CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

Every three points of attack raises average damage by four, but you need 99 defense to lower damage by one? That means for every point of attack, it takes 132 points of defense to cancel it out. Def up would not do much seeing as defense is near useless unless you design it to have absurdly high values compared to attack. I don't know why attack up don't work though.

Bloodborne is faster than Dark Souls. One big difference is the lack of a useful shield. What you get instead is guns. You can use the guns to stagger an enemy who's attacking you and if you invest in the right stat, you also have a viable ranged weapon. The first function is like parry, but the timing seems easier or at least more intuitive. So, blocking is more or less removed. The game is then modified to accommodate that change. So, if the shield-usage was a big reason the game feels slow, then that's great news.

The game is also faster overall. In general, the characters use their weapon faster and do less telegraphing (which may be what makes you feel that there's a delay) with their attacks. However, a lot of the design principles behind Dark Souls still apply to Bloodborne. The combat is nowhere near as furious as say Devil May Cry or God of War. While the telegraphing is not as big as in Dark Souls, it's still there. Basically, the combat is still based a lot on you having to judge whether or not you can attack and less on reacting than you may be used to.

Personally, I don't give my characters such clean roles. Often my characters are between two of those four roles and may even dabble slightly in a third. That said, that's clearly not what OP is going for.

Even if you give them specific roles, you can still let them dabble a bit outside of their main roles. For example, one of the tanks could be a paladin who can use Laying on Hands, a healing skill. LoH would let the paladin play healer, but you could give it a limitation like only one use every five turns.

There are also methods to be used for characters who are 100% stuck in their roles. If we compare two physical damage dealers, you can make one a more typical fighter clad in metal and another a dual wielding rogue type. The rogue could get two attacks per attack command, but have a much lower attack. Assuming a subtraction based defense, the rogue is more affected by enemy armor than the fighter is. The rogue would have less durability overall, but could have a move that temporarily greatly raises evasion. Finally, the fighter could have some stun moves while the rogue could have access to other status effects like poison and blindness. One idea would be to not give the rogue strong status effects like paralyze, only effects that are weaker than a stun, but lasts multiple turns instead of one.

Largely, what you can do depends on what you allow yourself to do. The more rigid you want your characters stuck in a particular role, the harder it will be to differentiate them.

I think a big question is how much of an actual build you want to encourage. Taking some final fantasy games as an example, FF V, VII and VIII are not so much about builds as the games simple throwing you a lot of cool stuff for you to take advantage of. Out of those three, FF V is the one that the most encourage you to figure out actual concepts for your characters and is also the one where changing build is the hardest. Even so, it's still fairly painless to do and you're actually expecting to change builds trough the playtrough.

Dark Souls (I have played no FF game that is focused on a single character) is more about having an actual character build and using what works for it. Looking at the Final Fantasy series again, the first one does not let you create your own builds, but it allows you to create your own party setup. Those games do not allow you to change your mind later on and you're expected to stick with your idea.

There's a reason to why those games are set up as they are.

Let's start with Final Fantasy VII. There's one support materia you can get that when paired with a magic materia makes you attack as well every time you cast a spell of that materia. Now, if we pretend that FF VII's balance isn't a complete train-wreck, you want a character with both good attack and magic to take advantage of that support materia. So, give them one spell materia, but not many more since they lower your attack and instead increase your magic with a magic+ materia or two. That gives you good a magic stat while still retaining most of your attack. However, if that attack when casting a spell option instead existed in a game based on builds, chance is all of the player's characters would either have high attack/low magic or opposite, meaning nobody can take good advantage of that option.

If your customization is about throwing the player a lot of cool stuff that they are expected to incorporate as they go, then I don't think it's even a question, make undoing choices simple.

For Dark Souls and the first Final Fantasy, allowing the players to easily change builds or party setup means that they don't have to learn the ups and down of their choices and to make best use of them, they can just change to a setup which has its up whenever their current setup encounters a down. More importantly, it can also sap the fun out of trying to master a choice instead of playing a malleable character/party, even if doing so would otherwise be more fun.

Personally, I think that Dark Souls would have been harmed by making it easy to switch build while Final Fantasy would not. In Dark Souls, I'm having a fun time building my character and the different builds plays significantly differently as well. However, Final Fantasy (based on the GBA remake) has every battle feel kinda sameish. I don't think an attack oriented party differs that much from a magic oriented party in terms of how you overcome your challenges other than that one is likely to be flat out easier to use than the other. So, playing again with a different setup don't makes that much of a difference.

Is your game set up so that every reasonable choice works and that they play rather differently? The more this holds true for your game, the more likely it is that you want to make it hard or even impossible to undo choices.

author=LockeZ
Yeah, that's a formula I've seen before in professional games, and it works well in a lot of games well for all the reasons you described. It does have a couple noteworthy side-effects though. First, it means that if the defender is significantly lower level, then buffing their defense is totally ineffective. And second, it means that if the attacker is significantly lower level, then buffing their attack power is crazy-ultra-effective.

Well, imagine we have two different encounters, one against a single giant with 600 attack and another against six goblins with 100 attack each. It does feel intuitive to me that armor would be more useful against multiple weak attacks than against a single massive strike. In some games you may also want buffing to be differently effective against different encounters. It gives the player something to take into account while also allowing for easily followed visual cues (this enemy looks really strong, so buffing defense will help relative little and that enemy wears heavy metallic armor, so buffing attack or going magic will help a lot). Of course, in other games you don't have that desire.

What is a side effect for one game can be the primary effect you're aiming for in another game.