Critique my class system. Needs a lot of work.

[Eschaton]

First, I design almost all skills around the philosophy that damage is the main goal; no turn should be wasted on skills that ONLY cause a SLIGHT chance of debuffing the enemy. So, all skills do damage, and all skills cause debuffs. Skills need to have high utility; even if the enemy is strong versus fire, they can still be blinded by the smoke.

Second, I want player skill to be even slightly involved. Most skills and especially the Attack command have “timed button presses”. For the Attack command, getting the timed press ensures a critical hit. For other skills, timed hits ensure the enemy gets debuffed, for which there is a high chance anyway.. Either way, the timed press isn't absolutely necessary for beating the game unless you're on the hardest difficulty. (Thanks to Galv’s Timed Button Attacks).

Third, all skills have a “cooldown” which prevents the user from using those skills until the Cooldown is over. Rather than using MP or TP, the use of skills triggers a Cooldown. Equipping heavier gear increases the time for skills spent in Cooldown while leveling up reduces Cooldown. (Thanks to Yanfly’s Skill Restrictions)

Finally, some enemies come into battle with automatic states, such as Shielded and Fleet-Footed (high evasion), Armored (high defense), Barrier (high defense and magic defense), and Health Regen. Having these states makes the enemy immune to the Stagger state (which stops them from acting for a turn). Certain skills are designed to remove these states and make the enemy easier to kill. Strategic use of skills and attacks can debuff the enemy, keep them staggered, and make killing them faster and more efficient. Learning how these skills work is the key to success.

Now, without further ado, here are the classes. Only the player character gets access to these classes and the player selects the class at the beginning and cannot change it throughout the game. Party members get their own unique classes and skillset (from the below skills).

The Fighter

- Can equip any weapon, armor, and shield.

- Their signature move is !Limit, which adds a brief state to the user which makes timed hits easier to execute while doubling damage.

- !Shield Bash – Hit the enemy with your shield. Must have a shield equipped. Stagger enemies with protections. Briefly incapacitate enemies without protections.

- Warriors have access to “stance skills” which add states which alter how their attack command works. Only one can be active at a time.

- !Brutal – makes attacks hit harder, increases chance of attacks adding the Stagger state, has a chance of adding the Panic state. Accuracy is decreased, however. Useful against enemies with Shields and Armor.

- !Precise – makes attacks more accurate, makes them very effective against flying enemies and enemies that are “Fleet-Footed” (high evasion). However, physical attack damage takes a slight penalty.

- !Knockout – gives attacks a high chance of inflicting an incapacitating state.

The White Mage

- White Magi are less interested in killing their enemy, but their skillset is very capable of Staggering them or outright removing them from the fight in a non-lethal manner. What makes a White Mage extremely useful is their ability to invoke the divine to heal the wounds of their allies.

- Their weapon selection is limited to Staves and Hammers. White Magi cannot equip medium or heavy armor, nor can they equip shields.

- Their signature ability is !Pray, which relies on faith in the Random Number God. It's effects are variable; reliant on your health, your states, and how recently you used Pray. If you need health, you have a very, VERY high chance of healing your party and restoring their health Regen. If you're fighting a boss with high physical attack, you have a chance of getting a buff that increases the party’s evasion. If you're fighting an enemy which casts powerful magic, your party might get a Barrier. If your level is higher than what it should be, Pray might not be as effective. Using the skill reduces the chance of getting what you need, preventing the skill’s abuse by the player.

- !Dispel – Deals Holy damage. Staggers enemies, even if they have protections. Weakens armor. Cancels Health Regen. Has a high chance of destroying Armor and especially Barriers. Extremely damaging against the undead. Panics the undead.

- !Float – Yanks the enemy helplessly into the air, making them extremely vulnerable to Archery and !Precise. Merely staggers enemies who have Shields, Armor, or Barriers.

- !Wind – Hit the enemy with hurricane force winds. Staggers an enemy if they have protections. Briefly incapacitates enemies without protections. If the enemy is affected by Float or are Flying, they will be ejected from the fight.

