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.