GUILD MASTER - RPG SIMULATOR TOURNAMENT - PRELIMINARIES

Hola. I've been prototyping a game I've been calling Guild Master and need your help bug and balance testing the combat simulation. To do so, I'm going to run some kind of informal forum tournament where users create a party and I can toss them into the simulator to see how they fare. However, before I actually setup a proper tournament I want to run some exhibitions to get the major balance issues and bugs out of the way. This also gives you a chance to familiarize yourself a bit with party creation and combat mechanics.

Your role is to assemble a party of four heroes. Select their class, abilities, and equipment. I will then throw them against another user's party where they will auto-battle until only one side is alive or a stalemate has been reached.

Each hero you create has four abilities. Abilities may have an offensive or supportive package, or both. Because battle is conducted automatically, each ability has a type of targeting behavior. For example, "Low HP" will select an entity with the lowest health percentage. The four ability types are below, and a hero may only equip one of each type:

(click links for full listing of abilities)

Active Abilities:
Active abilities are the default action and generate AP each time they are used. Some abilities deal lots of damage but generate little AP, while others deal little damage and generate much AP.

Expensive Abilities:
Expensive abilities are the priority action but can only be used at full AP. Upon use, AP is reset to zero.

Reactive Abilities:
Reactive abilities are triggered whenever an actor is the victim of a hostile action. Some reactives generate AP for the user, while others will counterattack the enemy.

Passive Abilities:
Passive abilities are always on. Their effects are quite varied, ranging from straight stat boosts to applying bleed conditions to every attack.

Ability Fields:

(a)Soulsteal	(b)72 AP	(c)0 MaxAP
(d)Scope	(e)Target	(f)Power	(g)Hits	(h)Type	(i)Element	(j)Inflict	(k)Remove	(l)AP	(m)MaxAP
Enemy	Any	100%	1	Magical	Chaos	none	Shield	0	0
Ally	Self	50%	1	Magical	None	none	none	0	0

(n)Chaos magic that steals HP.

(a) Ability name.
(b) Amount of AP generated for the actor.
(c) Modification to the actor's MaxAP. Many healing expensives increase the actor's Max AP to prevent heal spam.
(d) Scope identifies which party it selects targets from.
(e) Target specifies how the ability behaves. A Low Res ability will target the enemy with the lowest Resist, while Bless will target the enemy with the most blessings.
(f) Power is how strong the ability is, expressed as a percentage.
(g) The number of hits an ability delivers. Multi-hitting abilities can penetrate shields more easily or apply multiple status conditions.
(h) Physical abilities scale with Attack while Magical abilities scale with Magic.
(i) Elemental affinity of the ability. Abilities with no affinity inherit elemental properties from weapons.
(j) Status conditions added to the target.
(k) Status conditions removed from the target. Blessings or Afflictions include all conditions of that type.
(l) Modification to the target's AP. Reducing AP delays expensive usage.
(m) Modification to the target's MaxAP, permanently making expensives more difficult to use.
(n) A crappy description of the ability. These need to be redone.

Elements
There are two elemental wheels. If an element is strong against the armor element of its target, damage will be increased to 150%. If it is weak against an armor element, it will be decreased to 67%. Like elements deal full damage: Fight fire with fire, as they say.

Fire	strong vs.	Nature
Nature	strong vs.	Water
Water	strong vs.	Fire

Chaos	strong vs.	Holy
Holy	strong vs.	Death
Death	strong vs.	Chaos

Equipment
I have filled out some sample equipment to choose from. If you have a request that isn't in the list, just describe the equipment type (mighty, medium, etc), general stat composition (high attack, medium defense, etc), and element.

Equipment List

Classes

As stated earlier, each hero has a character class. Below are the available classes with their respective Lv25 values. These status are probably going to change. Each class can only equip certain equipment types. All classes have a base MaxAP value of 360. This number was chosen because it is highly divisible by many factors, so that I can define abilities as "3 hits to charge up an expensive."


Statistics
HP: Health points. You know how they work.
AP: At full AP, a hero uses their expensive ability. Lower Max AP is better.
Att: Attack determines damage dealt by physical abilities.
Mag: Magic determines damage dealt by magical abilities.
Def: Defense reduces physical damage.
Res: Resist reduces magical damage.
Agi: Agility determines turn order and hit/dodge chance.

Formulas:
Damage = ability.Power * Modifier * (100 / (25 + Mitigation))
Such that modifier is an actor's Attack or Magic, and Mitigation is target Defense or Resist.

