DISCUSSING ORIGINAL CLASSES

author=JosephSeraph

author=doomed2die
I was just saying that there are a lot of commonly seen archetypes that should be obvious beyond the warrior/mage/cleric trio that we should address.

Your classes basically end up being that, albeit mix'n matched.
For example paladin is just warrior + cleric. I see no innovation there. Also no need to adress overdone classes because they're already overdone. Unless, of course, you intend to change them in a meaningful way.

Yep, misinterpretations.


But on the point of the Paladin Class, I beg to differ. Paladins sacrifice offense for defense and they can tank on behalf of allies, not typical of the warrior class. On top of that, the versatility of a mixed class is meaningful. Often times, games would be excruciating without the backup of a "white mage" class. This averts that pain by giving you alternative options with, what I see as, meaningful gameplay differences.

Also, "attack" skill subsets generally re boring and frustrating. Attack is cool because it's reliable. Don't make it unreliable, just make the skillsets actually interesting.

Depends on execution really. I wouldn't nix an idea just because you've seen it poorly executed as opposed to well executed. It's really not that different from a game where "Attack" doesn't exist as a command only skills are available. The ideas I gave, were again, sort of just proving the point. There are other attack ideas available that I'm just not getting into.

I see your intentions but you're doing it wrong. These classes aren't fun and they're poorly balanced.
If the thief's higher SPD gives him actual extra turns then he might begin to become useful...

Again, interested in how. I mean, there are a lot of factors that go into balance too. Who are your enemies and their skillsets? How much do which stats affect what? It'd be pretty ahrd to say a concept is inherently overpowered (short of like invulnerability, instant death too easily, etc.)

True true; it should be an easily accessible, reliable skillset but the difficulty is the skills have to have meaningful differences too. But in games, often times, I'm either only using skills or only attacking with certain characters. To have a bit of a medium would be nice.

Lemme try something different. Instead of just giving you the end result, I'm going to try to describe (and try to remember) my thought process while designing a thief class that just went live in my MUD today. The game had a thief class already, but it was awful and so we recoded it from scratch. I say "we" because it was a group effort; there was a LOT of bouncing these ideas off of people, and it went through like twenty revisions before testing even started, and another ten after that.

So without further ado, here's my train of thought, followed by the final version of the class itself.



- Thief revolves around stealing, that's its whole gimmick
- Old version of steal is stupid as shit because there are over 1200 monsters and only like maybe 15 pieces of stealable equipment, and everything else just gives randomized healing items. A skill that only even has a chance to work 1% of the time is idiotic.
- Adding several hundred new pieces of equipment is a terrible solution. So can't add more stealable equipment, but can't leave it as is. Simplest remaining option is to remove it.
- So it needs to steal something, but not equipment. Stolen equipment can be gained another way. Will figure out where to put the equipment later; for now worry about the class.
- Players get two classes per character. Could thief be changed to steal resources and reagents used by other classes? MP, healing items, combat explosives, ninja stars? Make it totally a support class?
- It can steal healing items now. No one uses it. Would they if it could do it better? Probably. Some people are neurotic about saving gold like that.
- Better question: would that be enjoyable? Sitting there in combat stealing 20 flame scrolls or 10 samurai essences or 99 potions? That sounds an awful lot like FF8's Draw skill. I could make it faster, though. Use your attack skill 30 or 40 times, use steal once.
- OK. I'll design the class like that and test it a little. Oh my god this is awful, this is so boring. Even if you steal a thousand items at a time, it takes too long to get the item you actually wanted.
- The only way to keep this from being mind-numbingly boring is to give them fine control and have like 20 different steal abilities. And at that point it's simultaneously crazy overpowered and yet somehow still awful. Not to mention totally uninteresting! I'm sure it's potentially solvable, but I can't think of a good way after spending three weeks trying, so...

