Health pools over expansions

[TrollShaman]

the only reason they do stat squishes is cause peoples computers couldnt handle seeing higher than over 9000 power level readings couldnt resist urge to say it someone was gonna eventually

Quoting from Dontain's wotlk fury warrior pvp video "BAMF, BIG NUMBERS! Numbers make me want to play wow". That was the only reason I was sad about the squish.

[Keashaa]

So what? It's only a lot of zeroes.

Does it really matter if Boss/Player has 100k, 100,000k or 100,000,000k HP? As long as DPS/HPS numbers scale proportionally the actual number is completely irrelevant.

For math? Yes, it does not matter as long as the scaling works.
For human mind? No, it does matter! The majority cannot handle big numbers. For example, they understand the difference between 10 and 20. But when it comes to big numbers, this does not working anymore. People start to shorten numbers (instead of 10.000 they say 10k). But the problem is every bit counts. 12.499 and 24.998 have the same relation as 10 and 20, but peope shorten these numbers to 12k and 25k and now it's nowhere 1:2 relation.

So yes, big numbers do affect players negatively as they cannot handle them right.

[ThePants999]

I haven't really put a lot of thought into this, it just came to my mind, but how would people feel if health went the same way as mana?

Make hp static by level, and give tanks like double hp. For legion, 500k for dps/heals, and 1m for tanks. (Just arbitrary numbers of course). Stamina could then be dropped since it's fairly irrelevant, just comes with gear. Or they could make it a secondary stat like spirit is now and stamina offers faster resource regen, lower cooldowns, or something to that effect.

Not sure how good the thought is.... Hopefully others could weigh in.

Personally as a tank myself (guardian & protection paladin) I wouldn't really mind a static health pool for balance purposes.

No, because they need to scale up the incoming damage over the course of the expansion to keep progression relevant for healers.

[Deleted]

No, it's still 32 bit. And they wont change it in legion.



Are you sure? Maybye the code is [number of coppers] + [number of silvers] + [number of gold]. No reason to conver everything into number of coppers.

Nope. Gold and silver are just multipliers. Base money unit IS copper.
A quest that rewards you 500 gold, in reality rewards you 5.000.000 base money units.
Gold and silver exists pretty much only to crunch the numbers to something manageable, because without them we'd operate with millions even in vanilla wow. Today it would be billions.

The method you described works in a game like Tibia where you have gold, platinum and crystal coins, with same value ratios (1 cr = 100 plat; 1 plat = 100 gold. therefore 1 cr = 10000 gold). But currency there isn't actually a currency. It's an item that you keep in your bag. It stacks up to 100 in one slot. Therefore, gold; crystal and platinum coins have different item ID's - they are actual stackable items, not just currency.

[Supercool]

Makes my head hurt that people don't understand why the squish was needed. Player health is irrelevant, player damage is irrelevant. They didn't squish because "numbers are big LOLOLOL MAKE EM SMALLER OLOLOLOL"

The issue was boss health reaching over 2 billion and the engine couldn't handle it, that's why the Garrosh fight had to be split in 3 phases. Player health is nowhere near 2 billion so it doesn't matter.

Archimonde has ~450 million health in Mythic so we're fine for Legion and then probably another squish.

Also when the squish was happening Blizz stated outright that they intentionally did not squish HP as much as damage.

The reason for this was obvious to anyone who did PVP: Players in MoP could do single hits on mobs for double or quintuple a player's health pool, so PVP required massive base resilience to lower damage enough so that players weren't one-shotting each other. By letting HP go higher relative to damage, players no longer needed ~50% base resilience at all times.

[Djriff]

I haven't really put a lot of thought into this, it just came to my mind, but how would people feel if health went the same way as mana?

Make hp static by level, and give tanks like double hp. For legion, 500k for dps/heals, and 1m for tanks. (Just arbitrary numbers of course). Stamina could then be dropped since it's fairly irrelevant, just comes with gear. Or they could make it a secondary stat like spirit is now and stamina offers faster resource regen, lower cooldowns, or something to that effect.

Not sure how good the thought is.... Hopefully others could weigh in.

Personally as a tank myself (guardian & protection paladin) I wouldn't really mind a static health pool for balance purposes.

I think something that would be good is drop stamina and replace it with a damage reduction type thing that only works in PvE instances or world bosses. As you progress through raids/dungeons and get better gear players will take the same amount of damage, but the damage itself will be higher so that you can bring a fresh 110 in as they'll get one shot, kind of like resistance gear.

On the flip side it's a terrible idea due to the way spell power scales for healers. In the beginning of the xpac it'll take 5-6 flash heals to fully bring up a target and at the end it's around 1-2 depending on your spec. That would need to be addressed as well. Maybe have healing be in % rather than a flat number?

[TheWindWalker]

On the flip side it's a terrible idea due to the way spell power scales for healers. In the beginning of the xpac it'll take 5-6 flash heals to fully bring up a target and at the end it's around 1-2 depending on your spec. That would need to be addressed as well. Maybe have healing be in % rather than a flat number?

That's one of the few situations in which they have total and absolute control over the balance and it's strange it falls apart like that. In WoD, there's no reforging, gems are weak, non-weapon enchants are just a slight boost, and they know exactly what flask you'll be using, so it doesn't make sense that they would double the value of stamina but still not manage to prevent spellpower+secondary creep from catching up. I mean, they have 11 years to work on it and employ people with degrees in math just to work on this and yet... you're not wrong.

[Djriff]

That's one of the few situations in which they have total and absolute control over the balance and it's strange it falls apart like that. In WoD, there's no reforging, gems are weak, non-weapon enchants are just a slight boost, and they know exactly what flask you'll be using, so it doesn't make sense that they would double the value of stamina but still not manage to prevent spellpower+secondary creep from catching up. I mean, they have 11 years to work on it and employ people with degrees in math just to work on this and yet... you're not wrong.

Well if we did swap to healing in % rather than numbers, people wouldn't feel more powerful and it would lead to other design problems as well. The system we have currently isn't perfect, but it's better than the alternative IMO.