RPG Maker Forums

I love game balance. I love thinking about "how much damage should this do," or "how does it feel to use this." But I am terrible at getting started and I have absolute garbage math skills. I don't know how to create proper formulas, I don't know how to make skill damage/heals scale to be useful early and late game, I don't know exactly how much of what number give what stat and everything involved with balance. I just know "I think this should do this amount of damage," but don't know how to achieve it. I can just copy the basic default formulas that come with the database skills like "a.atk * 4 - b.def * 2" and "a.mat * 4 - b.mdf * 2", but that's not exactly useful when trying to achieve specific amounts of damage. I can kind of get around that by adding flat damage values to a skill, like "I think this skill should do about 300 damage at this time of the game" so I can put "300 + a.mat * 4 - b.mdf * 2" but that's not true balance, nor does it enable it to scale into late game where I want that skill to be able to do thousands of damage.

Where do I go to begin to learn these things and set up stat growth per level, balancing it with enemy stats and creating relevant and meaningful skills that remain useful from early game to end game? If I specifically want to learn how to use RPG Maker formula math for balancing my game properly, where should I go? I understand basic math and algebra so I understand formulaic equations and stuff, but not how to create or apply them to functional RPG mechanics. I especially want to be able to make creative and specialty formulas, like an ability for a tank class that does more damage depending on the actor's current target rate, or abilities that hit more times depending on the actor's current M.ATK or AGI and stuff like that. Creating sub stats like STR, VIT, INT and MND, where INT is for mages and MND is for healers. FFRK heavily inspires me, but I have idea how to translate some of their ideas into RPG Maker because I don't know how to use math properly.

Heck, I really like how FFXIV handles skills and abilities. They slap on a "potency" in the description and balance around that. This skill has 100 potency, and this skill has 150 potency, and that skill has 300 potency. Those 3 skills are just as useful at level 5 as they are at 80, and I wouldn't mind creating something like that in MV, making it very easy and clear to balance and communicate with the player. It's even got unique abilities like Spirit's Within that has a base potency that decreases the user's current HP drops.