All of this with a grain of salt, I am not 100% on all the design points obviously because I am not balls deep. I am sounding board guy. I am like your mother that way except I am way less good in bed. Also this is stream of consciousness so take that as you will. Not necessarily in order of thought, I have tried to group relevant things, but it is going to be all over the shop.
First zone fight impressionsLow hit moves are overly punished. Evade just makes them painful. They have a decent hit rate still, but mutlihit moves absorb the RNG so much better. This really stands out on Spark Cluster which is already RNG.
Also feel it very hard with Kasia. I really really don't like the Focus system as it sits with Kasia now. Especially frustrating when I am trying to test it to form an opinion and enemies in Thug Hideout got 2 evades and then a miss (Because they blind as well lol). Throw on a sword and even with 2 hits if she at least connects once she isn't punished nearly as much.
Rando targetting on Sleeping (Crescendo) is unreliable three enemies and one enemy gets targetted twice.
Is MP restoring to full with each fight? It feels entirely meaningless in this context with how quick these fights are. Might scale differently with higher level skills. Pretty ambivalent to it in general. The scale is high, the costs are high. The impact on all of it in the test is pretty close to nothing. If they regen to full I don't see much use for basic physicals? outside of trying to build FP on Kasia (which is turns spent not defensive buffing).
Speaking of, without eyeballing numbers, Flare Shot feels entirely inferior to Fireball for Erastus in almost every situation he will encounter in randoms. He also feels punishingly slow at these levels (stuff target him, he will explode. Probably one shot if they have Amplification)
BANDAGES DO NOTHING.
Blasting Spread and Searing have no description.
Thug Hideout BossTrying to do the Thug Hideout boss underlevelled (3) feels near impossible to keep up with the damage output. Sleep the 2 Raiders and then try to burst down the Second in Command, Erastus is too slow to get more than a turn before the damage output from the two guys left in the fight overwhelms your limited healing. Elfboy could do it with Kasia solo, but mere mortals like myself are shit out of luck. Guess I can try sleeping the Leader, but the MT on the Second in Command is significant and I don't think you can keep up with mitigating it. Will try again level appropriate. This is also a point that really highlights how terrible FP is for Kasia. She sits on 0 for the whole fight and it is going to stay that way. Also that much burst makes opening salvos RNG as fuck. You don't have Second in Command damage incoming at least, but he has initiative and goes right after Erastus at these levels. You don't have much of a chance to reduce damage, if they burst down someone you are pretty fucked.
Case in point when I just went sleep the leader, missed, 2 Flare Shots on Noemi and she is on 57 Health, the Leader missed Erastus with a 2 swing attack. I get 1 Erastus turn where he can do nothing and Kasia heals gets you Healblocked and a repeat focussed offensive (after Second in Command does his high damage MT) is a wipe.
I will poke it a bit more and see if anything else interesting falls out then try again at level appropriate.
Second in Command resists lightning and Lightning's whole thing was that it is high power and helps deal with high MDef? So far the times that Spark Cluster has been worth casting = 0
Looks like RNG evade and absolute bullshit luck with Sleep can get you a win though. lol enemies can evade spells when sleeping.
Thug Hideout randomsFP gain really really needs to be on action taken, not on hit if at all possible. That fixes a huge part of the RNG on Kasia and makes missed status (see sleep above) less punishing.
Level gain rates are pretty decent, but I worry about level balance with more characters. Current implementation has out of party people not getting experience (not intended I would think with this team?). Regardless of implementation episodic release lets you set basic level cutoffs anyway, so largely level scale balance is in your hands rather than the players.
Thug Hideout Boss 2.0Now actually eyeballing the numbers, Flareshot is better than some spells in Erastus skill list in a few situations. Specifically when you need to kill shit and then it is better than his FP skills. Those are terrible in Chapter 1 other than for say cutting down on some physical damage. In randoms by the time he can use them you may as well just kill everything with Fireball.
Level 4 means dick on the boss in Thug Hideout if you get Second in Command doing 2 MT in a row. Kasia died. That is game. I should have gone for a second sleep on a raider instead of Flareshot on Second in Command to try and get more FP for MT Sleep bullshit again. Relying on it and still don't like the rando target (because I am relying on it). Not sure if Gang Leader resists sleep or I have been unlucky with RNG, but he needs to not if the strategy relies on him being sleeped. If he is up after the first turn then your chances of a winnable scenario drop significantly.
