Big numbers make a small difference

If you look at things now, everything hero related in warcraft have HUGE numbers. Like have 8k health or 10k mana. What the heck?

Isn't 8k the same as 80 when you reduce everything to a mininum?

It would be like having 80 health and 100 mana. Those numbers are easier on the eyes. And instead of dealing 30k damage, same thing would be dealing 3 damage.

Once in a while, I would like to see something like that. Yeah...

I'll make something related to this.

i agree, thanks for putting that out ignited star

Not entirely. If it has too much numbers like past 10k life, then the game starts to get unbalanced... as in, if a hero was to do 600 damage, it wouldn't acually do 600... more like 150, and takes forever. If you have too little numbers it gets kinda boring for me. You have to find that happy medium.

Only in custom maps, in normal maps heroes never get that far.

No it isn't, having higher numbers, as Azhag said, leads to imbalance. Lowering the numbers to natural WarCraft 3 amounts re-balances it.

Scenario: One hero is level 20 and has 100k hp the other player is 5 and has 10k hp and some units to help him out. Who's going to win? The level 20 of course. However in normal WarCraft 3 a level 10 can be taken down by a level 3 with back-up, heroes are not almighty gods.

You're way too late, play a lot of towers defenses, single player ones in particular, have done this so many times.

having high #'s would be balanced, but most people are too dumb to balance things like that. they are balanceable, just hard to do. And often people just make the hero stats really high and make the normal units stats low so that the only thing that natters in the game is heroes. just take a look at how "helms deep" maps turned out ^_^

I'm not talking about TD's; they suck. TD's begin with low numbers and then they get way too high.

Remember, that all of this began with tomes. That's what started everything... literally.

higher numbers are better if you ask me, theres just something about it that makes the bigger numbers more appealing. Also, if you have 5000 health and 50 health, having 5000 is better since you have two more digits, making it more interesting. Plus, it seems like all the good maps do this too, bigger numbers can be more balanced, if you know how to do it correctly

I agree with Ignitedstar. Huge numbers are ugly. When they get too big to be displayed in the box meant for them, it just gets ridiculous. Having lower numbers is more simple. Simplicity is elegance.

I think Starcraft was better at this than Warcraft. Marines had 40hp. Now footies have 420hp. What kind of number is that anyway? Of course, Blizzard had to increase all numbers because attacks have damage-dice now and armor decreases damage by percentage instead of absolutely.

And I don't know what this all has to do with balance. Ignitedstar said it, it doesn't matter at all if you have 200 hp and 20 damage or if you have 200000 hp and 20000 damage. Except that the larger version is terribly ugly. Nevertheless, most maps that have such high numbers are unbalanced, because you can't expect people who use such numbers to be competent to make a balanced map.

Just look at Dungeons&Dragons, it uses very low numbers (unfortunately, it still uses dice, so it's terribly based on luck), now that's a good design.

i agree aswell... aswell as the most people do -_-

Edit: to the small numbers that is :)

but with lower numbers, its like having decimal points, it allows for more balance if your using dice and everything, which should be used for wc3. of course, if you get to 500000000 health and all, your getting a little too high, i guess if your right in the middle, then your good

Vuripro, you also right. Most people who use huge numbers do it abusively. They probably don't take time to look a what effects what.

Higher is NOT better
Lower is NOT better

you need to find the middle ground. armor should never go abnove 50% damage reduction. Damage should never go above 1/8 health. Find the middle ground, and make it work.

Well, that always depends on what kind of gameplay you want. Starcraft had a higher damage/hp ratio than Warcraft does, because it's a different game. Besides, even if the 1/8 rule would stand, it still doesn't say anything about low/high numbers. you can have 10 damage and 80 hp or 10000 damage and 80000 hp. As I said already, I find the first option more elegant design-wise, but gameplay-wise, they're both the same. That's why I don't see this high/low number thing as a balance issue, but merely as an aesthetic issue.

they arnt both the same. because in the higher number version, armor affects damage diferently. Remember: Armor reduces damage by a PERCENT. and evasion and critical strike spells affect damage even more if you have units attacking verry fast. want a truly balanced map? the only way to get it is start with low numbers, then bring em up to what you think should be balanced, test, edit, test, edit, test, edit.... balance is a "hit and miss" kind of thing.

Ok, I think I see what you are talking about. High hero stats, right? Anyway, I wasn't talking about that, I just meant normal units, if the hp and damage are a thousand times larger, if the armor and attack cooldowns are the same, it doesn't matter balance-wise. However, agility increases armor and attack speed, so increasing all of the hero stats by a thousand times really doesn't give you the same effect.

The problem is not in the numbers! After all, maps with large hero-stats could easily have altered gameplay constants so the stats wouldn't boost hp and dmg so much, or more powerfull spells so spellcasters wouldn't be useless against fighter heroes... but they don't because whoever made them wasn't thinking.

Using warcraft-like stats is just a suggestion, a guideline, so mapmakers can use original warcraft spells as a reference for balancing. But you can easily use different stats, if you know what you are doing, and if you have enough time for testing, because you're right, you can't calculate balance, you need to iterate it.