When hunting mobs (monsters), and PVP PKing, managing your health is very important. The idea is simple: Completely remove your opponent's health before yours is taken away. If your health reaches 0.0 you die. However, even if your health is at 0.1, you are still in the fight. (At 108 health, I once took a critical hit for 108.6 dmg and stayed alive long enough to win.) When you die and revive, you always start again with 1.0 health.
To see your general health you can look at the red/yellow/green bar just left of your radar. However, to see what your health is specifically, press the "K" button and look under the attributes tab. Your health is in the upper right section, showing (current health)/(full health potential).
NOTE: As of VU 9.1 seeing your actual current health is no longer available.
SKILLS FOR HEALTH
Beginning avatars start with quite low health, (88 I believe) but that number is increased based on increases in certain skills/attributes. You can see which skills increase your health on the
PE-Wiki health charts. Under the "HP Increase" column, if it says yes or gives a number, increasing that skill/attribute will help increase your health. Increasing your Combat Reflexes 1,600 points, for example will give you another full health point. (Please note the numbers, etc. are approximations based on player research, since
MA does not comment on specific info such as this.) However the short and easy version is: The more you hunt and mine, the higher your health increases over time.
However, if you are in a hurry for more health and have some PED to spend, you can buy some skill chips and your health will increase appropriately when you insert them.
Also note that health, like all skills/attributes don't increase in whole numbers. They increase in parts. If your health attribute shows your full health as 99, it could be 99.1 or as high as 99.9. When you increase to a whole number in your health, you get a "You have gained additional Health!" message in the chat window.
ASPECTS OF HEALTH MANAGEMENT
Proper health management involves 2 aspects
- Making sure you do not die
- Staying alive as economically as possible
The first aspect reminds us that we don't need to be at full health all the time to stay alive. The second reminds us that using a fap costs money, and some cost more than others.
BASIC RULES
The basic rules for health management are simple
- Heal naturally whenever possible
- Use your lowest fap when you have the time
- Use your mid-fap when you need a small quick boost
- Use your largest fap only during a fight when in danger of dying, or truly need to regain health quickly
HEALING EQUIPMENT
Healing items come in three groups, looted faps, crafted emt kits and looted healing chips. For simplicity sake, we'll lump emts and faps together (let's just call them faps). Each group has their pros and cons. (For now we're leaving out Resurrection Chips & Coover's Personal Nurse for obvious reasons.) Faps and healing chips are one of the 4 major cornerstones of hunting, together with weapons, armor and skills.
Healing chips are by far the least used among miners/hunters. The slow speed, high usage cost and problem of losing concentration due to getting hit makes them more useful for long-distance healing of sweaters or team mates.
Of the faps, the best is by far the Modified Omegaton Fast Aid Pack or
Mod Fap. healing up to 160 health at 1PEC/use makes it the best, in both quality and economy. However, the average player will never get their hands on one, so let's skip it.
Check out fap stats on
PE-Wiki.info here.
HEALING & MOVEMENT
Remember, you can not fully heal yourself while walking/running forward. You can lose as much as 75% of your faping ability while walking/running, (depending on speed of movement) while still paying the same decay. Doing this is a huge waste. You can heal fully while walking sideways or back, however, this action is generally useless. You can't walk backwards fast enough to evade mob hits, and it's usually better to just shoot them as they enter from a distance (assuming your health isn't too low to begin with).
PHYSICIAN HEAL THYSELF
One fact in
EU that many Calypsians forget is regenerating health. Every avatar regenerates a certain amount every 20 seconds. This amount currently seems to be based on your total health. Since the exact regeneration rate seems to be changing a lot lately, let's just say that higher health requires longer to fully heal, but the essence is the same:
If you have the time, you will fully regenerate for free in just a few minutes.
The two parts of that statement you should focus on is the time frame and the cost. During heavy hunts that regeneration time is much too slow to help by itself. However, we can use the cost aspect to our advantage elsewhere.
For example, just because you ran into some Merp along your mining trip and took some damage before killing them, you do not need to whip out your fap and full heal. If you are not expecting any trouble for a short while, (no red dots close to agro range) and you are still relatively healthy, allow yourself to heal naturally while you mine your claim(s).
Let's say you died and just revived. You don't need to grab your biggest fap and restore yourself to full health. (Assuming you're not using a TP chip) heal naturally while you run back. Once you start coming close to red dots on your screen, and are about to fight again, stop running for a moment (outside the mobs agro range) and heal yourself then. Use your most economical fap that your time permits.
