[2023] The old wellness system

Originally posted by DerFinneAT:

Originally posted by ElDudorino: Plus you can get caught in a death spiral where you just get weaker which makes you unable to defend yourself, then worse and worse until you're just pathetic.

I always considered this to be quite exaggerated as a statement while the changes where discussed.

At no point in the game you would have been defenseless and in an actual death loop, if you just adapted the playstyle to your current condition.

So while you are weak you pick your fights carefully, and do what you need to do to come back.

But anything other than nilly-willy-head-on-horde-busting seems to be a too complicated concept within 7d2d.

I know that 7d2d does not consider itself as a survival sim.
And I agree that the actual possible non-poi-combat activities in this games are severly reduced, since the farming and building systems have been reduced to a pure skeleton, of what they were.

So finding activities that would be possible for an impaired character would be quite dull within a20.

I would love to have the wellness system back - if I could sink my time into other activities in this game nowadays, than bashing Z's heads.

Big disagree there. It had the same problem original pre-patch Dark Souls had with Curse- You die, you have less HP, so you die easier, so you have less HP, so you die even easier, so you have even less HP- It got to the point where any single hit would kill you, so it was basically uber-hardmode to try and get yourself uncursed.

I never had too much trouble with wellness myself, But 3/5 of my group of friends who were playing had MASSIVE problems with it and were constantly down at 50~ max HP because the restricted HP and much more dangerous zombies we were encountering by that point made it so easy to die in 1-2 hits.

And the big issue with it is that it requires numerous days off accumulation per death- Which sounds great on paper, but in practice, it functionally forms a death loop, because every death sets you farther back than you can gain in the same period, ESPECIALLY when you don't already have a big stockpile of good food to get your wellness back- A lack of stockpile which drives you out to loot and so be in danger and so...you die, again.


And, IMO, That's basically the problem with wellness. It pretty much draws a line right down the middle of the playerbase- The people who can't handle it absolutely despise it, Because it's just a deathloop that gets worse and worse and is hard to break out of. And for the people who CAN handle it, it's super easy, barely an inconvenience because it never really impacts you except to make you slightly more aware of your surroundings till you get your max HP back.

The old wellness system was way too easy to exploit, and had very little overall impact in gameplay. You basically had two extremes. You either managed it well, hardly died, and when you did die it required minimal effort to recover. Or you would get creamed before it was set up, and then be basically stuck in a death loop that was near-impossible to recover from.

The system was extremely flawed, and the only time it offered any kind of a challenge was after it was almost too late to save yourself. TFP dropped the system for good reasons.