Healing = ability.Power * actor.Magic * (100 / (95 + (actor.Lvl * 20))

Hit Chance = (100 * actor.Agility) / (actor.Agility + target.Agility) + 25
Such that if an actor and target have the same agility, then the ability has a 75% chance to connect.

Status Conditions
Status conditions come in three flavors: Blessings, Afflictions, and Taunts. Most status conditions stack, with the exception of Shield and Barrier. If an ability hits multiple times, then it applies an associated condition multiple times. Conditions tick at the end of an actor's action rather than at the beginning or end of a combat turn.

Blessings
Regen: Regenerates HP. Regen power is 20% (see healing formula) and scales with Magic. Duration: 3
Barrier: Reduces direct damage received to 25%. Duration: 2
Shield: Reduces direct damage received to 0. All direct damage abilities dispel Shield. Duration: 2
Toughness: Increases Defense by (actor.Level * 3). Duration: 3
Willpower: Increases Resist by (actor.Level * 3). Duration: 3
Haste: Increases Agility by (actor.Level * 3). Duration: 3

Afflictions
Poison: Damages HP. Poison power is 20% and scales with Magic. Duration: 3
Wound: Reduces all healing to 75% per application. Duration: 4
Decay: Reduces Defense by (actor.Level * 3). Duration: 3
Flay: Reduces Resist by (actor.Level * 3). Duration: 3
Slow: Reduces Agility by (actor.Level * 3). Duration: 3
Stun: Prevents all action. Duration: 2

Other
Bleed: Damages HP. Bleed power is 5% and scales with Attack. Duration: 6

Taunts
Taunted: Actor will only attack targets affected by Taunting. Duration: 3
Taunting: Actor becomes a priority target for those affected by Taunted. Duration: 3

Rambling
Most of the values have been arbitrarily chosen and very little balance testing has been done, so I imagine many overpowered abilities and load-outs will emerge. For now, come up with a party of four heroes. Go through the ability links above (which is formatted poorly but will have to do for now). Think about the hero's skillset and party make-up holistically. I will pastebin the combat log so you can see how it plays out. Keep in mind the log is formatted for debugging and not player consumption yet, though.

Feel free to ask questions while I expand the documentation. Ability descriptions in particular are woeful, as they're only informational enough so that I don't forget what that ability does. They'll improve once abilities aren't in flux as much. Also, documentation on how stats and damage equations work, etc.

Hero Form Example (need four heroes per party):

Team: Necropolis

Name: Marcus (must be 12 or fewer letters, no numbers or symbols)
Class: Gladiator
Active: Flurry
Expensive: Antagonize
Reactive: Flail
Passive: Bloodbath
Weapon: Atlas
Armor: Crescent

If it wasn't clear, you can only have one of each ability type per hero.

Try again, Sei. Magus has two reactives and no expensive. Riftlord has two actives, two reactives, and no passive or expensive abilities. Paladin has two actives and no expensive. Freelancer is correct, however. Also, give them a name.

I may add an online database so people can create heroes via drop-down menus. Depends on how lazy I am. I will create a character sheet in the interim and fill out my own party.

Jude's TMNT vs Sei's Pokemon

Here is the first combat log, in which Sei's team totally trounced mine. Combat logging is still unoptimized for players and too verbose, but getting around to that is low priority. I also plan to implement post-combat summaries to easily identify types of damage dealt, healing, healing mitigation, number of blessings/afflictions, etc. That way, when players lose they can rapidly identify, "Oh, there's a lot of fire damage in play so I can counter that with water-affinity armor."

Results for CAVE_DOG's Cavedogs vs Sei's Pokemon have been simulated. Cavedogs win. Raw combat log is here:

Cavedogs vs Pokemon

Your Daryl build highlighted an oddity with Metabolize that has now been fixed.

You may notice that the stats seem different. I changed many things last night and haven't updated the post or ability pages to reflect them yet. Soon.

author=CAVE_DOG_IS_BACK
not quite sure how battle mechanics work but SEE IF YOU CAN GUESS WHAT ARCHETYPE EACH PERSON FALLS INTO!! also I don't have any idea if decreasing AP with weapons is good or not.

It is good. With two -45 MaxAP items equipped you require one fewer turn for a 90 AP ability to activate an expensive ability. I realize I should annotate the weapon/armor charts to correctly reflect that it's a modification to MaxAP and not AP generation.