I was playing Diablo 2 the other night on my level 50 druid (multiplayer, hardcore) and realized I was one or two shotting most players <50 with maul. This makes for some pretty lack-luster battles. So I thought up a stat (that may have been used somewhere else, I don't play too many RPG's) 'Hardiness'. The Hardiness stat would replace stamina (vitality), or be improved alongside it (IE, your hardiness is calculated based on your stamina) essentially, the hardiness stat would be the minimum amount of hits you can be killed in. So if you have a hardiness of 5 it takes at least five shots to kill you. This would not only ad to the character building element (as all new stats do) but it would make the glass cannons (mages, dragoons) think twice about putting all their stats towards spell damage.

Cool Idea, but the max for such a stat should somewwhere between 5 or 10, you don't want it to take 70 fireballs to take down an unarmoured man.

Also, how will this work out? Will the max damage you can take in one hit simply your health divided by the amount of hardiness points?

Maybe if it took 4 hits to kill you, and you have 100 HP and are getting hit for 75, your health would be reduced to 1, and stay there for another hit, and then the fourth hit would kill.

I've seen an idea vaguely similar to this implemented in the Valkyrie Profile games as "Guts". When you are hit by an attack that would normally kill you, you have a chance, based on your Guts stat, to be merely very badly injured. I think you're required to have a certain minimum number of hitpoints for Guts to kick in (e.g. at least 25% of your maximum), to prevent characters from becoming immortal.

I do agree that you shouldn't allow people to sustain many arbitrarily-powerful hits before dying. I'd say one at most. Something along the lines of "Okay, you got lucky that time, but don't push it!"

Love the input.

As for maxing out hardiness, I think if someone had 100 hardiness they'd probably do 1 damage and hit 30% of the time.

Call me old fashioned, but I really don't like imposing limits on character building. When I used to play RuneScape (I know, so sue me) I made a level 50 character who (using various character building tricks) hit Max damage and could one or two shot people (which sounds hypocritical, but RuneScape wasn't a fun combat game, the only fun thing about it was character building). They changed the system so that the best build was spreading all your points evenly over defence attack and strength, which to me seems kind of pointless (why not assign points automatically).

It sounds like what you're looking for is a way to cap damage totals. Instead of saying "Oh, 5 hits" for your hardiness of 5, I'd say move from arbitrary damage caps of how many digits reach the display, to a damage cap set at the max HP divided by the hardiness. That way, for an enemy with 250 mHP and a hardiness of 5, the damage cap would be 50 for any attack.

Unfortunately, this will have the side effect of pushing players down into spells that do the least amount of damage but still hits around the cap (as a MP saving measure). That is, of course, unless you have an associated status effect that reduces the hardiness.

Maybe there is a way to merge all the opinions in one.

What if the Hardiness stats grants a chance to halve a damage that would normally kill you?

You have a way to survive the hard blow unless it's an Overkill (and when an enemy is far superior he deserve to kill you)
You also have the chance that hardiness kicks in more than one time in a battle but sooner or later will fail (actually I think is sooner... but that's fine)

You can change the reduction of the blow if you want a more useful stat.
Like a third or a quarter.

Quote:

Original post by Inmate2993 It sounds like what you're looking for is a way to cap damage totals. Instead of saying "Oh, 5 hits" for your hardiness of 5, I'd say move from arbitrary damage caps of how many digits reach the display, to a damage cap set at the max HP divided by the hardiness. That way, for an enemy with 250 mHP and a hardiness of 5, the damage cap would be 50 for any attack. Unfortunately, this will have the side effect of pushing players down into spells that do the least amount of damage but still hits around the cap (as a MP saving measure). That is, of course, unless you have an associated status effect that reduces the hardiness.

Thats exactly what it would do.

What did you think I meant? Have someone take you down to 1hp then staying there for 5 hits?

I'm having trouble seeing why this isn't just done by keeping the damage that a weapon deals to a reasonable level. Or, if the problem is that damage dealt to 'reasonable' enemies is fine but damage dealt to lower level enemies is too much, then the differential between the levels is probably too high, I would think.

Quote:

Original post by Kylotan I'm having trouble seeing why this isn't just done by keeping the damage that a weapon deals to a reasonable level. Or, if the problem is that damage dealt to 'reasonable' enemies is fine but damage dealt to lower level enemies is too much, then the differential between the levels is probably too high, I would think.

Although I always liked the "guts" thing in games like FFT I have to agree with Kylotan. "Hardiness" sounds like some cheap way to avoid balancing the fighting system. Like someone mentioned above it would probably be better to have it as a skill and make it more along the lines of: Raise the chance of surviving a critical strike.