DEALING WITH POISON

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As a developer, how do you handle your Poison condition? Or your Bleed/Burn/Disease/whatever other damage over time condi.

By default in VX Ace, it's -10% HP a turn. This isn't very useful against a standard enemy that dies in a few turns, but is incredibly useful against a boss. A pretty common tactic is to make bosses immune to poison, which makes the whole thing pretty worthless.

So how do you make a Poison skill that's worthwhile, yet balanced?
I like to make Poison deal 25% HP damage and go away after battle. It makes it a real threat in games where much happens in few turns, but might be too much in more slow paced games where heroes and monsters chirp away at eachother in preparation and buffing.

Also, to beat the fact that poison might be too strong on bosses, instead of making them immume I like to make poison spells deal 2 kinds of poisons: Mob poison and boss poison. Mobs are immune to boss poison and vice versa! So you can still have poison being powerful, but not overpowered, against bosses. I do the same with HP% abilities, cutting them in power, but still allowing them to be a very powerful option :)
I think poison would become better balanced if the damage was given an algorithm like a normal attack or a skill. Flat percentages are impossible to balance and will wreck bosses unchecked, but if poison did DOT with an algorithm, then it could easily be used against bosses without too much worry.

I don't think I've seen this done, but I'm sure it's possible.
The way I made it work for my game is to have damaging skills with a high chance to inflict Bleed/Burn. These skills are a bit weaker than one without secondary effect, but Bleed inflicts 1%+1HP damage per turn with a chance to shake it off every turn (higher chance when struck with physical damage). Considering every time a character moves counts as a turn, Bleed/Burn can often deal a significant amount of damage if it manages to stay on the target for a while, but it's unlikely to stay on for so long that it could be considered overpowered. The effect seems to be just powerful enough to make an impact, but not be so strong that it can be used as a reliable way of easily taking down bosses.
But even if these skills fail to inflict the condition, or if the condition wears off very quickly, they still did a good amount of base damage, so it never feels like you wasted a turn on nothing or that they're pointless to use on regular enemies.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
This is a problem with status effects in general. If enemies die in two or three hits, there's no reason to do anything to them except direct damage.

I typically solve this by making enemies take more like eight to twelve hits to kill. Then damage-over-time effects, as well as other status effects, are legitimately useful. It doesn't make any sense to me to make normal enemies die so fast that most of your skills are pointless against them. They should be training the player for the boss battles, and they should also be interesting and have a flow and pace, not just be a race to get the battle over with ASAP.

In general I don't really like or understand the point of giving the player skills that deal damage equal to a percent of the target's max HP. Unless all your enemies including bosses take similar numbers of hits to kill, you're going to end up with it being either really useless or really overpowered against some enemies. You either have to balance it around normal battles, which makes it so ridonkadonk in boss fights that you have to make them immune/resistant, or you have to balance it around boss fights, which makes it useless the other 90% of the game. I do understand the point of giving enemies these skills sometimes, but... not players.
I'd love to be able to give poison something like "20% HP loss per turn / max of 200", for example. That way it still does a considerable amount of damage to normal enemies, and it could be worthwhile, but not OP, to use it on bosses. Then you could have "Poison II" which is also 20% but caps at...say, 500. Venom, etc.
As mentioned before, I like it when poison deals stat scaling damage over time rather than a certain percentage - however, this does require scripting. In fact, the statscaled poison damage in Etrian Odyssey can end up oneshotting your characters!
Another idea is to make poison resistance not affect the likelyhood of it being inflicted, but rather change the percentage of health you lose per turn.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
Skie Fortress
I think poison would become better balanced if the damage was given an algorithm like a normal attack or a skill. Flat percentages are impossible to balance and will wreck bosses unchecked, but if poison did DOT with an algorithm, then it could easily be used against bosses without too much worry.

I don't think I've seen this done, but I'm sure it's possible.


this is how i do it in all of my games.

differnt %s for mobs vs bosses works too, or you could just be like FF Record Keeper and make it a boss-oriented status effect. it's 3% damage every few seconds, which is pretty useful in that game. you have no reason to use it on mooks but sometimes that's okay! one of the most recent bosses in the game's best strategy is inflicting Poison and Sleep then taking a break.
author=JosephSeraph
Also, to beat the fact that poison might be too strong on bosses, instead of making them immume I like to make poison spells deal 2 kinds of poisons: Mob poison and boss poison. Mobs are immune to boss poison and vice versa! So you can still have poison being powerful, but not overpowered, against bosses. I do the same with HP% abilities, cutting them in power, but still allowing them to be a very powerful option :)


I've been having success with a similar idea. For each state, enemies have one of four levels of resistance: none, minor, major, immune. The resistance levels affect how many turns the state lasts. This way, states can be fine tuned on a per encounter basis.


author=Craze
Skie Fortress
I think poison would become better balanced if the damage was given an algorithm like a normal attack or a skill. Flat percentages are impossible to balance and will wreck bosses unchecked, but if poison did DOT with an algorithm, then it could easily be used against bosses without too much worry.

I don't think I've seen this done, but I'm sure it's possible.
this is how i do it in all of my games.


