Health and Agility. Heavy part 3

Gonna take a break from finals week to write another blog post.

The combat class line is the balancing act between mobility and range that you must trod upon in order maintain distinction between classes, so where does that leave health in class balance relations? The answer is health should be balanced against a class' agility at that class's ideal combat range.

Another Graph

The vertices of the graph are in order Heavy, Soldier, Demo, Scout, and Sniper. I assigned numbers to difficulty to hit just based off of my 4 years playing TF2. Sniper is hard to quantify because he doesn't really have a maximum to his ideal range, so his difficulty to damage is more of an average.

This line doesn't involve class specialization like the the combat class line. What this line does is to ensure that no class is either too tedious or too frustrating to play against by trying to ensure that it takes a certain amount of time to kill someone fighting at their ideal range assuming they can dodge at the same skill level that the other player can aim.

When you have classes that take too many shots to kill, by either having too much health or being too mobile, it makes the game slow down. With medics and health packs everywhere, every extra second someone stays alive is a second they can get healed or escape to come back a few seconds later with full health. While the exact speed that you want the game to be played at is another design decision entirely, you want the game to have a fairly consistent pace or people can become frustrated by joining a server expecting to have a quick game of cp_badlands only to find out that there are 6 heavies on the server and it is now a slogfest, or the opposite situation wanting a nice slow game of dustbowl only to find that the offensive team is all soldiers and demos and quickly moves through the whole map.

This means that there should theoretically be a maximum limit to the health of classes as at a certain point classes can't become easier to hit. According to my graph, and in reference to the three core combat classes, that maximum is going to be at approximately 250 health. So in relation to the heavy, the first thing that would need to be done in order to make him more balanced is to lower his health. Then once you do that you can adjust him in other places.