CategorySuggestions and Improvements (7)
TopicSuggestions - Combat (20)
MessageStamina, Crits and Hit Point Deaths (139)
ByDRAGONREALMS
OnMar 11, 1999 at 17:31

Players have been seeing for some time now a growing situation in which players don't die from critical hits but from being pummled to death...ie hit point loss kills you.

Suspecting that high staminas might be the cause of this, I did some experimenting and found that stamina was indeed the main culprit in this. Higher staminas were having a larger affect than anticipated. In addition it was having only reducing critical hits and not hit/health point loss. IE, you could be hit with a massive hit and get only a scratch.

I copied a high level player, lied down and allowed a rock guardian to pummel me. I died quickly but always due to health point loss. My body was just scratched up a bit. Then, by lowering my stamina, this critical hits suddenly reappeared.

Staring at the code I put in a fix to this for GMs to test. This fix puts a little randomness into the ability of stamina to reduce criticals. I also increased the likelyhood of getting a critical. Finally, I changed how hit points were applied so that it would had less of an effect on killing players, first by using stamina to reduce health point loss and then by choosing only the highest of the three types of damage (impact, puncture and slice) instead of adding them together.

The result was more deaths by crits, fewer by health point loss.

Some version of this is going to go live in the game in the next week or two once the GMs have fully tested it and I've tweaked it so that the actual danger of being in combat isn't altered significantly. IE, you don't get killed by rats after being successful against guardians.

This is the initial warning that this change is coming. There is no need to panic that this is going to ruin your ability to hunt. But you do need to be aware of the change in case it requires you to alter your hunting style or your expectations of what to see in combat.

Zoha