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Wooben

Let's discuss what a damage type is

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I got a bunch of stuff I want to post but here's one interesting (more interesting at least) take on elemental damage in Path of Exile (Diablo 2.5).

 

You have 3 elements, fire, ice and lightning. Some enemies are rarely resistant to one, usually all of them, but resists cap out at 75% and you kill stuff so fast anyway. Lightning spells usually have an absurdly big damage range in comparison to the other two, 20 to 500 damage instead of 240 to 270.

 

The interesting thing is that when you deal enough damage of a certain type to an enemy (based on what % of their total HP you just dealt in X damage type), they'll get a different status effect. Fire damage puts an ignite on them that will continue to do damage as they burn, lightning damage will shock them, causing them to take 50% more damage from everything while they're shocked and frost damage always chills (slows movement and attack speed) and can also freeze (the enemy cannot do anything except stand there frozen).

 

You can get items and talents that reduce how much damage you need to do for that to occur as well as the duration, make shocks/ignites stack, make your status effects proliferate so you can ignite one zombie to make the whole room burn or freeze one thing to freeze the whole screen. There's also weird effects like 

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That is an interesting way of handling status effects Jutranjo. I am arbitrarily declaring that status effects count as damage types, because I want to share a neat example.

 

So most MMOs (and plenty of RPGs) have some kind of stun abilities that allow you to temporarily prevent an enemy from attacking. They also have powerful bosses who it would be ridiculously powerful to stun, so they handle it in one of two ways. Either everything above minion rank is immune to stuns, or all player stuns last two seconds and take four minutes to recharge, so that players will never be able to get much stunning in on a boss. City of Heroes had a really good solution to this problem: stun protection.

 

Each enemy had stun protection number, and they would only be stunned if the amount of all stun effects currently on them exceeded that number. Things were generally tuned such that minions required one stun, minibosses required two stuns, and elite bosses required a bunch of stuns. Let's say my character has two stun abilities, which each last ten seconds. I use my first stun on a miniboss, the effect goes onto him, but he is not stunned because of his stun protection. Two seconds later, I use my second stun on the miniboss. His stun protection is overcome, and now he's stunned. Eight seconds later, my first stun effect expires, and he only has one stun effect left on him, so he comes unstunned.

 

They applied the system to a wide variety of debilitating status effects: Stun, Immobilize, Sleep, Confuse, etc. It sometimes led to some silly effects, like being able to organize dozens of people with stun abilities to stunlock Hamidon, the giant megaboss of the game's one 50-100 player raid. He was supposed to be unstunnable, so the developers had just set his stun protection to 99, figuring no one would even achieve that.

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So I remember WoW's elemental resistance; it survived until Wrath of the Lich King, and while they only used it in vanilla raiding and in one fight in Wrath of the Lich King, it existed that entire time. What separated raiding gear in vanilla was whether it had fire resistance on it, and you wanted to take just enough fire resistance that you didn't stress the healers, but the more you took, the less strong the rest of your gear was. I suspect this inspired the design of hit%, which acted similarly: you needed a certain amount to guarantee you'd always hit but everything over that amount was useless. By Wrath, players had access to buffs that improved their resistance (in this case, frost) and resistance didn't count against the stat budget, but Blizzard still weren't satisfied and eventually gave up on the system entirely.

 

I always thought it was interesting that Final Fantasy games had a 200% to -100% elemental resistance scale. In those games, if you improved your elemental resistance enough, instead of not taking damage you'd actually start to heal from certain kinds of attacks. This gave rise to the classic Phoenix Down attack in those games: zombie enemies healed from dark attacks - and were weak to light attacks, so if you healed them, they'd take damage, and if you tried to revive them using a revive item, they'd die. This worked on bosses.

 

Guild Wars 2 launched with a system for dealing with crowd control effects a bit like CoH's: enemies intended to test a group had several applications of a buff called Defiance. Using crowd control effects reduced how many applications of Defiance enemies had, and once they're run out of Defiance, the next stun/what have you went through and they gained Defiance again. It was a disaster because you'd frequently get people using their stuns at the wrong time or saving up a big stun for when the Defiance fell off and someone would drop an immobilize as part of their attack and it just never worked.

 

They replaced it in the expansion with a defiance bar: every crowd control effect reduces the defiance bar, which regenerates on its own depending on the properties of the enemy. Things like knockbacks and stuns take off a chunk of the bar, while effects like slow act over time, and some enemies can lock their defiance bar entirely until they expose it by doing an attack, so players have to focus down their stuns in a small window. If the defiance bar is fully depleted, the enemy's either stunned, or maybe loses an invulnerability buff, or in some cases fall out of the sky and smash on the ground. It seems like some enemies can take more defiance damage from particular sources, so a fiery enemy will feel chills more keenly.