Gods fuck, you can sleep the Second in Command? Thanks rando sleep for teaching me that. Now the hit rate needs to be not shit either. That or you thorw more random chance to the pile wheeeee!
Since I am using it so much, I haven't noticed a sleep timer tick down? Do I put these guys in to comas forever? Sleeping them has the downside of making their magic barrier last forever.
Miss first sleep on Leader, hit second sleep on Second in Command. Watch Erastus get focus fired down! No one's ever gonna keep you down! Unless you get attacked by 3 dudes in a row that all about 2HKO you. Otherwise you are the best around.
Waiting to wipe after someone goes down early in a fight is pretty boring.
High evade enemies with high speed are terrible to fight with. See rant about Kasia and FP and multi hit and RNG again.
At this rate I had more success at level 3 than 4. If there is an approach to this fight that isn't rolling dice on the one status move I have over and over again I would love to hear it because my load out is Coma spell, Damage, Healing or Damage With More Damage And Status Effects That You Won't Get To Cast Because It Takes FP You Better Off Leaving As Regen But You Are Probably Dead.
Gang leader attack that causes bleed gets multiple swings on Erastus. Fucking lol. Pray for evade or die in one hit.
If fights go like this, every single time we have discussed overly punishing mechanics like enemies with high defense or evasion and that it is okay because you can switch the party on the fly in combat or swap gear? Yeah no. Not happening. You will be too busy picking your teeth up off the ground to get into a position to keep trial and erroring your way through the fight. Eat the reset and try again bro.
I give up, I am not beating this fight again. I want to test something else. So beta is beta, but yeah damage output as is, even if you sleep the two Raiders, leaves you with 2 enemies that are both fully capable of bursting down a character in one turn and leaving you in an unwinnable position is my take on the fight.
Mirek and Eirwen introHealing value on First Aid is terrible. This makes the 2 man boss very
Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge.
Couple that with the dexterity on the Assassin? This is the first fight you have these two for? The answer is No. This fight needs to be nerfed into the ground. Beta is beta and in spite of my harping on the last fight I tend to take testing balance with a huge grain of salt obviously. This one is No. Halve the damage you take at least. Into. the. ground. Prepared Mirek physical 4HKOs the guy. He 3HKOs Mirek and comes with support. No.
Did I mention that the support has status? One of them is Stun. The other is Def Down. This makes for a 2HKO.
It is so No that Brad Pitt says it 5 times. I trust Brad Pitt on boss design choices.
In other news. Eirwen's focus skills also are not good. Although she builds up stuff for them easilly enough, the only one worth using costs 2 turns to do. Speed Fang is not a good investment in the current fight dynamic. It takes the same number of turns to build up to as Vulcan Chain to do less damage than a basic attack. The added benefit? It is fast so you can do another attack and do another weak attack. With some tweaking it could maybe be a long term battle net benefit in damage, but currently fights are far too short for it to be worth it.
I had hopes for Bloodletting. It turned a 3HKO on one of the Legbreakers in this fight into a 3HKO after the bleed damage because poison can't kill. This move is terrible for this fight, but a little bit less than Speed Fang because it is kind of free every second turn (other than costing you her only good focus move).
Beat the fight two times now. Both involved significant amount of evade.
I have found a handy map to show where this fight needs to go.Sebrle Plantation So on to the next area. Fights where I spend half the time without control of my character are not enjoyable. Even less so by having the guy that I described as punishingly slow in the earlier part get hit with confuse or Stun. He gets maybe 2 turns in a fight as is, losing them just makes him worse than dead weight.
Also Confuse is great man. I totally dig having access to a status that did about as much damage as my normal attacks to the enemy and CCed them at the same time. You mean I am the guys on the right, not the left? They seem to be under AI control though, so I thought I was the monsters.
Two sets of randoms when I set myself on the top of the expected levels of the area with the expected tier of gear. Not interested in testing more. Just nothing enjoyable about the fights here.
LegionSo yeah Legion. I get it, Erastus is bad and I should feel bad. Benching him next fight. In other news, just as I expected the focus loss on his defend command is pointlessly punishing. He is in absolutely no danger of heal tanking anything. If anything it needs to give him free focus, because like I said, Focus is doing nothing for him currently.
Oh hey a use for Spark Cluster Fuck though. As long as it hits (lol nice Crescendo bro *Evade*).
Another fight where MT is crazy brutal. Bonus points for attached status. I hope he is scripted to never Magnify -> Putrefaction because MT OHKO damage is pretty win when it happens at random but a crazy oversight to let slip through scripting.
