Negative damage

[Apophis]

Would it be possible to bring back attacks which cause negative damage?

I used to have a weapon (called the Dice of Oblivion) which uses two attacks simultaneously, one causing normal damage and the other negative to give a chance of either harming or healing the enemy (though weighted to make it more likely to hurt the enemy) - basically a weapon with a very powerful attack, but also with a considerable degree of risk involved (because you might accidentally end up making the enemy stronger). However, since Edge 1.24, which was the last version to allow negative damage, it hasn't worked properly, only dealing the positive damage, making the weapon somewhat pointless.

Negative damage also allows a lot of other cool effects, like enemy healers and such, and self-healing enemies, which could also be useful.

[andrewj]

The plan was to introduce an explicit "HEAL" function instead of people using an awful hack like negative damage. However it was never a burning need and just never got done. Best I can say is that perhaps maybe possibly it might get added after the 1.31 release.

[Apophis]

Negative damage would probably be more useful, though. If you consider the amount of work that would be required to emulate a healing projectile - i.e. creating custom pain states for every single enemy and ensuring the painchance is 100% (probably getting into the hundreds of lines of code) - compared to simply being able to put a '-' sign somewhere in ATTACKS.DDF, then negative damage is clearly superior. The heal function would simply be a more cumbersome and less powerful way of doing what could already be done more efficiently with negative damage.

The only real advantage I could see would be that a heal function would allow the option of capping the healing at some maximum value, in cases in which you don't want the enemy to be able to gain unlimited health.

[BaronOfStuff]

Although... the ability to gain unlimited health would be pretty cool for a 'boss' type monster

[Nick_Perrin]

[Apophis]

In hindsight I guess I'm not too sure where I got that conclusion; I must have just assumed that a heal function would act in a different way to damage. I guess if HEAL=x is just used the same as damage in attacks.ddf, it would be just as good as negative damage - especially if you could combine healing and damage in the same attack as this would allow a single attack which has a chance of healing or harming the enemy.

One area where actual negative damage would be interesting though would be in conjunction with resistance - i.e. if you could set negative values for RESISTANCE_MULTIPLY. You could have say, a fire based monster which actually gains strength if you attempt to use fire based weapons on it, or a dark magic weapon which heals any undead foe you attempt to kill with it. Or a boss monster which becomes stronger if you shoot it at the wrong time (use BECOME to switch it between the normal version and the negative resistance version, and of course provide some sort of visual/behaviour cues so the player has some chance of knowing when they should try to shoot it).

[deathbringer]

[SR69MM-JC]

why can't you just allow the negative damage again?
is it so hard???
or does it make edge crush??
what's the problem, guys? why don't you want to allow it?
you can really add many features with it...
i understand that there are alternative ways to heal something but i don't understand the reason of not allowing negative damage