- START OVER LOL
- Not included in this post: an entire version of thief with like 40 abilities that revolved around temporarily stealing stats and buffs from the enemy and then dealing damage based on them. And a second version that started out similarly, but could go into an alternate mode where the steal skills got replaced by various aerial, fast, and stunning attacks.
- Let's try again. Thief stealing resources used by skills in other classes didn't work. Maybe it can steal resources used by its own skills, would that work? The stat-stealing version was kind of like that, but I'm thinking something more direct. Literal physical items that only thief can use.
- Would need two basic abilities, then, Steal and Use.
- So thief has its own set of resources now. A bunch of combat items that only thieves can use. Grenades and smoke bombs and elemental damage items and a healing item and a couple of buff items.
- Good buffs or weak buffs? We'll go with good buffs for now since they need a special resource and can't just cast them over and over.
- How many items can they hold? Don't want them storing up a ton of items. Want to create a rhythm. Three of each item?
- The combat items themselves aren't super interesting. It's not like they combo in together. They just do damage, or elemental damage, or damage + ailment. And I don't really want them to do more than that, I want to make other new skills to make the class interesting instead.
- If the items are all just situationally better or worse depending on the enemy rather than depending on the current state of the battle, the player's choices need to be severely limited, otherwise using items isn't interesting. Maybe just one of each item?
- If you can only carry one of each item then you will use it, steal, use it, steal. If steal sometimes tries to give you items you already are capped on, and the cap is only 1, then most of your steals will do nothing, which is obnoxious.
- OK then, what if the player can only hold one item, total? They would literally have to steal every other round. That would certainly prevent long stretches of doing nothing but stealing, I guess.
- Combat items would need to be REALLY STRONG to make up for all the things that can go wrong. They take two rounds, you can't choose your item, and you sometimes get a healing or buff item. You'll be dealing damage barely over a third of the time, and often of a resisted element or alongside a useless status.
- They'd have no control over their item usage at all then, right? Well, yeah, they would. They could steal again to replace their existing item. That's a hefty penalty though just to inflict damage+blind instead of damage+slow.
- But it's the illusion of choice that matters sometimes just as much as actual freedom. Even if using what they got is always the best option, they still have the capability to try again. And they'd at least have a little control - they could choose which item to take with them for round 1 of a boss battle. And if they don't need to heal or buff they will certainly steal again and try for a damage item instead instead of using the useless item.
- I think I actually like the idea of only being able to carry a single item.
- Still, this is a really really random class. That's unattractive no matter how powerful I make it. Wonder if I can mitigate that randomness with other skills while still leaving Steal as its bread and butter?

- MITIGATING THAT RANDOMNESS MODE ACTIVATE
- Give it a basic damage skill that can be used when an enemy is one hit from death, that'll help.
- Give it something powerful and reliable that's on a long cooldown. Possibly link the cooldown into stealing somehow instead of just X number of rounds?
- More skills on cooldowns as the player gains thief AP.
- Add some upgrades to Steal later on. Mug seems like an obvious one to include, for example.
- The stealable combat items include four single-target damage items of different elements, three area attack items that are about half as strong but sometimes also inflict a status effect, and one area attack item that doesn't inflict a status effect but is stronger than the other three. Then a party healing item, a standard phys resist party buff, and a standard magic resist party buff, which are the game's two strongest buffs.
- Make different enemies more likely to carry specific items. Like I said, we have over 1200 enemies, so it'll need to be automated by some pattern. Let's go with creature type, the most easily recognizable pattern to players.
- Elemental resistances and weaknesses are another way to automate it. Make fire-elemental enemies give you more fire damage items, aquatic enemies give you more water damage items? No, that's retarded. I mean, it makes sense from an in-universe perspective. But the items would be useless, since you have to use them the very next round, in the same battle. Why have an increased chance of getting items that are useless? It's better game design to do it the other way around. Fire-weak enemies give you more fire damage items. And then, similarly, make the player less likely to steal ailment-inflicting items from enemies immune to those ailments. This might all be invisible to the player, but even if they don't consciously notice it, they won't get as frustrated.
- Average damage per round of stealing and using items, if you use every item you steal, is X% higher than the starting damage skills of other physical jobs at the same level. (I can't remember now, but I figured it out at the time when I designed it.) Not much higher, but somewhat higher, and you're also getting buffs and heals and inflicting ailments. If you re-steal any time you don't get a damage item, you only deal like 10% more damage over time, but the immediate payoff against that particular enemy is obviously much bigger. The low average bonus over time is just because healing and buffing items are kinda rare.
- Uh hey me. I hate to break it to you but, you see those two defensive buffs you included? Lots of player strategies are built around the assumption that those two defensive buffs are up at all times. People typically recast them the next round after they go down, because if they don't, they tend to die. And they're really common, seven other classes have the same buffs, so if the player needs those buffs he's going to have access to them via his second class. People recast their defensive buffs in specific cycles, in fact, to make sure they don't have to spend too many rounds in a row with a buff worn off. Having an unreliable ability that randomly casts these defensive buffs when you wanted to attack is totally incompatible with the game's design, particularly boss fights and large parties. Whether I like that aspect of the game's design is irrelevant; I'm not the only designer, and the buff system's in place and not going anywhere.
- So to make the buffs better, I have to replace them with... worse buffs? That sounds totally illogical. And yet it's completely correct! The player never *needs* haste or hp regeneration, so if they get applied, it's a useful bonus instead of an obnoxious way of messing up your defensive rebuffing cycle.

