Blah, Blah, Blah

[booooooze]

To expound on Darvin's reply: generally, you and all other creatures in the dungeon will heal 1 hp per level per unexplored square revealed. Which is why, in general, when you're trying to kill things of a higher level than yourself (which you should, for the bonus experience), you shouldn't go off exploring mid-fight, because they will heal faster than you will. However, monks heal twice as fast, so where other classes need to avoid doing that, for monks, it's their primary skill.

[The Avatar]

Especially when you combo it with the fact that you are resisting somewhere between half and three-fourths of their damage, assuming it is physical.

[Lujo]

Regen fighting works like this.

Every time you reval one block of unexplored space you regenerate your level worth of hit points. If you're, say, level 4, and reveal just one block you will regenerate 4 HP. You also regenerate one mana, so, in most circumstances, you get a BURNDAYRAZ every 6 blocks.

This is a bit hard to figure out by itself because one block is very rarely revealed (it's chunks of 3 most often). It's written on the health tab tooltip, but it took me ages to find that too... It's one of the main reasons people seem to take forever to get good with regen-fighting - every time they attempt it, they reveal 3 blocks and the monsters health goes up too much.

Why does the monsters health go up?

Because the monsters also regenerate their level worth of HP every time you reveal a block.

Now, If you do more damage then they regenerate, you can just reveal enough blocks to survive a hit, and with that hit, do enough damage to the monster to take away all the HP they regenerated + some more. If you have say, 50% physical reisistance, it takes you less revealed blocks to regenerate enough life to be able to survive a hit. Because the monster is only doing half damage to you.

In case of the monk, who regenerates twice his hitpoints per block and has 50% phys resistance, you only take half damage from monsters, but you also "beat" them for regeneration because you get more out of revealing a block than they do. If you're fighting a boss at lvl 10, and reveal one square, he regenerates 10 HP, and you regenerate 20 HP. And every 6 blocks, you regenerate enough mana to hit him with a Fireball, or you can hit him with PISSORF every 4 squares. Or you get extra help from HALPMEH.

That is sort of the gist of it. The reason newbies find it hard to figure out is that they can't tell from expirience when's the right time to start fighting a boss. Since fighting higher level monsters is generally harder, they seem to assume that being as close to lvl10 before fighting the boss increses their chances. It also seems unintuitive to start fighting a boss before you've taken advantage of everything on the map - if you didn't need it, why is it there? So they explore everything before even attempting. It's an inherent "if you play it intuitively, the game is hard, if you assume the game is not hard beforehand, the game turns out ot be easy" moment, simmilar how you don't need most of the stuff in the game to beat VICIOUS.

It's the same reason it takes people a while to really discover level-catapults, because they require leaving stuff behind deliberately which requires a conclusion that you don't really need all the stuff you find.

Several really nasty exploits took a long while to become public knowledge because of the underlying phenomen at work here.

[dislekcia]

If health regain were more granular/obvious on the health bar and enemy health regain were equally simple to see, I think regen fighting would make more intuitive sense. Right?

[The Avatar]

Probably. If it showed exactly why you got _ hp and the monster got _ hp it would be easier.

[Lujo]

Also, if there were more (any?) situations where you don't explore 3+ chunks at a time, players might be able to spot subtleties sooner. But I don't know how and where to enable those. Maybe an "Exploration" Puzzle pack as the second starting pack in the explorer guild? To teach players how to effectively use exploration as a resource?

[fall_ark]

[Lujo]

There is also this thing which regular civilized people find intuitive, and powergamers and guys from the balkans don't, related to exploration and regen fighting. When players start out the game (from what I've seen), and start hitting the first guy, they instinctively try to regen fight him when they figure out they'll die if they don't regen. Especially if they allready used up their health potion.

Then they accidentaly reveal 3 squares or more and see that the monster has regenerated as well, often faster than them. Since they don't know exactly how it works, and since they try to kill stuff higher level than themselves, they sort of conclude that "this isn't going to work, I was silly thinking it would be that easy" and then go looking for more powerups and health potions for a damage spike, which becomes their main tactic for a good while. They feel good about themselves for "discovering" the damage spike for as long as it works. They'll even discover level-catapulting before they figure out that the "you can't explore while fighting stuff" rule is there to be broken.

On the other hand, a powergamer tries to see how to get around this phenomenon and ends up discovering how it works and how to get around it. And ussually discovers that exploration is in fact the greatest resource in the game for any charater that can exploit it. But that's not regular humans.

And a person from the Balkans get's pissed because he thought he was very smart when he came up with the idea to regenerate while fighting the monsters. He was going to outwit this silly game, but then it turns out that the dev's accounted for guys like him, and then he stubbornly stumbles around for ways to show them who's boss, and accidentaly turns out to be right. But that's not civilized behaiviour.

Long story short - regen fighting is not the problem concerning intuition, but the fact that monsters regenerate at all, coupled with the difficulty of choosing how many blocks you reveal makes "you can't regen fight stuff" look like one of the first "rules" of the game you learn, and one that's in place for a reason. No conclusive constructive point from all this, except maybe that there really should at least be some sort of tutorial on regen fighting.

EDIT: Oh, and that it takes a certain level of criminal genious to figure out optimal uses for BLOODTOPOWA, I guess...

[Darvin]

Last night, I came up with a puzzle design that might really illustrate regen fighting.

The player is a human fighter with BURNDAYRAZ and GETINDARE in their inventory. The character begins in the middle of a 5x5 dungeon area, with the outer tiles unexplored. In each of the four adjacent (non-diagonal) tiles are stat boosters: one mana, one health, and two attack. After grabbing these four boosters, the four corners (and nothing else) will be left unexplored, making it trivial to reveal tiles one at a time.

There are four monsters in the dungeon to attack, all using venture cave stats (I don't have the precise numbers on me right now, but I crunched them last night to make sure this works). There is a level 2 wraith, a level 3 snake, a level 3 golem, and a level 5 goat. The wraith is easy to kill if you cast BURNDAYRAZ twice and follow with a melee attack, but with only a single mana booster you need to reveal a tile to pull it off. After this, the golem and snake are more tricky; you'd need to use fireball on the snake while using melee attacks on the golem, reveal enough tiles to get a second melee attack, then use your death protection and two GETINDARES to finish the snake and golem on first strikes. The goat can then be easily killed so long as you convert your glyphs at the last moment.

This puzzle would teach the fundamentals of using regeneration in combat, draw the player's attention towards what happens when exactly one tile is revealed, and also has the poison and mana burn status ailments on the field to illustrate the complications they present. Finally, it forces players to consider how efficient use of resources can allow them to take on stronger monsters.

[gjaustin]

That strikes me an excellent advanced puzzle for the puzzle pack.

The first puzzle should just be a Rogue next to a Meatman with unexplored space