A solution to the THP generation system

I’ll try to keep this as concise as possible. The issues with the current THP system lies in that there is a heirarchy of THP talents. This constricts the use of many weapons on many careers, bottlenecking the variety of weapons that are usable (in the sense that they feel good/are good to use).
For example, the THP-on-cleave talent is close to useless currently, meaning on a class such as RV, THP-on-stagger is the only remaining option, which in turn means that weapons such as 1h axe, 1h hammer, greataxe and pickaxe are largely useless on him. The only weapons that he uses that generate an acceptable amount of THP is dual hammers and axe & shield, which is incredibly limiting. Almost all the careers in the game are currently corralled into using very specific weapons that can generate THP for them, since THP is such an essential component to combat. So the main complaint for this system is most definitely regarding weapon diversity. A quick list format on the problems with it:

  1. Not all THP talents are equal, creating serious imbalances between classes and weapons.
  2. They seriously limit weapon choices.
  3. The talents also force a different, often unwanted playstyle on the player, such as THP-on-kill forcing players to vie for the last hit, or trying to stagger a heap of enemies before allies kill them all, thus denying you your THP.

Fortunately, my friend Zaphio was kind enough to code a LUA executable for me to test as a solution.

A SOLUTION:

image

This was the easiest way to test this, but ideally it wouldn’t be a talent, it’d be a blanket passive for all careers. “In combat” refers to having damaged an enemy with a melee weapon and for 2 seconds after, in this case. The benefits to this would be:

  1. Opens up a new row of talents for every career, scrapping those polarizing THP talents.
  2. Every career is rewarded equally for risking melee combat.
  3. You aren’t restricted in your weapon choices by viability in THP-generation.
  4. Because it’s gradual, it still punishes taking hits, while rewarding a flawless combatant with a buffer of THP.

Here is what the passive would look like in-game (just keep an eye on the THP generation):

Again: this wouldn’t be a talent, but a passive for all careers in the game, as a replacement for THP talents.

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Doesn’t look like a bad idea.

But now, that this exists, due to FS’s aversion to use any player suggested/created solution to a problem, it will never be implemented. But thank you anyway. :laughing:

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Yeah, this kind of thing could work, even if it would be a bit boring (and too passive for my tastes).

Personally, I’d love to see the “default” THP generation Talents (well, the best ones anyway) be a bit less effective and more alternate methods added (like Pyro’s on Career Skill use, HS’s on ranged Headshot and so on) to complement and possibly even replace the normal generation. This would certainly go double if something passive like this suggestion was added as a baseline - make the baseline generation weak so that a very good player can use it alone, but give another one or two (possibly mutually incompatible) methods to complement it (and to make the generation more active).

I mean if THP still has to be tied to talents this is probably one of most generically safe choices just to get a baseline going which is appreciated. I’d rather the talents were just gone, though, and THP generation just becoming an inherent mechanic like stagger. Let people generate it from anything - kills, cleaving, staggering, etc(sometimes more than one at a time, which could be interesting). You could nerf overall temp hp gain to compensate, or better cap temp hp at a set threshold of your max hp. Weapons automatically balance the different methods by being inherently better at different things, and it makes the ‘kinda decent at everything’ weapons less automatic a choice since they may or may not generate this health cushion as quickly. In theory, anyway. If nothing else, tweaking a specific weapon’s temp hp gain is a lot easier than the ramifications of arbitrarily adjusting talents.

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Well just to remove it and adjust the enemies a little would equalize as well and remove an unimmersive game mechanic to keep track of. But given the stagger system hope of improvement in general is probably way outside of the possibles.

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I think the problem with THP is not the HP part, nor that it’s too easy/too hard to generate, but that it’s not actually Temporary.

If THP actually wore off in a meaningful time frame, nobody would be able to walk around for entire maps with bars full of white health anymore. It would serve it’s purpose of allowing you to play aggressively but without making health management trivial.