- FLESHING OUT THE SKILL LIST MODE ACTIVATE
- OK. This class has a very clear high-level design now: it starts out highly random but highly powerful, and then it gains more and more reliable tools as the player levels it up, without ever really giving up that core randomness. Let's play with that.
- What's a way for a cooldown skill to work that plays in with stealing? It doesn't have to be a literal cooldown, it can be a skill that relies on a debuff that only one of the items inflicts, or it can --- OH.
- FF9 had this semi-cool skill called Thievery that did more damage the more times you'd successfully stolen from enemies. Eventually it got up to 9999 damage. In Dudesoft's FF forum RPG, the two of us reimagined it as resetting the power to zero each time you used it. It was great even though I never got to use it. I can build on that.
- Don't want the player to hoard steals forever until it does 2.14 billion damage. That's why I never used it in the forum RPG. Because if I didn't use it, it would be even better later; ad infinitum until the final boss. I'll add a cap. 10 charges max seems sane. That'll let it be used every few normal battles, and several times per boss. Often enough that you feel like you can safely use it instead of saving it, but rare enough that I can make it do kickass damage.
- How much damage? Hmm. Let's say when fully charged, about one and a quarter times as much damage as the strongest stolen combat item. That doesn't sound very kickass, but it is, because it only takes one round and never randomly gives you regen instead of working. This is now the strongest physical skill in the game, I think.
- This skill is pretty strong and needs to get unlocked pretty late in the class. I guess I need to make another cooldown skill for the player to get earlier, then.
- How about a second type of stealing on a cooldown? Something simpler, more predictable.
- Most obvious second type of thing to steal is money, of course. That's not much of a damage skill, though. I guess there need to be buyable throwable items, or something? Ugh, that sucks, but I don't know what else to do instead. What, are you going to throw the money back at the enemy to deal damage? Come on.
- ...
- Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what you're going to do. You're going to steal money, and then have the extremely painful choice of either keeping the money or immediately spending it to deal massive damage.
- The amount of damage should be based on the amount you stole. Stronger enemies have more money, so you deal more damage when you fight more dangerous enemies. Seems legit.
- OH GOD THIS DAMAGE FORMULA, I WANT TO KILL MYSELF, THIS EQUATION IS SIX LINES LONG. End result: stealing gold from an enemy and then throwing it back at the same enemy deals about half that enemy's expected max hp. Some enemies have more or less max hp than usual, though.
- Can only steal gold once per enemy. But stealing gold needs a time-based cooldown too, ugh. Enemies die too fast for once-per-enemy to be a good enough limit on its own. 30 seconds is enough I guess.
- Hmm, the basic physical "finisher" skill that I wanted to add has the potential to be so much simpler than the rest of the class that no one ever uses anything else. Should I give it a cooldown?
- Better idea: make it deal highly random damage. Hahahah. It can be unlocked as soon as you get the class, then. Let's build on the class's obnoxious start-out-as-random motif. Call it Lucky Strike or something. Just make sure it does less damage on average than steal does on average if you use every combat item you get and re-steal any time you get a healing or buff item (which is the max dps method of using steal).
- Might as well add a third cooldown skill, for variety. Another steal, maybe? Is there anything sane left to steal? I don't want to steal stats or exp, I want a damage skill here, this is ultimately a damage class.
- Huh, I could go back and steal MP, like my original design. It was dumb because the class doesn't use MP, but... what if it did?
- Nah, making the other skills cost MP doesn't help anything. The class has enough handicaps already, and MP isn't a handicap that fits thief thematically.
- The player's second class might use mp, but then thief still needs to do something with it, or the skill feels flat. Something like the gold-tossing skill, maybe?
- MP burn, exactly like gold toss but with mp? Spend the mp you stole to deal damage. Similar cooldown.
- Something is missing from that idea. It's just more of the same. Can I make it more different? And possibly also make it so the player actually gets to keep the MP?
- Keep the MP you stole, but deal damage based on how much you stole, then.
- How is the amount you steal determined? Stealing more from higher level enemies doesn't make sense in this case. Base it on agility maybe? Thief is an agility class.
- Hmm, would be sensible if you couldn't steal any more than you've spent. That would create a built-in cooldown, because you have to use MP before stealing it.
- Skill would be reliant on the character having a magic-using class as their second class, but that's okay. Synergy! It's only one of the class's skills, everything else can be used by any thief.
- The passive upgrades to steal, then. First up: Mug. Does damage when you steal.
- The damage should probably be pretty light. Want to make sure stealing is still a lead-in to using the stolen item, not an end unto itself.
- Instead of replacing Steal with this skill, it could be a passive upgrade to all three types of steals: items, gold, and mp. Once you learn it, all three deal damage in addition to their previous effects. I like that. Keeps the job's identity from straying too far. You don't lose your old skills, they just get better. It does mean that Mug needs to be learned after all the steal skills though.
- Another upgrade. How about something to make stealing faster? An upgrade that makes stolen items get automatically used as soon as they're stolen?
- Hrm. That's way too powerful. That's double damage. Give it a random chance to activate? ARGH NO, BAD LOCKEZ, NO MORE RANDOMNESS
- Perhaps you have to equip the skill in one of your limited support skill slots? Most of the support skills that go in those slots are useful to a wide variety of players, though. I don't like the idea of one that only affects a single ability.
- Trash the insta-steal-use-combo idea for now then. Look at other options for steal upgrades. How about something that lets you use the item two or three times before you have to steal again?
- I actually considered that one really hard and almost did it. In the end though, I decided that if I thought using an item several times before stealing again were acceptable design, I should do it from the get-go, not as an upgrade. And I didn't want to do that. So I tossed the idea.
- Try a third time. Possibly something that directly removes randomness? What if all three of the steal skills had a failure chance, and there were an upgrade that removed it? Ahahahahahaha oh my god I'm going to add a failure chance to steal. This is awful and hilarious. It fits perfectly though. Absurdly random at first, randomness disappears later when you learn the upgrade.
- Maybe a party buff. The job is extremely unfriendly to parties right now compared to most other offensive jobs, so it'd help. Although I said I didn't want to make the job get more random as it went on, I can't help myself because it fits too perfectly: improve the party's crit and evade chances. Fortunately, that's adding a random chance for things to go better than expected, not a random chance for things to go worse than expected. So it should be fine, and it feels very much in tune with the class.
- Actually. You know what? Let's combine those two skills into a single skill. A party buff that improves evade, improves crit rate, and makes steal skills never fail. Call it Luck, I guess, since I'm super original and great at naming things (clearly not). Like Mug, it'll need to be learned after all the steal skills.
- Might as well give them a combat-ending skill. It's a neat utility that two other classes already have, and it doesn't directly fit with the whole "random mega damage" thing but it fits okay with the basic generic idea of a thief and we do need to give it to a third class. I like to spread out these utilities so that multiple classes have access to them, after all, albeit sometimes in slightly different ways. In this case I think I'll make it take the entire party out of the battle instead of just the user.