Do you have a script for something like this? I've been considering implementating a similar system, inspired by the condition damage stat in Guild Wars 2.
BizarreMonkey
I'll never change. "Me" is better than your opinion, dummy!
1625
I have two types, chip poisons, such as burn, frostbite which do 1% elemental damage over a turn, which nothing is immune to (and can stack with different elements) and then the big poison, which most bosses are immune to, that chips 20% or so HP off each turn.

In the newest version of my game I've yet to release, Zardari will be able to be killed entirely by players, (no more deus ex machina horseshit) in total you can chip off 6% of his hp per turn, which is good because uh...

Yeah.
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
Yeah, the best way to handle any DOT is to make it "attack" the victim over time, as if the source of the poison was using an attack skill.

Then you can have, say, "Fire" which has 100 power and "Burning" which has 250 power, but only over its full duration. It creates interesting ways to optimize your damage--Burning is a damage increase over Fire whenever the enemy isn't already Burning. If you know you're not going to be attacking in a few turns (say, a large AoE attack is coming and you'll be healing instead), you might refresh Burning early as a damage increase.

It introduces an element of skill.
Might be interesting to make it work like venom or poison in real life: the weaker (or smaller, lighter) the enemy, the more damage it incurs.
oops I didn't mean to actually post ignore me plz
I changed states so they have an internal state instead of the garbage slapdash implementation where they are entirely static. This way an instance of a state like poison can determine its own damage when its applied. Maybe it'll look at the stat of whoever applied it vs the defense of the victim, or the damage the victim took from the last action, or maybe just current HP or w/e. Then every tick / turn the state calculate the damage it'll deal or change its own state for a DoT that deals increasing/decreasing damage over time.

The main idea behind this was to get a poison or similar DoT state that is stat dependent on the user. You attack with your serrated sword and did 100 damage and inflicted bleed which will deal 50% of that 100 damage for the next 3 turns for example. It is more complicated to set up and maintain though (and a few other pitfalls that I never resolved).
Rhyme
Tear Harvester Rhyme
7582
In my games, bosses have a special tag that will cause any percentile HP damage or healing to be scaled down - for Substar and Lunatic Dream specifically, it's 3.5% of the boss's actual HP value (10% damage per turn would translate to 0.35% damage per turn instead - this also applies to HP regen states!)
While it does make the actual damage-over-time effect much less effective on it's own, the skills are designed to take advantage of status effects can benefit from it, and the status effects themselves usually apply an additional, minor debuff in addition to it's main effect.

Damage-over-time effects are also elemental - you can have a resistance, weakness, or even absorb the damage from a damage-over-time status effect. That also lets me give players skill that increase/immunize damage from status effects and status effect-inflicting skills, and skills that reduce the resistance of status effects on enemies (allowing status effects to be inflicted easier and increases the damage done from status effects)!

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author=Skie Fortress
I think poison would become better balanced if the damage was given an algorithm like a normal attack or a skill. Flat percentages are impossible to balance and will wreck bosses unchecked, but if poison did DOT with an algorithm, then it could easily be used against bosses without too much worry.

I don't think I've seen this done, but I'm sure it's possible.
I do it!
It might also be interesting to have a boss succeptible to poison only, where that 10% damage-per-round then translates into "survive 10 rounds of boss attacks with no way of counterattacking."
author=Zachary_Braun
It might also be interesting to have a boss succeptible to poison only, where that 10% damage-per-round then translates into "survive 10 rounds of boss attacks with no way of counterattacking."


It's not a good idea to make a boss only beatable with a skill that's been useless up to this point - not to mention how dull it is to just sit around and wait for the boss to die by itself.
While I'm still working on balancing everything, since there are so many unique factors, damaging debuffs in Binding Wyrds so far are balancing out to be far more reliable against high defense enemies than normal attacks. Since defense is random and can completely nullify an attack, an attack that can also cause poison can give you a reliable set of damage every turn.

For all games, I would find it very important to note that any status effect ability should cause damage as well, even if it is less than a normal attack or costs more. This way even if it fails, you're still dealing some damage, so you won't feel you wasted a turn trying it against an immune enemy, and just stop using it. (I also recommend not even having bosses immune to abilities unless absolutely necessary).
Deltree
doesn't live here anymore
4556
In a game I'm working on, I have "damage from poison" as just another enemy stat. So, for a low level foe with 100 HP, I set it to something like 40 and it does a good chunk of damage. For a boss with 10000 HP, I set it to 500, so it's not a trivial amount of damage but not ridiculous like a percentage would be. Of course, this necessitates writing my own logic for DOTs in the battle system, but from a design standpoint, it gives me flexibility. I am also having it stack for a finite number of turns, MMO style, and enemy resistance or skill strength determines how many poison counters to add.
I have several types of states that deal damage over time, like Bleed/Burn and the like, in my game that are slightly more life-threatening than the other. I usually make it where tougher enemies have a high chance of inflicting these states through skills/their normal attack, since having an 8% HP slip per turn state in a really easy normal battle just seems kinda tacked on, imo. Unless it's a late-game battle, of course.
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