The best example of using free healing to full advantage is the naked hunt. Those that hunt naked, meaning no armor and (often) no fap learn how to combine the regeneration factor plus aspect #1 above to full effect so they can hunt as fast as possible while still keeping their health high enough to stay alive. They know to slow down between mobs if they're dropping a little too low on health, to allow a bit more healing before facing the next beast.
For now, we'll assume you will be using a fap during your hunting/mining.
FAP CHOICES
When hunting and mining, it's best to have 2, often 3 faps with you. They should be high, medium and low powered (or high and low when just using 2). Each one is useful at the right time. Currently, I carry fap-5, fap-28 and ek-2500 (for certain times, I bring my ek-2350) so we'll use these in our example.
Note for miners: most faps weigh 5-9 kg, usually 5. that means 3 faps will likely weigh 16-19 kg total (2 will be about 10-11). Please factor this accordingly for weight management.
Your choice of faps depend mostly on 4 factors;
- heal amount
- heal speed
- decay cost
- price (including markup)
Price, is essentially n/a on faps you loot, since you don't pay markup. However, generally the more they heal and faster they work, the more decay they use and more expensive they are.
As an example ek-2500 heals up to 30 every 2.3 secs. (7PEC decay) while ek-2350 heals only 24, but every 1.4 secs. The speed of the ek-2350 makes it valuable, but 2 quick heals costs 12PEC decay. Using only 1 of these faps for all occasions can get rather expensive.
LOW FAP
Your low-powered fap should always be the fap-5, or Vivo T1. Yes, I said Vivo T1, the same one you get at the Trade Terminal, or the old fap-5. Why? Simple. 1PEC or less per use.
Let's say you have time for a slow heal, and you need to gain 50 health back. Using my 2500, assuming best results, I'll need 2 uses at 7PEC each, for 14PEC total decay. Using the fap-5 will take a bit longer, but will only cost me about 7 uses or 7PEC total. I save 50% in decay each time I do this. (Some believe you also skill a bit more doing this, since you use the fap more times.)
However, the Vivo T1& fap-5 generally heals much too little (just over 10 max.) and much too slow (about every 3 seconds) to be useful during any real hunting. But just because you're in a fight doesn't mean you need your biggest fap every time either.
MID FAP
Now, let's say you took a little damage, and are afraid of getting a critical hit before finishing the fight. You may want to use your mid-fap just to boost yourself enough to avoid that problem. (this is where knowledge of mob dmg amounts vs. your current health comes in handy.) My Fap-28, for example, heals me 20 points for half the decay cost of my ek-2500 healing 30. (3.5 vs. 7) One use of my fap-28 could keep me healthy enough to survive any possible crit for the next 2 hits until I kill the mob and I'm good to go.
You can also use your mid fap to "top off" your health, if you want full health, but only need to heal 10-20 points, for example.
HIGH FAP
In a huge fight, when you are in danger of dying, you should use your biggest fap. Again, don't over do it. Stay healthy enough to win, but don't get into the trap of healing yourself needlessly after every hit you take. Remember, the mob is regenerating also, (some mobs regen faster than others, but on avg. it's about the same as avas.) so the more time you waste healing yourself, the harder it is to win.
The only other time you really need your biggest fap is when you just died and need to return to the "scene of the crime" ASAP. Even then when you are almost full health, you can switch to your mid/low fap to top off before firing up your TP chip.
Quick hint: If you must "speed-heal" right after dying, start hitting your fap button during the white screen. You'll begin to heal yourself even before you fully arrive at the Revive terminal. (But like I said, for economy sake do this as little as possible.)
LIMITED FAPS
Now, (L) faps are available. These faps are not repairable. They have a nice mid-high heal, but are quite slow.
However while the heal rate/sec. is nice on them, the fact that they are non-repairable makes it even more important to stay with the multi-fap rule. It would be a shame if this was your only fap and it broke in the middle of a nice run. If you plan on using (L) faps, consider always having 2. 1 for backup. Also do not forget your other faps. It's even more important to not waste clicks on an (L) fap when time permits using something a bit more economical.
THE UNDERLYING RULE AND WHEN TO BREAK IT
Notice all the above rules I've given are about your health vs. time. In short, the more time you have, the cheaper your healing is. There are situations when it seems you must break the rules I've given. That is when you are under a time constraint, such as during a 1-hour most-loot wins event. In that case, you're more worried about the time aspect vs. health economy and will likely use your high fap and neglect the others. In this case that's exactly what you should do. Stick to your high fap and rack up those points for the win. However, there you are just swapping economy for time, so the most basic rule still applies:
Manage your health according to your time and equipment constraints and you'll enjoy this universe even more for even less.
Well hopefully you'll find this information useful. I know I have.