A fan asked how [WIKI]healing[/WIKI] and [WIKI]health globes[/WIKI] would be handled during long boss fights. The D3 Team has previously said that bosses would cough them up periodically during such combats, and [WIKI]Bashiok [/WIKI]replied to restart that,with a bit of added info.
[BLUE]There are a lot of different ways to do it, and it’s likely that the way we give health will be tailored to the style of the encounter and behavior of each boss.[/BLUE]
Another fan jumped in and brought up some (I think) fairly reasonable problems with this method. A partial quote with formatting and grammar fixes:
Do we have to understand that health will flow in a scripted manner? Like, dodging Leoric’s enraged mace swing when he’s at 30%, mace landing in a big pillar which collapses thus releasing health Orbs …etc? I really hope it is not what you mean.
Health regain has to be, for the most part, managed by the player. Not by scripted events. Hell, people cry about WoW’s possible influence on D3 but they should watch out for God of War ones…. Add WoW drop lists for each boss and you’ve got the worst case scenario. No replayability. Don’t take me wrong, GoW is very good game, but one you play once, maybe twice and that’s it.
Chances for orbs to drop ‘on hit’ is unbalanced toward fast-hitting skills, thus penalizing slow and powerful strike/spells. Else they do it ala Proc Per Minute, but then you have a constant and predictable flow of Health Orbs which kills the excitement. Screw scripts! Leave things in the hands of players! And in the hand of Randomness too!
You dont give us health, you give us the means to manage it. Its very different.
Bashiok was less than enchanted with this recitation of woes,and replied accordingly.
[BLUE]Well, regardless of what the end product is let’s just agree that you’ll be negative and immediately critical of it.[/BLUE]
Update: The Bash-master returned for more later in the day, with a more substantial explanation/argument about boss fighting mechanics.
[BLUE]
Even if i know that D2 Diablo is going to Red Lightning Hose me, Cold Touch me, i dont know exactly when, how many times etc.
Bashiok: I hope you’re not calling that an interesting fight, or saying Diablo II was replayable because it had no mechanics beyond the boss’ abilities.
In Diablo III we want at least some boss fights that aren’t defined simply by having a creature with more health, unique art, and more powerful abilities. We want there to be something more to them, tell a story, have more unique mechanics that make sense for the boss.
As far as the original topic, when health globes could be delivered during a boss fight, there’s really no limit for how they could be delivered. Take the King Leoric fight, they were delivered through creatures that he summoned, normal skeletons. Every boss could essentially have the same thing, normal enemies around him that can be killed for the potential at getting a health globe drop. Or, you could have something more interesting … like a boss that does a special attack that has the ability to break open some large corpse storage tanks that are in his lair. The player has to lead the boss to the tank and try to invoke the special attack so he’ll break the tank open, which unleashes some health globes. You could even treat the tank (code-wise) as a normal creature, meaning abilities and items could augment the number that drop and amount they heal, etc. giving some control to the individual player. If you don’t need the health you can ignore the mechanic, but it could be a way for players to try to game the boss and make sure they can survive the fight. Totally hypothetical, we don’t have a fight that resembles what I described, but it’s a possible delivery system.
I disagree that having bosses that do something more than simply cast the spells they’re given to cast kills replayability. [/BLUE]