Classes and balancing.

[Wavelength]

I try to create a lot of Incomparables between different avenues of character customization - for example, certain stats don't affect the damage formula but trigger beneficial effects during battle, and most skills provide some sort of extra conditional utility ("restores TP on a critical hit", "speeds up the party if it kills the foe", etc.) beyond their damage output and elemental property.

This provides a lot of interesting and fun choices during combat, but it also makes it exceedingly difficult to balance the classes/skills/builds on a mathematical level.  If Critical Hits simply do 300% damage and a +1 change to AGI gives you a +5% chance Crit, then that AGI point is worth +10% damage, which you can directly compare with a +1 change to STR.  But if that Critical Hit burns the enemy and restores some of your TP, the calculus on how effective that +1 to AGI is against the +1 to STR becomes very hard to directly compare.

So I just take my best guess and then do a lot of playtesting with all the different possible character builds in whatever different situations I can engineer as a player.  I ask myself questions such as the following, and if any of them are true, it means something about the class/skill/build needs to be reworked:

• Is the character dying too often?
• Does the skill crowd out other similar skills (because it's superior in almost every way)?
• Does the class require too many things to "go right" in order to be effective?
• Is the tradeoff between speed/power/defense/utility uneven or unfair?
• Does the class feel restrictive or limited?
• Is there a clearly abusable setup that lets the player stockpile resources in battle?
• Is one stat or character build consistently outperforming other (reasonable) stats/builds?
• Does this class'/character's role in battle feel different than the class' aesthetic/the character's personality?