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Official: Tank Hitpoints
noworries
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 651Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Tank hit points have gone through different adjustments and changes (some unintended) in the last few modules. M19 brings more of those, so we wanted to take some time to explain why that is, why some different changes have happened, and why some more are going to happen. I'm going to attempt to tackle this information in the highest level possible, but that will still require some references to the core engine math/aspects. This will be a bit lengthy, so I'll make a TL:DR as best I can at the end, but for those of you who like to better understand the inner workings of the game, enjoy!
In the core formula, base stats are what comes from the character itself. For example, there is generally a table which says at level X the base hit points are value Y. This means that a piece of equipment that adds 5000 HP is not base. I will refer to that as the "Bonus" amount for this discussion (it has a more dry/mathematical naming in the engine).
The formula also has percentage modifiers to boost or lower the base value. That total is then added to the Bonus. As some of you have likely already realized from that rundown, that is a problem for our setup where a lot of your total stats come from gear and other sources and only a very few come from the base.
One of these approaches that was used for a while was a setup which made certain powers count as base. The easiest way to discuss how this setup worked is to look at the tank role hit point bonus. Initially that applied to actual base, stats from gear, and stats from companions. Then we made adjustments to companion powers to fix issues they had and suddenly they no longer counted towards the tank hit point bonus. This highlights the issues with that approach. It was limited to certain power types to help keep it from causing self loops that would keep hit points going higher and higher endlessly, but that setup also meant we were very limited in how many things could count into the base.
The tank role bonus power was changed during M19 to use this new aspect. This means the 40% tank hit point bonus applies to your Base stats, and the Bonus stats no matter their source (gear, companions, and anything else). So problem solved! Except, this put the tank bonus on the same aspect as the other player powers that boost hit points. By doing so it made it additive with those powers instead of multiplicative.
In most cases, that's exactly what we want. For example if a player casts a power on themselves that increases their max hit points by 10% and then another power that increases their max hit points by 15%, we want that to be: Maximum Hit Points * 25% so that the bonuses don't inflate at extreme rates. The issue is that the tank role bonus shouldn't be additive with those, because the tank role bonus should act more like it is an addition to the Bonus hit points, which is then multiplied by the player powers. To show that with a pseudo equation, we'd ideally want it to be like:
Final Hit Points = (Bonus + Base) * Tank Role Bonus * Player Power
We actually have that work figured out and have it implemented locally. The reason we didn't bring it to live yet is the risk associated with it. In a perfect world with all powers implemented exactly as we'd like, there would be no risk. But due to some of the limitations designers were working with in the earlier years there were some equations setup that would now be problematic. Over the years we have fixed all of those that we knew about as we got new tech to allow us to change them, but there could be a few ones still lurking around. Because of that we want to let the change soak internally for a bit to see if we run into a bad setup that needs a fix.
For those of you curious, due to wanting players to get a bonus to their stats based on the "real" value of them but not having avenues to do that in a more proper way, we ended up with some equations like this in the game: TotalRunSpeed = TotalRunSpeed * 1.2
Those are the types of setups that can become problematic once Bonus and Base are combined. That type of setup is also what caused those incidents in prior years of stacking speed debuffs that would make the player fully unable to move as a fun bit of bug trivia.
A side benefit of our change is that constitution was applying its health bonus to only true Base. With this change it will apply to Bonus as well which means everyone will see a bit of a hit point increase.
Hopefully this was informative and not too confusing. It is a lot of information to take in for just an adjustment and a bit tricky without going into deeper detail on engine infrastructure and equations, but we thought you all might appreciate knowing more of the why it has, is and will be what it is.
Original Formula:
Neverwinter's base formula for getting the final results for stats is the same formula that we use for all of the projects. This has pluses in that we have a uniform base platform to build from for all of our games and can have a team which supports that core engine. It also has some negatives in that different games are suited to different base math for their structure of game.In the core formula, base stats are what comes from the character itself. For example, there is generally a table which says at level X the base hit points are value Y. This means that a piece of equipment that adds 5000 HP is not base. I will refer to that as the "Bonus" amount for this discussion (it has a more dry/mathematical naming in the engine).
The formula also has percentage modifiers to boost or lower the base value. That total is then added to the Bonus. As some of you have likely already realized from that rundown, that is a problem for our setup where a lot of your total stats come from gear and other sources and only a very few come from the base.
Side-stepping the Formula
Over the years some different approaches were made to make it so at least some of the bonus stats could count as base, and therefore be boosted by the modifiers. The goal of that approach was to have a power that said it increased your maximum hit points by 10%, attempt to increase as much of the stat by that amount as it could. The goal being to make a more intuitive/easy to understand approach for players to interact with as well as to have more meaningful buffs.One of these approaches that was used for a while was a setup which made certain powers count as base. The easiest way to discuss how this setup worked is to look at the tank role hit point bonus. Initially that applied to actual base, stats from gear, and stats from companions. Then we made adjustments to companion powers to fix issues they had and suddenly they no longer counted towards the tank hit point bonus. This highlights the issues with that approach. It was limited to certain power types to help keep it from causing self loops that would keep hit points going higher and higher endlessly, but that setup also meant we were very limited in how many things could count into the base.
Adjustments to the Formula
In more recent times a new addition was made to the formula. This addition was a modifier which applied to the final result of the original formula. This in turn means anything applying a bonus from this part of the formula is fully taking into account all of Base and all of Bonus. That type of approach works better for our setup since we want to treat additions to stats from multiple sources as base.The tank role bonus power was changed during M19 to use this new aspect. This means the 40% tank hit point bonus applies to your Base stats, and the Bonus stats no matter their source (gear, companions, and anything else). So problem solved! Except, this put the tank bonus on the same aspect as the other player powers that boost hit points. By doing so it made it additive with those powers instead of multiplicative.
