Not sure how much you've read my spreadsheets yet, but every item is equally balanced to be used all throughout the game, and only a few items are steal/Move-Find only. So it's more-or-less something I'm thinking of to help so stats don't get ridiculously high.
I hadn't glanced at the items yet.
Looking at them, I don't think there's any particular concern in the long game--the equipment is stuff that would fit in fine with endgame FFT. Well, other than the usual "FFT's quadratic formula encourages people to attack with fists not weapons at high levels." (And you're already doing plenty to discourage that--like no Bracer equivalent and no Power Sleeve equivalent; actually, for all I know you've changed the damage formula on fists).
My concern would be more in the earlygame, when HP from class is going to be much smaller than HP from equipment. I'm guessing you were planning to deal with this by setting the level 1 HP much higher and then taking away the ability to level? That'd work. Another option would be to raise the starting HP and also significantly lower the HP growth.
Basically, you can balance reasonably effectively either way; FFT's system is fairly flexible like that.
What you should be doing is asking yourself what kind of game would you rather make? If you remove levelling, then you can be more precise in your designs; you can set things up so that the player can only survive by 1 HP and only with the right class/equipment; this is not something you could design normally. On the other hand, RPGs generally have a bit of an auto-correct difficulty, where if you're having trouble you will gain more levels, and thus the game gets easier...and you lose that when you don't have leveling. (And JP gain systems don't always have the same dynamic--in FFT an experienced player can make a much more powerful character with 1600 JP than a new player generally will with five times the JP).
But...yeah, roughly how I think about the design process is:
Step 1: Decide who your audience is.
Step 2: Figure out what large-scale systems are good or bad for that audience. Cull the bad. Keep or extend the good.
Step 3: Now that you've done that, go mess with some numbers for balancing (bearing in mind that, depending on the audience, the definition of "balancing" may change).
The decision to include or exclude levelling is such a large scale change that I feel like balance shouldn't be coming into the question yet; you can make a fairly balanced game with levelling, or without levelling regardless of when equipment shows up. It's a question of: does no-levelling match the kind of game you want to make?
(If the Aesthetic you're shooting for is "you get everything from the start", then it might be the right decision. Then again, increased choice is a different variable from the relaxation/trance of the grind. The reason most games don't do increased choice from the start is choice paralysis, but you really shouldn't let that stop you--LFT definitely leaned on the side of "more options earlier!" because it worked under the assumption that LFT players already know FFT and therefore won't find the flood of options overwhelming).
I'm going to try and break the post into pieces so I can address each issue indivdually.
1) "Looking at them, I don't think there's any particular concern in the long game--the equipment is stuff that would fit in fine with endgame FFT. Well, other than the usual "FFT's quadratic formula encourages people to attack with fists not weapons at high levels." (And you're already doing plenty to discourage that--like no Bracer equivalent and no Power Sleeve equivalent; actually, for all I know you've changed the damage formula on fists).
My concern would be more in the earlygame, when HP from class is going to be much smaller than HP from equipment. I'm guessing you were planning to deal with this by setting the level 1 HP much higher and then taking away the ability to level? That'd work. Another option would be to raise the starting HP and also significantly lower the HP growth."
-Simply put, I'm a mage fanboy. I absolutely hate it when physical classes outshine magical classes- which is what happened in FFT, for the most part. I'm really trying to promote magic by giving most classes magical options. Even physical classes like the Sentinel get magic. (i.e, Sentinel gets Protect/Shell, Viking gets Thunder/Water, Berserker gets Berserk, etc.) This will promote wanting to boost MA and elemental boosting even on physical units, so magic will (hopefully) get as much screentime as things like Wave Fist, Earth Slash, and Geomancy now. Addressing Barehanded attacks, the formula is -not- going to change, but Brave itself will. Basically, Brave is becoming "Fury", which is like a physical variant of Faith. The higher your Fury, the higher physical damage you deal, but the higher damage you take in return. The inverse is also true- lower Fury, lower damage taken and received.
-Regarding HP Growth/Multipliers... this is admittedly my weakness. I'm really not good at balance. This is further hampered by my indecisiveness about whether to maintain levelling (which I'll address below). For now, my primary concern is making sure skills work- growths/multipliers can be easily tweaked later and will likely be changed a ton anyways during playtesting.
2) "What you should be doing is asking yourself what kind of game would you rather make? If you remove levelling, then you can be more precise in your designs; you can set things up so that the player can only survive by 1 HP and only with the right class/equipment; this is not something you could design normally. On the other hand, RPGs generally have a bit of an auto-correct difficulty, where if you're having trouble you will gain more levels, and thus the game gets easier...and you lose that when you don't have leveling. (And JP gain systems don't always have the same dynamic--in FFT an experienced player can make a much more powerful character with 1600 JP than a new player generally will with five times the JP)."
-The concept of making each battle a puzzle is not new to me. It was more or less my plan to make bosses "puzzle-like" when I was making FFVI Hardtype. That said, for FFT, there's just so many various options and customisation, I don't really see how this is viable. There's just too much to cover when making puzzle-like battles. I think I'm making a more Tactics Ogre approach out of this, in that battles will most likely be longer (due to the high HP and survivability of units thanks to much more defensive equipment), and buffs/debuffs are thusly more important. So spending the 200 JP or whatever on a debuff might be worth it more in the end than taking the 500 JP level 2 elemental spell.
3) Regarding the "kind" of patch I'd like to produce, I already feel that I'm very much taking away from standard RPG fare, which is why I'm hesitant on removing levelling. I want there to be -some- sense of familiarity when playing PW, which is why I've left special jobs intact (mostly- although they've been rebalanced). It's also why I'm making Vanilla FFT Generics recruitable (although slightly modified due to limitations). I very much want to keep a Final Fantasy feeling while breathing fresh air into FFT. Hopefully that makes more sense than I think it did.
4) In general, my audience is really anyone who's bored of standard FFT fare. Now, I would love to open it up to a wider audience- which is namely why I don't intend for PW to be difficult. I want it to be -different-, not necessarily tedious or challenging. Obviously it'd be harder than Vanilla... but that's not saying much. As far as choice paralysis is concerned, you absolutely hit the nail on the head. That is my single biggest fear right now is that people will patch the ISO, boot it up, beat Orbonne, look at all the new jobs, skills, and items, go @_@ and never pick it up again. I'm really not sure what to do in that regard, other than put a HUGE disclaimer beforehand about trying out all the new skills and such.
