Who cares if you have 20K or 40K health if you're going to die either way? We'd be in a better place if the mortar-dodger was allowed to take the occasional hit, but can handle a higher monster power as long as a majority of them are dodged.ģ. It also means that once you decide you are going to accept being one-shot, you don't care about your health at all. One moment I'm at full health, the next instant I'm dead. In my previous example with mortar, some of you may be thinking 'There's room for turning up the Monster Power, just don't get hit at all!'. For players who push the MP up anyways, it makes the game feel like it was designed around one-shots. In both cases you're healing instantly to full and surviving through the damage no matter what, and in both cases turning up the monster power results in you dying no matter what if you take a single mortar wave.

In this state, there's no way for a clever player (who wants to dodge mortars) to differentiate themselves from somebody who doesn't care (and just decides to get hit).

If a wave of mortar hits takes me from full to nearly dead, and then I instantly heal back to full, then mortars don't pose a realistic threat to me. Unfortunately, if the combat pacing and dominant builds are such that all players are geared to survive the biggest possible hit from a monster and instantly heal to full then there's no room for that differentiation. I'd like to see a game where a clever player can handle a higher Monster Power by reducing incoming damage through good play. This leads to comments like 'As soon as I turn up the Monster Power I get 1-shot'. When incoming damage is that high, a 15% increase in monster damage would result in death. A health pool that quickly goes from full to nearly empty implies that there's not a lot of room for variance in incoming damage. Here are Wyatt Cheng's gripes with combat pacing:ġ.

'I know not every character build plays this way - but I would assert that it's not good for the game when this is a dominant or even common way to play.' The Blizzard Senior Technical Game Designer breaks down the areas where this system proves a negative impact on Diablo III's gameplay. 'From a big picture standpoint, it's not healthy for the game when a player's health pool goes from full to nearly empty and back to full on a regular basis very quickly, over and over, during regular play,' argued Cheng.

Diablo 3 gameplay health