- I AM DONE
- Oh wait I'm not done, some of these things don't work in testing quite the way I imagined them.
- The combat-ending skill can easily reach 100% success chance if there's only one enemy, thanks to the formula being dumb. This means the player can attack, end combat, heal to full, repeat forever, and have a 0% chance of ever dying to anything. And it works against every enemy in the game.
- Let's fix that, I guess. I don't want to make any enemies immune to it, so I guess I'll change the formula so it never hits a 100% chance? Though it should be able to get pretty close. Like 90% or higher if your agility is high enough.
- Also add a cooldown to it, to prevent the abuse situation mentioned above.
- I had the mp burn and half of the items set as agility-based magical damage, and the rest of the skills set as agility-based physical damage. The idea was to give the player a reason to collect and wear both magical and physical gear while still making the job only really good for agility-based characters. In practice it had a major problematic side-effect: it was better to just stack physical attack power and then never use or even bother learning the mp blast. So I ended up changing all the skills to physical damage.
- Stealing gold is nuts. Need to keep players from just going to the moon at level 1, stealing 50000 gold from a level 150 enemy, and then fleeing or even just dying and losing half of it. Sigh. Guess it needs a cap. What's the strongest enemy you could reasonably fight and kill? One and a half times your level or so, I guess? No one fights higher than one and a quarter times their level, but let's allow up to one and a half to encourage players to live on the edge a little more.
- Can only steal gold once per enemy. But it didn't occur to me that you can throw gold TWICE per boss, if you come into the fight with gold already stolen. That won't come anywhere near killing any bosses, but it'll take most of them instantly down to like 40%, which is too much. Needs a nerf so it only brings them down to like 70%. Preferably without making it any weaker on normal enemies... somehow.
- So I redo the gold toss damage formula. Again. It's like five hundred pages of algebra now, thanks to the fact that gold actually gets scaled based on the player's level compared to the enemy's level. All of my hate. All of it.
- Blasting the enemy with stolen mp is shitty and never gets used. Even with healing magic as your second class, you can only use it like once every ten minutes. I guess that means the damage needs to be buffed, since it was only slightly better than tossing a stolen item.
- Oh hey, 80 levels later, blasting the enemy with stolen mp is ridiculously fantastic and mega crazy overpowered against bosses, because you're healing two out of three rounds, instead of once every few battles. Also because the formula is whack: it gains double influence from agility since stealing 400 MP makes it do 400% of a normal attack... but the amount of MP you can steal and the damage of your normal attack are both based on your agility.
- So yeah. This formula is totally whack and isn't going to work at all. Start over from scratch. Nine attempts at different formulas later, it's kind of working. It ends up semi-not-really-okay in normal battles and good in bosses. I don't know why it didn't occur to me from the get-go that the skill would be best against bosses. That's where you use your MP at full speed, right? No matter whether you're using it for offense or defense, the boss is where you go all out. So of COURSE you steal MP way more often in boss fights.
- The success rate of steal was agility-based at first, then I made it level-based. But ultimately, I realized I don't want to discourage people from fighting things that are challenging. The thief is using an attack every other round against normal enemies, but only every third or fourth round against hard enemies? Lame. Any other class could attack every round. Both the level-based and agility-based success rates were unnecessarily reducing thief damage to a lower and lower fraction of other classes' damage, the stronger the enemy was. So the steal success rates all got changed to a flat 75%.
- Use needs a new name, because this is a text-based game, and "use" is the command to use a skill. So you're typing "use use". We'll go with Toss instead, I guess.
- The random-damage physical attack skill, Lucky Strike, is so bad. It's okay at first and then it gets worse and worse as you level up. Or, well, to be more precise, the player gets more and more better options. So I guess let's make the luck buff also improve this skill. By the time you can learn the luck buff, Lucky Strike needs the improvement badly.


