I told you how mc is the best right? Because mc is the best.
Nah, it's more that I have years of exposure from my job and from attending 7 GDCs. There are people who kick my ass at game design; I work with some of them--it's awesome. I love getting my ass kicked.
-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.
Yeah, not to worry: this is largely a forum of math nerds and literature nerds, so...about half of us could help you there. The gist of it is as follows: you'll want to adjust the raw starting HP/MP values for humans (because multipliers only go up to 255--which isn't enough; you'll probably want starting HPs more like 100 given your equipment numbers).
However, growth basically multiplies your level 1 stats, so...given classical FFT growths you'd be slamming up against 999 HP at high levels (making equipment that boosts HP kinda useless). Realistically, you probably want it to, say, start at 100 HP and end at 200 HP (about 100 growth) or a bit more aggressively, start at 100 HP and end at 300 HP (about 50 growth). Or alternatively, have the starting HP be 150 and go to 300 (about 100 growth). This is about the range where both the HP boost from equipment, and the HP multiplier on the class play a noticeable role. Obviously equipment will matter a bit more at lower levels, and class will matter a bit more at upper levels given these kinds of numbers, but neither one dwarfs the other in this range.
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.
Well...hmm. Here's a radical concept that I've considered in the past:
Consider having less than 20 classes.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1839/too_many_clicks_unitbased_.php?page=2Generally humans can hold 6-8 things in their mind simultaneously, though for games this gets reduced to 5-7 for games because one of the multitasking items is just using the controller--reading the UI, interfacing with the game.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that WoW has exactly 7 classes to choose from at the start of the game (and, what, 5 races per faction?) Furthermore, what's one of the most fun things to do in FFT challenges like SCCs? Choosing what hat to equip, and choosing what robe to equip. In the case of both hats and robes, there's...4-5 good ones that you'll be choosing between at most, and different ones are good in different fights.
Now, I'm not saying "you must have exactly 7 classes and 7 hats and...". But, you might find that some of your classes are basically filling the same role (for instance...glancing through your spreadsheet, a bunch of your mages have pretty much the same three spells just with different elements, and then a mixture of three statuses). You could probably combine some of these into one class, and end up with, say,12 classes that all have very distinct gameplay roles, instead of 20 classes, some of which are very similar.
Mmm, I don't agree with this. Black Mage is THE class you go to for any sort of magic-carrier because of its obscene MA multiplier, no question asked. The other carrier is Geomancer, which you can class as "Physical" maybe and that one is debatable amongst a number of people.
The physical carrier in Vanilla is Ninja, not Geo. Quite a bit more PA multiplier than Geo (according to the FFT Patcher they actually have 122 PA mult, not the 120 the BMG claims--so even more of a gap above Geo). 120 speed mult, better attack and movement than geo. Granted, there's only like...two physical skillsets to even be carried in vanilla (Jump and Punch Art), but Ninjas are also used as a speed carrier; best user of skills like Item and Talk Skill and such, and the status-based Mathskills. (Although honestly, the biggest reason to run a Ninja is nothing to do with carriers, and everything to do with "I want to guarantee that I don't lose to Roof of Riovanes")
Geo has a carrier role in vanilla, but as a shield carrier; if you're up against Balk (either fight) where elemental shields are the best thing ever, then MAU Geo is marginally better than Equip Shield Wizard, and there's no equivalent for Short Charge Geo. The other place Geo's good is Agrias--Geos equip swords and they're better than her base class.
EDIT:
They all seemed fairly frail and the CT for certain spells was way too high, causing them to be midcharged unless you had Short Charge or the like.
It's all about CT planning. You can land Meteor, the slowest spell in the game, without Short Charge up through Chapter 3. (In chapter 4 enemy speeds start to spread out, so you can't coordinate as effectively).
The place where spells really break down is level 99. And...well, one solution to that would be to make speed growth slower. If speed growths were typically 200 rather than 100, you'd have most classes capping out at 8 or 9 speed. It will also help if Thief Hat is not the default highest-level hat that all level 99 humans wear.