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I think there are better solutions like tying thp to a separate weapon trait instead of the level 5 talents. This gives players the freedom to choose whichever current talent choices they want from the full pool without being left with a bland blanket solution.

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I think the main problem with health per hit is the 5 base. This is a hold over from before the substantial changes to cleave. How is HM,FK or RV gunna damage 5 enemies in 1 swing? So because the 1st hit is nerfed and the 4th and 5th often isn’t viable, why would anyone pick it?

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Hey quick question sorry. So judging by your comment, temp hp on cleave only counts enemies that get damaged by your attack, not just ones that get hit and staggered, is this correct?

I’m all for it, as long as it’s melee only.
This would be a very simple solution to a bunch of issues I have with the current THP system.

  1. No more fighting over elites to get one’s THP.
  2. No more overly passive playstyle some people went for with the stagger-THP talents.
  3. No more thinking about my build in a “I can’t really use this weapon because this career gets no THP with it due to it’s talents” way.
  4. No more hordes being a “break” rather than a threat because it’s so damn easy to just get a full bar worth of THP back from them, especially with Skaven. And some builds are downright stupid allowing you to get like 10%+ of your HP bar back with a single charged attack or a push against a horde.

This would both incentivize going into melee combat and actually punish taking hits (unlike the current THP system).

The only thing I would maybe add to this would be something like:

  • get +1 THP from every ~5th consecutive melee strike (pushing counts)

Simply just to encourage players to play a bit more aggressively and reward them for doing so without taking hits.

I like it :+1:

I’d rather see something like this and then open that talent line up for more career talents.

3 Likes

So the whole row of temp HP talents would get scrapped ?

That is probably not going to happen, and if they would just overlay this on top of current broken system, it would not fix the situation, it would still be highly unbalanced.

I don’t understand what are they doing, how is it even possible that they did not fix this in months, and if they are lazy to tweak it (just changing some numbers - again could do this over weekend …) they should at least revert it back to what it was. (it might not have been perfect before, but it was fine, maybe they could just tone down few very strong combinations and that’s it)

And again, this is something (the 2.0 temp HP changes) that should never get pushed on live server. If someone actually tested this, they would see immediately that it’s horrible.

ps: Adding same passive temp hp gen for everyone sounds kinda boring.

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I kinda agree with Yzneftamz. If some THP generation was passive, and talents woud improve some part of hits, it could be better. It would indeed ask for more balance than your current solution, but at least it gives a bit more “active” (even if you’re active during a fight) feeling*, and also not remove totally talents with nothing to replace them.

  • Active feel => You’re the direct generator of your THP, with each impact of your weapon of choice, whatever the impact means (staggering, damaging, cleaving).

TLDR; replace THP, don’t fix it.

As long as THP is a given I can agree with that. But what if we take a step back, is THP even a give?

If we instead of getting stuck on THP focus on the purpose of the mechanic itself; avoid taking HP damage from single hits in otherwise good runs. THP is one solution to this, and a solution which is very hard to balance, as many have mentioned before. But what about mitigating single / few hits from draining HPs?

I suggest that there should be a HP-buffer system (which can be called whatever), which is only generated through excellence in combat (damaging or staggering, or something else, not an important detail here) and slowly decays. Traits and other factors (such as class) can modify the size of this buffer (perhaps IB can have a trait preventing decay?). This buffer depletes before you take HP damage, and potentially having a full buffer improves resistance to stagger (or something else, maybe increases stagger of you swings?). Behaviour when hit similar to how Protoss shields work in Starcraft, i.e. deplete shields first, then HPs.

This solves two of the most important issues with THP (as I see it);

Issue Solution
THP is meaningless when at full HP. With a buffer system this would no longer be true, and you can still fill your buffer while at full HPs.
THP can replace HP. Adding to a buffer instead of THP would make HPs more valuable, as they are harder to refill in practice (i.e. through kits and pots).
HP levels are quite similar between characters A buffer / shield system would allow for different balances between hard to regen HP (i.e. normal HP) and easy to generate HPs (i.e. buffer), as such armor “heavy” careers such as IB and FK can have much bigger buffers so they can actually shrug off several hits from normal enemies. As such further differentiating careers choices.

