Combat Mechanics: Power, Damage, Healing

[Gaswafers]

I have another question about Snuff Out. Does it deal damage based on max HP, or base max HP? I would assume it's base max HP because otherwise it would have anti-synergy with other dark moves. Another obscure side-effect is that dealing damage based on base max HP means that enemies with bonus max HP are resistant to the one-shot kill combo. That combo only works on enemies who are weak against both light and dark though, so it's not relevant unless there's an obscure enemy that has bonus max HP and both of those weaknesses.

[Ferret]

It's actually based on the "average" unmodified MaxHP for that level. i.e.: What a character with exactly Vitality = (Level+10), no bonus HP, no resistance table, and no bonus for having low Speed, being modified, being Unique/Hero/Summoner.

Some of the more interesting implications of this:
* Drained MaxHP and bonus MaxHP have no effect, so it works fine w/ other Dark magic.
* High Vitality does not make the damage go up.
* Characters with "expensive" resistance tables (looking at you Ehlose) or high Speed (hi Raicho) will be more vulnerable than they appear. (Since they have less than average HP, 25% of average HP will be > 25% of their HP)
* Modified/unique demons, and especially heroes, are less vulnerable than they appear. (Since they have more than average HP, 25% of average HP will be < 25% of their HP. In the case of heroes, the HP won't seem that different, but Heroes ignore a large chunk of all incoming damage. Snuff Out can still work on the, but probably at about 1/4 or less the listed HP.)

Since it seems like you're exploring the mechanic, you've probably already noticed it can get quite powerful if you work at it. A source of OFFUp, DEFDown, the two Miens that conditionally raise damage, Innocence... with all of these, I was able to one-shot same-level enemies weak to Light and Dark on a starting Level 1 Dark/Ice orb's stats.

It largely avoids being a balance issue because:
* It requires an enemy weak to Light and Dark. Very few of these exist in the game, and unless a player makes interesting life choices regarding Soul Armor, it is never in a player's resistance table. (Nor is this combination found in any ghost's resistance table, for that matter. Best you can get in either case usually is weak to one, no resistance to the other.)
* It does require OFFUp and DEFDown, which technically makes this a 3 shot kill at worst. Granted, in terms of Demon, that is spooky since a team can in theory take 4 actions in a single round, but, the big one...
* Very high single stat builds are player only (this will be true even after ghosts are introduced: ghosts with stats over 3/level or so will have the offending stat smoothed out by shifting points to other things.) I'm much more willing to look the other way on things only players can do.

[Gaswafers]

So the amount of damage it does is much flatter than someone would think. I wonder if there is space to reflect that in the new description.

If I have read this right, it means that Snuff Out's amount of damage is like the damage of any other dark damage attack, but it scales with the target's level instead of your own.

[Ferret]

Maybe more accurate to say it scales with both a bit. A higher level target will have more average maxHP, but if they're higher than you, that will limit the bonus from your own Magic stat.

It's a difficult scenario to reflect in the description, unfortunately. The answer might be to just make it a true all or nothing X Power attack. It would change the current behavior a bit, but it'd be much more clear and easier to explain.

[Gaswafers]

That's why I said "any other dark magic attack". It has the same scaling, except instead of the base damage being calculated using your level, its calculated using the target's.

I thought Snuff Out was a "tank buster" before and that's why I thought it should keep the percentages in the description, but seeing how it actually works has convinced me that it would indeed be better as a power attack. I guess other attacks will give a clear enough "feel" for the player to use for Snuff Out, especially since the description I proposed wasn't as informative as I believed it to be.

[Ferret]

That's why I said "any other dark magic attack". It has the same scaling, except instead of the base damage being calculated using your level, its calculated using the target's.

Ah, sorry, missed that that was you meant.

I thought Snuff Out was a "tank buster" before and that's why I thought it should keep the percentages in the description, but seeing how it actually works has convinced me that it would indeed be better as a power attack. I guess other attacks will give a clear enough "feel" for the player to use for Snuff Out, especially since the description I proposed wasn't as informative as I believed it to be.

Yeah, it's really just supposed to be a powerful "all or nothing" attack, and I probably just need to change it and its cousins to that. At this point I'm not even entirely sure why it uses the funny MaxHP stuff. I guess that's when you know you've been working on your roguelike for awhile, even you don't remember exactly why you did some of the old things the way you did.

Thanks again for poking at this with me. Roguelikes usually turn out better if players aren't afraid to politely and patiently point out when the dev is being a dork.

[Gaswafers]

Do the values from ignite, poison, pariah, and guilt work the same way? That is, they don't look at the afflicted's actual max HP and just look at the normal value for their level?

[Ferret]

Those all work off of your actual, current at that moment MaxHP, including all modifiers. (Which if anything is another reason to change the instant death mechanic, since it's the only exception in terms of how it checks MaxHP.)

[Gaswafers]

What is the exact relation between speed and HP? Does moving 200% speed make you have half the HP, and moving 50% speed double your HP?

Whatever it is, I would expect slow speeds to be desirable for demons that don't value turns that much, but I don't see much design of that nature.

[Ferret]

Basically, in either direction, 1% MaxHP = 2% Speed, with base Speed capped to 50-150%. Raichos have 150% Speed, but unless I'm forgetting someone, I don't actually use the bottom of that speed range yet. Of course, modifiers can take you outside of the 50-150 range, but Speed modifiers are restricted to uniques only, so those are a special case anyway. Also, when modifiers give Speed bonuses, they don't necessarily follow this formula: it depends on the modifier.

This matches, other than the 150% cap, what you assumed for the 200% speed example (if 200% was possible, it would indeed be at the cost of 50% MaxHP), but it's pretty different from the other example (50% Speed only gives +25% MaxHP)

I actually used to do it that way (a formula that, at 50% Speed would result in 200% Max HP) , but low speed demons were way, way too tanky, far in excess of what the raw numbers suggested should be so. As we've recently discussed, a great many things in Demon (Regen's effect, base HP regen rate, amount of bonus MaxHP you can have) are based off your MaxHP: when you increase MaxHP, you increase all of those too, which is what made the old much more generous HP bonuses for low speed get so out of line so quick. It wasn't just x2 MaxHP... it was x2 recovery from Regen, x2 healing from Guilt, etc.

I think the MaxHP bonus slow demons gain can definitely be put to use, but it takes some work to make a place for them. Tanking is definitely their easiest role to fill: support them with Regen, Guilt, and/or give the MaxHP drains, give them reactive abilities that don't care how many turns they get, and you should find them fairly handy.