Damaging negative status effects - How does one make them fair?

[YEEART]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Negative Status effects are pretty much the reason WHY some fights can be challenging as hell, or the reason why some fights can be easy as hell. I like a hard, challenging game, for the player and monster alike, but I've always encountered certain problems.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt] [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Negative status effects.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt] [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]There're spells which inflict both damage but have a low % chance of inflicting state X, yet there're spells which do no damage at all, but have a higher chance of inflicting state X. I mean, to use the latter, the status must be pretty useful to waste a turn, having a 50% chance (for example), rather than the former. But logically speaking, wouldn't the status effect be far too powerful? Then we encounter yet another problem, the title, how does one make them fair?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Would it be okay for a poison skill, which deals 5% of max HP damage, to have a 75% chance of being successful? This would be [/SIZE]ridiculously[SIZE=10.5pt] [/SIZE]powerful for monsters which high health points.[SIZE=10.5pt] I can't deny it, I love big numbers. The final boss in my game has 600k HP. Assuming I've done my maths right, 5% of 600k is 30k damage. And this is just taking in account of poison itself. I have multiple other states, such as bleeding and burning (bleeding does 2% while burning does 7%). Imagine if they all stack? It'd be a single handed slaughter. Of course, a way how to deal with this is to simply lower the %HP figure, but, wouldn't that somewhat render then useless compared to raw damage?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Anyway, going back onto the topic of % chance (since I went off topic), I can make the success fairly low, but make the %HP figure fairly high, or the opposite. But, is it really worth it to sacrifice an entire turn depending on your luck?[/SIZE]

I look forward to your comments

tl;dr

Is sacrificing a turn attempting to inflict an enemy with poison (for example) worth it?

 

[Warpmind]

First important question - is the damage percentage based on HP or Max HP?
Also, how long do the states last?

A state which deals damage equal to 5% of MHP over ten rounds, for example, isn't necessarily overpowered, even with 100% success rate.

 

[Kes]

And you have to factor in another option - a skill which does some damage (perhaps a bit less than normal) with a percentage chance of inflicting a status effect as well.  This is my preferred approach, as I dislike the notion that any turn is a wasted turn, whether actor or enemy.  Also, from my reading of other threads about this sort of aspect, a huge percentage of players will ignore the status effect skill altogether if all it does is give a % chance of inflicting the effect, so it's something of a waste of time doing them.

 

[Matseb2611]

From my experience and player feedback I got over several games, it seems most players REALLY don't like it when the % chance of successfully inflicting the state is low. If it's less than 50%, they wouldn't even bother unless that skill can outmatch other skills in terms of damage, in which case they'd only use it for the damage. The best approach I've found is to make the state infliction 100% successful, but to make the states themselves weaker. You could have say only 3% HP drain a turn over 3 turns. Might seem weak, but the fact its guaranteed makes a world of difference, and if you have other similar states to stack up, then it only makes the battle more strategic.

You could throw other things in to the mix. Like the boss having a native HP regen. E.g. they regenerate 2% HP every single turn, and perhaps you can still outdamage it via normal damage-dealing abilities, but if say you were to inflict poison with 5% HP drain over a few turns, then you're not only negating his HP regen, but also inflicting some bonus slip damage during those turns.

Or you could simply make state-inflicting skills under restrictions, like warm ups and cooldowns, or for certain conditions to be met. Like maybe you have to stun the boss first before you can successfully poison him, and so on.

 

[bgillisp]

Currently I've been doing 50% chance of inflicting the status aliment + some damage for most of my status aliments. Those that have higher initial chance of success either do really low or no damage.

However, it also depends on the status aliment. Status aliments that cause those inflicted with it to lose a turn (for example: sleep, confusion, charm), because of how powerful they are, I tend to do 25% chance of success and no damage as well. Then it's burn a turn to (maybe) cause the target (or targets, as my sleep spell is applied to all opponents) to lose a turn.

 

[jonthefox]

In a project I'm working on, "stunning blow" has a chance to stun the target, but also has a chance to miss.  The chances of both these results scale with character and target attributes (strength increases your chance to stun, agility/dexterity decreases your chance for it to miss).  Stun is a very powerful status effect in my game (in addition to losing 1-2 turns, it significantly lowers your defense).   So this skill is very risk/reward, but the chance of getting the "reward" and the chance of minimizing the "risk" can be increased based on the stats you decide to invest in.

