Why don't derived undead get health bars?

[njvack]

I've wondered this since forever but never thought to ask -- why do zombies and skeles not get damage indicators? I know they don't heal, but that seems a bit orthogonal...

[Shard1697]

I sort of feel like this is something that probably got implemented really, really early on in crawl's development, under some sort of reasoning like "well, it's an animated corpse, so you wouldn't be able to tell how close to death it is", and then later non-derived undead like liches got added and got visible health because they're so much more dangerous... and derived undead just never got changed, for reasons I'm not clear on.

I think it's a sincere clarity issue. When someone starts playing crawl, all the monsters they run into at first, weak or strong, have health bars which deplete until death, and in videogames with HP bars seeing something with no HP bar(and thus no feedback on damage) tends to make a learning player think something like "I can't kill this". That's actually what I thought when I first encountered a zombie(followed by the "I guess I just can't tell how close to death it is" flavor reasoning above, followed by confusion when I encountered other kinds of undead later.
And you run into plenty of derived undead later on which are tanky enough that you may want to see their health.

[Sar]

they're always at maxHP because they take damage to maxHP

[Arrhythmia]

they're always at maxHP because they take damage to maxHP

Why do they take damage to max HP, instead of just taking regular damage and not healing?

[Sar]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[duvessa]

They actually don't even take damage to max HP anymore. The health bar is just hidden because crawl.

[njvack]

That's right, they can still get healed by that weird ghost fire, right?

[njvack]

OK so I bet what happened was this:

* They were originally non-healing, and took damage to MaxHP so "this monster doesn't heal" didn't need to be implemented separately. This meant the undeads were always at MaxHP and didn't get health bars as a side effect
* "This monster doesn't heal" got implemented for DD reasons, undeads kept their old ways
* There got to be ways for undeads to heal, so they needed to switch to being regular non-healing monsters instead of losing maxHP
* Because undeads hadn't displayed health bars, they got a special case to hide their health bars

TBH maybe the best thing would be for derived undead to heal normally; since player undeads expire they won't heal much, and monsters that don't heal encourage resetting fights even more than monsters that do heal. Especially as derived undead are generally slow.

[PleasingFungus]

idk that there's a real problem of players being encouraged to reset fights against derived undead these days, though i could be wrong. the removal of undead-creating spells from monsters & of slow zombies from d were both huge helps there.

not much reason to not display health bars, beyond a vague, uh, flavor thing? idk. it's a real mechanical differentiator (since hp & damage are both randomized, it actually is concealing information, not just 'spoilers') but it's not a very good one

[Shard1697]

idk that there's a real problem of players being encouraged to reset fights against derived undead these days, though i could be wrong.

It's not that common, but it does happen that you run into a zombie/skelly that you might run out of HP just hitting tab against(eg: an early centaur skeleton, or later on certain giant zombies/skeletons), especially as a conj-type character, so you just whack it some, <, 5, >, repeat until it's dead.

Either way I think it would be much better for clarity's sake for them to have health bars... I've already mentioned how it confused me when I started playing, but every single person I've introduced to this game I've had the moment where I have to explain to them "yeah you can kill these undead, they're not invincible threats you just have to kite, but you can't see their HP anyways, but you can see other undead's HP, because, well..."
I don't see any good reason to conceal it for specifically derived undead when all other monsters in the game have visible health.

[PleasingFungus]

OK, they have health bars now. Will let you know if this gets reverted.

[dowan]

Am I the only person who played the tutorial? It tells you that undead lose max HP, and therefore don't show health bars.

But yeah, health bars seem good for everyone. Next, implement heath bars!

[njvack]

Wait, were derived undead *not* affected by spectral fireball before?

[ydeve]

idk that there's a real problem of players being encouraged to reset fights against derived undead these days, though i could be wrong.

It's not that common, but it does happen that you run into a zombie/skelly that you might run out of HP just hitting tab against(eg: an early centaur skeleton, or later on certain giant zombies/skeletons), especially as a conj-type character, so you just whack it some, <, 5, >, repeat until it's dead.

FR: derived undead can use stairs.

[PleasingFungus]

Wait, were derived undead *not* affected by spectral fireball before?

afaik they were not. i think that's why josephine's pack of zombies was replaced with wraiths?

FR: derived undead can use stairs.

wouldn't fix much. ref: jorgrun