- !Pulse – Cause an earth tremor beneath the feet of your enemy. Stagger all enemies with protections. Incapacitate enemies without protections. Does not affect enemies that are Flying or affected by !Float.

The Monk

- The Monk is a warrior who combines white magic with martial discipline to create a brutal high-risk-high-reward combat style. Monks are very effective under pressure, doing more damage if they are in greater danger. (Current HP is factored into their damage formula).

- Monks can use their fists more effectively than any class, but they can also equip Staves.

- The Monk’s signature move is !Kick, which closes the distance between the Monk and their enemy. When using !Kick, the monk briefly enters a state which maximizes their accuracy and their target rate, while minimizing their evasion. After a successful hit with !Kick, the monk can follow with more hits, each increasing their chance to be attacked while decreasing their evasion.

- !Brutal – same as the Warrior’s skill

- !Knockout – same as the Warrior’s skill

- !Float – same as the White Mage’s skill

- !Pulse – same as the White Mage’s skill

The Black Mage

- Black Magi are more interested in pushing the extent of elemental power to their limit. To that end, they study the destructive effects of arcane magic.

- Black Magi can equip knives and staves.

- !Fire – Burn your opponents and their gear. Heavy damage to unprotected or armored enemies. A successful timed button press causes your enemy to panic and lose their health regeneration.

- !Thunder – Stun your enemy with an electric surge. Effective against aerial enemies, enemies with shields, and machines. A successful timed button press can cause your enemies to drop their shields and weapons.

- !Blizzard – instantly freeze and shatter enemies without protections. Slow down enemies that don't get frozen.

- !Curse – The signature skill of the Black Mage has various effects depending on the enemy. Weak enemies can be killed outright with a successful timed button press. All enemies are briefly paralyzed, and a successful timed button press can cause the enemy to be weak versus magic. Cast this skill on enemies affected by !Fire, !Thunder, or !Blizzard to trigger a powerful magic “explosion.” Might be OP, still working on this one. A lot of its effects are going to be enabled by events and scripts, but all enemies are either vulnerable to instant death or paralysis, and are immune to both if they have auto-states/protections such as Armor, Shield, Fleet-Foot, or especially Barrier.

- !Muddle – Distract your enemies by affecting their minds, reducing the Black Mage’s target rate significantly. A successful timed button press can cause the target(s) to become confused, attacking their allies.

The Rogue

- Rogues combine combat skill, stealth, and black magic to hide their movements. Even in broad daylight, a skilled Rogue is supposed to be impossible to find. While under the Stealth state, Rogues can inflict massive physical damage with a Sneak attack or they can Steal their enemy’s gear.

- Rogues can equip knives and are especially adept at Archery, enjoying easier timed button press attacks when equipped with Bows.

- !Precise – Same skill as the Warrior’s and the Monk’s.

- !Knockout – Same skill as the Warrior’s and the Monk’s.

- !Sneak – The Rogue’s signature skill adds a state to the user that minimizes their target rate and unlocks the Steal and Sneak Attack while active. Initially, !Sneak requires the use of “Smoke Bombs,” but this cost can be eschewed by upgrading the Rogue.

- !Fire – Same as the Black Mage’s skill.

- !Muddle – Same as the Black Mage’s skill.

The Red Mage

- Red Magi seek versatility rather than mastery, and to that end, they practice black and white magic as well as the use of the sword.

- Red Magi can equip knives, staves, and swords.

- !Wind – same White Mage’s skill

- !Dispel – same as the White Mage’s skill

- !Sealblade – using a sword a something of a “lightning rod,” the Red Mage intercepts and nullifies magic cast at the party, but only if the Red Mage is equipped with a sword, which increases the RM’s cooldowns.

- !Thunder – Same as BM’s skill

- !Blizzard – Same as BM’s skill

 

[Wavelength]

There are several things I could say about this system, but there's one that, in my mind, supercedes all of them: your skill sets sound like something that would be much more appropriate in a MOBA than a single-player (presumably turn-based) RPG.

