Soul Shepherd

Why does the skill Nightmare exist by the way? It's pretty lame...

I really like the hyper mechanic. Great work on that.

Also, you're probably the only person on RPGMaker who know how to make stairs, so good job.

author=zombero
Why does an instant death skill exist? Hmm... because it's an RPG tradition, I suppose, would be the main reason. I can't think of any reason instant death skills need to be in a game. The closest I can come up with is that it instills fear and is a unique threat that players need to try to avoid and manage. The "avoid" (which currently comes in the form of the Sanctuary rally) admittedly needs some work. It reduces the chance of instant death succeeding substantially, but I also want to change it so that even when it does work, it knocks any character at above-critical HP down to critical HP instead of killing them.

I see. Well, it's especially annoying for me when I'm going to a place I've already been to 100 times, try to run, it fails, then he insta-deaths me. I either have to waste a phoenix down + SP to heal, or just teleport back. I'm looking directly at Onryo on this one. This actually happens very frequently. I don't mind it so much in newer areas where the enemies are supposed to be a threat. Reducing to Critical would be a very welcome change for it.

Some other random feedback I thought of through the first section:
- Soulshards seem a bit useless past the first few areas, because the enemies just repeat the same soulshards. Shattering higher level souls gives no benefit because it just gives the same thing as some lower-level soul.
- The journey from the east town to the beach seems inordinately difficult. There are two bosses on the path, and two lands worth of new enemies players have never seen.
- Some warning before the 4-kobold team would be nice. Unless you have incredible reaction time, you can't get away before they fight you. Luckily I knew it was coming, but it could suck if you ran out of SP.
- Maps are really well made. I really like the new terrain you gave the first map.
- I'd like something you could do with the early-game souls. I know there's a soul forge, but those seem to only use the souls from that area. I'm kind of clogged down with 30 or so of each soul type from early on.

Maybe as an easy solution to the soulshard stuff, shattering a higher level soul could give some number bonus. For example, shattering a Bat will give Tailwind lvl 1, but shattering some other gives Tailwind lvl 2, and a slightly higher bonus.

author=zombero
It's generally expected that the player will sleep at the inn between the two fights, and possibly after the second fight as well. It takes 3 inn stays for them to respawn. I do agree that it is a rather difficult segment, but it's kinda meant to be. Maybe the walk distance from the beach entrance to the beach house could be reduced.

I didn't know 3 inn stays resets bosses, that's useful. Though, still in my run I dodged the second boss so that was a non-issue. I guess my main issue with that segment is that it spans so many areas, the enemies are difficult, and that the path is not distinct.

What do I mean by that last one? Well, take the little area with the bridge for example. If you walk up to that place and see the bridge and the other area, RPG sense would dictate that the place across the bridge is the next area, and the area off to the side is a bonus. However, if you take the bridge there's only an item there, and you face a minimum of 3 battles going there and back. It takes several party attacks, detoxes, and heals, so you'll waste probably 30-50 SP on each character, and have to waste the Chakra Kit just trying to get it back.

I don't like having to go to a new area after being severely weakened. Typically, the new areas are accessed from the towns or from areas that no longer pose a problem. The forest segment will drain your SP hugely, even if you rest after the Lindorm. It's important to be able to heal before a new area because then you can adequately farm the souls before moving on.

Before getting the souls, a new area will easily crush you if you battle more than 3 or 4 enemies there. The Basaan is new, and the Nekomana or w/e seems to not spawn in more than 1s before, so these enemies will probably kill you if you battle them for an extended period of time without their souls - but getting the soul is hard and lengthy, especially considering if you rest once more, the bosses come back.

Overall I think it's mostly fine, but the beach part is the real killer. And I really don't want to go back after the entire forest anyways. Even with resting after the first boss and ninja-avoiding the second, I only survived the beach due to astounding luck in my run.
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Some more stuff I thought of:
- Having souls disappear when unequiped seems somewhat needless. After all, you did already get them.
- I'm not actually sure if this is intended... but if you stun an enemy who can double or triple attack, they can still attack once or twice. It seems to only cancel one attack instead of canceling enemy's turn. I'm not sure if bosses can be stunned, but Hyper enemies can be.
- Some soulshards seem vastly underpowered compared to others. The biggest offenders are Viral Mutation and Somnolance. I can't see any circumstance where these would warrant equipping. Mantra also seems bad, as neither Wrath nor Malice work against bosses, and it's quite a low chance. You said you're planning to look back at soul shards after the game is done, but just wanted to put this out in case you didn't consider it.
- Misc technical issue: if I play for a long time, the Escape and Enter keys stop working and I have to restart my computer. *probably* not anything related to the game (windows 8 is a piece of garbage, probably its fault) but if you know anything about it, that would be nice.

