3.0.10: The Health Overhaul & Blood Death Knights

So I've skipped my plans of naming this update 3.0.8 because of how much weight these changes have in overall gameplay. This is not to be confused with 3.1.0, which is the Vaaz Update.

💓 Health Gain per level

Why do I have +200 HP now!?

Okay so first things first, the HP overhaul.

You might've updated and wondered why your hotbar now has a healthbar instead of hearts, and why you have so much hp, how is this balanced!?

Well, let me explain how this works.

Now you will start your journey in Prominence with 24 health at level 1. Because from now on, each level will grant you 4 hp, making you have around total 280 base HP at level 65.

Why has this been added?

Two reasons:

DPS to Max Health Ratio

At late game we see builds that deal from 100 to even 400 dps. This is of course not that much considering the existance of mythic bosses, but there's a big problem with it, and it is PvP.

While Prominence II never had a big focus on PvP, right now late game PvP is impossible as the DPS that players deal is too high, and even reducing the damage on PvP to 60% won't really fix this issue.

So instead, I've made the approach of buffing both the player's max health in the late game, and buffing the damage of all enemies so the experience is the same, just with higher numbers.

This damage adjustement of course doesn't apply to players, but as they already deal a good amount of dps in the late game, this balances out the issue of players being too squishy, while also making level progression feel better.

Big Numbers

I like big numbers, so why nerf dps when we can buff everyone's health!?

Jokes aside, this also provides separation from mid to late game. But even so, the point above by itself is enough for this change as players are just too weak.

🔴 The Side Effects

While you might think "Oh okay, I just have more health, cool", this has brought a lot of side effects that will become a norm in Prominence, though they are good, don't worry!

Passive Healing

The first issue is that you now have around 10x the health you had before. Saturation by itself is not enough to regenerate 200 hp which means hunger becomes a real issue.

For this, I've implemented passive healing after 10 seconds of not being in combat which regenerates at a rate of 3% max hp per second, as long as you have a full hunger bar.

Dependency of Healing

Healing is now a must. Whether you're a tank, DPS, bard, etc. With this new change it means that even effects like regeneration will have little impact in your health regen due to how much health you'll have.

This makes healers be more impactful in multiplayer servers (and even singleplayer!), but most importantly also makes players have to care about their health.

There are a few ways of healing yourself in combat, such as:

Stacking regenerations for a small passive regen
Enchants such as Radiance II
Mine Cells' Health Flask, which now heals 10% of your max health and grants Regeneration IV for 5 seconds.
Life steal in builds with items such as Vampiric Glove for self sustain

⚔️ Gear Adjustments

To balance out these changes, a few items have been buffed to give more health and be overall more useful for tank specs.

Sapphire Ring/Necklace: +2 Max Health > +10 Max Health
Netherite Sapphire Ring/Necklace: +4 Max Health > +20 Max Health
Juggernaut Band: +6 Max Health > +40 Max Health
Sentinel's Amulet: +6 Max Health > +60 Max Health
Warden Set: No Max Health > +15 Max Health per piece
Sapphire Set: No Max Health > +20 Max Health per piece

🧾 Talent Adjustements

S'kellak's Armor Blessing > S'kellak's Blessing
It now also provides +100 Maximum Health

Conclusion

This update's results are still somewhat experimental, and I expect lots of bugs to arise that will be fixed on later updates.

Thank you for reading this. As a reward, I'm gonna spoil you that the next update is going to have new artifacts and a few changes to existing ones ;) don't tell anyone 🤫