Your classes have very small, complicated kits (many of your spells have four or more different and sometimes unrelated effects) and an entire party together would be able to cripple any powerful enemy with a single ability cast apiece.

This is great in a MOBA, where:

• A large part of the appeal is in spending hours learning the intracacies of a hero's kit and the counterplay that can beat it
• Mastery and Competition are valid design aesthetics to shoot for rather than Progression or Exploration
• Professional UI teams ensure that you can access most of the information you need in a split-second, and particle effects fill in whatever is missing from the UI
• Gameplay is exciting and fair while either you or your opponent can get utterly fubarred by a single good combo of skills
• Real-time action necessitates a small number of skills for cleaner gameplay
• Your party is often spread throughout the map so extreme "wombo combos" are an edge case

I'm having a really hard time seeing this kind of system work in an RPG, where:

• Progression, Exploration, Variety and Discovery are usually core design aesthetics
• You (hopefully) encounter a large variety of enemies so you won't learn the tiny intracacies of all of them
• It is difficult to convey to your player how a skill with four different effects works (especially in RPG Maker where you have limited screen space to work with)
• If you can wreck the enemy with a single good combo and your enemy can't do the same, battles become boring
• If your enemy can also wreck you with a single good combo, the game becomes frustrating and impossible to progress through (if losing in battle is a game over)
• A longer adventure length almost necessitates learning new skills over time to keep things fresh, meaning that players aren't going to spend 50+ hours "mastering" a single kit of 4 skills
• Your party remains together in battle so that first-turn "wombos" are de rigeur

The fact that you're not limiting the use of skills through a chronic resource like Mana, but rather going with the much more acute gating that Cooldowns provide, will only serve to exacerbate the problem.  Your party can unload their skills at the start of each and every battle without needing to worry about having the resources to do so next battle.  So one character can remove the enemy's protections or remove them from the fight, a second character can utterly blow up that now-vulnerable enemy, and a third character can reliably confuse the second enemy to have them attack the third or blind them to make them useless and each of those skills is also doing damage!  What are the enemies going to be able to do by this point?  If it's something commensurate with what the characters can do, it's going to be a frustrating experience that often results in losing the battle.  Otherwise, they're going to be utterly helpless against your onslaught unless they appear in very big numbers.

I love utility, I love cooldowns, and I love speedy, decisive battles.  But I'm looking at your proposed system as something that wouldn't work in practice, at least not for an RPG.  Maybe seeing the system in action would change my mind and if you have a demo of some sort I'd love to try it out - you certainly have a lot of creative ideas at work here.  But if these are simply ideas that you're not totally sure about, as your thread title seems to indicate - my advice would be, spread the utility out amongst a larger number of skills for each class, and either gate the highest-effectiveness skills with mana or force the player to "warm them up" (such as requiring two critical hits to be scored against a target before they can be Cursed).

 

[Eschaton]

I knew you wouldn't let me down, Wavelength.

But some of the limiting factors I had in mind would be that your party members would have significantly limited kits by comparison to the player, and have significantly longer cooldowns.

I also feel like there should not be as many enemy encounters as a traditional RPG, and certainly none of them random.

The Rogue is limited in their casting by also needing items, but I couldn't think of a way to limit the Monk's casting. I didn't want to use mana because players will just grind for mana restoratives.

 

[Wavelength]

So, like I said, these are my impressions based on what you've laid out here.  It's difficult to judge it in a vacuum because part of the success of any game mechanic is always going to be how it plays with all of the other mechanics and systems in your game.  Of particular note, you mention that other party members have limited kits - if they are very limited as to only provide basic utility and nothing like the "signature moves" from these classes, then some of my concerns aren't as relevant.

