Health Damage Asymmetry: Difference between revisions

** 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.

** 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.

 

=== [[Role-Playing Game]] ===