Consistency of honour experience across different build types can be better; here's how

Right now, there's a lot of weirdness that comes from how honour works:


1. Max honour is based on HP+ES, but doesn't factor in other defensive stats.
2. When grouping in Trial of the Sekhemas, loss of honour is shared across players as a flat value.
3. Honour restores are generally flat values as well.


This has the following results:


A. Characters building ES tend to have a much higher maximum honour than other sorts of builds, but also don't see as much value from honour restores.
B. Characters building Evasion or Armour see more value from honour restores, but have much smaller max honour pools.
C. If characters building ES group with characters building Evasion and/or Armour, the ES character getting hit will likely cause the Evasion and/or Armour characters to fail the trial without they themselves failing the trial - if the ES character eats a big hit, it might take 20% of their max honour pool, but 60% of the max honour pool of an evasion-built character - and the evasion character gets no benefit from their evasion, because they're not the one being targeted.


Given that the Trials are more or less mandatory for all characters, having radically different experiences from build to build doesn't seem ideal. That said, there's a fairly straightforward way to fix this: normalize everything to be based off of percentages instead, with the following set of changes:

I. "Max honour" is just always 1000. Max honour modifiers from relics could bump this up above that default value.
II. Honour loss is based on percentage of health/ES lost, rather than flat values: if you get hit for 20% of your combined health + ES, then you lose 200 (20% of 1000) honour. (Honour resistance would further reduce this loss, just how it does right now.)
III. Honour restores from all mechanics are rebalanced given the flat 1000 max honour value. (If working with 1000 as a base, that'd probably mean slightly reducing the numbers of most items in terms of how much honour they restore, and the shrines would probably restore something more like 100 or 250.)


The combination of these changes would result in everyone having a more balanced experience with the honour mechanic:

- An ES player getting hit for 750 but having 7500 HP+ES = 10% loss

- An evasion player getting hit for 750 with 2500 HP = 33% loss, but because of evasion they only get hit (and thus lose honour) a third of the time

- An armour player getting hit for 750 that gets mitigated down to 250 with 2500 HP = 10% loss

This also means that when grouping together, you get a much more consistent experience, because the losses from different players are normalized against how their character feels to play - if a character feels like they took a hit they can shrug off, the hit to everyone's honour will also be relatively minimal; if someone takes a hit that feels big, it'll be a big hit to everyone's honour.

This seems like it'd be a good fix for some of the oddness I'd been noticing. It's seemed like in multiplayer, the current system attempts to give everyone their own individual honor bar (based on their own maxHP) rather than a group bar, but then shares Honor damage - which in practice makes it a group HP bar that just kicks out some players in the group before others. An ES char grouping with an Evasion char just means the Evasion char will die honor-death far before the ES char is even worried about their honor, every time.

I'd been thinking about solving this by conglomerating everyone's HP into a single group honor bar that takes from all their HP pools, but that still doesn't solve the weirdness with honor damage "bleeding" from e.g. ES players to evasion players and making it unfavorable for them to group together (or, in degenerate strategies, an evasion player "hiring" an ES player to provide a much larger honor bar, then just stay in the entryway so they don't get hit). The proposed solution here seems to get around that, and also fix the widely differing values of honor-restore mechanics as a side bonus (they've felt near-worthless on my ES character due to a massive Honor pool that gets chipped down easily, compared to their value to a low-HP Evasion character that avoids most hits).

If the current system was intended to give everyone their own "individual" honor bars as a means to make it more possible to join and leave partway through, it doesn't really seem to be achieving that; if honor damage is going to be shared, it feels like it's probably best to just have it be a proper shared bar for the full run, and then have the proposed percentage-damage sharing. It seems like if honor damage is shared, then if a run's going to fail due to hitting zero honor, it should do so for every player at the same time, not kick out one player before another's even down to half.

so now i know i have been dying even though my honor isnt depleted. honor is shared.. lol.. one player dies, everyone dies..