I suggested this months ago.

Apparently it was the dumbest idea ever.

How about it shows a bar, very slim above our own health bar. Or it can replace the bar since we have a spot that shows our health in the first place, be it not all of or health we still see when it gets low.

I forget who actually figured it out, but I remember reading that a "bar" is actually 40 health. I do not remember how they came up with the number... 3rd party program maybe?

You can sometimes rev another player when you have one bar because the bars are not exact, they show a rough estimate of your health. Assuming that the guy was right a half bar is anywhere from 1-20 health and a full bar is 21-40 health. To rev with one bar you'd need exactly 40 health.

I do wish I could remember who had figured it out...

~Gwen

1. Make it toggle-able, as previously stated on the thread
2. Make it not very distracting.

Floating health bars might be too distracting to me. I'd like a hotkey similar to "alt" for Warcraft 3 to display enemy health bars temporarily.

Or...

Checking out Bastion (awesome singleplayer game by the way), the health of the enemy is shown as a "dotted" circle on the ground and is always behind (technically, "below", 3d-wise) any enemy graphics so they don't block the action. The Bastion "health ring" also comes in a blue color which shouldn't interfere with any of the "ground spikes" that telegraph an enemy attack.

@Shidara:
"This is merely my own theory, but I think one pip of health represents four HP, but only every second is visualized. So, one full pip would represent either 3 or 4 HP, and half a pip 1 or 2. In that sense, it's just like the hearts from the Legend of Zelda games, but in a different shape."

I thought that for a while, but (1) the empirical evidence doesn't support it, and (2) it doesn't make sense from a design standpoint. I believe health is simply a floating point number.
(1) If it's true that a full pip represents either "3" or "4" HP, then roughly half the time, when you pick up barely enough hearts to fill your entire meter, you should not be able to pick up one more heart because you're actually full (i.e., you're at the "4" mark instead of the "3" mark). In practice, 99% of the time, you CAN pick up one more heart, which means you're far more often at the "3" mark than at the "4" mark. This makes it far more likely that that a full pip represents the range (0.5, 1] than the set {0.75, 1}.
(2) There are a LOT of different potential defense values, and they increase in very small increments. If health is discretized to such a coarse level, it doesn't make sense for defense to be at a much finer level. This makes it far more likely that health is simply floating point.

@Actinium:
"Sometimes I have 1 pip of health left and I can give half of it to a teammate to res and sometimes I can't."

I don't believe it's documented on the wiki, but it's at least somewhat common knowledge that if you have "enough" (2.0?) health left and you take what would be a lethal blow, you're instead reduced to exactly 1.0 health, which gives you 1 pip of health that can actually be used to res. Because health and damage are (as far as I can tell) floating point, if you end up at 1 pip any other way, you're infinitely more likely to be in the (0.5, 1) range than exactly at 1.0, in which case you can't use it to res.

Back on topic: I wouldn't mind seeing boss health bars as a special part of the interface (though it's already been suggested). Health bars in general will probably clutter the screen, but one or two health bars for a couple specific stages seems quite reasonable. There's a lot of precedence for this in action games that tend to hide numbers (Mega Man, a lot of space shooters).