Balancing stats guide?

[NoPiessadface]

What's the best way or technique in balancing stats? I want it to add diversity to it like there's a strong guy and a potentially weak guy but when I try to create one it always ends up weird like they're just completely unusable or literally break the game. I really hated long hours of play testing again and again forever just to see a small detail of change to make it perfect. So any faster way to do this?

 

[Andar]

you can't completely replace playtesting, but you can minimize it by giving all options a good starting value before testing.
and that means mathematics - usually starting with a program like excel or calc where you enter the values and damage formulae into a table and calculate the base values of each enemy and actor and then balance them to be on the correct starting levels before playtesting to see which combination needs to be modified.

 

[LordOfPotatos]

I made all the stats worth the same, that's a lot easier than using MV's default stats.
for example, the average character looks like this:

on level 1: ------- on level 99:
HP: 1000 -------- HP: 5000
MP: 100 --------- MP: 500
ATK: 100 -------- ATK: 500
MAT: 100 -------- MAT: 500
DEF: 100 -------- DEF: 500
MDF: 100 ------- MDF: 500
AGI: 100 --------- AGI: 500
LUK: 100 -------- LUK: 500

and then made the damage formulas and ability costs based on this.
that way you can compare stats easily, a strong slow guy can have 20 less AGI and 20 more STR on level 1 (except HP which you just multiply by 10).