It does seem like there are still a few gamebreaking fight-opening combos available within a single class, though.  For example, the White Mage can open any fight with Dispel (which removes protections and staggers an enemy, making it so they can't fight back this turn) and then use Pulse the next turn (which incapacitates foes without protections), thus incapacitating (I assume this is like a multi-turn stagger?) them without any chance of them fighting back.  No amount of cooldown is going to prevent this extremely disabling opening-combo (Chronic resource costs could discourage it).  Of course, there are several different ways to balance it (e.g. making the White Mage's damage low so that enemies will be able to recover from the disable and eventually fight back, or having large enemy parties and having WM's disables only apply to one enemy), so as long as you don't fall into the trap of crowding out all other possible White Mage openings for most enemy parties, it can be okay.

A big part of the success of your system, too, is going to be how well the player can learn how to handle enemies.  I took a similar approach as you seem to believe in as I made timeblazer: a very small number of enemy encounters, non-random, and each with their own strategies and gimmicks.  The biggest challenge has been to convey all of the information that the player will need to understand how they're supposed to overcome the challenge; I've tried to do it with battle events and dialogue, and while that certainly helped, I found that players had a hard time keeping track of everything, so they needed more contextual clues, from things like item/skill descriptions, extra menus (like a States window), and HUD additions.  I'm implementing those now, so we'll have to see how it goes, but I feel like it's going to add a lot more clarity about the rules and current situation.  I've also found that this low-frequency, fixed encounter sequence has made it very easy to balance mana costs with restoration; as an oversimplification, I get away with including very few restoration items at all (just enough for the player to comfortably get through the battles they'll encounter if they play well), and I have an "emergency" move available where you can sacrifice turns to restore some mana if you run out.

Are the player's kits going to expand as they level up/progress through your game?

Like I said, whenever you have the system mostly implemented, I'd love to try it out; I could probably give you better advice once I can "feel it" instead of just thinking it through.  The demo for Sacred Earth: Promise has a battle system that I think I would have been very concerned about if I just read the ruleset and moves, but when I played through the combat, it felt great, allowed for a surprisingly wide set of tactics, and was only imbalanced because of a few abusable "edge-case" skill combos (which I'm sure will be corrected in the full game).

 

[Eschaton]

I was going to construct something similar to *Final Fantasy Tactics,* with a point-buy menu (again, thanks to Yanfly's Common Event Shop) to upgrade skills. When a skill reaches a certain level, other skills will be made available to the player. I should edit the list to show what is available at level 1 and what needs to be unlocked.

But I've been thinking about warmups before skills. Maybe upper-tier skills might require a warmup period before they can be cast.

What I'd really like is a to have a global cooldown which prevents the character from using any skills at all, but I haven't found any way of making the CD time variable based on other variables.

 

[Milennin]

In addition to what has already been said, how do you plan on making all this information available to the player? I see skills with like 4 different effects on them. How are you going to fit all that information on the screen during combat without overcrowding the UI? Or are all these extra effects hidden from the player and they're meant to look it up in a manual or something?

 

[bgillisp]

The Rogue is limited in their casting by also needing items, but I couldn't think of a way to limit the Monk's casting. I didn't want to use mana because players will just grind for mana restoratives.

In addition to what has been said, I want to focus on this. This is an issue because...why? Why do you want to restrict how the players play the game? If someone wants to grind for mana, let them. That's their choice.

 

[Kes]

To pick up and develop bgillisp's point a little further, it does seem to me that this whole thing is shaping up to be one of those games where unless the player plays the way the develop envisaged, they're stuffed.  With only a small number of encounters, there is little chance that the player will have the opportunity to develop strategies that you never thought of, therefore they will have to go the pre-ordained way.  No grinding, so the less strategically-minded player has no alternative route/aid to completion.  Things like that make it less appealing, because who wants to be railroaded into one way of playing?

 

[Wavelength]

To pick up and develop bgillisp's point a little further, it does seem to me that this whole thing is shaping up to be one of those games where unless the player plays the way the develop envisaged, they're stuffed.  With only a small number of encounters, there is little chance that the player will have the opportunity to develop strategies that you never thought of, therefore they will have to go the pre-ordained way.  No grinding, so the less strategically-minded player has no alternative route/aid to completion.  Things like that make it less appealing, because who wants to be railroaded into one way of playing?

