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 is also the root cause of [[Redemption Demotion]], especially when considering how much the HP changes.

 

* Classic example: the original Doom had demons with many hundreds or even thousands of HP (the player's maximum, ever, is 400), yet with the exception of the Cyber Demon, none of them had attacks that come even close to the player arsenal's destructive power. As a result, the single player campaign tends to be reasonably mildly paced, while in multiplayer most fights are over in a matter of seconds. (and, with the introduction of the double barrelled shotgun in Doom 2, sometimes a fraction of a second)

* [[Halo]] Combat Evolved. Hearsay has it that the pistol wasn't supposed to be the death machine we met it as, but that someone accidentally changed its damage value right before shipping. Especially on Legendary, it makes the MC the glass-cannon version of this asymmetry.

** Lower-rank Brutes are actually the tank-who-can't-dish-it-out version of this. Until you enrage them. Higher rank ones carry all sorts of destructive goodies, though.

 

* ''[[Diablo II]]'': There is no damage or HP cap, but players can easily deal over 10,000 damage while their own HP is below 1,000. Even with damage cut to one-sixth in [[Player Versus Player|PvP]], many duels end in a single hit.

** 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.

* In ''[[Billy vs. SNAKEMAN]]'' Phase Battles, Phases have 5000 to 21000 HP and have a small chance of dealing one damage (two if it's the final boss) on any given turn. You have 1 to 6 HP and deal hundreds of damage a turn.

 

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

** In ''[[Chrono Trigger]]'', Magus as a villain has [[Six Hundred Sixty Six|666]][[Four Is Death|6]] HP,<ref>Even ''after'' Lavos sucks away most of his powers</ref> [[Redemption Demotion|but doesn't have more than 999 under player control.]]

* 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.

 

** Enemies do in fact have healing surges (1 for Heroic tier, 2 for Paragon, 3 for Epic), but there are very few official monsters that have abilities which allow them to be used so the point usually still stands. Usually.

** [[Subverted Trope|Subverted]] in that enemies generally deal about the same amount of damage as party members.

 

* [[First-Person Shooter|FPSes]] generally scale the enemy's damage and HP with difficulty level, and are often equal to the player on the hardest difficulties.

** For example in Deus Ex, where the player can take a few hits on early difficulties but can be instant killed by a head shot on the harder 'realistic' difficulty where damage is equal.

** 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.

* ''[[Atlantica Online]]'' generally keeps everything on the same level, though monster health and damage depends on where they are. Only bosses are significantly stronger and thougher, to the point where most of the fight will be the players entire party against the boss alone. Even areas designed for groups of players house mobs about on par with the player's mercenaries, but you'll almost always face three parties of monsters at once.

* ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'' has monsters that have the HP as an equal level character (and sometimes significantly more). The game is a careful balancing act for the players in terms of maintaining attack and defense; if either is too low, you won't do enough damage and you'll take significantly more. Melee classes in particular, lacking any kind of special abilities on the same scale as magic-users, have to be especially mindful to be using appropriate equipment, so as to win the resulting war of attrition.

 

** ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' series

** ''[[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.

* ''[[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.

* In ''[[Dark Souls]]'' both you and the standard enemies go down fast.

* The online game ''[[Ginormo Sword]]'' usually plays the trope straight but at one point throws out a duplicate of the player with identical stats. If the player isn't careful both sides will end up with a screen-filling sword that can kill the opponent with one hit, and [[Computers Are Fast]]...

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:CRPG Tropes]]