Maximum-health reduction changes how much health a player can hold rather than merely subtracting from the current value. A fair version exposes the original cap, missing capacity, current health, restoration condition, and duration separately, so a heal that stops early reads as a known consequence rather than broken input.
Kern opens a fixed vertical lane at 0.30 s. Tavi moves fully outside its 68-unit half-width before the 1.00 s resolve, so current health remains 80 and maximum health remains 100. The avoided cast establishes both the geometry and the fact that the orange chevrons mean a cap-changing hit.
Autoplay is disabled by reduced motion. Scrub across 0.30, 0.88, 1.00, 1.82, 2.68, 3.08, 3.28, 3.72, 4.08, 4.48, 4.96, and 5.40 seconds to inspect escape, hit, cap loss, blocked healing, restoration, refill, and reset.
Define which contacts reduce current health, maximum health, or both; the cap floor and stacking policy; clamp order; duration; cleansing and rest behavior; healing interaction; persistence through phases, death, and checkpoints; multiplayer authority; UI and accessibility signals; and tests for simultaneous damage, healing, restoration, and repeated applications.
Resolve damage and cap reduction as named outputs of one authoritative contact, not as one oversized damage number. Choose additive points or a percentage of base maximum, define the minimum legal cap, decide whether repeats refresh, stack, replace, or ignore, and clamp current health only after the new cap is known.
Give cap-changing attacks a stable pre-hit language that differs from ordinary damage. Keep the original maximum and lost segment readable, explain whether time, cleansing, a phase objective, rest, or death restores it, and test every healing source against the reduced ceiling so the same request produces the same applied and blocked amounts.
Specify behavior at phase changes, checkpoints, revives, character swaps, cutscenes, co-op joins, difficulty changes, and save reloads. Restore capacity and current health in an explicit order, identify each application and cleanse, and test simultaneous hits, healing on the sever tick, repeated messages, rollback, and a cap floor already reached.
If the original frame disappears, players cannot distinguish injury, a temporary debuff, a permanent upgrade loss, or UI scaling. Preserve a reference track, a maximum marker, and a patterned lost-cap segment, then announce both the amount and the restoration rule.
Different update orders can kill, heal, or duplicate loss at the same timestamp. Resolve the contact once, derive the new cap, clamp current health, process later healing against that cap, and record separate reason codes for damage, capacity change, blocked healing, and restoration.
Store base maximum, effective maximum, current health, active reduction instances, and restoration state independently. The effective cap constrains health but is not health itself; changing one should never silently manufacture a transaction in the other.
Measure cap lost per avoidable contact, attack frequency, time spent below each survivability breakpoint, access to cleansing, and the damage of later patterns. A small reduction before a demanding sequence may matter more than a large reduction immediately before a guaranteed reset.
Set a floor, maximum stacks, source ownership, and replacement priority. Show each accepted stack and reject applications at the floor with a different response. Avoid shrinking the bar until labels, markers, and remaining current health become unreadable.
Telemetry should retain requested healing, applied healing, blocked-by-cap healing, cap lost, time to restore, cleanse use, and deaths while reduced. This reveals whether the mechanic creates an understood planning constraint or merely invalidates healing without teaching why.
The first orange lane passes after Tavi clears it, leaving the green ward inside its full stone frame. The second cuts away the frame's outer runes. A healing spark reaches the new marker and breaks; only cleansing rings rebuild the frame before the missing green segment can be filled.
Combine length, a fixed reference frame, hatching, a maximum marker, text, sound, and controller feedback. Offer larger resource UI, restrained flashes, narrated value changes, longer telegraphs, smaller reductions, a higher floor, automatic cleansing, or conversion to recoverable temporary damage while showing the selected rule before combat.
Ordinary damage lowers current health while leaving the amount that healing may recover unchanged. Temporary health adds a disposable layer above or beside health. Maximum-health reduction lowers the legal ceiling itself; current health may also be damaged or clamped, but later healing remains limited until capacity is explicitly restored.
Wounding reduces recoverable maximum health whenever the player is hit, so the Tree of Men's repeated fire, platform pressure, and hanging enemies erode the value of later healing as well as current health. The health bar retains the wounded portion, making accumulated capacity loss readable across the long multi-level fight.
Maliketh's Destined Death attacks temporarily reduce maximum HP while also applying damage over time. The effect therefore needs to communicate three concurrent facts—ongoing loss, a smaller ceiling, and eventual restoration—without making a healing input appear to fail arbitrarily.
During the final battle, Gloom first marks hearts as unavailable and later Ganondorf's attacks can destroy heart containers for the encounter. Breaking the familiar row itself turns reduced capacity into dramatic escalation, but it also demands a clear distinction between temporarily gloom-locked hearts and containers removed until the fight ends.
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