END RESULT!

Thief is an agility-based job. Thieves use their quick reflexes and wit to steal from enemies and perform tricky attacks with the things they've stolen. While the job starts out with randomized abilities that are difficult to control, players get more and more reliable tools as they gain job levels as a Thief. Thief abilities use agility to calculate attack power, even when wielding a strength-based weapon like a sword.

-Job level 1-
Steal: Steals a combat item from the enemy. Can carry only one at a time. Any item can be stolen from any enemy, but enemies are more likely to carry certain items based on various creature properties. 25% chance of failure unless Luck status is active.
Toss: Uses the item you stole with Steal, expending it. There are four single target physical damage items, four area physical damage items, one area heal, one area haste, and one area regen. The single-target ones are different elements. One of the area attack items is stronger than the other three; the other three inflict blind, silence, and def-down. The damage items do major damage.
Lucky Strike: Deals highly random physical damage to an enemy. Damage is pretty low on average. Bonus damage if Luck status is active.
Steal Equipment: Ugggggggh. I ended up just leaving the old equipment-stealing system as-is and moving it to a seperate ability, instead of recoding it to be decent. Equipment stealing will be recoded later, but that's too big a project to do simultaneously with the job recode.
Flee: Ends combat between all allies and all enemies. Chance of failure based on your speed compared to the enemy's. Higher chance of failure when fighting more enemies at a time. 90 second cooldown.
Evade: Equippable skill that goes in your counterattack skill slot (players can equip one counterattack at a time). Increases chance of evading attacks. More effective with higher agility.

