Balancing Tips (Equips/Monsters/Classes)

Hello!

So, I've gotten to the "fun" stage. I know there are several great resources online and tuts, and videos on this topic, but I still like to see for myself.

A little backstory on what I've got so far... I've created a warrior, priest, and mage. Like wise I created equips that suited those archetypes with some "cross class" sharing. Ex. Light armor can be worn by the priest/warrior. But Robes are priest exclusive, heavy armor is warrior exclusive and so on.

In those exclusive armors and weapons I've tailored them to that classes, high def on hvy armor, and low def on robes. Since I wanted the warrior to be more "tanky".

I created my first monster for a level 1 battle, and did a battle test at level 1 with level 1 gear. I set the monster stats to somewhere in between the total stats of the party. Ex. Lowest total def was 30(priest) with level 1 gear and class, and highest was 37 (warrior), so I set the monster atk to 34. When doing a battle test the monster will hit the priest for lets say... 70 (which was a good number vs their max hp), but will do 10, sometimes 0 to the warrior.

So, I bump up the monster atk to deal comfortable damage to the warrior vs his hp and then it ends up just annihilating the priest and mage with their lower def and hp.Short of going back and manually tweaking all the armors/weapons to be comfortable I'd like to get some advice on how I should proceed. Even if I have to manually tweak all the stats on the armors and weapons, I'd like to have a little more info and knowledge from other users on how you approached it.

I understand that I could scale back the warriors armor, that's probably my first step, but I was surprised by the jump in damage variant for a small increase in defense. 70 to 0 damage vs 30 - 37 defense.

Thanks for the read and advice on how you tackled balance.

It depends entirely on your damage formula. What are you using for skill 1? If you use the default, every point of ATK does 4 more damage, and every point of DEF gets rid of two points of that damage.

Also remember all skills have 20% variance by default. I personally set that to 10% as I think that's too high, and maybe you should set it to 0 while you get the rest of the stats sorted out before messing with that, as that can throw off balancing.

Thanks for reply.

The formula is default. No skills were thrown in, it's all based on default attacks on both sides. I did see the 20% variance on the attack skill. I will try lowering it as you said to 10%.

So, I have already created all the equips. I ended up equipping the party with their "end game" gear to see the difference, and it's actually embarrassing. The total def for the priest gets up to like 200, whereas the warriors was 450. I mean the magic defense on the robes were around 400, since the warrior was designed to take more physical attacks and the priest/mage take magical attacks.

I still may have to shore up the stats on either side, or bring them a little closer together with slight bumps rather than these enormous differences.

I'd check for plug-ins then too, as the math says this should be your damage:

Priest:
4 * 34 - 2 * 30 = 136 - 60 = 76 before variance.

Warrior:
4 * 34 - 2 * 37 = 136 - 74 = 62 before variance.

So it sounds like you might have a plug-in giving your warrior damage reduction as well. Or you had a weird display glitch.

I'd suggest creating an excel sheet and seeing how the damages look late game with the best armor for each class and best stats they can have, and seeing if the damage is what you want. Few I know though stick with that formula as they find the balance for it bad at best.

Personally, i think it should be about the damage formula, too. Better not use a simple formula like "a.atk * x - b.def * y". It is hard to balance with this kind of formula because if your ATK or DEF is overwhelmed your target's or attacker's, it will not be good.
Besides, you should estimate and control the amount of stats your actors/enemies should have at certain phases during the development.

Thanks the the reply, James.

I currently do use the default formula. Is there a better one you can suggest, or recommend a method of creating one that works for me?

With estimations, how I built all my gears was first in excel, with a "point system". It increased every piece. So, the end game hvy armor had the same points as a end game robe, however I just distributed it differently across the stats. I thought, at the time, that was a good way to keep things from scaling to high/low if all pieces increased in points at the same rate.

I prefer calculate the damage dealt based on ATK/MAT, then reduces it by percentage based on DEF/MDF. It is not a real good method, but personally i find this easier to control than the default formula. This is just my opinion so it might not suitable for everyone.