With regard to poison, I'd suggest using a plugin available that allows for flat ticks of damage, based on a formula.  This way you can make the skill not overpowered vs. bosses, and not underpowered vs. regular enemies.   In terms of the chance of success; what is the cost of the action? If it's a spell whose main purpose is to poison, and the player is spending MP to cast it, I think the chance of success should be very high.  If it's part of a regular attack that is going to do damage even if the status effect fails, then you can/should make it lower.

 

[TheGamedawg]

For poison, I had the idea to make it so it will take a percentage away from a character's health, but have a maximum limit.

For example, poison will do 5% per turn, unless it would do over 100 or so damage.  Then the damage per turn becomes 100.

 

[Wavelength]

To answer your question directly - it's often not worth it to rely on luck to inflict status effects (because the battle must be balanced enough that it can be won without using random-chance-based effects, so adding high variability is unlikely to work in the player's favor), no matter how powerful those effects are.

There are a lot of ways you could go about making status effects powerful and reliable without being overpowered.  Some would require a bit of scripting, some could be done with databasing and/or troop events:

• Make all status-inflicting skills do damage to an enemy as well (except perhaps skills that inflict a status at 100% reliability), so that a failure to inflict the status is not a waste of a turn.
• Make all statuses inflict at 100% reliability, but make them weaker (for example, have Poison do 2% of the enemy's HP per turn instead of 5%).
• Make all statuses inflict at 100% reliability, but make them very expensive (in MP, TP, or some other resource, like collectible items), or limit these statuses to "Limit Break"/"Over Limit" type moves that can only be used when some condition is met.
• Make all statuses inflict at 100% reliability, but give bosses (and some normal enemies) "resistances" to the statuses that affect how long it lasts or how powerful it is on them (for example, if Poison normally does 5% damage for 6 turns, a boss that's resistant to it might take 2% damage for 3 turns, and a 5-turn Sleep effect might last 1 turn instead).  Have a popup (etc.) show that the boss "resisted" the status effect.
• Change the status inflict formulae to be highly dependent on a stat that's not used for too many other things (such as LUK), so that by raising your LUK very high, you could inflict a 30% status ailment at 80% instead.
• Tie the application of status effects to other events in battle, such as Critical Hits (I did this in timeblazer) or KOs of other enemies.
• Give some kind of "bad beat bonus" to a character who repeatedly fails to inflict a status effect (perhaps make their next attempt more likely to work, or restore some of their HP/MP).
• An idea from TheHonorableRyu: Create "Levels" of status effects - so that, for example, Level 1 of a Poison would do 2% damage per turn, Level 2 would do 5% damage per turn, and Level 3 of that same Poison would do 8% AND reduce the enemy's defenses.  Have each use of a status-inflicting skill inflict at least (but possibly more than, depending on the RNG or the user's/target's LUK stat) one level of the status, and allow the levels to stack (so that using the skill on a level-1-poisoned target would at least bring them to level-2-poison).

 

[ash55]

I think your issue is you have stacking poison debuffs, I personally wouldn't have more than one poison debuff. Maybe you could change Burn and Bleed so that they have different effects? Or ensure that all bosses are immune to 2 of the 3 poison debuffs to prevent you stacking them.

I don't understand your "fair" question? It shouldn't be fair right? Forgive me if I misunderstand you, but I just wanted to say Low-Spike-High-DoT and High-Spike-Low-DoT shouldn't deal equal DPS. The former should deal more DPS than the latter IMO. No-one would use the former if latter skills are equal / better, and by the nature of debuffs, you can't spam them, you need to wait for them to run their course.

I don't think skills really need to be balanced in terms of their attack power, since variation in power helps to vary the pacing of the battle, and that gives you a better feeling when you finally unleash a strong skill. Instead, skills should be balanced in terms of the amount of resource they drain and whether they're offensive, defensive or restorative. 

Just randomly I think due to the long term nature of Poison (no instant-gratification), it might be an idea to make Poison a hard hitting skill with spike damage and 100% accuracy, but with a high MP cost. Poison often feels feeble in a lot of games, and that's not very fun, especially if DoTs are essential to victory (which I think they should be).

