Throwing Stuff Where It Hurts: Optimizing Offensive Item Use

Most people are familiar with attack items in many JRPGs; items that serve an offensive purpose and do some sort of damage. 

Considering a big part of my game's battle system is conservation of resources in favor of more intense, strategic battles, this leads me to a few decisions to make regarding attack items. The issue is that with many JRPGs, attack items tend to be useless at the start or largely outclassed by the middle of the game. 

In my game, I want attack items to be competitive and useful at least in a strategic sense since the player is only limited to holding 15 copies of a given item at one time, and AP usage for spells is easily replenished through defending, but not something the player can spam. 

Now, a caveat here; there is a party member you obtain early in the game that specializes in using items. How can I make this character competitive but not overpowered with the others in terms of damage output via using these items while making Attack items themselves still be useful independent of this character who specializes in them? 

Discuss Attack items, guys.

That's an interesting concept, a character who specializes in items. I'm a bit confused as to what a specialization would entail, however. You would think if two people used the same item, there shouldn't be a different effect, at least when it comes to attack items. I've seen many games with a character or stat, that increases the potency of healing items, but never attack items. Maybe you can increase the limit that an item specialist can use per turn, or just go ahead and make attack items stronger for that character.

I would say if you want items to compete with spells, you would have to either give items an additional effect, or have unique effects. What I mean by additional, is if you had a Firebomb, and a Mage has the ability to cast Fireball, Fireball will deal more damage, but a Firebomb will apply a Burn. And unique effects could be simply something no other skill could do, like if your characters do not learn a Stunning skill, a Net or Bear Trap as an attack item would be very useful.

There are two RPGs that jump to mind when I think of "offensive items": Final Fantasy X and Legend of Dragoon.

Final Fantasy X's implementation had items dealing a flat damage, but they required a skill to be used (so you'd have to use "Use Item" before you could use these items and only one character had access to this skill by default).

Legend of Dragoon's implementation had items that dealt magic damage and scaled with the user's MAG stat. And because magic in general was limited in that game (you could only use magic while in Dragoon form, which you spent limited time in), the "mage" characters tended to have 80% of their damage coming from attack items. Miranda's MAG stat was so good that she was actually one of the best damage-dealing characters in the game.

In a more traditional RPG where magic could be used more freely, you could still borrow from Legend of Dragoon, and give offensive items scaling - this will instantly make characters with a naturally high corresponding stat better at using items than someone else. If you don't plan on using Luck for it's default functions, you could use that stat as your scaler for item strength. If you want offensive items to still be useful for characters with poor Luck, give the items a Base Damage that the scaling goes on top of. But now they would work almost exactly like spells, though, just with a different "cost" system. For making them unique, it would depend on how your magic works...but in a more traditional magic system, I'd try and give clear roles to them. Assuming that a Mage's spells are unique to them, items are going to be usable by anyone, and therefore I wouldn't strive too hard to make them completely unique. As said before, their damage could scale with a certain stat, or you could keep Luck's default function of improving chances of inflicting status ailments and turn your Item User into a specialized status inflictor. Perhaps you could merge this with FFX's flat damage so that your items deal a Flat Damage + Luck Scaling (not a 1:1 ratio, but something like 0.5 damage : 1 Luck stat), and is NOT reduced by target defenses, which could already make them good against enemies with high defensive stats. If you go this route, you'd definitely want to monitor the scaling factor of the items (a 1:1 ratio could make them insanely strong for instance).

Since you've limited the amount of each item the player can have, the amount of items they have will gate their damage potential similarly to MP usage gating mages.

EDIT: One more game comes to mind: Wild Arms 3. Virginia had a special ability that allowed her to give a single-target item multi-target capabilities. In essence, she was the only character in that game that could use a single-target healing item and heal the whole party with it. This was definitely a defining characteristic for her, and made her heal with items rather than with spells. The same principle can apply to offensive items.

You could have Items produce a set amount of damage, BUT your Specialist has Techniques which use up 1 item each, but which do unique damage or add status effects or add elemental use to the items.  For example:

- Blessed Knives - Holy based attack using throwing knives

- Eye Poke - Chance of inflicting Blind status

- Vital Throw - Small chance of instant death (i.e. the throw hits the enemy in a vital area)

- Poison Tip - Inflicts Poison damage

- Super Throw - Adds Magical element to the throw, enabling it to hit, say, werewolves or vampires

- Thousand Blades - Does a lot more hits

Also, the specialist techniques would increase in effectiveness as ATK, AGI and/or LUK increase.

If a non-specialist uses a Throwing Knife, maybe it does a fair amount of damage, but has a chance to miss (after all it DOES take special practice to have a prayer of hitting someone with a throwing knife in real life)

Well if you want them to have access to the exact same attack items as the rest of the group uses... You could give them a special Skill only they can use which lets them use an item instantly once per turn without consuming their turn. Maybe have every item they use from here apply to all targets (all foes or all allies)

Example of a Battle

*1st turn*

Chemist uses "Throw" and selects fire bomb and it hits all foes for fire damage. Chemist gains a status effect which disables Throw till next turn

Chemist uses "Item" like everyone else can and uses another fire bomb which hits a single foe.