This is certainly a topic that any good designer needs to consider because railroading kills fun like nothing else, but it's not necessarily one that I see becoming a problem in this system unless certain combos are so good that they "crowd out" other tactics (in which case the enemies will need to be balanced for these combos and anyone who fails to use them will be screwed).

Both of the Ace games that I've released have either featured no grinding and completely fixed battle sequence, or have limited the amount of grinding you can do with a days-and-deadlines mechanic, and in both of them, players have generally praised the amount of strategic freedom that was available.

Again, I think a really good point to bring up in general, but I don't see it as being intrinsically tied to a small encounter rate.

What I'd really like is a to have a global cooldown which prevents the character from using any skills at all, but I haven't found any way of making the CD time variable based on other variables.

You can lock out skills by Sealing them (or Sealing the entire Skill Type) with a State.  It would require a significant amount of eventing to change the duration of that lockout based on variables.  Or you could use my Utility Scaling script to do that, but it's very possible it will conflict with certain Yanfly scripts.

 

[Milennin]

Also, if you don't want to let the player grind for mana restoratives, you could always limit the quantity of items they can carry with them, or remove restoratives altogether and have skills that restore mana instead.

 

[Eschaton]

My thing about restoratives is that if you make them abundant, then casters will do 2 things with their turns: cast and use mana restoratives. If they are made rare, then they will be too awesome to use, making spells too awesome to use and encourage mashing Attack.

I feel cooldowns encourage the use of other skills and the attack command, and making skills incredibly useful encourages the player to use them.

Combos I feel will encourage the player to experiment and use all the tools given to them.

But mana and mana restoratives, I feel, are a failed experiment.

 

[Milennin]

That's why I mentioned skills that restore MP. Obviously they would be weaker/less effective than skills that don't, but they could be used as soft cooldowns. Or give some to other classes so they can play a secondary role as support for classes that do require mana for their skills.

Auto-mana regen every turn instead of restoratives can also be used as a sort of cooldown mechanic.

 

[woootbm]

It's too early to critique the fine-tuning of the system. Let's not just automatically assume things will be OP or unfit for a genre, I say. That being said, there are indeed things to consider as the game balance is navigated. The thing that stands out to me is that there's a lot of staggering and stunning and paralyzing going on. Which sound like all different kinds of crowd control, just at varying strengths. It seems like the idea is countering different enemy types, which can turn into the whole "rock, paper, scissors" feel people dread. Although that's not automatically a bad thing (hell, Pokemon built a whole franchise on that simple gimmick, right?) it's important to balance things out with regular abilities that are of merit without being a specific counter to anything. And "hard counters" should be limited. This isn't PvP, so those are still viable.

And if stunlocking is a problem, it can easily be lessened. Have enemies gain a buff after coming out of a stun that makes them immune to stun for X amount of rounds. Or for the rest of the fight. Or require that stuns be crafted out of combo's (IE a mage chills a target then a rogue dumps a bucket of water on it to make it frozen) thereby increasing the amount of turns required to achieve it.

Also, the equipped armor affecting cooldowns thing reminds me of Mass Effect 3's weight system. It was handy in identifying who was a noob by whether they had two heavy guns on, heh. Anyway, this can be another possible balance issue because the power to spam abilities is almost always the best idea. But armor? I've played a lot of RPG's where armor is underexplained and seemed useless. Depends on the system, though, Armor can be OP if the designer underestimates the power of mitigation and "effective health."

Anyway, pre-mature balance concerns aside, I had thoughts on the more creative side of things:

-Some classes share the same abilities... I'm never a fan of skill overlap myself. While the idea of making ALL skills unique is daunting, I'd personally prefer cutting a class if it meant keeping each one more individualized. Although this is just me. A lot of games have overlap and have had great success.

-I'm a real narrative driven guy. So the class names are a bit too archetypal. But maybe the lore stuff is just meant to come later. Or maybe that's simply not your focus.

-Overall, I really like what's going on here. I find it exciting over the typical RPG Maker stuff. Even it ends up making the player OP, it could feel really hype  BD