 

[gstv87]

For optimum balance, your debuffs should effect a percentage damage of a given character's HP, but not as percentage value, rather as integer.

so, say at level 1 you suffer 5 points of poison damage.

For a level 1 character with 50 HP, that's 10%.

As the character levels up, so does his HP, so the debuff is no longer a threat after say level 5, so you adapt the debuff accordingly with a value that's 10% of the new HP value.

Say the level 5 character has 70 HP, so now your poison does 7 damage.

As level increases, so does the resistance to that damage, so in the end you suffer 10% damage in an increasingly rare frequency, so the total damage is reduced.

The system works for MP consumption as well: if you have a lvl 1 skill that costs 10 MP and you grow your character's MP proportionally to the level, at level 10, 10MP is but a tiny fraction of their final MP, so it costs the character nothing in terms of gameplay risk.

I've recently dug into the mechanics of D&D games, and their damage-to-HP relations seem to be pretty consistent.

you should try basing your logic on some of the board game systems out there... modify the final names of elements and spells, but keep the proportions and basic logic.

If one system is balanced, so should be your game, even after the modifications.

I think your issue is you have stacking poison debuffs

Stacking effects is perfectly fine as long as there is some kind of counter to either one of those effects. Say, you stack poison, bleed and burn all together.... it's a massive drain for the character, but as long as there is a healing system involved, everything cancels out. (you have to apply it, that's the trade-off between using spells and wasting MP on removing ailments)

You should not stack same-type effects, though.... that's kind of given.

Always a stronger debuff overrides a lesser debuff of the same type.

(Working out the logic of how that system makes sense, and which effect goes to which monster or character, is a pain in the ass.... it's a lot of variables and paths, and it's not something you want for a simple game. But if you aim to make an interesting game, it's a plus.)

 

[hadecynn]

I was writing about this in my own thread (here) but my take on it is to use have each "tick" of the negative effect damage/effect be stat-dependent instead of %-dependent. 

Quick example to illustrate, let's say your mage has 2 skills: Fireball, Poison Mist, and let's assume Fireball is a regular damage spell, while Poison Mist has 100% chance of inflicting "Poison" state. Also assume that both costs the same amount of Mana. Here's one way I would approach it:

To keep the math simple, let's say your Fireball spell formula damage was ( M.Atk * 10 ), and let's say your mage currently has 100 M.Atk. Removing variances, this means that each turn, the mage can output 1000 damage just by spamming Fireball. With this setup, in order to incentivize your player to want to use Poison Mist, it must have some sort of benefit over Fireball (broadly speaking, it could be less Mana cost, additional effect, etc.) But let's focus our discussion on pure damage.

You could setup your "Poison" state so that it deals (M.Atk * 2.5 ) over 5 turns. Now Poison Mist can do 1250 damage at the same cost as the Fireball, but the downside here is that you need to wait until the 4th turn for Poison Mist to break even with Fireball, and until the 5th turn to beat Fireball. What this leads to is that players probably wouldn't use Poison Mist on a trash enemy that they can expect to kill quickly, but during boss fights that lasts 10+ turns, Poison Mist becomes a very viable skill that can boost the Mage's overall damage potential. (Specifically, raise average Damage-per-Turn from 1000 by just spamming Fireball, to 1050 by using Poison Mist on the first turn, and then every 5th turn after that)

Using stat-based damage ticks also allows you to be more creative with other variations of Damage-over-Time negative effects. For example, your other effects could be:

Burn - Lasts 3 turns, deals ( m.atk * 2.5 ), costs 1/2 as much Mana as Fireball/Poison Mist. < here you get less damage than Fireball or Poison Mist, but it has the best Damage/MP ratio, so this skill might be valuable if Mana is tight.

Bleed - Lasts forever, deals (m.atk), costs twice as much Mana as Fireball/Poison Mist. < the longer the fight lasts, the more damage you do. Of course, you need 10 turns just to break even on damage and 20 turns to beat Mana consumption, but if you want to give players the freedom to explore a variety of tactics and you allow the waiting game, then a viable strategy would be to pop this on the first round, and then just heal/stay alive until the boss dies after a LOOONG time)

Hope you found this useful.