(important edit)
After playing a bit more into the next area, I will say that Gloom is completely game-breaking. Even with will-heavy characters, a battle with 3 of those Bat things easily kills me.

Also, after I got the bat soul, I started spamming gloom. It annihilates everything. This even kills Hyper enemies (o.0), which takes most of the challenge out of those...

I don't really think insta-death has a place in a game like this, but I could go either way. Insta-death for EVERYONE though? That is certainly not good.

(final thing)
Is the fight against Ares won after a certain number of turns (so it's like a survival challenge?) because I don't see how I can do 100,000 damage a turn to counter Eternal Warrior.

I finally did it! I beat ares. I realized I had been using the wrong strategy all along. I'm not sure if this is how you intended the battle to go, but I did the vast majority of his HP in one turn. Actually, I did not even need the battle to be dangerous at all in order to win (and if I was to do it again, I could heal much more and still kill him). I'm going to put video on the LP thread.

First I inflict every buff/debuff in the game and Agony, then deal some minor damage - a few Claws per turn - and using Aura twice. I use Flame Guard on the turn when the fire is used, or Siegfried will die. This takes all characters Impulse meters to 100%. Next turn I use Charge on all three of my attackers and Lifewater on Siegfried. This triggers Blessing+ on him, allowing him to survive the coming fire spell. Next turn every character uses Cleave. This triggers Wounded Animal and Master's Touch, allowing them to do huge damage.

In fact, with perfect luck and execution, I would not need to attack Ares a single time before this burst damage. Characters who trigger Wounded Animal deal 25K each with crits, and without it 20K crit/17K crit depending on chat. If two of them have wounded animal active, this would do 67K damage (a fatal blow).

More things I've thought of (though I might have mentioned a few of these at some point in my posts)

- Imo ares should have less Will stat. I'd like it if you could always or almost always land Agony. There's nothing more frustrating than losing the battle on the first turn because Agony missed.

- There should be some way of analyzing enemy defenses to find out what stats they're weak for. Without this, it's just trial-and-error (and this can fail if you haven't learned any of that element). For example, I still don't even know what Lindorm is weak to.

- I think some change is needed to status conditions. Statuses are - in general - much more lethal to players than they are to enemies. Enemies only need to kill you once, whereas you need to fight 5-10 battles before you can get where you need to be. When a status is only landing at all 50% or less of the time (as it mostly is), I take that as a sign that you are not supposed to use statuses.

- I don't like pure random soul drop. A few days ago I was playing soul shepherd from the beginning, and got to Claire's house, and I tried to farm Nekomanika soul for over 45 minutes with no luck. There are other times when I got a hard soul first battle. A pseudorandom generator might be better.

- Some way to get a bigger backpack and be able to store more than 9 items would be cool. At this point in the game, they are not very useful in battle but are very useful for preserving SP outside of battle.

- The bonus for defeating the bosses (+1 stats) seems kind of lame, seeing as I have about 100 as my highest stat at Ares.

- Agony seems to have no use besides on Ares. There aren't many healing enemies in the second part. I can only think of one (Tyrant)

- When you're learning a new ability, the cursor should start outside of the ability box and you need to press an arrow key to select an ability. Or else when you click through the battle quickly and miss the Ability Learned text, you delete ability 1.

author=Zombero
- This I don't really agree with... If you can Numb, for instance, half the enemies in a fight, it pretty much makes that fight trivial to win. Plus ailments are inflicted using the same stat you heal with, so anyone you spec as an ailment user is also filling a vital party role for difficult battles. Poison, Wrath, Sleep, and Malice also feel pretty useful to me just for dealing damage. Why is 50%, or even 40%, a bad rate for AoE statuses?

Well I meant 50% for landing at all in that use. It seems that around half of the time statuses miss everyone in the battle. I should have stated that better. For abilities like Numb and Gloom that are devastating, that's true. But consider early game statuses, namely Blind, Sleep, and Confuse.

Sleep: Players have to queue up all their orders at once, so this seems like one of the worst abilities because you can't change your orders when you see who it lands on. I suppose you could give Sleep to only your slowest team members, but it seems that people who learn statuses and have high will are really fast (scourge). Not only do you have the chance of waking up the target you slept the same turn, making the sleep literally a wasted turn, but you also cannot use party damage moves on characters slower than the caster (or you wake up 100%)

Confuse: Same deal as sleep

Blind: Lots of enemies have Tail Wind, nullifying this. And enemies also frequently hit through it. Despite that this seems like the most useful one of the early game skills.

To be honest, for abilities like Sleep I would prefer a single target spell with a very high chance of success. This would allow me to surely not wake up the target, and be able to focus down the dangerous members of the battle and remove them for some turns.

Numb is a really late game spell, and it's probably good that it misses frequently seeing how strong it is. The only reason I didn't spam it like Gloom is that I didn't find out who learned it til later.