I straight up went to look at spell stats on stuff with Absorption hit Eirwin for 100 and she evaded 2. WTFed face at OHKO drain. the one hit was a crit. Even with that in mind that is way too strong.
I am on the fence about Essence Flare. In a game with this high damage and Heal Block, a tank is pretty shitty. Mirek gets more mileage out of Soul Bunker instead. I am not convinced this isn't going to be pretty much universal.
In an unsurprising analysis, Mirek is too slow and his Focus is not in a good place. Not because his skills are bad, because he is so slow he never gets turns so never gets FP so never can use them. Still better than Erastus on this fight because he doesn't explode because there was anything remotely close to him being looked at, getting completely resisted and only bringing stat downs that have no impact on the enemy is pretty terrible. I get this is aligns to plot but wooowwwww does Erastus suck here.
Buffs need to either add to duration or at least reset duration. Losing an Empower (Crescendo) because Eirwin already had the status effect bites the bag.
That said with how those interact, at least when the stat buff symbol shows up with 0 turns left on it you can at least reapply them. Confusing bit of interfacing there.
So my buffs wore out and Legion isn't even at half health. Mirek doesn't have the MP to cast shit again. So I was going to bitch out how bad that is but Andy's comments got that covered off. No duration on Soul Bunker would make the fight less taxing.
HOLY FUCK Because this fight lasts so long I actually got to use one of Kasia's Focus skills! Arterial shot causes bleed. See statements about how shit that was on Eirwin. Barbed shot, does this guy even have counters? Okay. So I guess I give him 3 turns of evade down. Oh wait sorry, she had to spend a turn healing and that costs FP. Focus back to being worthless for Kasia.
Mirek finally got FP saved up to use one of his skills. I used Prepare before hand. It did just shy of 400 damage. It is about 4x his normal damage (Which I am assuming is a Prepped basic attack). This comes at the cost of 60% speed for the loss of FP on his passive. For those of you keeping at home, I find FP on one more character highly questionable in its value.
Haha while fishing for the numbers on Preped physical I got hit with Magnified MT attack. It didn't quite OHKO but it really fucks your shit up. Of course I got some evades...
I will give the fight this though, for all the bullshit it can throw at you, it was the first one that I was able to beat first try with some effort and a touch of luck. Which in comparison to RNG it 8 times for a win previously, that is an improvement .
Sea BattleSo to finish it off because it is late, I jumped to level 8 and grabbed all tier 3 gear then saw the boss fight so jumped directly to that, fuck randoms.
THIS IS NOT WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR WHEN I SELECTED GIANT ENEMY CRAB.
He can crit for 400 damage. With Strength Down from Staggering Strike (Not the Stagger). Against Mirek for reference.
I think that is a bit questionable myself.
I don't know if Negation is limit only, but it sure as shit should be. I saw it just before he died and it caught me completely off guard. It was okay because Bartol OHKOed it afterwards.
Speak of. His Focus skill would suck if it wasn't functionally free. I don't think Staggering strike is supposed to give Str Down? I dunno, it does and I am fine with this.
I do have to say MT damage is done right with Giant Enemy Crab. Generally so far MT has been as strong or nearly as strong as ST damage and this is excessive given your highly limited expected outgoing healing in the game. You only have so much outgoing HP per turn and it is not ever going to keep up with 2HKO MT damage that we see in test. In my general opinion that much MT is way over the top.
Cut that shit out.
What you have done right is still have MT, but it is supplemental to a normal focused damage attack. It is still too strong of course, but it is the right direction. That is without mentioning that you gave him 2 other strong MT attacks, so the idea has is hardly completely realised, but it is a start. Blasting Blow should be your basic form of MT in this design. I definitely think there is room for a fight or some fights with more traditional full MT damage, but that shouldn't 2 moves every boss has.
Final ThoughtsOkay. There is a few things we really need to take on board with this. It is beta, so balance is a thing. Not all of the things I have said or complained about with regards to balance will make sense if things are balanced in other directions.
So lets start with the good things first. Heal block is freaking great. It does exactly what we wanted it to. It makes healing a meaningful choice and keeps things interesting. There needs to be some more supplemental healing to work with though. I am not sure if this goes to a weak heal that doesn't apply the block or buffing Regen up a bit, but in the demo there is scenarios where you are gambling when you heal early because someone has taken 1/3 damage but enemies are fully capable of bursting down 2/3 of your health before you get a turn again, let alone before you can even heal again. I suspect the problem will be alleviated with damage paradigm being cut drastically, but I still suspect we are going to be facing problems. There was consistently points where some of the RNG nature of fights could have been reduced with some kind of triage heal. Something to just get by on between big heal block inducing heals. This could be piss weak items (Things about as strong as Eirwin's First Aid now as a general item with a Regen with more kick to it would do the job quite well I think) or it could be expanding other party member's skillsets.
