Health Damage Asymmetry: Difference between revisions

[[File:playervsmonsterHP.jpg|link=Final Fantasy VI|frame|A fairly balanced fight in the world of RPGs.]]

 

 

There can be several reasons for this design:

** This trope is the reason that the Necromancer's Iron Maiden curse, which reflects monsters melee attacks back at them, doesn't work in the long term. The further into the game you go, the less damage monsters do proportional to their health. It's better to go with the more basic Amplify Damage instead. Likewise, the Paladin's Thorns aura doesn't work as well as his Might.

 

* MMORPGs tend to play this one straight, with players being able to deal ''more damage in one hit than their max HP can take'' and bosses having as much HP as a significant portion of the server's population ''combined''.

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' plays this straight with bosses, particularly raid bosses, which under most circumstances deal only a tiny fraction of their health as damage. However, since they're supposed to be fought by groups of 10, 25, or in the past ''40'' players to one, this tiny fraction is still enough to [[One-Hit Kill]] anyone not [[Stone Wall|built to take it]], and even they can expect take many, many times their total health in damage over the course of a fight. From the player perspective a respectable end-game damage output would enable many damage-focused players to kill themselves, on average, in about 5 seconds. Indeed, some of the most consistently dangerous abilities in the game are variations on the theme of reflecting players' attacks back at themselves or their allies.

== [[Role Playing Game]] ==

* Nearly every single [[Eastern RPG|JRPG]] ever. This can be taken to extremes with optional bosses.

* The flash game ''Monsters' Den: Book of Dread'' plays this straight, but one might not notice it until the "end" boss(after that boss is endless play) {{spoiler|summons copies of you to his side. You can take them out in 1 or 2 swings if you've been playing right, but they're ''exact copies''. [[Oh Crap|So can they.]]}}

 

* Non-RPG example in [[Punch-Out!!]]. Little Mac, the player character, is usually chipping away at foes' energy bars with dozens of punches, while dodging blows that will level him in just a few hits. Justified in that, as his name suggests, for a pro boxer he's really small, and even the shorter enemies tower over him.

 

** This also applies in FPS games when you have difficulty mixed with friendly fire. For example, in ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'', you won't do too much friendly fire damage to your teammates on Normal while Advanced ups the damage a little bit. On Expert, friendly fire damage is 100%, which means you can cause the same amount of damage to a survivor as you would to a zombie. This can cause an instant knock down if you're not careful since most guns can do more than 100 points of damage and survivors will never have more than 100 health.

 

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' averts this with normal enemies, they have about the same hit points and damage as a player of the same level. (Somewhat lower on both to allow players to kill stuff of equal level.)

** However, player characters are allowed to deal a lot of damage compared to their health. This had led to issues in [[PvP]] until they introduced a defensive stat called resilence, which reduces damage taken from other players significantly. Woe to those who step into a battleground without wearing resilience equipment.

** ''[[Disgaea]]'' probably deserves special mention, as damage can rise to ridiculous levels (millions of damage per hit), but HP can as well. The damage output inevitably ends up overtaking the HP gain to the point where almost everything is a [[One-Hit Kill]], though.

** However, many Tactical RPGs (definitely ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' anyway) have this in a different form. Generally, the enemies will be much greater in number, but will be slightly weaker (except for the boss) or have poor strategy to compensate.

* [[Mon]] games in general tend to avert this for the same reason tactical RPGs do.

** The ''[[Monster Rancher]]'' series averts this trope even with the rare non-recruitable bosses. They have the same stat cap as any monsters you can raise.

* ''[[Shin Megami Tensei]]'' largely averts this by having the enemy and your HP be on the same page. The randomly generated enemies will all have the same HP as you, and in many games, even the rare marks will never break the HP caps that your character normally has. This is only challenged when you come across enemies that are labelled as "bosses" but that generally is still limited to HP. The damage that is done is still the same for both sides because of the shared statistics. However, this does serve to throw a lot more problems at you in terms of boss fights. Since they damage that you deal is generally the same, boss attacks will hurt a lot MORE for you than for them. Even if your hits exceed 1000 damage, they not only can do the same to you, but for them it is a strong poke. For you it is a deathblow.

* The ''[[Valkyrie Profile]]'' series averts this, occasionally inverting it, with some enemies doing just as much, if not more, damage per round to you, while some bosses will [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|hit you for several times your maximum HP]] ''per round'' while you have to whittle away at them.