The dodge point keeps getting lost, so here’s the short of it: dodging is effective health. Every hit you avoid is damage you didn’t take, so dodge count and distance are a durability stat, same as HP or DR. The elf is built around that, more dodges, longer dodges, plus stamina to back it up. Her 100 life isn’t her whole survivability, it’s one slice while she’s loaded up on another. DR and dodge do the same job from different ends: one soaks hits, one avoids them. She sits at the dodge end, and her life total is balanced against it.
The bigger issue is your argument runs two ways at once. Either low HP is just a difficulty knob that won’t help skilled players, or it tracks DR as a balance variable. It can’t be both. If it doesn’t affect a strong player’s output, it’s not a balance lever and shouldn’t track DR. If it does, then adding 25 changes durability.
And survivability is power. A Shade who eats two or three more hits a run isn’t just forgiven mistakes, she plays more aggressively and keeps her damage uptime up, which is the same aggressive play you admit Slayer would get. You’re granting that for Slayer and denying it for the other two. Same mechanism. If the extra life matters for one, it matters for all three, which is exactly why I’m cautious about it.
just coming in here to say, that having more difficult/complex character options is entirely valid, characters that have higher skillfloors and require more time to master have raison d’être.
just as much as having easier and simpler options for beginners.
neither is a signal for bad design, quite the contrary. diversity of options is a good thing.
I’m so confused man. Why have you responded as if I said the complete opposite to what I actually said? I stated that I am NOT talking about the lore or her race. I’m talking about the holistic identity painted by common elements across her different careers and weapons.
High finesse, high mobility, high dodge, high attack speed. These are all elements coherent with low HP, because she gets access to better damage avoidance tools, and thus is given lower HP.
I apologise for originally referring to her as “the elf”. Clearly you’ve misinterpreted that as the reasoning for my post, rather than literally just being a way to refer to her. That said I have explained in ample text what I meant by “thematic”. You have no excuses left to still act like I’m making an appeal to lore when I very clearly an not.
I genuinely refuse to explain how I’m not talking about Warhammer lore for a third time. Either you understand now or I give up on trying to make you understand.
You are a more patient man than I to still be trying to explain this point to people who are clearly, willfully ignoring it to argue against a lore strawman instead.
All of their career skills help them survive. You must be doing something really wrong if you are experiencing the opposite.
Shade is meant to be a glass cannon. Slayer already has 50% damage reduction from elites and monsters from that one talent. Handmaiden is meant to be better at dodging, blocking, and pushing to survive. She also has Heart of Oak talent to increase her hp which allows you to survive being 1-shot by overheads on Cataclysm. Increasing her base hp would make that talent completely nonviable in that row.
To elaborate, tanks are tanks because they have high “effective HP”.
An enemy attacks once per second for 10 damage:
A rogue with 100 health but 80% dodge chance will take 2 hits every 10 seconds on average and will die without healing in 50 seconds.
A knight in heavy armor with a tower shield has 125 health reduces incoming damage by 75%, he takes 2.5 damage per hit and will die without healing in 50 seconds.
A barbarian in a loin cloth has 150 health and heals himself for 7 health per second by showering in the blood of his enemies, he will die without extra healing in 50 seconds.
All three have the same effective HP in this instance, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but they’re all “tanks.”
Handmaiden is a mobility/dodge tank, she stays alive by avoiding damage via dodges and dashes.
Shade isn’t a tank at all and deserves her low HP as an assassin, if she gets caught she’s not doing her job properly.
Slayer is basically a “lifesteal tank” in that he leaps in and out THP regens the incoming damage with damage reduction, stagger potential, and with just how absurdly fast he attack. If you stop attacking, he dies quick.
Slayer is insanely tanky, assuming he’ll go down quicker/easier because he has less HP is immediately countered when you take a talent like Grimnir’s focus into account. Grimnir’s doesn’t have a cooldown preventing it from reactivating either. Whether it’s a monster, a group of mass elites, or a patrol someone aggro’d. Start with a heavy attack and you now have 5 seconds in which you take 40% less damage, allowing you to spam lights to kill bosses, monsters and elites. I’m not sure how it works in conjunction with Barkskin (I’m sure someone has the percentages/numbers), but the damage reduction is immediately noticeable, allowing you to shrug off a hit that would down a GK or WP (obviously the ideal goal being not getting hit in the first place).
Great Hammer + Great Axe, Skull Splitter Slayer not only hands out high damage and huge horde clear, he can take it too. This is one example from the second time I played Well Of Dreams on Cata.
No bomb effects, no potion effects, no blessings and I wasn’t the host.
I want to add in that although I was chuffed with handing out grudges like they were smarties to those monks, I know there are battle wizards out there with elite kills in the literal hundreds. This screenshot is to show you that Slayer really isn’t weak, or as squishy as you think.
Also take that GK in the group into account, he joined before we hit the Monk Pit area (just after 3rd tome location). He didn’t have a high ping, had a decent talent stack combined with weapons and he DID play well. He took out about 4-8 monks and some Storm Vermin (IIRC) before getting overwhelmed and running out of stamina.
This is why I prefer RWC’s guide on Great Weapon Slayer, high power, high stagger, super faster cooldown thanks to Adrenaline Rush and No Escape for zooming in, around and dodging attacks.
