Are self-buff skills satisfying to the player?

[jonthefox]

When coming up with skills, I like to offer the player choices.  One way I usually do this is by letting the player to choose to sacrifice their current turn in order for a larger payoff in future turns.


Some typical examples:


-a warrior may use a "Battle Focus" skill that boosts his critical strike and critical evasion chance for 5 turns.   


-a barbarian may use a "Muster Strength" skill that increases ATK by 300% for the next turn.


These skills will often be optimal/beneficial in many situations, but I'm wondering if they feel good to the player.  People tend to look for instant gratification--maybe it feels really bad for the barbarian to spend a turn doing nothing in order to get an empowered attack.  People would also expect barbarians to not be a class requiring patience, quite the contrary--so it might also feel bad thematically to have this kind of skill.   


Curious what other people think about this kind of thing.

 

[bgillisp]

In order to make the skills worthwhile, you have to make the benefit of the boost offset the lost damage from attacking for one turn. So to use your 300% ATK example, it will only feel satisfying if the damage with 300% ATK is 2x normal damage or more (and if it is 2x normal damage on the dot, the player may still decide attacking two turns in a row is better). Otherwise, it is a wasted move in the player's mind.

 

[RHachicho]

Depends if they sync with the bosses .. For example an atk 300% would be highly effective if certain bosses or enemies had predictable times where their defences dropped. 


That way you are losing a turn in order to do massive damage during a limited window. And doing that massive dmg to a boss that otherwise takes little .. is pretty satifying. 


You also have to bear in mind that not all turns are created equal. Having 300% for your ultimate limit break is NOT the same as having 300% for a standard attack action. 

 

[moldy]

You could also create a dilemma for the player by making buffs only accessible through weaker damage spells. Like 50% chance to add the buff to the player by using a slightly weaker damage spell. High risk high reward.


Also consider debuffs vs buffs. Debuffs benefit the whole party whereas buffs only benefit one (assuming its single target).

 

[hadecynn]

I've always wondered why damage-causing skills and buff/state-afflicting skills have to be mutually exclusive and independent things. Meanwhile, in a corner of the forum elsewhere, people are pulling their hair out over making meaningful, tactical skills instead of falling prey to the Fire 1, Fire 2, Fire 3 paradigm.


Why not marry the two ideas? Example:


Fireball - Deals 50 damage to enemy, inflicts Burn on enemy (additional damage over time)


Firewall - Deals 40 damage to enemy, increase defense of user by 10% for 3 turns


Incinerate - Deals 60 damage, no other additional effects.


Takes care of "are self buffs/status causing attacks worth using?", "how do I get players to continue using skill X after they learn skill Y?", and "how do I make my battles offer strategic choice?" all in one fell swoop, no?

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

@hadecynn - good points, though it's still good to have exclusive self-buffing or de-buffing skills as long as you manage to balance it out and make it worthwhile to the player. Like if you create the game in such a way that sometimes, using those damage + buff skills aren't optimal (like maybe have an enemy that has high HP that you would want to inflict him with HP% damage that maybe "Burn" offers, but you cannot really hit him with Fireball because he counters direct hits from Fire element). Ofc the more options you put, the harder it is to balance it out. XD


@jonthefox IMHO, it's all about balancing your game. Your buffs need to have an impact.


For example, in my game I have this skill that causes your next move to have 100% CRI if it belongs to a certain type. Why/When would a player use it? Battles in my game flows via action speed (it's like a delayed action CTB, you pick an action and you unleash it on the next turn which is determined by the action speed) and the skills of that type are kind of slow so sometimes it will be better to do Buff-Attack strategy rather than Attack-Attack. Then there's also these "finisher" moves that you can trigger, if you time your usage of that buff skill right before you're about to trigger the finisher, well you have a 100% CRI burst damage skill.


Now if you do something like a 50% def self-buff but the enemy still deals 1-Hit KO even with the buff or doesn't even deal that much damage without the buff, then using that buff bears no impact to the player. 

People would also expect barbarians to not be a class requiring patience, quite the contrary--so it might also feel bad thematically to have this kind of skill.

Eh? But most barbarian classes in games that I have played have these "shout" skills that buffs themselves or the party.