No you can make status effects last permanently, at checkpoints they recover from them, if the player gets unlucky to get hit by 10 deadly poisons between [c, c+1] he instantly dies and restarts from last checkpoint.That would be attrition at the scale of a single combat. Once the battle is over, the player has lost nothing if they've overcome this, so I'd say this isn't attrition.
Agree lets make a more detailed discussion.if you're where you shouldn't be and die, you start very far from there
1) What approach is better
A) "Balance trash minions based attritition for the route between 2 checkpoints [c, c+1]" or
B) "Balance trash minions based on that they will require 100% of your hp pool to defeat in 1 encounter" ? Afterwords you recover to full hp/mana.
Approach A: makes mobs too easy psychologically, possibly boring as you will only get to critical death state after 4 fights, with no imediate results to signify danger, that you failed as a player to adapt to them.
Approach B: enemies deal 90% of your hp attacks, almost 1shotting you. The healers have to watch the health pools, and get paniced, do i use my slow casting time healing spell, risking death? in approach A, healers spammed only 1 button (their slow heals). Now they have to decide.
Both approaches can lead to the same difficulty, however A is harder because you dont see the result, thus you aren't forced to play at your peek performance. At same arbitary point you "run out juice", which means that you instantly die totally unprepared and unable to do anything to fix it except restarting the game from last checkpoint.
Wow Priests: cannot exist in approach A as their playstyle gets tedius (1button)
Dnd3.5 Mages: cannot exist in approach B as mages are all about resource concervation, the mages deal 1000% more dmg than warriors, but they could only cast 1-4 spells in the whole dungeon. Thus a mage has difficult trash fights, where a warrior has a difficult boss fight. The mage can 1shot the final boss of the game in 1button but he will likely die to trash mobs.
Why did we chose attritution ?
1) Games were too easy without attritution, players would to start fight with full hp, thus
defeating the purpose of random trash encounters.
Well not according to wow psychologists.
Imagine a game that you only fight bosses one after another, challenging your party, is this fun ?
NO !!!
trash encounters make the game have a "relax" period that we dont have to worry about Fight Effectiviness. They are there to relax us from the big boss that we will meet in next battle and we have give all our resources in order to progress. But putting too match effort into attrition of those fights we are removing the "free period" of farming without caring about fight effectiviness, thus defeating the purpose of trash fights.
Questions to hear answers:
1) What approach is better
A) "Balance trash minions based attritition for the route between 2 checkpoints [c, c+1]" or
B) "Balance trash minions based on that they will require 100% of your hp pool to defeat in 1 encounter" ? Afterwords you recover to full hp/mana.
2) Is it fun for trash encounters to exist if they wont challenge your party ?
3) How much time should trash encounters consume for the players to relax, and how much for challenging encounters.
How do i mix them up. Following wow formula i.e Easy fights 5 min; Boss fight 5 min ; Easy Fights 5 min; Boss fight 5 min ;