Damage Ratio between Special and Regular Attacks

[B.Ultimus]

The concept is simple

What's a good damage ratio between normal and special attacks?

In my mind, you'd want a special attack to be something that's either situational or when you just want to do a lot of damage at once.

If you make special attacks weak in power, then Regular Attacks will always feel like the way to go.

However, if you make special attacks too strong, then Regular Attacks will feel utterly useless.

So what do you feel is a good ratio between Regular and Special Attacks? What's that sweet spot?

 

[Matseb2611]

To me it depends on:

- How much energy the special attack costs

- Are there any other restrictions to the special attack, e.g. cooldowns

- Does the special attack do anything else besides damage, e.g. inflict a state

There usually has to be bit of a payoff. Special attacks will generally be better than normal attacks, so they have to bear a cost of some kind. The more useful or effective the special is, the higher the cost should be.

Edit: Having said this, I normally make my specials roughly about 1.5 - 2 times stronger in power than normal attack, though some rare ones could as well be 3 times the power.

 

[Scythuz]

I'm pretty much in Matseb's camp here, 1.5 - 2 x the damage works well as a base for going from "Normal Attack" to a "Strong Attack".  I also think 75 - 50 percent works well for those standard 'attack all' enemies attacks.

 

[Milennin]

For an average special attack I'd like it to do at least 2-3x damage of an auto-attack. 1.5x isn't cutting it for me, it would feel too weak to spend MP on, unless maybe it has a useful, additional effect.

But it depends on a lot of other factors. If you make special attacks, say, 5x stronger than an auto-attack, you might want to limit the amount of times it can be used in an average encounter. On the other hand, if you have a special attack that's only 1.5x stronger than regular attack, but costs little MP, the player might be able to simply use it as a replacement of the regular attack since the MP cost would be negligible.

It depends a lot on how valuable of a resource MP is in the game. If it's something that is considered valuable, I want good value out of a special attack (2-5x). If it's meant to be spammed, then weaker spells (1.5-2x) would be fine, but could make it too spammable.

 

[bgillisp]

I use about 1.5 - 2.5x the regular attack for my spells (instead of special), though there are early area of effect spells that are actually 0.75 - 1x regular attack (the purpose in using those is they are AOE, not single target).

As MP costs go up I do raise that number accordingly, making it a tradeoff between how much mana do you want to burn vs how much damage do you want to do right now.

 

[Vox Novus]

In the game I was working on that used those types of skills It depended on what the skills did, some only did a minor increase in damage output compared to regular attack but might inflict a guaranteed status ailment. If the skill was meant to be entirely damaged focus then it would have a higher damage output; I use 3.5 as the base and a highly damaging skill would fall between 4.2-5.0 and usually have a more reliable variance as well. I should mention I stick to smaller numbers in general for the game

 

[Matseb2611]

I find it that the MP cost (or whatever the resource) has to scale up steeper than the damage potential. So for example a skill that does 200 damage will have to cost more than twice MP than a skill that does 100 damage, simply because it's not only the damage that's of importance here, but also the number of turns. You could use the 100-damage skill for two turns in a row to deal a total of 200 damage, but with the 200-damage skill you did the same in just 1 turn, hence it's better than 2 sets of the 100-damage skill.

I also think the critical rate is an important factor when it comes to deciding how much damage specials should deal. If it's easy to attain a high critical rate (even 30% is already high), then a special that does 3x the damage could deal 6x or even 9x if it becomes a crit, and this can break the balance of the game. With multi-hit skills, critical rate will especially have a big effect, since there is more chance for at least 1 of the hits to be a critical, and hence increase the overall damage the skill deals.

In addition to the critical, the elemental rates are also important here. A fire spell that does 3x the damage of normal attack will deal 6x the damage against an enemy whose fire element rate is 200% (i.e. weak to fire).

When criticial rates and elemental resists come into play, as well as Attack and Magic buffs, you start finding that some spells become OP very quickly.

 

[bgillisp]

@matseb2611: Good points, though you also forgot two other factors. One, you need to factor in how long is it going to be between times where you can fully heal (and how do potions play into this)? Two: How high is your max MP? Spell costs of 10 are high if the max is only 20, but if the max is 250 then 10 feels like nothing.

Because of those two factors, it is possible for a spell that uses only 5 MP and does 6x normal damage to feel expensive.

 

[Omnimental]

Honestly, special attacks that are just normal attacks with more damage are boring to me. I'd be quite happy to see specials that don't inflict any more immediate damage than a basic attack, but are made useful due to their effects. Hitting multiple opponents, buffing your party / debuffing the enemy, stuff like that.

 

[trouble time]

I actually make damage based skills do 5-10x the damage of an average attack, the way the game is set up though it's really impractical to just use pure damage skills unless you're sure it'll kill since I worked hard to make sure utility almost always trumps straight out damage and most damageing skills need some sort of set up tobe used effectively. In that way I'd actually compare it to a combo deck in Hearthstone or Magic, you can do a lot of damage, but you need to set it up and know when to use it.

 

[Chaos Avian]

I always make skills at least 40% stronger than normal attacks. Unless a skill has a guaranteed effect/ state or higher priority. On the flipside, I would never go higher than a 300% damage multiplier for a skill especially for a multi hitting attack. I believe utility with skills is important and that max HP/MP and costs should justify their uses.

 

[Wavelength]

You're gonna get a lot of different answers here and they're all correct because the answer to this depends a ton on the other factors surrounding the skills themselves and the battle system at large.  I believe you've created a few games before, yes?  So you should be familiar with a lot of this, but here are just a few of the factors that might be relevant when answering this question:

• Is most of the damage from these special attacks coming from "base damage" or "scaling" with your stats?
• How quickly do your relevant stats scale with level?
• Will basic-attacking with high stats ever outpace "base damage" skill bonus?
• Do special attacks allow you to exploit elemental weaknesses?  If so, how much extra damage will you generally do by hitting weaknesses?
• Do these special attacks hit multiple targets?  (And do most boss fights include multiple targets?)
• Are you adding "utility" (such as defensive buffs or chances to inflict negative states) to the special attacks?
• How much MP/TP does the skill cost?
• And even more importantly, how quickly and easily do your characters recover MP/TP?
• How many monsters are in an average dungeon run, and do they represent genuine threats or are they filler?
• How quick do you want your battle system to be (skills usually take longer to select), and how difficult do you want your battle system to be (will players need to make good use of skills to be able to win?)

To give a more direct answer to your question, my current project timeblazer tends to have cheap skills with little additional utility deal about 2x the warrior's normal attack damage (and 3-4x the mage's normal attack damage, which is somewhat lower assuming "average" equipment builds).  These numbers are pretty high because it's meant to be a strategic battle system where the player needs to use skills wisely to win, and because both skill costs and the speed of resource recovery are high.

It varies greatly even within my game, though.  Some skills do approximately 1x normal attack damage but also provide high utility (like protecting an ally or reducing the cooldown of other skills).  Some skills are very expensive, or have a malus effect (like sacrificing health or leaving you vulnerable next turn) and do closer to 5x normal attack damage.  Many skills are conditional, normally dealing 1-2x attack damage but raising to 3-4x attack damage under certain circumstances (such as the user is low health or the target is on Fire).