QUESTOIN ON CLASSES AND BOSSES

I'm definitely not a fan of making statuses randomly work on some enemies but not others, especially with no way to tell without wasting turns. The way I'm handling this in my current project is to make all status durations very short so that you can't just lock enemies down, bosses or otherwise. And then I also gave them cooldowns instead of failure chances. Mostt statuses shouldn't just result in you winning if they hit, that's boring and anticlimactic as you said. And if your normal battles are short enough that the player doesn't need to use ailments in them anyway, you should be designing all your ailements primarily for use on bosses.

Another method I like, in games where ailments work more like FF (powerful and long but can fail), is to give minions to almost every boss, or sometimes body parts. Then you can make sure the main target is immune but some of the targets can be hit by every ailment.

Yeah, I'm not sure it'd add anything to let everyone be the same. The player would experience fewer options, not more, since once they found something that worked they could do it with everyone, probably. (Depends on the player, but it's a real possibility.)

Making almost all your ailment skills deal damage is a good start. That means your ailments are more useful in normal battles, so you need to be sure not to mess that up too bad when finding ways to make them not OP against bosses. Making enemies or bosses immune to random ailments is bad communication though. Shorter will probably work fine, as would some other options. Low hitrate is usually hard to balance well...

Yeah, I'm not sure it'd add anything to let everyone be the same. The player would experience fewer options, not more, since once they found something that worked they could do it with everyone, probably. (Depends on the player, but it's a real possibility.)

Making almost all your ailment skills deal damage is a good start. That means your ailments are more useful in normal battles, so you need to be sure not to mess that up too bad when finding ways to make them not OP against bosses. Making enemies or bosses immune to random ailments is bad communication though. Shorter will probably work fine, as would some other options. Low hitrate is usually hard to balance well...

That's a pretty good Gourd impression, LockeZ, but I don't think we can fit all that in your user title.

EDIT: Okay, actually looking at the topic... I'll agree with what Treason and Locke said. Randomized all-or-nothing status conditions can be extremely frustrating if your really need that incapacitation to survive (maybe you're under-leveled or the boss is designed to be unbeatable without immobilizing it), which basically means that whether you live or die is up to chance.

I definitely prefer characters to not be able to be built identically to each other, as I feel it kinda defeats the purpose of having different characters.

Man. I don't even know how I did a quadruple post. I'm not even mad, that's just impressive.

Remember that the statuses used by the player and the ones used by enemies don't have to all be the same.

Sleep status, which paralyzes a character but breaks if they're attacked, is really tactically interesting if used on enemies - it gives you some crowd control but in a way that limits your strategies. But when used against the player, it's just a paralyze spell that can randomly be way shorter or way longer duration than normal.

Your way of handling the classes sounds fine. It makes the choice more of a specialization than a totally different setup, so the player can switch to specializing in whichever spells they are primarily needing/using/enjoying.

A status that triples all MP costs is the other way around. When used against the player, it significantly changes how you play without actually locking you down. When used against an enemy, it has no effect, except perhaps making it harder to design enemy AI.

author=Billiumw
Yo, just want to say that i love perusing this forum... a lot of insightful ideas from a lot of people... Now as for why I'm here...
I've been debating a class system in my head... In it there are 15 classes and each person has access to three different classes... ex, my holy character can be a paladin, healer, or crusader, (a holy mage)... Each class has 7-9 skills they spend JP to unlock, and that only that class can use. Would it make more sense for me to keep three classes to a person, or more fun for the player if I unlock all 15 for them to use?

Keep the 3 classes to a person. That makes the character more individual. Much better than "Everyone can learn everything". And too much choice is actually a bad thing for quite some players (hard to decide, requires guides to optimize, etc.).

Also, in regards to boss battles, what do you think about debuffs and statuses on them. Have like one or two work on each boss, pertaining to the gimmick, or have them have a lower chance to work on the boss? Obviously it would be anticlimatic to freeze a boss continually while you wail on him, but maybe having freeze work 15 % of the time? How have you guys approached this?

I'm not really a big fan of status spell with low success chance. Success chance should always be at least 80% or else it feels like a waste. Better make it 100%. Bosses do NOT need to be immune to status changes, it depends on how well you design the boss and the spells. For example I could make an instant death spell that always works but give it the requirement "Target needs to have less than 50% HP left". I could make it work on a boss and just give the boss a bit more HP. Then it's just a valid tactic to get him down to 49% and then finish him off with the spell.
Also take a 100% success sleep spell. You don't have to counter this with resistances, but for example also could do it so that the boss spawns minions when it can't act.

Generally, you can also reduce the duration greatly, rather than the success chance. For example all status changes have 100% success on both normal monsters and bosses but their effect is 30 seconds on normal monsters but only 6 seconds on bosses.

What is the best balance depends on each boss individually.

It bears mentioning that another way to balance out lower status success rates is by giving multiple party members access to those status problems. If a Sleep status only has a 50% chance of success, but two party members have skills that inflict it, their chances of putting the enemy to Sleep are greatly increased if they both use it. Likewise, if a status skill hits an entire group of enemies, you can get away with decreased rates since some will get inflicted while others won't. You should weigh the effects of the status problems carefully and decide the rate based on that.