Tigranes
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2009
- Messages
- 10,353
As I've said repeatedly, the mechanic sucks if you always have plenty of stamina. Now, imagine a situation where, just to be extreme, 2 or 3 hits are enough to burn all of your stamina away, and critical hits and most magical / special abilities will damage both stamina and health. Finally, to make the point, a situation where stmaina healing spells are cheap. Well, you never want to remain at 0 Stamina, because your health is going to take a battering it can't recover from. So you have to quite frequently use stamina healing spells - they may be cheap, but they still cost you time to cast, if they are even available to every class equally (and if they don't have any in-battle cooldowns attached to them). So then, you actually care about your health more than a standard HP mechanic; instead of thinking "meh I just wait until 2 HP and down a potion of full heal", you're constantly judging the possibility of crits or other attacks that bypass stamina, the possibility of your small pool of stamina being drained, the time / opportunity cost of using stamina spells, etc.
A similar tradeoff actually occurs in many other games with health and mana; in certain situations, you decide not to cast spells even though you could do quickly win the battle, because you know health potions are much more common than mana potions, and you'd prefer taking some damage and dragging out the battle. Now, it's not a very interesting mechanic (though not terrible) if that's a world where you have 500 potions and a few more hits does nothing to put you at risk. But it is interesting if your max health was not very high, and if you wanted to conserve your mana (or were low on mana), you'd have to face a quick and time-consuming drain of health potions to stay up.
In short, as I've said repeatedly: good mechanic if the balance is right, esp. how much stamina you get, how many ways there are for opponents to bypass to health damage, etc. If balance is wrong, of course it will suck. (I don't actually think my example is the best way to do it, because it runs the risk of becoming a tiresome chore where you have to keep casting Stamina-heal to avoid long-term damage. You'd want to do something like play with how buffs work and make them more important, or introduce certain restrictions or costs into stamina spells - which gets into the question of how the magic system will work exactly, but AFAIK we don't really know that yet. It certainly isn't "cast this spell for 0.2 mana every 3 seconds".)
A similar tradeoff actually occurs in many other games with health and mana; in certain situations, you decide not to cast spells even though you could do quickly win the battle, because you know health potions are much more common than mana potions, and you'd prefer taking some damage and dragging out the battle. Now, it's not a very interesting mechanic (though not terrible) if that's a world where you have 500 potions and a few more hits does nothing to put you at risk. But it is interesting if your max health was not very high, and if you wanted to conserve your mana (or were low on mana), you'd have to face a quick and time-consuming drain of health potions to stay up.
In short, as I've said repeatedly: good mechanic if the balance is right, esp. how much stamina you get, how many ways there are for opponents to bypass to health damage, etc. If balance is wrong, of course it will suck. (I don't actually think my example is the best way to do it, because it runs the risk of becoming a tiresome chore where you have to keep casting Stamina-heal to avoid long-term damage. You'd want to do something like play with how buffs work and make them more important, or introduce certain restrictions or costs into stamina spells - which gets into the question of how the magic system will work exactly, but AFAIK we don't really know that yet. It certainly isn't "cast this spell for 0.2 mana every 3 seconds".)
I may be wrong but have you heard that about one the playtesters of Dishonored? One of the devs shared some similar stories that the playtesters couldn't handle the big freedom they were given and couldn't think out of the box.