 

I still think the most interesting resistance system is the Souls' resistance system, where you have a certain level of tolerance for a status effect, and when that's exceeded, you have the effect until it falls off. There's lots you can do with that to make the effects different - Dark Souls' toxic vs poison is a famous example. Poison is unfortunate but survivable, whereas toxic lingers and does great chunks of damage if it manages to penetrate.

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In reading some of these responses I got to thinking about the purpose of status effects and damage types. They seem like a good, or at least easily understandable way to add some dynamism to the game but I think at a certain point this becomes cumbersome without a real benefit of it's own. In particular I'll give the example of Bravely default where there are maybe 5 or six disabling effects in the game, each with it's own spell or item to clear it. Now in these cases if you run out of that item, or your healer is the one hit by the effect that is typically the end of the fight, or it starts a back and forth where the fight becomes untenable. I can appreciate the aesthetic this creates, but I feel as though too much of this just creates redundancy or makes the random effects in the game swing wildly in either direction. This seems to be something that is fun to engage with when controlling a single character (planning 1 character times X status/damage effects). But when controlling multiple it becomes a chore, as well as muliltiplicatively more complicated such that it gets in the way of playing the game.

In the case of damage types, I think strategy games usually get it down pretty well. Units have set benefits and weaknesses and rather than putting on a piece of gear to account for this, you must compose your army differently. I enjoy this because it quite effectively and simply translates the background math into the mechanical action and play space of the game. If your army is mostly comprised of say fire units you can tell at a glance it will be weak to ice attacks, and so on. I haven't found an example of rpgs and the like that translate this idea effectively without the player first having extensive knowledge of the game's mechanics.

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One of my favorite applications of damage types was in Skyrim. It wasn't explicitly called "damage type," but in the melee skill trees there were different bonuses based on weapons being used. Swords got you a chance for critical damage, axes caused bleeding damage, and maces ignored armor. That was a bit more creative as far as "do more damage" goes, almost in the way of how the Mega Man X games work; using enemy weaknesses didn't necessarily mean doing a ton of damage, but rather you controlled the enemy's attack pattern.

 

Since ppl are bringing up WoW, old WoW did something similar but I think it was like this

 

Axe = 5% crit chance (which also converted into bleed damage since there was a spec that caused bleed on crit?)

Mace = 5% stun chance (best for pvp, also infamous for "well skilled proc" rage in pvp)

 

and..... the winner for hilarity went to

 

Sword = 5% chance for extra swing

 

because it could proc on itself and due to WoW's very 'streak-y' RNG, you often had nothing and once in a while just one shotted something or someone in pvp

 

Yeah I joined in around BC, so I never got to experience that stuff, and I spent most of my time playing PvP anyway. It was a good move on their part,  making builds that were useless for no good reason was silly.

 

In its essence, I like the idea of having things that are resistant to one type of attack, or susceptible to another. It's awkward in MMOs because then it causes exclusion as everyone is trying to optimise everything. 

 

Did you get glad?

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Annoying I didn't until Cataclysm. Missed out narrowly each time. I tried to get into the Rated Bgs then too, but could never get a group good enough to go far. We sold some carries for the weapon ratings though. Surprisingly lucrative.

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Annoying I didn't until Cataclysm. Missed out narrowly each time. I tried to get into the Rated Bgs then too, but could never get a group good enough to go far. We sold some carries for the weapon ratings though. Surprisingly lucrative.

 

Niceee, I remember getting my first 2k shoulders back in BC (me as resto shaman with average warrior (I thought he was good at the time but my friend retrospectively asked me why I teamed up with him for so long lol)), didn't hit glad myself til... middle of WotlK then hit this amazing sweet spot, got into this clique of really good pvpers in this really good pvp server got like rank 2 in BG for 5v5 running some braindead 4 dps team lol.  Man that group of pvper was so good, it was like 2 of every class and we would just make new team, try new combos, get to 2300ish in one week but it's really that fast and reliable repeat of new combos taught everyone in that group ton of tricks.  Then in Cata met these two amazing pally/warrior and ran this funky double healer war combo where each match lasted 30 minutes but holy shit they were good.  I felt like a total scrub with them but for some reason they thought I was the best shaman they teamed up with so heck yeah.

 

And heck yeah for selling ratings.

 

Shit this brings back memories.  Too real man, too real.

 

Also I was a total jackass then.  Made few ppl even cry during pvp cause I yelled too harshly or something.  What an ass I was.  I mean part of it was untreated mental health issue but still.

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Yeah, it was me who was pretty average, a buddy who was good, but we could never find a reliable healer for 3s. Went through so many, some who thought they were shit hot, others who we tried to teach, but mostly the healers we found were decent, just really flaky and couldn't commit. We both rolled healers to try and fix the problem, but neither of us were particularly gifted at it. 

