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You know you messed up somewhere when your mage-healer deals more direct physical damage than the rest of the party combined.
karins_soulkeeper- 10/19/2015 06:39 PM
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Sounds like Holy spam in FF14 2.0. White Mages got Holy near max level that was one of the strongest AoE moves in the game that could also stun*. To make it more potent they could use Cleric Stance which trashes their heals for doing more damage, swiftcast to skip the casting time of one, and another buff to make all casts faster. White Mages were one of the strongest AoE DPS in the game until they nerfed Holy some!
* Stuff like Stun in FF14 was full duration the first time, half duration the second, quarter the third, then the enemy was immune to it for a minute or so
(Relatedly I'm messing around with the idea of a healer/berserker combo, they heal by absorbing the damage of allies and they become stronger the more damage they take/absorb. Once they take enough damage they go berserk and dish out the pain but then you can't tell them to heal~)
* Stuff like Stun in FF14 was full duration the first time, half duration the second, quarter the third, then the enemy was immune to it for a minute or so
(Relatedly I'm messing around with the idea of a healer/berserker combo, they heal by absorbing the damage of allies and they become stronger the more damage they take/absorb. Once they take enough damage they go berserk and dish out the pain but then you can't tell them to heal~)
A rather unbalanced mechanic, I guess. It sounded nice in theory, but it turned out to be hard to implement. See, I've always wanted the healer to be a key player for once. The healer had this ability where a percentage of the amount healed by skills he uses is stored, then added later to his next normal attack's damage. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to add in when heals restore by percentage instead of by static amounts. That moment when he restored the entire party to full health with a not-very-costly aoe-heal, he almost single-handedly wiped a (supposedly unbeatable) boss. It's potentially game-breaking, considering that the stored damage is carried over across battles. Essentially, you can spam heal when fighting weak monsters to save up on damage, then dump it all on the next boss for an easy win.
Not sure if I should rebalance or drop altogether :/
GRS> So the healer/berserker transfers his/her hp to his/her allies (in a sense)? That's actually pretty cool. Although I think some might find the going berserk part to be a drag and do whatever to avoid it, unless if the boost is really huge.
Not sure if I should rebalance or drop altogether :/
GRS> So the healer/berserker transfers his/her hp to his/her allies (in a sense)? That's actually pretty cool. Although I think some might find the going berserk part to be a drag and do whatever to avoid it, unless if the boost is really huge.
Speak of the devil 
There's a few ways to keep it from getting out of control. A hard cap so you can't just keep on healing is a quick and easy one. You can also change the bonus damage algorithm to use an exponential function like AmountHealed ^ 0.5 so later points of damage contribute less than the first points. The bonus from healing can decay per turn, or only count actual HP healed instead of any overhealing. Think about it and mix 'n match some limitations and then see how it works!
There's a few ways to keep it from getting out of control. A hard cap so you can't just keep on healing is a quick and easy one. You can also change the bonus damage algorithm to use an exponential function like AmountHealed ^ 0.5 so later points of damage contribute less than the first points. The bonus from healing can decay per turn, or only count actual HP healed instead of any overhealing. Think about it and mix 'n match some limitations and then see how it works!
Gleason
5
I remember in FFXI White Mages stored "points" as they healed up to a certain maximum if they were in a specific stance. Said points made their Holy spell more powerful, but it took a while to cap it out, and the points were reset once cast.
I don't know the damage scaling of your game, but perhaps something like GRS suggested for point accumulation, and then another comment event/ variable check, in the vein of "if v > x then v = x", would let you keep that potency rolling?
I don't know the damage scaling of your game, but perhaps something like GRS suggested for point accumulation, and then another comment event/ variable check, in the vein of "if v > x then v = x", would let you keep that potency rolling?
Riou from Suikoden II was the main healer of the party, but he was also a physical beast and he had one spell that did basically what you wrote - healed x amount of damage for the whole party and whatever was left over would be converted to damage for the enemy. Suikoden II was a rather easy game as it is, but they balanced this skill by making it his fourth-rune-slot spell. See, each character only has x amount of rune spells per slot (four slots) so at the start of the game they might have 3 level 1s, 1 level 2s, 0 level 3s and 0 level 4s.
