What if everyone had more health?

Everyone knows how much health everyone has. Four have 125 health. One has 150 health. Two have 175 health. One has 200 health. One has 300 health. Yawn, boring. But what if everyone had double their current health?

Double health. Soldiers with 400 health. Medics with 300. Scouts with 250 health. Interesting, eh? Maybe, maybe not. But before we start, we ought to make some assumptions. All weapons do normal damage. Medi Guns heal as normal but Overheal still heals up to 150%. Critical hits still do triple damage and minicrits do 35% as always.

With the basic ‘rules’ up and running, let’s start theorycrafting!

First things first, games would be far, far slower. With everyone having more health, it takes that much more time to kill people, so it’d take much longer to clear a control point. Spies would become far more powerful here, as they’d have more health to survive being caught while still being able to easily kill everyone. Demomen, Heavies and Soldiers would still maintain their power, but Scouts would suffer, as it takes far more to kill people with their Scatterguns. Snipers would be pretty much screwed, due to their inability to instantly kill anyone any more.

Engineers would be in a lot of trouble too. Sentry guns at level 3 would only have slightly more health than a Medic and less health than Soldiers and Heavies, meaning that most heavy classes could easily tank the damage of a sentry and then destroy it. Wranglers would be a 100% necessity if an Engineer wanted to defend properly. Of course, dispensers and teleporters would still be useful, as not all classes have advanced mobility and everyone needs ammo. Things like mini-sentries would be nothing more than a tickling tool though, slowly pecking away at health before being destroyed in a glorious explosion.

Let’s not forget about Medics. More health means more healing, and healing to 150% would take longer, meaning Ubers are easier to build. It would take longer in general though for Medics to heal people, spending more time with each individual patient, although this is balanced by the fact that patients can survive for much longer before needing heals. Only problem is that Medics would be utterly unable to protect themselves with their syringe guns.

Of course, in all this, the strongest classes would still remain the strongest. Demomen and Soldiers, with their huge amounts of health, would be able to jump around with far more ease than ever before. Having 400 health will do that. And because they already do large amounts of damage, they wouldn’t mind so much about firing extra shots. Soldiers would probably be more affected though, as the Rocket Launchers need reloading faster than the high-damage grenades and stickies.

Spies though, it’d be like heaven. The knife does six times the victim’s health, no matter what their health is. Although their revolvers would be painfully weak, Spies could easily survive in this high health world as the added health means that any mistake they make can be recovered from far quicker. Fire? Means nothing. Jarate and Mad Milk? Run away and wait for it to fade. Overhealed Heavy? Here comes the knife!

Alright, back to reality. This isn’t going to happen. Probably for the best.

On a final note, apparently this has already been tried out in the now sadly deceased TF2 Beta. On January 6th 2011, there was this patch which increased health by 100%. Thanks, aabicus, for pointing it out.