Health Globe Area and Height

lynshake

 

Edited by Bottle on So this might be an interesting thing to discuss. In any Diablos, and I assume in D3, your health will be proportional to the height of the red pool in your health globe, rather than the area it takes up. However, our minds tend to react more strongly to the change in area of the globe, rather than the change in height. Given a fixed gain or loss in your health (i.e. a fixed red height change in your globe), the area covered by the red would change the most near the center of the globe (near half your life), and the least at the top or bottom of the globe (when you're near max or zero health). For example, let's say you have 50 max health, and you take a hit of 4 damage. That is 8% of your max health. Well, if you had 49 health, and you were taken down to 45 health, you would lose 4.7% of the area of your health globe. Likewise if you were at 5 health, taken down to 1 health. (Both cases are symmetric, as they're near the end of a globe.) However, if you were at 27 health when you took the hit down to 23, you would lose 10.2% of the area of your health globe! That's more than double the other cases, for the same life lost. We would feel like the hit was more urgent or devastating, when in fact, it was the same. (By the way, these numbers are not made up, I'll show how I got them in a bit.) Here is an actual picture depicting the fraction of area filled in your health globe, as a function of the fraction of your total health. As well, the rate of change of your area fraction with respect to your health fraction (the derivative of the first). Note that in the second graph, the rate is at a max near the center, which is representative of the fact that for a given health drop or gain, the area of our health globe changes more rapidly near the center.