationship added	related to 0010126