Final Fantasy Discovery

It is sort of bothering me that I didn't notice this much sooner...

The way I was calculating magic damage for abilities was totally incorrect. Don't get me wrong, the formulae were right... just how I was using them were incorrect. All magical abilities use a base power level and a multiplier to determine damage. The problem I was having was with the base power levels. I was mostly using static power levels that didn't change as characters leveled up, which made their magic abilities either way too strong at low levels, or way too weak at higher levels. I first came to the conclusion that I had a better method when I re-tooled the damage of Wedge's Meteor Limit Break ability.

While testing, I noticed a level 99 Leon was dealing around 25,000 damage with a physical attack, while spells like Firaga and Holy were dealing less than 9,000. That prompted me to take a look at how I could improve the calls that determined their damage. So, instead of setting a static number to a spell's power, I set it to a percentage of the character's Magic Power stat. Fire, Blizzard, Thunder and Water, for example, use "mat * 0.25" as their base power now, with an added multiplier of 1, making them use exactly 25% of Wedge's Magic Power stat as the power level for the ability. This allows the spell to deal the proper amount of damage at a low level, and increase it's power as Wedge's level grows higher.

The third tier elemental spells use "mat * 0.55" as their base power, with a multiplier of 3.5, which makes them strong enough at a high level to still be useful, while not making them incredibly damaging at low levels (formerly, Flare would deal somewhere in the 20,000 damage range even at level 1 with the old formula call; say what?!)

It had gotten to the point where Wedge's normal attack was dealing more damage than some of his strongest spells, and that was a problem. That's all fixed now, and I think I can finally put the damage calculation issues to bed and go back to work on other scripts that need some attention (Custom Battle Log, I'm looking at you).