 

I really enjoyed the rated BGs in cata. Half the time it was just a bunch of friends having a laugh and getting up to 2k, then never going further because we didn't take it seriously enough. 

 

Never played 5s though. It was too chaotic!

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I'm not sure if it should be classed as a damage type or not or if its been mentioned allready but ......................over the years because WoW has struggled so hard with players fighting bosses with huge hit point pools then fighting players with comparatively tiny hit point pools. Blizzards 1st solution was a stat called resilience which was essentially player damage resistance. 

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I got a bunch of stuff I want to post but here's one interesting (more interesting at least) take on elemental damage in Path of Exile (Diablo 2.5).

 

You have 3 elements, fire, ice and lightning. Some enemies are rarely resistant to one, usually all of them, but resists cap out at 75% and you kill stuff so fast anyway. Lightning spells usually have an absurdly big damage range in comparison to the other two, 20 to 500 damage instead of 240 to 270.

 

The interesting thing is that when you deal enough damage of a certain type to an enemy (based on what % of their total HP you just dealt in X damage type), they'll get a different status effect. Fire damage puts an ignite on them that will continue to do damage as they burn, lightning damage will shock them, causing them to take 50% more damage from everything while they're shocked and frost damage always chills (slows movement and attack speed) and can also freeze (the enemy cannot do anything except stand there frozen).

 

You can get items and talents that reduce how much damage you need to do for that to occur as well as the duration, make shocks/ignites stack, make your status effects proliferate so you can ignite one zombie to make the whole room burn or freeze one thing to freeze the whole screen. There's also weird effects like

Haha I was going to mention PoE too. That's a good explanation but there is a bit more.

 

So for starters there are 5 damage types. Physical, Fire, Lightning, Cold, and Chaos. Physical Damage (which can cause things like bleed, pinning, and stuns) is mostly avoided by stacking Armour in the current meta, but it can also be avoided by stacking Evasion, stacking flat chances for spells and attacks to miss you, stacking EHP, and using certain Uniques like Lightning Coil which converts a percentage of physical damage to added lightning damage. Meanwhile Fire, Lightning, and Cold are all fairly explanatory and are resisted by stacking their corresponding type. However PoE features replayable acts with increased difficulty much like Diablo. When you enter a new difficulty your resistances take a flat hit causing you to stack more. For example gear that gave you above 75% resists in normal difficulty now gives you 0% resists (and it hurts). Meanwhile Chaos Damage deals a nasty damage over time that by default ignores any form of energy shield and requires a fourth resistance type that is much rarer to the other three. It can be incredibly hard/expensive to reach the (regular) full 60% immunity to Chaos Damage. However some builds can hard spec into a talent that gives you full immunity to Chaos Damage but sets your maximum health to 1 which requires you to specialise into energy shield + armour hybrid gear and invest in a unique which causes Chaos Damage to be unable to bypass energy shield.

 

Idk there's tonnes more to that game which plays around those damage types and the defences you need to overcome them. Some builds spec into life-leech and apply talents that return the health instantly, others cause all cold damage to be converted to fire, and all fire into chaos damage, or convert all physical to lightning, or completely forgoe physical damage for higher chance at status ailments.

Sorry, having a bit of a nerd out with this one.

 

Also not a video game but I think Dungeon World has some interesting ideas in how to make a combat challenging which could be somewhat translated into a video game.

A well known story about it's combat is to do with the 16hp dragon. Now I'm sure a lot of the combat effect is taken care of with narrative roleplaying actions and gizmos. But from what I remember of the story was that the dragon had some armour which first needed to be pierced by armour penetration (I think the game might treat armour quite seriously so you do need armour pen to have a hope of getting through), then the party had to deal with a fear effect brought by the dragon which has to be overcome through dicerolls and actions, then after getting past these two defences the party ends up dealing a total of 9 damage to the dragon while it in turn does 1d10+5 damage which results in someone losing an arm. 

Now the dice rolls don't really mean anything and a lot of the roleplay only works because of people's imagination and a DM. But you could get some type of game where defying your fear became an action and fear was treated like a form of psychological damage (maybe like Darkest Dungeon which does feature some nifty ways of damaging players). Meanwhile maiming is a particularly violent route to go but that could be lessened by making it more Monte Pythonesque, or done to machines, or exo suits, etc. Combat that results in semi permanent debilitation would be an effective form of damage in its own right and cause players and designers to think about the trade offs for protecting specific areas of the body vs speed or whatever.

Idk, could be a fun set of ideas to channel into some kind of action game like a Dark Souls-a-like, party manager, or whatever.

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