How do you handle Poison/Burn/Bleed states when applying them to both enemies and bosses?

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Started by atoms 29 posts Page 2 of 2 View original ↗
  1. atoms
    #21 Source
    Thanks everyone! I like hearing what everyone comes up with! If anyone wants to share more, please do.

    I just wanted to comment here...
    Eschaton said:
    This is my opinion:

    Regardless of the actual damage, DoT should have very strict turn counts. Three at the most. Continuous DoT for indefinite turns is either overpowered and incredibly dangerous (if DoT is high) or underpowered and annoying (if DoT is low), and very rarely "just right."

    I like what you analysed, I'd just like to add to it, length of battles effects the range.

    For example. If a battle lasts a lot of turns, then small DoT for that amount of turns can suddenly become quite powerful, so length of battles, regular encounters, mini bosses and bosses, is useful to take into consideration as well.
  2. MrZalgo
    #22 Source
    I want to apply a tierlist basically for status ailments within my titles.

    basically being hit by multiple fire attacks will increase the tier and severity of said tier.

    for example:

    Fire has 4 tiers:

    Burn: simple DoT
    Scorch: DoT and player has a percent chance to fumble attacks due to immense pain.
    Melting: DoT, player has a higher chance to fumble attacks, and is crippled.
    Hellfire: Highest DoT, Guaranteed chance to fumble attacks, Stats are reduced by a percent value, and can't cast spells.

    The way I balanced it is that fire attacks require the player to be hit by a large number of attacks in order to proc Hellfire, you can also cure one tier of Fire with high mana spells or certain potions. The thing is, the same can be applied on enemies so in order to succeed, you want to take advantage of balancing debuffs and defending yourself so that you don't get the 4th tier, since getting to that tier is pretty much instant death.
  3. Wavelength
    #23 Source
    MrZalgo said:
    I want to apply a tierlist basically for status ailments within my titles.

    basically being hit by multiple fire attacks will increase the tier and severity of said tier.

    for example:

    Fire has 4 tiers:

    Burn: simple DoT
    Scorch: DoT and player has a percent chance to fumble attacks due to immense pain.
    Melting: DoT, player has a higher chance to fumble attacks, and is crippled.
    Hellfire: Highest DoT, Guaranteed chance to fumble attacks, Stats are reduced by a percent value, and can't cast spells.

    The way I balanced it is that fire attacks require the player to be hit by a large number of attacks in order to proc Hellfire, you can also cure one tier of Fire with high mana spells or certain potions. The thing is, the same can be applied on enemies so in order to succeed, you want to take advantage of balancing debuffs and defending yourself so that you don't get the 4th tier, since getting to that tier is pretty much instant death.

    This sounds like an interesting system, and could be a really good lever for balancing status affliction vs. status removal, with weak (in comparison to the characters) enemies needing to hit you several times in order to move beyond "Burn", versus strong enemies or bosses being able to jump right to Scorch or higher with a single skill.

    The one major drawback is that it's complex, with a lot of information to remember (which statuses evolve into which other statuses, and what each status does) and to track (how close a battler is towards the next level of a status). Spending time to craft a helpful GUI, and keeping the number of different status trees to a minimum (allowing the player to see each one more frequently and reducing mental bookkeeping) will go a long way towards making your system a success.
  4. ave36
    #24 Source
    I think a very good solution to balance Poison is reinvent it to do damage proportional to the attacker's MAtk and the defender's MDef, not to the defender's MHP. That is what I did in Legend of Terra Firma. This makes the poison state usable on bosses without being broken af. The mechanics of the vanilla Poison were transferred to the Bleed state which is rare and mostly used by enemies. The only player available skill that inflicts Bleed is the blue magic Razor Dance, acquired closer to the end of the game, when most of the bosses are already defeated. Razor Dance also has a low chance to afflict Heavy-class enemies, and most bosses are Heavies.
  5. Maliki79
    #25 Source
    In my game, I get around this by having levels or degrees of all my negative stats.
    In the case of poison, it can do anywhere from 0 to 99% hp dmg per turn, depending on the poison buildup.
    This buildup is dependent on dissipates at a rate dependant on the target.
    So bosses can have a fair tolerance to poison but can always get the aliment.
    (I HATE when bosses are 100% immune to aliments!)

    I even made a plugin that can buildup immunity to states after certain number of applications!

    So there are ways to incorporate status states to bosses. Just gotta find ones that work well.
  6. FirestormNeos
    #26 Source
    With scripts, I imagine there are many possibilities to balance DoT in a way that still makes it fun.

    Unfortunately, I don't use scripts, so I gotta deal with percentage-based HP damage that can't be adjusted with formulas ye olde fashioned way; just make everything else just as overpowered.
  7. CraneSoft
    #27 Source
    The way I do this is to add a simple line to change how DoT damage is calculated in the default formula - by multiplying it with element rate of an ID I use exclusively to manipulate the final DoT damage.

    For my game, I have all of the big three: Burn, Poison, and Bleed - each of them are extremely potent on their own (10~25% of max HP per action) and is stackable with each other, so they can be extremely effective if the player chose to use them against the regular enemies.

    For bosses and other foes where I want DoT to be usable but not game-breaking, I simply had to change their individual element rates and manipulate as I seem fit, including in the middle of a battle, depending on how much I want them to be effective.
  8. Frostorm
    #28 Source
    Wow, this is an old thread lol. For DoTs, I got rid of the default % HP-based damage. Instead, my DoTs use utility scaling, as in the dmg is directly dependent on the caster's stats. Both regular enemies and bosses are affected by the DoTs in the same way. Bosses simply have much higher stats and larger HP pools.

    My Burn effect is interesting in that there are 2 additional properties if the caster has the appropriate passive skill learned. First, the Burn state increases the amount of Fire dmg the target receives by +5% per turn remaining on the Burn state. Inflicting Burn while the target already has the state simply increases the duration, which makes the aforementioned effect even more effective. Second, the Burn state can spread to adjacent units, if the caster has the "Flammable" passive learned.
  9. Saireau
    #29 Source
    In Wildsilver, I'm using this Visustella notetag for my damage-over-time effects:

    Code:
    <JS HP Slip Damage>
 if (target.collapseType() == 1) {
 damage = target.mhp/40;
 } else {
 damage = target.mhp/5;
 }
</JS HP Slip Damage>

    Bosses take damage equal to 2.5% of their max HP, normal enemies and heroes take a whopping 20%. This makes damage-over-times a) actually useful in normal battles and b) dangerous for player characters instead of just annoying. You're really incentivised to cure it.