MP and the state it is in and the intended stateNow lets talk about something I haven't ranted about at notepad all night. MP at the moment is complete and total trash mechanic. It feels like a holdover from RPGs and we are just doing it because it is what you do. It is regenning after every fight and we are seeing it being necessary every fight. There was one fight that taxed MP supplies by itself and that was Legion.
Mirek is always having MP issues, that is cool.
Noemi on the other hand was running on fumes at the end of the fight for me. Noemi without MP is pretty terrible. I am not sure if it is optimal if she spams Analyse for FP or if she should be spamming basic physicals (which do give her 15 FP a turn). Then she can use Crescendo skills every few turns. She gets out of running out of MP the best.
For everyone else MP as it stands is horrible.
Erastus has a MP pool that is big enough to soak most of what you cast. Once he is spent, complete and total dead weight. As is he was already pretty close to this. Erastus fucking blows.
On the other side of the coin though we have Kasia, this is now going to turn into a rant about her rather than MP, but MP is part of it. Kasia gives no fucks about MP and it sure as shit isn't because she has a defend command that regens MP. I have already talked about how bad a state her things other than casting spells is. You basic physical out of basic need to do anything at all. At the end of Legion she had 200 MP left, hadn't used a FP based skill at all and had only used one move from her skillset. Kasia has absolutely nothing going for her other than Recover and that one skill is mandatory. This is a good thing because it is probably the best mechanic we have going in to this. The rest of the skillset? Completely worthless. She is a warm body that can heal on command. She is less useful as a character in battle than Marco from Radiant Historia and Marco is noted for being so good because anyone else can take his turn instead of him.
If you get rid of MP regenning each fight you are left with a terribly broken game. The MP scales start off big and the costs are high. Fights have way too much incoming damage to lean on basic physicals with people and some are straight up worthless at them (Erastus). You either need a strong MP Regen mechanic or dungeons are going to be grindy and bad. You need those MP for the boss fights. You need those MP pools to get through the fights. You probably have enough of a pool to get through 6 or so sets of randoms. That isn't enough to make the jump in levels we have posted for Sebrle Plantation. This will not go well. Making people play more effeciently guts your skillsets and guts the fun of the combat.
I don't have a good suggestion here than to completely scrap MP entirely. In chapter 1 you mostly have damage parity on skills anyway, there is very little that the trade off is high MP cost for big benefit. The moves that are not useful don't see a lack of use because of their MP cost (FP cost certainly does). I can't tell which system needs more work.
FocusFocus isn't working at all. Mechanically (outside of miss = 0 FP) it is working, but it is not even close to doing what we want it to. We have Wild Arms basic system and we are doing it worse than every single WA game. Including the first one. It is good for two characters in total, Noemi and Eirwin and those two because hey free damage is cool! Or a free resk free damage buff. I think NEB might kill me for suggesting it, but if you want these to be worth doing you need to either change the FP gain system, definitely want to untie it from anyone's passive (Like Mirek) and most importantly you want to be able to USE the skills before the fight is pretty much over.
Character balanceSlow characters suck worse than a clogged drain. Mirek and Erastus are both terrible. I don't hold Andy's optimism in bugfixes saving Mirek. He will be mandatory in some fights and otherwise is spot on for Fourth Character Slot that you cycle through whoever happens to be mandatory for the current puzzle or whoever has best damage that is left.
Fight balance Fights are massively overtuned nearly universally. The combat is entirely rocket tag at the moment. Heal Block honestly works better the longer a fight goes on. If your fight is over in 3 turns then you either were taking insurmountable damage or the blocking to your healing is meaningless. In the current state of combat everything is incredibly volatile. Big damage incoming, evasion is make or break, status hit rates on turn 1 force hit rates. Stuff like that. Slow down damage on both sides and you will see a much more decisive combat flow. I am not saying we need to make Xenosaga 2 or anything but I am most definitely saying you do not want to make Saga or Zeboyd games. There is room for the HP/MP regen of those games with more prolonged combat.
I will be frank, this is much tidier than the feedback I had written last night. You don't have the Authentic Grefter Playtester experience here, but I hope it is constructive.
