Attack, crit and intuitiveness

[jack1974]

I decided to adopt the new miss system, since after testing more, it looks good. Adds some randomness to battles (but in a good way, not frustrating). Here are some new enemies, ghosts and phantoms
In next Friday's blog post I explain the mechanism in detail.
Today I plan to finish the nobles robbery, so then there's only the mercenaries left (the most difficult one for fights). If I am not distracted with other stuff I could actually finish the coding part early February, so then there's only to wait for writing/missing CGs. Definitely sooner than I thought!

[Miakoda]

I'm really looking forward to this :D

[yayswords]

Honestly, considering 99,99999999999999999999% of players just play my games for story/romances, I think current system is fine.

This was pretty offputting, which is why I haven't replied till now.

Firstly, yeah I had some ideas. For example you could make a skill deal your attack score's worth of damage and ignore defense. So if you have 10 attack 10 crit and target has 40 defense, a basic attack would deal 2.5 damage but with this skill you'd deal 10. Every other idea follows this theme really; making some skills use only attack or crit so that while balancing them might be optimal for general damage, gravitating towards one grants utility, survivability and/or very niche forms of damage. This very choice exists right now with Distracting Blows, and I keep envisioning I will favor attack a little for my Thalia just to pimp that skill up.

I have a concern or two about this avoidance mechanic, primarily I think the game loses some simplicity if mobs suddenly have a stat that isn't derived from attributes and that the sisters cannot get. But maybe they can, I'll wait till you explain it in full.

[jack1974]

Yes the stats is derived from Agility. So now Agility influences Speed and the "Evasion" (let's call it that).
Since the speed has much a less impact than Loren, I think is OK that Agility also influences this. I really don't see someone putting all his points on Agility, since otherwise she couldn't do any damage having low attack/critical hit.

I used this solution because was the easiest one, without need to modify existing skills. In my testing it works, and doesn't unbalance the game (only adds a bit of uncertainity but I yet have to lose a battle because of this).

But as always the real test is when people start to play with it, with words sometimes is hard to describe the mechanics

[yayswords]

Conceptually that sounds pretty good, allowing you to bump up survivability without getting stats that are purely defensive. Out of curiosity, can you crit on a half-damage attack? :D

[jack1974]

Yes it can happen, so in practice you do normal damage, even if is critical
(it's quite a rare combo though!)

[yayswords]

Is it still attack*crit=damage though? Doesn't look like it from the screenshot.

[jack1974]

Yes the damage formula is unchanged, I only changed/added the hit/miss thing.

[yayswords]

How is the damage prediction 8 then?

Attack really needs some more skills that scale off it alone now though. Maybe evasion is good for the game but it hasn't entirely solved the issue I brought up. Shouldn't be hard to think of some, like for example the defense piercing ability I described earlier.

[jack1974]

How is the damage prediction 8 then?

Who knows!?
Honestly I gave up understanding it. One day maybe will recode a system in the good old (crappy) PS1 method in which you could always clearly understand how damage is caused with attack-resistance=damage. Stop
I only know that I didn't change that thing since the alpha. Maybe is the weapon Kira is currently equipping (I put some default ones).

Attack really needs some more skills that scale off it alone now though. Maybe evasion is good for the game but it hasn't entirely solved the issue I brought up. Shouldn't be hard to think of some, like for example the defense piercing ability I described earlier.

I don't think so - battles already last so little, that if I even added higher damage they would end in 10 moves (total, not 10 moves each character).
I wanted to have shorter battles, but not THAT short!