my understanding of the health bars:

blueish-purple/light purple = shield
blue = heal absorb/some other heal debuff
fully purple bar = player cannot be healed by anyone but themselves (such as having pale order ring equipped)

MidniteOwl1913 wrote: »

And the red one with the line thru it?

i cant say ive seen a red health bar with a line through it

Nilandia wrote: »

eMKa8 wrote: »

I do have a question about trauma. What is that?!?!

Trauma is the official term for the healing debuff, where people need to receive a certain amount of HP in raw heals before they can be actually healed again. Sometimes called a heal absorb.

Both "Trauma" and "Heal Absorption" are official terms for this effect, where the former is the "immersion-friendly" version, while the latter is what you're likely to see in a tooltip. The earliest source of Trauma was the 2018 PvP set Soldier of Anguish, where the tooltip read, "applying NNNN Heal Absorption to all enemies hit for 4 seconds, negating the next NNNN points of healing done". Heal absorption did not get used in PvE until 2019 with Nahviintaas's Soul Tear in Sunspire.

I would however avoid calling it a "heal debuff", since that's very ambiguous as there are multiple forms of healing-related debuffs in the game that behave differently from each other.

And the best way to describe heal absorption is that it's the negative version of a damage shield.

• Just as a damage shield will prevent damage from reaching your health bar by absorbing damage until it expires or is broken through, heal absorption prevents heals from reaching your health bar by absorbing healing until it expires or is broken through.
• Just like damage shields, each heal absorption effect has a number of hit points, and just as a damage shield can be broken through by dealing damage exceeding its hit points, heal absorptions are broken through by receiving healing that exceeds the absorption effect's hit points.

Generally, PvP-sourced heal absorptions like the Soldier of Anguish set or the Trauma script are fairly short in duration, so you can either break it or wait it out, but PvE-sourced ones have much longer durations where breakthroughs are the only option.

Finally, as for whether you should use "trauma" or "heal absorption", the former is shorter and has fewer syllables but is less descriptive while the latter describes what the effect does is but is quite the mouthful, so it depends on whether brevity or clarity is more important for the situation. Just don't call it a "heal debuff" please.


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Edit to add: A bit more historical context for the naming... when the effect was first introduced with Soldier of Anguish, the only publicly-visible text was the set's tooltip, which called it "Heal Absorption".

At the time, the term "Trauma" was not actually visible by players and was visible only to addon developers (this made things quite confusing, since the game's API uses "trauma" exclusively while the publicly-visible text at the time exclusively used "heal absorption", and it was not immediately clear that these were just two different names for the same effect).

The term "Trauma" did not become publicly visible until 2022 when it showed up in the death recap description for the Hindered debuff in DSR, but that's kind of niche and not something that most players would see. It was also confusing since this text made no mention of heal absorption so nobody initially knew what this was (aside from addon developers who had seen this before in the API; I remember getting a lot of "what is trauma?!" questions when DSR first hit PTS, and I had to explain that it was just another name for heal absorption that until that point had only been used internally by their API).

Trauma finally gained true visibility this year when ZOS named their Heal Absorption script "Trauma" (though the tooltip text for its effect when it's applied to a skill says "Heal Absorption" with no mention of "Trauma").