-Job level 10-
Steal Coins: Steals 20% of the target's money. Since higher level enemies have more gold, you'll steal more gold from them. Once per enemy. 30 second cooldown. 25% chance of failure unless Luck status is active.
Coin Toss: Expends the coins you stole the last time you used Steal Coins to deal damage to one enemy based on the gold stolen. Deals about half of a normal enemy's expected max hp, which is about 15-20% of most bosses' max hp.

-Job level 14-
Pilfer MP: Steal MP from an enemy. The amount stolen is about half of your agility. Not all enemies have MP, but the vast majority of them do. 25% chance of failure unless Luck status is active.
MP Burn: Deals physical damage to one enemy based on the amount of MP you stole with Pilfer MP. Scaled so that, at full power, it's usually about 40% stronger than tossing one of the single-target stealable damage items (which are the strongest ones). Once you use MP Burn once, you can't use it again until you Pilfer MP again. Since you can't steal more MP than you're missing, there's a built-in cooldown while you spend MP. The cooldown ends up being much shorter on bosses, since you spend more MP on them.

-Job level 18-
Luck: Party buff. Improves critical strike chance and evade chance. Also removes the failure chance from Steal, Steal Gold and Pilfer MP, and greatly increases the damage of Lucky Strike. Like 99% of buffs, this persists between battles and can be cast outside of battle, so it's essentially a permanent passive upgrade as long as you take one round to recast it every minute and a half or so. Doesn't affect Steal Equipment because I'm not touching Steal Equipment with a ten-foot pole at this point if I can help it.

-Job level 21-
Mug: Passive effect; permanently active once learned. Causes Steal, Steal Gold and Pilfer MP to also deal a small amount of physical damage after being used. Works even if the steal is unsuccessful (though it shouldn't ever be unsuccessful if you're keeping Luck status active). Doesn't affect Steal Equipment because honestly if an enemy has equipment to steal you probably don't want to hurt it.

-Job level 23-
Thievery: Deals damage based on how many times you've successfully stolen since the last time you used Thievery. Maximum of 10 charges. Fully charged, it does about 125% as much damage as tossing the strongest stealable item. While that's admittedly a little weaker than MP Burn, Thievery only takes one round to use while MP Burn can't be used unless you spend a round using Pilfer MP first.

Change the command STEAL to OVERTHINKING. Got it.

(Also, I got about 1/3rd to 1/2 through, and thought... steal is basically a gamble, and that there is a certain inherent thrill to gambling? There seems to be an overly analytical assessment of this skill)

Also also, you seem to be perplexed by the randomness of the skill. Why not take out the randomness by giving a player a list of things he can steal, and a rough chance of the steal being successful? Also also also, if I steal that knight's sword, I expect his damage to drop.

i was thinking that a thief with a Scan ability wouldn't be remiss... as long as it also told you items held by baddie. or even Scan being built into Steal so that the turn (at least the first one) isnt completely wasted if he misses the steal.

Kill 200 slugs to get a rare hamburger recipe

How do these look? They're fairly early starts at fleshing out a couple of ideas I have in mind for my current project.

The Enchantress:
Roles:

• Weapon skills augmented by self-buffs are good at quickly dispatching important targets, and effective at dispatching tough enemies.
• Enchantments are excellent at protecting the enchantress and her allies, and also helpful for neutralising priority enemies early on.

Skill Examples:

• Aegis: A potent magical shield. Caps incoming damage, but shatters under extraordinarily powerful attacks.
• Abjuration: Sequesters an enemy or an ally for two rounds.

Here, I'm assuming that an 'enchantress' is a female who crafts enchantments, rather than the D&D definition. I know that abjuration will be all kinds of fun to balance, but it's at least more interesting than a regular stun effect.

The Songstress:
Roles:

• Weapon skills augmented by self-buffs are good at dispatching multiple opponents
• Can use Spell-songs to hinder opponents and aid allies.

Skill Examples:

• Fury: Inspires rage in the songstress, increasing her damage and allowing her to rampage.
• Rampage: Triggered by successful weapon attacks while under the effects of fury. Hits random enemies.
• Majesty: A defensive song. Enemies are awed, causing them to hesitate in their actions. Allies are emboldened, and take less damage when attacked.

The 'songs' here are, for the most part, instant casts with a short duration. They aren't really songs in their own right, just elements that can be woven into a song.

I've never played Final Fantasy X-2, so I don't really know what its interpretation of a 'songstress' was like.