Enemy-Only Abilities

Enemy-Only Abilities

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#21 Emitai

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23 October 2013 - 04:18 AM

kyozo22, on 23 October 2013 - 02:30 AM, said:

Yes but Return 2 in 1.3 didn't one-shot Altima, did it? It still trivialised the fight when used properly though, didn't it?

My assumption is that Advent made the decision to remove said skill from the player's hand because it would trivialise most fights in the game, plus make skills like Enlighten and Might redundant.

not only this, but on boss fight is better just use myrmidon and spam aura. is way better than true kaiser because the ap cost is way lower and the damage from myrmidon is very close to kaiser. Removing aura is also an attempt to make players use another dragon forms

#22 maxi

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23 October 2013 - 08:23 AM

kyozo22, on 23 October 2013 - 02:30 AM, said:

Yeah, the thing i'm asking is how exactly, mechanically, is this going to happen. Return 2 is a binary full incapacitation spell. Focus and Medidate don't prevent anything from functioning and don't even really boost your sustained damage output.

It is not that i particularily want these skills back or anything. I just really don't understand the reasoning behind the decision. And it bugs me.

Enlighten and Might being made reduntant by Focus / Meditate feels weird, too. How are persistent buffs made redundant by 1-turn effects? They serve completely different purposes.

#23 Advent

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23 October 2013 - 09:52 AM

maxi, on 22 October 2013 - 09:59 PM, said:

Please walk me through this.

How is an attack that does nothing for a turn and makes your next turn 50% stronger is more broken than just doing the same attack twice? That is doing an attack this turn and then doing another 100% of the same atack next turn.

The advantages of focus that i can see exist in form of less resources per point of damage and less reprisals. Also there are some situational tactical advantages that create potentially interesting gameplay. These are actually the real reason people like using abilities such as these.

The only way i can see it as any sort of broken depends on how the game does defenses. If armor / mdef is simply substracted from the attack value, then Focus-likes become very strong against armored foes. Is this the case in BoF?

They don't make it 50% stronger, they outright double that stat, and I've actually heard that it can boost it even further than that. If you use Might 4 times, you have double your attack already, then you stack Last Resort on, then Focus, you're boosting it a hell of a lot. Let me give an example.

If you put Garr under Bunyan and leave him there till 80 (not a wise move, but maximum attack) you'll have 508 attack before weapons. If you boost that with Might you get 762. Raise that again with Last Resort and you're probably hitting 999 power already. Focus twice at that point and you're at 1,998 power. You are going to be doing an absolutely broken amount of damage right there, albeit with a single attack.

#24 maxi

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23 October 2013 - 10:34 AM

Advent, on 23 October 2013 - 09:52 AM, said:

Being able to strike twice as hard after spending 3x turns is not what i would consider overpowered. In terms of sustained damage over time it is worse than just simply attacking. You essentially seem to be saying that 3x999 damage over three turns is alright, but 1998 damage after three turns worth of investment is broken. Which just doesn't really sound sensible.

If additional mechanics are included, then there are four ways in which using Focus can have an advantage over just attacking:
1) a situation where armor calculation increasingly favors higher attack powers. For example, if armor calculation were to simply substract a fixed amount from damage done. 3 strikes at 999 power against a unit whose armor absorbs 998 damage per strike would do 3 damage. A single double-focused strike would do 1000.
2) a situation where there are a lot of units with regeneration and healing abilities, against which a concentrated single attack allows to prevent most of the healing that would otherwise happen over a more protracted period
3) a game that is balanced in such a way that efficient manage of resources such as MPs is very important, so capacity of Focus to outright double the resource efficiency of attacks is valuable
4) a situation where units have a lot of strong reprisals. Using Focus cuts the amount of attacks needed to destroy a creature in half (even though these attacks come slower), thus reducing the impact of reprisals.

Only potential advantage number 1 (focus being way effective at busting down defenses) strikes me as any sort of game-breaking. The rest seem to have much more to do with tactical decisions of players.

P.S: so this thread is wrong about focus mechanics? - http://www.gamefaqs....re-iii/42266984

#25 Advent

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23 October 2013 - 10:37 AM

maxi, on 23 October 2013 - 10:34 AM, said:

Damage != Power

If it was damage, that'd be alright. This is their attack power that is used in formulas.

If I had to balance stuff based around the presence of Focus and Meditation, it'd have to be done in a way where they would have to be used to win.

Edit: Also, the above example is not taking into account if they used an attack ability that the enemy had a weakness to. Dual element strikes will probably be a thing in this hack, and it could account for about seven thousand damage or higher under the right conditions.

