Reworking Regen to be more intuitive

[chemical_art]

If you really want to confuse things, call regen shields, color it blue, and make the old shelds hill. for me  the idea of eegen having its own hp that regenerate over hull hp that does not seems easier to understand. wait, was that already tried ?

[keith.lamothe]

Unfortunately none that are simple.

Player.also dynamically increases in power to a lessee extent.
Either have enemies not scale.
Alter the model of armor. Either a hybrid.that also includes percentages or a separate one for percents used if choose at game start or something else entirely.

Sadly none are simple.

Well, I guess it depends on the scope of the problem.

If the problem is "Damage Reduction and Regen are ok on Normal, but are very under-useful on Hard or Expert" I can just have it use different values for those two stats on those two difficulty levels.  The actual numbers would take some iteration, but otherwise done.

My question is whether that's actually the problem, or what

[Pepisolo]

Regen definitely doesn't look quite right, yet. My exo's health bar seems to go up and down while regenerating. Not exactly sure what's going on. The green bar should always fill in the white bar -- the green bar shouldn't push the white bar further up and then the white bar disappear. Hard to explain, but needs a bit of tweaking. The pure aesthetic of the bar is fine, though.

Well, then what should it do in a case where you've taken 10 damage out of a total of 1000 health, and will regen all of it next turn?  If the regen slice doesn't displace a health slice it won't show a regen slice at all.

If you have 990/1000 HP, so 10 HP of white, then next turn shouldn't that 10HP just turn green? Hey, I'm not great with the intricate mechanics of this, I'm just telling you it looks wrong at the moment. It seems like the health is healing up to 1000 AND the regen bar is still there (pushed further up and then it disappears a turn later). Hey, others will certainly pick up on this and maybe they can give you a more mechanical explanation of what's going wrong.

[keith.lamothe]

Regen definitely doesn't look quite right, yet. My exo's health bar seems to go up and down while regenerating. Not exactly sure what's going on. The green bar should always fill in the white bar -- the green bar shouldn't push the white bar further up and then the white bar disappear. Hard to explain, but needs a bit of tweaking. The pure aesthetic of the bar is fine, though.

Well, then what should it do in a case where you've taken 10 damage out of a total of 1000 health, and will regen all of it next turn?  If the regen slice doesn't displace a health slice it won't show a regen slice at all.

If you have 990/1000 HP, so 10 HP of white, then next turn shouldn't that 10HP just turn green? Hey, I'm not great with the intricate mechanics of this, I'm just telling you it looks wrong at the moment. It seems like the health is healing up to 1000 AND the regen bar is still there.

What I mean is that there aren't 100 pixels of granularity there (or if there are, you get the idea; eventually you can have damage too small to represent), so the leftmost "regen" slice will actually be sort of a mix between current health and regen-able health.

Anyway, I can try giving it another look, but we may just need to find a different way of showing what can be regen'd than the two-part bar.

[Winge]

Maybe we're just used to the Arcen way of presenting things 

Then you need to see a doctor immediately.

LOL, no worries...I am an engineer, so I'm pretty sure I'm immune.

[chemical_art]

What if regenerate had its own health bar to begin with, and it had to be depleted before permanent damage is done? Seems simpler all round.

[Misery]

Hmm, I still havent had a chance to try out this newest patch yet, so I cant say too much about it.


What I meant about the regen values though didn't have anything to do with surviving the turn;  no amount of regen saves you if you have 400 HP and you take a hit for 5000 damage, after all.  That was never a problem.

It's moreso the fact that the game's way of handling the regen values has changed, thus changing it's effectiveness.  A regen value of 60 before was pretty nice;  I had that on my Assault and it meant he was fairly decent at tanking when needed, so long as he didn't get hit much right afterwards.  If he took a hit for 200, he could in fact heal that, if given the turns to do so, and if he avoided more attacks.   I had also boosted his shields to 600 or so to enhance his ability to take hits.  These things combined to be pretty useful.   Then I look at my sniper, who doesnt have as much shields (maybe 300-ish) and only about 12 regen.  So, he could handle minor blows, and he'd regen at least enough to make something of a difference which would save him sometimes, but I still needed to be super careful with him.

With the mechanics changed, yet those values remaining the same, the effectiveness looks like it's gonna go down.  Regen of 60 now means TOTAL regen..... multiple turns or so just to GET to 60, not multiple turns OF 60.  This isnt all that helpful with that smaller amount (and is much slower, too), so right now it's looking like it's best to instead just see if I can use the slots to get an extra 100 shields or so for my assault.   Wheras my sniper.... multiple turns to get to 12 is.... well, nothing.  That one was "weak but helpful" before, enough to still make at least something of a difference, but the current value is actually too low to be worth the part slots it's taking up.

