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Health Damage Asymmetry: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
Generally seen in [[Role
There can be several reasons for this design:
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# '''Player Rewards:''' One of the most rewarding things a player can get is a stronger weapon or a more powerful attack. This makes it much easier to kill all the enemies you've previously faced, but to avoid making things too easy as the game progresses, the monsters in later areas need to have their HP ramped up quickly, so that the new weapon becomes par for the course, and the player has to seek a newer, better weapon.
In [[First
Beware the [[Standard Status Effect]] known as Confusion, which can quickly kill a player character due to the damage a confused PC can inflict.
This is also the root cause of [[Redemption Demotion]], especially when considering how much the HP changes.
{{examples|Examples:}}▼
== [[First Person Shooter]] ==▼
== Played Straight ==
* 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.
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** 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.
=== [[Hack and Slash]] ===
* ''[[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.
=== [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]]s ===
* 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
** This was a huge problem in [[
* 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.
=== [[Role
* Nearly every single [[Eastern RPG|JRPG]] ever. This can be taken to extremes with optional bosses.
** In ''[[
*** Of course, continuing to play the trope straight, he seldom does over 200 damage as an enemy, but routinely does thousands as a party member. This is also one of the few games in which Confused allies do pathetic damage to each
* 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.]]}}
=== [[Fighting Game
* Non-RPG example in [[Punch
=== [[Tabletop Games]] ===
* Fourth Edition ''[[Dungeons
** 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
▲== [[First Person Shooter]] ==
▲* [[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.
=== [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]]s ===
* ''[[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 [[
** Blizzard has had to address this issue a few times in general. In the first expansion, stamina was put on nearly every item in bigger chunks than the other stats, and for Cataclysm, health pools are planned to grow a lot again to combat this creeping up in nearly every gameplay aspect.
* ''[[
* The original ''[[
* ''[[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.
* ''[[City of Heroes]]'' mostly
=== [[Role
* Tactical [[Role
** ''[[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
** 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.
*** The [[Final Boss
* [[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.
* Most RPGs based on existing role-playing systems, like ''[[
* ''[[
* 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.
* By comparison to other games, ''[[
* 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]]...
* ''[[Monster Girl Quest]]'' has this, though it's not so much that the player characters have low HP and high damage as it is Luka, specifically, having low HP and high damage. Alice and the Four Heavenly Knights have HP in the tens of thousands, while doing comparatively little damage to Luka when fought as enemies. Luka's maximum HP reaches a cap in the two thousand range, at which point he can dish out twice that amount of damage with normal attacks. When Alice and the Knights become allies, they actually keep the exact same maximum HP and start doing damage comparable to Luka. However, enemies will become capable of doing thousands of points worth of damage to them, to balance this out. This leads to the strange situation where the enemy uses an AoE attack, causing many times more damage to Luka's allies than to Luka himself.
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