*turn ends*

*2nd turn*

Chemist uses "Throw"and selects Hi-Potion and heals all allies for 200 HP. Chemist gains a status effect which disables Throw till next turn

Chemist attacks foe with his sword.

*turn ends*

*3rd turn*

Chemist uses "item" and selects firebomb and deals fire damage to a single enemy

*turn ends*

Chemist facepalms cause he forgot to use "throw" first.

*100th turn*

Chemist uses "Throw" and selects Phoenix Down and revives all dead allies.

Chemist uses uses "item" and selects Mega-Potion and recovers HP to the party and saves the day

White Mage flips off Chemist

*turn ends*

----------------

Maybe he can have a TP move that let's him turn 1 type of item into 3 (some item's can't be multiplied for balancing reasons) - again making it an instant move so people don't lose a turn and that a character that depends on consumable items doesn't run out of consumable items.

There is an item specialist for ya~

Interesting thoughts here, everyone. Harmill in particular;

I liked the way The Legend of Dragoon did it with Magic Damage determining Attack Item power. HOWEVER, the reason why that worked so well the way it did was like you said, magic damage was scarce and was only available in a particular way; your Dragoon form. Given that this is not possible to do every battle, but mage type characters such as Meru and Miranda/Shana still needed to be relevant, they added in Attack Items that scaled with MAG to give them an extra edge since Meru had a low attack stat and Shana/Miranda didn't have any additions. The idea was so that those characters can still be useful even when they couldn't use Magic. Now Meru and Shana/Miranda ended up completely overpowered for entirely different reasons, but still, that was the intent.

But in my game, (or I figure, most games) magic damage and spells aren't so rare, even if only certain characters can use them; they can generally use their spells every battle. So yeah, Attack Items are a good fallback in case they run out of MP or want to conserve, but generally magic serves its purpose. NOW with that said, characters with low MAG power and no real offensive spells will still get a use out of Attack Items, and the character that specializes in Attack Items will have special uses for them that no one else has, like the ability to combine multiple items for special attacks, and increased power for the regular ones, and so on.

Right, so with a "default" magic use, I'd refer back to the idea of perhaps making the items do Flat Damage + Scaling Stat, and unaffected by enemy Defense/Magic Defense. It may not be perfect with your game, but it would allow items to excel against targets with high defenses.

I'm not sure if you read my edit since I kinda ninja-edited my post 30 minutes after posting it, but I mentioned Wild Arms 3 giving one of their characters the ability to use a single-target item and have it affect multiple targets. If you already intend on having attack items that innately target everyone, then this won't work. But it's another good idea for defining an "item thrower" role. Personally, this is my favourite idea so far (Wild Arms 3 has a number of unique and awesome mechanics).

As for combining items to achieve unique special attacks, that's another good route. That's what Rikku's Overdrive is in Final Fantasy X. She can mix two or three items together to get a ton of different possible outcomes. In her case, it wasn't enough to give her an "item thrower" role, though, but you could definitely tweak it to better support the individual mechanics of your game.

I'd also like to mention that I quite like omen613's idea. It gives a defining characteristic to an "item thrower" much like Wild Arms 3 does, but in a different way. I think these are the types of ideas that will best create an "item thrower" rather than a "mage that uses items".

As long as the Attack command is reliable and Magic is economical, attack items are useless. 

I'll compare two implementations:  Mass Effect 3 and The Legend of Dragoon (as discussed above).

In LoD, casting was not economical.  You had to build up SP, transform into a Dragoon, and have the MP to cast the spell.  I don't recall being able to purchase MP-recovering items.  Meanwhile, you could buy attack items.  They were a viable option in comparison to Dragoon magic (but they are inevitably outclassed) because of how much effort goes into Dragoon magic.  The player had to judge between the viability of Dragoon-ing up and casting, and just using an easily-replaceable item.  Very tactical for a JRPG.

In ME3, you had Powers which triggered a global cooldown (use power:  can't use other powers until cooldown is over), and you had Grenades, which consumed a grenade, but didn't trigger a cooldown.  Fine balance between the two, leaving the player to have to consider both options if he is caught in a cooldown surrounded by mooks.

Most RPGs tend to make Magic extremely economical and attack items very rare.  Earlier games tended to make attack items weaker than spells.

Bottom line:  make attack items equal to magic somehow.  Magic has a high cost to offset how finite items are.  Something.  You're the designer.

Interesting thoughts. What do you think of games like FFX and FF5, where (respectively) Rikku with her Item and Mix was one of the most powerful forces in the game, and in FF5, the Chemist was able to outright break the game?

The FFV Chemist !Mix command and the FFX Mix Overdrive (as well as weapon and armor crafting) were most likely ways to address the problem of accumulating stuff that obsolesces as the game progresses that was perceived by the developers of the Final Fantasy series.

It's apparent that the developers of these games thought it was more important that these items have a use rather than streamlining future FF games and just getting rid of them (at the time).

I applaud that mindset. I think it's an important thing to be able to look at something in game design and go 'How can we reincorporate this and make it useful and fun' rather than 'this isn't necessary get rid of it'. Simple can be fine and all, but a lot of modern games take it too far and it's reduced to 'put round peg in round hole'. I especially enjoy crafting, that is, when done correctly (and it is an easy thing to screw up).