Damage Delay

#1

So I recently lost a promising 1/8 wizard to limon the sprite godess. Nothing worth crying over, but the nature of the death is what pissed me off. It’s a classic story: you’re doing just fine at nearly full hp, grinding to max dex, when suddenly limon jumps right on top of you, no time to react, nothing done wrong, dead. This led me to thinking about how often this sort of thing happens. This game isn’t really that difficult, but I, for one, always end up dying in the dumbest most unfair ways. This happens in just about every game ever, but there are several reasons why it happens in realm more often (and is more devastating). It’s a chaotic bullet hell with random enemy placement/area layout, lots of variables like status effects and other players to muck things up. It has no I-frames either, and the permadeath is brutal combined with the grindy rpg that this game is. The amount of time you have to spend grinding also creates more opportunities for something dumb and unfortunate to happen.

In short, it’s a big problem. However, I think i have an interesting possible way to fix this problem. Enter damage delay. It’s a pretty simple idea in concept: basically, add a short delay between when you are hit by a projectile, and when the damage actually “takes effect”. Visually speaking, instead of the red of your health bar just dissapearing when you take damage, it would first turn white, then the white part would gradually dissapear. Kinda similar looking to the boss hp bars. Practically speaking, you have lost those hps, meaning that they can be healed back immediatley, and if they hit 0, you are technically “dead”,meaning you can’t nexus. If they hit 0, however, you don’t acually die until the cooldown finishes, so you can still spam hp pots if you have them. Negative hps (up to your max health) are also possible. The cooldown should be fairly short, around 1 sec for 600 hps. IMPORTANT: cooldown length scales exponentially with damage taken. In other words low damage is virtually unaffected, even if you take like 200 damage you still only have like maybe a fraction of a second delay.

Opinions welcome.

#2

To be fair realm has been trending in this direction - e.g. grey blobs no longer instapop your level 14 wizzy. That said, I don’t know if this system is necessary with the way the game heals. With pets and healing classes this could possibly make the hp bar more cluttered. This may jut be personal opinion.

#3

“Damage delay” is also known in video game terminology as immunity frames or iframes for short. Not similar in the way you described it (it’s actually kind of cool with your white health bar suggestion) but basically keeps you from instantly dying or getting “popped” to stupid stuff. I suggested this exact thing a while ago Lack of Immunity Frames but the way I interpreted the feedback was that lot of try-hard realmers got really angry at me thinking the game would be too easy or they simply didn’t understand the concept.

#4

I am not sure about whether iframes or damage delay would make gameplay more balanced, but they may be one way to address some issues I’ve been experiencing lately. Some of these instapop attacks are sudden lunges that can be hard to react to because they literally register as hits on my character before it is shown on screen that the boss is attacking me, thus when I move away I die and my grave teleports to where I was standing when I started to react to the boss lunging.

Anyways, I think it would be feasible to have a “drink all potions” hotkey for your hp (and stat) pots so maybe when you’re getting lined up or something you can chug them all at once and heal. If you drink them one at a time it’s not guaranteed that the server will accept all of your inputs before it has also decided your character has died since it determines death quicker than human reaction speed without giving you all the info you need to avoid death…

#5

Realm already does that: its called “Latency”

#6

I think that something like this IS needed, no matter how much this game heals. Even if you have a max heal/mheal pet on a priest with an inventory full of healing ichor there is still some unfair crap that could kill you no matter how good you are. I’m willing to accept bad luck in most games, but in realm, the fact that this sort of thing is even remotely plausable is pretty ridiculous, considering how punishing it is to die. Like, you’re telling me that this game could up and shoot 12 hours of progress strait in the head for no good reason? c’mon, you gotta admit that sounds a bit outrageous. I think my idea has some merit because it inherently applies to situations where the game doesn’t normally give time to react, and gives a well-prepared player time to do just that. If you’re risking it on low hp or without hp pots, you could die just as easily as you can now.

And about the hp bar being cluttered? I was a little worried about that myself, but I was thinking it wouldn’t be too confusing if the number displayed just matched the red part of the bar (as it does now).

#7

It’s worth noting that this is not at all like iframes. With damage delay, you still suffer full damage from every hit you take (unless you go down to your max negative hp value). I, personally, am not a fan of the concept of adding iframes to realm. Awkwardly enough, I can’t quite explain why, aside from saying that it really doesn’t feel… right for this game. However, I do think you were going in the right direction, as realm needs SOMETHING to fight the possibility of unfair deaths.

On the topic of game difficulty, I think it’s very important to note that there is a fine line between “challenging” and “frustrating”. Both of these things are a subset of “difficult”, but what makes a game “frustrating” is always a lack of control of events on the part of the player. I would agree with most of the community that the game isn’t really that hard. But due to this game’s nature, unfair deaths are relatively common, and even though fighting their occurance would make the game easier, I believe it would still be healthy for the game.

#8

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