So, it's not so much the difficulty level, really, but just the math or whatever that's changed.   If that makes sense.   I'm not entirely sure that it does.

[Winge]

What you are saying makes sense, Misery.  It's what I was thinking during my game, actually.  I'm thinking it needs to be multiplied by 2-3 or so.  Four to five would probably be a bit OP now that it works under fire, even though that matches the previous state.

[Tridus]

Yeah that does make sense. So those numbers will have to come up for sure.

As for damage reduction, I wonder if those numbers should come up too but it should block a % of damage instead? If DR X blocked 50% of the damage taken on a hit up to a maximum of X, that would let the number go up quite a lot without making an exo invincible against weaker guns. Then you could ramp the numbers up such that it offers some real protection against things like Wyvernbots or other things with really big guns.

[Winge]

Yeah that does make sense. So those numbers will have to come up for sure.

As for damage reduction, I wonder if those numbers should come up too but it should block a % of damage instead? If DR X blocked 50% of the damage taken on a hit up to a maximum of X, that would let the number go up quite a lot without making an exo invincible against weaker guns. Then you could ramp the numbers up such that it offers some real protection against things like Wyvernbots or other things with really big guns.

I like that idea, but I think it would quickly end up as either too weak or too powerful.  What would you think of making it more like armor in Warcraft or LoL, where:
damageReduction = armor / (armor + armorConstant )

[keith.lamothe]

The difficulty with %-damage-reduction, even in a diminishing-returns (or, rather, "equal returns", percent-point for percent-point, as in Dota or LoL) situation is that it stays relatively as effective later in the game.  Unlike +shields or +regen, which lose relative effectiveness as overall magnitudes go up.  So either %-damage-reduction doesn't go up on later parts (which isn't really workable) or it's such a low amount that it doesn't matter, or it's just way better than +shields or +regen.  At least, that's my guess

[keith.lamothe]

Pepsisolo (or anyone else), can you give me a save where you get behavior from the "what can be regen'd" visualization that you think is wrong?  Presumably it would be one of those "load save, look at bar, wait a turn, look at bar again" types of repros, but either way let me know how to get it to misbehave.

Concrete test cases will help me understand, and know whether or not I've found an actual solution when I try

[Tridus]

The difficulty with %-damage-reduction, even in a diminishing-returns (or, rather, "equal returns", percent-point for percent-point, as in Dota or LoL) situation is that it stays relatively as effective later in the game.  Unlike +shields or +regen, which lose relative effectiveness as overall magnitudes go up.  So either %-damage-reduction doesn't go up on later parts (which isn't really workable) or it's such a low amount that it doesn't matter, or it's just way better than +shields or +regen.  At least, that's my guess

Well, in WoW the armor is a number rather than a percentage. That armor number gets turned into a percentage baesd on the level of the thing attacking you, so it's actual effectiveness goes down as the enemy level goes up (and thus you need to keep getting more). The original pre-expansion formula was this:

DR% = Armor / (Armor + 400 + 85 * AttackLevel)

It worked well in WoW, since the game is functionally about getting more gear and so bigger numbers are better. I don't think it's going to work that well in this game, simply because someone can get an item with "47 armor" and have no idea what that actually means against a level 7 enemy bot.

[Pepisolo]

Pepsisolo (or anyone else), can you give me a save where you get behavior from the "what can be regen'd" visualization that you think is wrong?  Presumably it would be one of those "load save, look at bar, wait a turn, look at bar again" types of repros, but either way let me know how to get it to misbehave.

Concrete test cases will help me understand, and know whether or not I've found an actual solution when I try

Sure thing. It'd be nice to hear others' thoughts actually on what I perceive to be wrong as I seem to be the only one that thinks it doesn't look quite right at the moment. If it's only me that's even noticing it then it might not even be worth changing.

This save gets right to what I think looks weird. Wait a turn and the health bar seems to jump up (then the white disappears the turn after). Oh, on another note, overload can regen, not sure whether that's intended or not.

[keith.lamothe]

It worked well in WoW, since the game is functionally about getting more gear and so bigger numbers are better. I don't think it's going to work that well in this game, simply because someone can get an item with "47 armor" and have no idea what that actually means against a level 7 enemy bot.

Right, I said Dota or LoL because I figured those models could potentially be made understandable, but despite my intimate familiarity with most WoW mechanics and armor in particular I could basically never glance at a particular armor value in that game and tell you what it would get you except "less physical damage"

It works for them, but like the ratings systems (crit rating, haste rating, etc) it was much more of a "this is the best we can do" solution than a "this is actually intelligible without special tools" solution