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Uncertainty on Player Health
SonicXplosion
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
As we know from the recent AMA, you wont be able to directly see what health a person is at just by targetting them. However, we dont yet know the exact uncertainty, for example, if theres a 10% uncertainty, it would mean that if a player is at 70%, it may look like the player is anywhere from 60% to 80%. There was a lot of people on Asmons stream that didnt think this was that great of a mechanic, but Im not against it. However, I think it would be a good idea to be able to reduce the uncertainty by increasing your wisdom stat. So maybe it would drop from 10% uncertainty to 5% uncertainty (just my example).
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For example, a cleric is all about that healing and would know if a person was dying right? Because that's when they step in and heal them. So maybe that class gives you more certainly or even a skill that allows you to know the correct health percentage but not the actual number of health points, and/or anything in between. As the cleric class, if any, would know someone's health.
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The idea behind it is so that if you attempt to attack a player with the intention of not killing them in order to not gain corruption - you actually kind of can't do it.
For those who don't know, the way it worked at pax was your target had what looked like a big health bar but instead of going down like normal, it broke as the target took damage. It only seemed to have 4-6 stages. I never took the time to figure out exactly what it was but it seemed like you saw the first stage when someone took damage, possibly at 95%, then it changed again when they hit about 60-50% health, then again at ~40, ~30-25, and ~15-10. it felt like at ~15-10 was the last step until they died as I felt like I chased people down for 5-10 seconds before I finally finished them off.
As I said, this is just my observations so I could be completely off. I played the game a lot both times they showed up at pax so I like to think I know something but it's been ~2-3 years so I'm starting to lose my confidence in what I saw. Even if I'm right about what they had, it could easily have been changed by now.
That said, I never felt it affected gameplay in a negative way. Generally, you still are going to be focusing the same targets and try to finish people when they are low. Just because I didn't know that the mage was exactly at 12.6% health, didn't stop me from trying to finish them off.
Kind of like this and I like the idea.
Now, the benefits of not displaying players HP:
1) as soon as anybody notices a low HP target, they all jump on that target. That target has 0 chances of fighting back and recovering once people see the low HP bar. It counters zerg mentality.
2) when there are HP bars, people keep looking at it and act accordingly. If the game doesnt show it, players can focus on on the enemy character they fight a) instead of looking for the low health bar player nearby
b) look at the actions the enemy is performing, enjoy the combat visuals and when the enemy dies, then you won, look for the next objective.
Since there will be some indicator of the state of a targets HP, I would like to suggest that the devs make it less visible, in order for rogue and ranger primary class combos to benefit from a unique ability, only available to them, which would signify when an enemy HP is at 30%.
It shouldnt be an over the top effect, or massive red pointer saying "THIS GUY GETS LOW HP. TARGET!!!!!", but something so that these classes can do their job and exploit an enemies vulnurable state.
And no, I wont play rogue or ranger. I dislike them both over the years of gaming.
I am surprised you want it to be a mystery and don't want the player to be able to switch his HP with infinity. With all of your ideas, that woul be the least terrible one.
There is supposed to be some form of visual cue, yes. Rather than having no idea what their health is, the word used was that it would be obfuscated.
While I don't know to what level this would mean, a good description of this based on the dictionary definition *could* be that it would be like looking at a regular games HP bar, but through really, REALLY frosted glass.
Rather than being able to see exactly where the bar is at, we'll be able to see sort of where it is. We'll see color changes if it goes from green to yellow to orange to red, as an example, but the information we have will be granular like that, rather than on a scale from 0 - 100.
For example you see someone fighting mob and that player is very low on health. Instead of PKing, you could stun him (if you have such skill) and wait for mob to finish him. This way, you grief player, but dont become corrupted.
This was prevalent in L2, particularly because if you died from mob (not player), you could drop items. So people would try to grief you by making sure you die from mob. But because you didnt see enemy health, it was much harder to do that (people that were being attacked would sometimes use tactics where they unequip gear to die before being attacked, so they would bait griefer for him to get PK)