Actually, let me just run this number real quick. Let's say I made Wind Strike into a Fire/Wind element. If the enemy has 0 Fire and Wind resistance, that is a 600% damage boost. 1500 damage would turn into nine thousand damage. That is way too high for a single attack.

This post has been edited by Advent: 23 October 2013 - 10:40 AM

#26 secondadvent

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23 October 2013 - 11:50 AM

maxi, on 23 October 2013 - 10:34 AM, said:

1) a situation where armor calculation increasingly favors higher attack powers. For example, if armor calculation were to simply substract a fixed amount from damage done. 3 strikes at 999 power against a unit whose armor absorbs 998 damage per strike would do 3 damage. A single double-focused strike would do 1000.

Focus increases the base attack power before subtracting enemy defense, so if the enemy has 100 defense and you only have 80 attack, one use of focus would take you to 120 damage, resulting in a power of 20 (120 - 100) for the rest of the formula, with two putting you almost at full base power for the attack (160 - 100 = 60, same as attacking a 20 defense enemy). Assuming your attack and the enemy defense isn't at max, you can boost your attack with might as well, but it would take 2 turns to reach a single focus' use in effectiveness, 4 uses taking it to two focus uses which is where it caps, assuming it didn't reach the 999 stat cap before this (which focus ignores, as it's done after capping in the physical formula itself).

Focus doesn't even really need two turns to be able to attack - if you are faster than the enemy and have a decent reprisal chance, you can effectively boost your damage and attack in the same turn, and at a much higher boost than a single might use would have you at. If an enemy has max defense, only critical hits and post-cap attack modifying abilities will allow physical damage normally (jump, aura, shadowwalk, gambit/risky blow, bonebreak (defense = 0 for enemy), spirit blast/mighty chop, maybe a few others), so if you rely on capping attack modifiers then they're useless in this case while focus will -always- boost your attack.

So for the most part, focus can completely override the need for might/other attack boosters in faster battles (or where you're going to die often, since bonuses are reset on death/transformation). Meditation can double or triple the effective int (one or two uses), but isn't as bad as magic defense is percentage based - even at 2997 effective int, a 250+ int target will effectively halve the damage taken before other resistances/barrier (barrier + 250 int = 25% magic damage taken).

Two uses of Enlighten doubles the Int of the target (capping at 999), just like one use of Meditation. However, if the target is under 250 Int, Enlighten will also increase the target's magic defense (magic defense = floor(Int / 5)%, capped at 50%/250 int) while Meditation only works for attacking, not defending. If anything, due to the ease of resisting magic damage (250 int is not hard to get, neither are resistances) Meditation could actually stay around to compliment Enlighten at higher Int values. There's no big game-breaking damage bonuses from it (unless you're fighting an undead because OMGWTFBBQ healing, but Enlighten/Kyrie are just as bad here), and the biggest potential Aura-esque candidate, Mind Sword, loads the attacker's int without the Meditation bonuses (instead using focus bonuses since it's a physical attack with Int instead of Attack).

All in all, Focus does take extra time to set up, but it allows quicker damage boosts than Might, you don't have to worry about spending a few turns adding might again when you die, and it allows breaking of ANY defense if your attack is high enough to begin with. Lowering the defense of the enemy is an option as well, but with the low chance of doing so against most targets (based on int of attacker and target, then applies resistance on top of that), focus-boosting or simple Might boosting are generally better than that, and with focus being better than Might in this regard (other than the one-time use) there's a clear cut winner for any quick damage boosting you need to do.

Meditation can probably be put back in (later, possibly as either a master spell or an enemy's learnable skill), but Focus should not be allowed back in.

#27 Emitai

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23 October 2013 - 01:36 PM

i agree with secondadvent and meditation maybe can be back, we all know that physical damage formula is a kinda broken, since rewrite all game code is unviable magic will need more tools to deal with it

#28 Stann

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23 October 2013 - 01:37 PM

My suggestion is to finish the mod first, then decide which moves are too broken to include.

#29 Advent

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23 October 2013 - 07:06 PM

Stann, on 23 October 2013 - 01:37 PM, said:

My suggestion is to finish the mod first, then decide which moves are too broken to include.

It's best to remove the ones that strike you as problematic, then readd them and see how it works out, because if I release them from a Master or as an Enemy Skill and someone gets it, I can't take that away from them without having it crash the game when used.

#30 maxi

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24 October 2013 - 09:39 AM

I guess i can get on board with remove-readd idea. Especially if removing it now and adding it later allows to avoid various external issues.

If physical armor in BoF3 is indeed substraction based and not percentage based, this is a good reason why Focus can become potentially overpowered against foes with higher armor.