Ailments/Injuries

[willmon8]

Ailments appear to be too prevalent after modifications to accrual methodology in Patch 1.48.

[willmon8]

Information from DSG is below. Game testing and data collection regarding the issue is in progress. I will submit findings in a response.

The chance to receive an ailment is based on the damage taken relative to maximum life. Hence having more life means lower chance of getting an ailment (something like VT which greatly lowers life will make you receive ailments at the slightest scratch). Like wise wearing armor reduces the chance of getting an ailment as it reduces damage taken. There is a minimum damage you must take to receive an ailment, so light hits with good armor might never give an ailment. Bosses that hit very hard have an extremely high chance of giving an ailment due to how much damage they deal.

The old system it replaced had a fixed chance per hit above a minimum threshold. This meant that getting hit by a boss that takes most of your life away had the same chance of giving an injury as getting hit by a weak zombie or even some rapid fire DoT effects. This meant you were more likely to get an injury being sneezed at by zombies rather than being crushed by a towering boss.

Due to issues the injury rate was never balance tested. It is possible that the rate is set too high so injuries occur more often than desirable. It is also possible you are being hit a lot by powerful bosses which do a lot of damage in which case the system is working as intended as those bosses are meant to have a considerably higher chance of injuring one than the average tiny zombie.

Damage from a single hit has to be larger than 4% of your life to even have a chance of inflicting injury. Otherwise it is 1 injury roll (roll has same chances as always, that has not changed since I worked on the map) per 10% life lost. From 100% to 0% means you get 10 injury rolls, which is the same as being hit by 10 zombies before the revision. The actual injury type inflicted still uses the same logic as always. Worth noting that injury chances increase with difficulty, as they always have.

At some stage I wanted to limit what could inflict injuries. However I never got around to that before stopping development due to feedback problems and such.

[DrSuperGood]

From my experiences running Normal/Hard runs they should not be any more prevalent than before. Most injuries were caused by mass zombie hits which did <10% of life when wearing armor anyway. Just bosses now have a high chance of inflicting injury which makes sense.

In the long run one should consider making strong ailments only occur from hits of a minimum power (eg 25%+ hp damage). However random ailments has always been part of UA...