Guys -- there's no value hyperinflation, I promise. There's also no "level 1." Its not "you start with 9k health." It's "you always have 9k health." Vitality stones and enchants can increase your working max health, but your baseline value never goes up. This isn't an RPG.
Having enemies do really coarse values of damage (1-3 damage) really is something that I run screaming from. Maybe it's just too many years as a strategy game designer, but to me that says "all enemies do the same damage!" There's no nuance there whatsoever. Anything small hits for 1, anything larger hits for 3. Yawn.
Now we hit tier 2. Those guys do 1.5x as much damage right now. Except wait -- we can't do that with small numbers! With larger integers you lose some very minor precision but it's negligible. Even going into the hundreds loses a lot of this, unless one goes to floating point.
But wait, there's more! What about math from an enchant that reduces my health by 80%? What about buffs that increase enemy power in a certain area (like windstorms). What about weak spots? All of those involve multiplicative math. All of those don't work at any integer scale smaller than what we have now with precision enough that people won't complain.
In other words, we have well reasoned reasons for using the scale we do, and I'm not remotely convinced to change it at this point. The argument for changing it seems to be based on a general belief that large numbers make it hard to do fast math and therefore make a bunch of predictions based on looking at the HUD. And that's true. But spending that much time staring at the HUD to do the calculations is beside the point; that's not intended to be part of the main flow of general gameplay. If you meet a never-before-seen monster and have lowish health and want to be sure, by all means break out your calculator. But as a general rule, just shrinking the scale of the health and attack values would destroy not just balance but also the ability to have rebuffs or non-whole-number buffs. And given the fracas when the tier scaling was 2x instead of 1.5x... I don't think anyone wants that.
For mana, that's already floating point and we could easily lose a zero, actually. It's not synced in mp, even. My view has been that its preferable to have health and mp on roughly the same scale, but if folks feel strongly against that one could actually be changed without really affecting anything except what you see on the screen.
For that matter, for display purposes if people just want to see rounded health and damage values that are divided by 100... that could also be arranged. It would need to be ceil on damage and floor on health, though. Maybe shown with decimals when the numbers are suitably small. Because even just changing the display on that on means that if you think you have 9 health, but you really have 907 health... and you think an enemy does 9 damage but it really does 901 damage or 944 damage... confusion is inevitable, because we'd have hidden important details from you, giving you a false sense of knowing what was going on.