In most cases, that's exactly what we want. For example if a player casts a power on themselves that increases their max hit points by 10% and then another power that increases their max hit points by 15%, we want that to be: Maximum Hit Points * 25% so that the bonuses don't inflate at extreme rates. The issue is that the tank role bonus shouldn't be additive with those, because the tank role bonus should act more like it is an addition to the Bonus hit points, which is then multiplied by the player powers. To show that with a pseudo equation, we'd ideally want it to be like:
Final Hit Points = (Bonus + Base) * Tank Role Bonus * Player Power
Future Change
That brings us to a future change. The next change we are going to bring to live is going to allow us to create that formula above. For that we are going to have a change to Neverwinter which actually combines Bonus into Base. Meaning those stats from equipment will now become part of the actual base. And as I wrote probably way too many paragraphs ago, we already have an aspect to apply a bonus value to the base value, and then a separate aspect to add a bonus to that result.We actually have that work figured out and have it implemented locally. The reason we didn't bring it to live yet is the risk associated with it. In a perfect world with all powers implemented exactly as we'd like, there would be no risk. But due to some of the limitations designers were working with in the earlier years there were some equations setup that would now be problematic. Over the years we have fixed all of those that we knew about as we got new tech to allow us to change them, but there could be a few ones still lurking around. Because of that we want to let the change soak internally for a bit to see if we run into a bad setup that needs a fix.
For those of you curious, due to wanting players to get a bonus to their stats based on the "real" value of them but not having avenues to do that in a more proper way, we ended up with some equations like this in the game: TotalRunSpeed = TotalRunSpeed * 1.2
Those are the types of setups that can become problematic once Bonus and Base are combined. That type of setup is also what caused those incidents in prior years of stacking speed debuffs that would make the player fully unable to move as a fun bit of bug trivia.
A side benefit of our change is that constitution was applying its health bonus to only true Base. With this change it will apply to Bonus as well which means everyone will see a bit of a hit point increase.
TL:DR
- Tank Role Bonus of 40% now applies to all sources of stats.
- Because of this, player powers on the tank that boost stats won't boost them to the degree players expect because the two add together first and then multiply off of the existing value.
- We will have a change in the future which will make other sources of hit point boosts to multiply off of the role bonus instead of adding with it
- This change will also increase players health from Constitution
Hopefully this was informative and not too confusing. It is a lot of information to take in for just an adjustment and a bit tricky without going into deeper detail on engine infrastructure and equations, but we thought you all might appreciate knowing more of the why it has, is and will be what it is.
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Final HP = [Character Base + Equipment HP] * [1+Σ Player Powers+Tank Bonus]
and the way you want it to be is:
Final HP = [Character Base + Equipment HP] * [1+Σ Player Powers] * [1 + Tank bonus]?
Does Constitution factor into Player Powers or is it multiplicative with the whole. IE, is it:
Final HP = [Character Base + Equipment HP] * [1+Σ Player Powers+Constitution] * [1 + Tank bonus]
or
Final HP = [Character Base + Equipment HP] * [1+Σ Player Powers] * [1 + Tank bonus] * [1+Constitution]
Over the past week, you have questioned the game in 6 classes (3 tanks, 3 heals).
- Wonderful! Go on!
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We did not get a single dev post ( or patch notes ) on the ninja changes made to Power scaling a couple of months ago yet players such as myself logged in and figured it all out within 20 minutes of the patch going live then shared it with others. The impression i'm getting is that the new HP scaling formula will mirror the recently changed Power scaling formula ( with a few obvious exceptions that are not present in Power scaling calculations ) which would also result in a much easier to understand standardised formula that will most likely make investing into a character much more appealing and calculating exact gain/return on investment on any piece of gear/enchant/companion much easier for even the average player.
Attempt to use some brain power before jumping on the hate train.
I wasn't going to respond to you directly, i was just curious how you managed to bring up companion stat boosting and bondings in a thread that has nothing to do with either of those which is why i even mentioned you. You don't read the thread you are in before commenting and complaining about nerfs, i have absolutely no intention of helping you specifically after you made that crystal clear with your post.
What i did do was put the HP formula changes into perspective for people that actually take the time to read what was written and were not aware that a very similar and entirely player beneficial change to Power scaling via changes to the Power formula was made recently ( Mod 18 ) without any announcement / explanation like we see here. We all benefited from the Power scaling changes and will likely all benefit from the HP scaling changes as well so close down your salt mine and think before you type.
Are stats from companion gear also going to count towards "companion base stats"?
Will hp from runestones finally count too?
Did these changes go live with todays patch ? No mention in patchnotes...
> @noworries#8859
>
> Did these changes go live with todays patch ? No mention in patchnotes...
Seems like it. I gained 45k HP on my GWF's DPS load out & 100k HP on his tank load out after last night's patch. Quite the pleasant surprise. Thanks Cryptic! 🙂
Mod 6 and later mods inflated HP values on gear to the point where players get way more HP from gear rather than the character base, which is why CON was a joke roll for a long time.
Otherwise, I agree with the bolded assessment.
I don't get why the rest of the ability scores had their bonuses reduced in potency (with the changes made in Mod 16 as a whole, you would think the bonuses/feats would revolve a bit more around ability rolls to make every class stand out) and why the ability rolls were normalized (ie, you have Clerics, Paladins, Warlocks, and Wizards running INT for spell damage, rather than just Wizards).