Now Riou's skills are learned a bit differently. For most they learn more levels as they level up, so at level 20 they might finally have access to 1 or 2 level 3 spell slots (maybe 1 level four if they're an incredible mage, like Luc or Mazus). However Riou's rune, being a True Rune, had his skills locked so that while he could get spell slots for levels 3 and 4, and while another rune equipped could be used at those levels, he had to wait for story progression to unlock the higher tier spells of that rune, which included this particular spell - which he gets towards the end of the game. Not only is it locked by how many slots in that level he has (I think he gets 2/3 by the end of the game - that's 2-3 uses of the spell until next he sleeps at an inn), but he also had to wait until a certain event before it unlocks to be able to be used.
That said, it is very powerful.
In your case you could do something like check the amount of left over it has and convert that instead into multiplication. So say you have a base of 2000 HP it can heal, if you have 2000 left over after healing, make that 5x damage for one of his normal hits and decay it from there.
You could also look into a time delay - make it cool down over a set amount of turns or actual in-game time. Or have it usable only a certain amount of times through the whole game (think Meteor being too much for Tellah's body to handle). You could also make it so that it does something else instead - say gives the healer an extra turn for the next turn instead, so that they could get, say, two spells off or two attacks. Or have it add buffs to the party if there's x amount left over.
Now Riou's skills are learned a bit differently. For most they learn more levels as they level up, so at level 20 they might finally have access to 1 or 2 level 3 spell slots (maybe 1 level four if they're an incredible mage, like Luc or Mazus). However Riou's rune, being a True Rune, had his skills locked so that while he could get spell slots for levels 3 and 4, and while another rune equipped could be used at those levels, he had to wait for story progression to unlock the higher tier spells of that rune, which included this particular spell - which he gets towards the end of the game. Not only is it locked by how many slots in that level he has (I think he gets 2/3 by the end of the game - that's 2-3 uses of the spell until next he sleeps at an inn), but he also had to wait until a certain event before it unlocks to be able to be used.
That said, it is very powerful.
In your case you could do something like check the amount of left over it has and convert that instead into multiplication. So say you have a base of 2000 HP it can heal, if you have 2000 left over after healing, make that 5x damage for one of his normal hits and decay it from there.
You could also look into a time delay - make it cool down over a set amount of turns or actual in-game time. Or have it usable only a certain amount of times through the whole game (think Meteor being too much for Tellah's body to handle). You could also make it so that it does something else instead - say gives the healer an extra turn for the next turn instead, so that they could get, say, two spells off or two attacks. Or have it add buffs to the party if there's x amount left over.
Thanks for your thoughts guys!
A damage cap shouldn't be necessary, if the growth rate is slow enough. Math's but one of my weaknesses, so I didn't know nth roots behaved like that. I'm not sure about how a gradual decay would work though. I'm more partial on letting the player to stack that damage if they so want to, and not be under any pressure that they'll lose their work, but the stored damage should reset to 0 at the end of each battle. That should be good enough of a restriction, and it would save me the troubles of compensatory balancing (because, laziness ;p). It's somewhat like allowing the player to "grind" while battling, except that their progress won't carry over to the next encounter.
Ah also, I already have an "overdrive" of sorts present. I hijacked the tp system and called it "rage". As is with default tp, it fills up when performing actions and when taking damage. Each battler is consequently equipped with a several "rage" skills that cost varying amounts of tp, with the strongest one emptying the bar completely and stopping it from ever rising again for the rest of the battle.
A damage cap shouldn't be necessary, if the growth rate is slow enough. Math's but one of my weaknesses, so I didn't know nth roots behaved like that. I'm not sure about how a gradual decay would work though. I'm more partial on letting the player to stack that damage if they so want to, and not be under any pressure that they'll lose their work, but the stored damage should reset to 0 at the end of each battle. That should be good enough of a restriction, and it would save me the troubles of compensatory balancing (because, laziness ;p). It's somewhat like allowing the player to "grind" while battling, except that their progress won't carry over to the next encounter.
Ah also, I already have an "overdrive" of sorts present. I hijacked the tp system and called it "rage". As is with default tp, it fills up when performing actions and when taking damage. Each battler is consequently equipped with a several "rage" skills that cost varying amounts of tp, with the strongest one emptying the bar completely and stopping it from ever rising again for the rest of the battle.
Addit
6394
Hey, I wished that my mage-healers could do that. It would make the rest of the team completely expendable.
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