It would also make certain classes more entertaining to play. For example, if Zealot had to balance real HPs and buffer going low on HPs would require significantly more skill if the buffer is capped at, say, 30 HPs worth of buffer. In comparison, maybe Shade should have a 10 HP / one-hit-when-full buffer, since Shade is not supposed to get hit etc.

Just my five cents on THP, i.e., don’t fix THP, replace it.

2 Likes

In defense of the THP system. Acquiring health through damaging enemies promotes a more aggressive faster paced playstyle. Prior to 2.0 I thought this was deliberate on the part of Fatshark, and it was great.

The best thing they could do for THP is to make it more available like it was prior to 2.0. The nerfing and this new slow regen proposal promote slower gameplay, which is less fun for most people. If Fatshark wants to court the small group of people who like this I believe it’s part of a trend that will lead to the death of the game.

My biggest concern with 2.0 isn’t the bugs present, it’s the design decisions and the fact that they lead me to believe Fatshark wants the game to be something very different from what it was pre 2.0. But I fell in love with that game, if I were to have started it now I would have abandoned it, because the endgame is not fun enough to warrant putting up with the absurd grind and godawful loot/crafting system.

3 Likes

I don’t think it would be slower paced. You’d still gain HP for damaging things, the only thing that’d make it slow paced is if you deliberately try to kill things slower, but that’d be a pretty terrible plan.

Exactly, this just sucks so much currently, on the classes that don’t have some decent temp hp talent available.

I would bet, may more players enjoy running and killing stuff fast than bunkering down and holding the block all the time.

If they can’t change it for the better they should revert it immediately as they get the feedback or see how it turned out.

Solution you propose is better than the current nonsense, but it’s monotonous.

Why not just revert it back, if they don’t have time to make proper TempHPV2.0, and just tone down few super overperforming combinations ?

Btw, they could make it so much more interesting, like what about there would be difference in how the temp works/feels for different types.

For example:

  • Stagger Temp: High temp hp amount, but fast decay (creating situation where you can generate more with this than with other options, but it will decay real fast and you basically lose it all before next fight… while maybe on kill would be relatively low temp hp but would decay very slow so you could keep it easily between the fights)
  • On Kill Temp: Low amount, but slow decay
  • On Cleave Temp: Medium temp hp, medium decay

There would surely be many ideas on how to make temp hp interesting, but since they don’t seem to have time to even fix major game breaking bugs, I still believe that sensible move would be just to put it back where it was maybe with very minor tweaks. It was fine for ages… and now that they made the game significantly harder and more complex with stagger mechanic they also decided to reduce temp HP a lot, increase decay and on top of that just force some classes to play no-temp-hp mutator ? That’s so ridiculous.

4 Likes

I basically like the sound of this idea, and of @flisker 's variable THP degradation speed as well. However, it would be introducing a completely new system with all the coding and balancing (and resulting problems) it entails. I think a satisfying THP can be achieved way more easily with tweaks to the current system, which would cost way fewer effort. Maybe a nice idea for V3 in the far future though…

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@EmpIzza I really like this idea and it sounds much easier to balance than what we have honestly. @flisker suggestion also sounds great.

Would be real nice to have anyone from the Fatshark team let us know they’ve actually seen this, or even acknowledge the inherent problems with temp health that are being addressed here. I sure hope this next patch is worth the three weeks of radio silence and months of year old bugs (hello enemies spawning a metre in front of us at least once a match) we’ve been living with since WoM.

Hard to trust this will ever be fixed when we’ve been living with some form of glaring THP imbalance since launch :frowning:

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Yea, pretty hard to stay optimistic. Especially when even obviously important & easy to fix/revert stuff is not getting fixed in months :frowning:

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