How to make LUK effect in battle more relevant?

[S.Court]

Hi everybody. When I was working on my project I couldn't avoid to notice of all states, Luck is probable the most expendable parameter. You could just change the luck effect in script editor (I'm using VX Ace) and it'd have no effect at all in the game. Of course, that doesn't mean the stat can't be used, but the mere default effect sometimes it's not enough to justify the use of it (specially in a project where you give the player free stats customization) so I'd like to hear some ideas you have used for your project, uses you have seen of this stat in another games or ideas you'd use to make this stat more relevant. Here are some things I have observed and could help to give more relevance to this stat.

• Making the use of states and buff/debuff more relevant: The fact this state only have this use doesn't mean it's useless per se, that'd depend specifically of how important are states or buffs/debuffs in your project. For example, if your random enemies are difficult enough to give you a beat if you're careless, or adding states as a layer of strategy to cripple them and beating them quicker would add states, and by extension, Luck stat more important. Reducing the states resist/inmunity equipment would make Luck a more important stat by itself because if you don't want to be crippled by states, Luck would be the best way to avoid them.
• Adding more effects to this stat: Luck could have another effect like increasing evasion, critical hit rate, critical evasion or another parameters is a way to make Luck a more useful state as well. Fire Emblem games gives Luck more uses besides increasing evasion and hit rate (which is already important enough if you want to make an offensive unit works with more consistance) taking this stat in mind to activate unit's skills.
• Utility scaling: After seing Wavelenght's post about this topic I became interested in this approaching, and even when all stats can see its utility improved with this concept, Luck would be the most benefited due to its not good enough initial use.

This is all I can think until now to improve the effect of this stat in particular, but please, feel free to add any other idea you have in mind

 

[Fernyfer775]

In my Eternal Twilight game, I made LUCK my "POWER" stat. Power adds a base percentage boost to ALL damage + healing.

A damage formula might look something like:
((a.atk+a.agi) * (1 / (1+(target.def/250)))) * (1 + (a.luk/100))

The last portion in bold is using the Luck (power) stat to multiply the rest of the formula to increase it's effectiveness. It's a lot more complicated than that in my game since I am using a plethora of damage formula plugins, but that's the gist of it.

Power also double dips as a "critical damage multiplier booster." For example, a basic critical damage hit does 2x the base damage, but the more Power a character has, the more the damage multiplier goes up, allowing the multiplier to reach 3x, 4x, and even 5x the base damage on a critical hit.

 

[HumanNinjaToo]

I've seen it used as the DMG stat for certain types of characters, like ones that rely on speed rather than power.

I guess it will depend on your game and what you want to accomplish. I could see it being used as a way for characters to sync their attacks within battle, and create dual attacks.

You could use it for events/skills. For example, luck would determine how well a character can pick a lock, or use stealth, or pickpocket, or steal from enemies in battle, or any number of mechanics that rely on chance to operate effectively.

 

[Aoi Ninami]

I've renamed it to "spirit", and the main things it affects are healing magic, poison and regen. That is, the effectiveness of A healing B depends on A's Magic stat and B's spirit.

 

[Darkanine]

In my "Amenia" project, I renamed Luck to "Kindness" to fit in with the games themes of compassion and mercy. The stat was unique from the others in the sense that the stat that only went up in "field" events (giving some of your food to your hungry neighbors for example), not by leveling up. It would effect some story bits, but also improved how much healing spells heal, the effectiveness of team-attacks, items and other stuff that revolved around comradely.

 

[Wavelength]

The short answer to a question like this is to examine the larger mechanics of your battle system, and pick out what kinds of interesting and relevant choices you can offer through your stats system - or in other words, what the player might want to make their characters good at, stylistically. (Importantly, though, specializing in a stat should never severely limit the number of different actions that are feasible for a character within combat.)

In some combat systems, the ideal number of stats you're offering can literally be two (Health and Attack); in others, it could be over ten (such as League of Legends where champions have over ten stats including lifesteal, heal/shield power, two types of defense penetration, and CC tenacity).

LUK is a great stat for you to bring up here because it's indeed negligible in most RPGM games, but this idea really applies to stats universally. It's best to start by looking at your own system at a high level, and figure out from whole cloth which stats you do want to include in it, rather than starting with "which stats does RPG Maker provide" and then trying to shoehorn each stat in.

With that said, speaking specifically to LUK, here are some ways I've seen discussed or implemented in the past to make it more relevant:

• Use a multiplicative ratio to determine LUK's influence on state application. For example, the success rate for applying states to enemies could be something like [State's Default Success Rate] * User's LUK / Target's LUK. If your LUK is 4 times as high as your enemy's, your 20% chance to apply Poison to an enemy now becomes a whopping 80%.
• Apply the states consistently, but use Utility Scaling or similar systems to have LUK determine how powerful the states you apply are. For example, a low-LUK user might debuff an enemy's DEF by 15%, but a high-LUK user could use the same skill to debuff an enemy's DEF by 27%. (This becomes especially interesting if that debuff was attached to a standard attack spell that scaled on INT; perhaps that first user did more damage with it, but the second user applied a stronger debuff!)
• Repurpose LUK (remove its standard state-application function and add in another instead) to influence Critical Hit rate. One of my own games has a base Crit rate of 20% * User's LUK / Target's LUK. If doing so, I'd recommend changing the way Crits work, to provide something besides damage (otherwise, this becomes a simple mathematical calculation in determining whether to improve STR/MAG or LUK, which is complexity without depth).
• Repurpose LUK to influence the power of (incoming) heals. This creates an interesting choice in how the player wants to make their character durable - high initial HP vs. take less damage from attacks vs. easy to heal back up.

 

[S.Court]

LUK is a great stat for you to bring up here because it's indeed negligible in most RPGM games, but this idea really applies to stats universally. It's best to start by looking at your own system at a high level, and figure out from whole cloth which stats you do want to include in it, rather than starting with "which stats does RPG Maker provide" and then trying to shoehorn each stat in.

Just for the record, I really enjoy to see your inputs in those topics, Wavelength

Thinking in retrospective, the lack of effects of LUK in default system is a good and bad thing at same time from LUK, yeah, the default effect might not be that useful but at same time it acts as a blank canvas you can use to fulfill your needs.

Use a multiplicative ratio to determine LUK's influence on state application. For example, the success rate for applying states to enemies could be something like [State's Default Success Rate] * User's LUK / Target's LUK. If your LUK is 4 times as high as your enemy's, your 20% chance to apply Poison to an enemy now becomes a whopping 80%.

I like this approaching, and I find funny I decided to take the opposite approach for my project. Instead making LUK helps a lot to put the state, I make the LUK stat has a great effect to help avoiding them. Enemies have a quite high chance to apply states with their attacks and investing in LUK can help a lot in those cases.

---

Talking about my project in particular, I renamed LUK into "Vitality" and has a wide amount of effects: Increase the effect of HP Regen, reduces the damage of HP leaking states, and it increases the characters's inherent MP Regen (I don't have MP recovery items in my project). It helps as well to avoid some attacks (MP and TP damaging skills as well as attack make fractional damage) some skills use Vitality instead Magic to damage/heal and accessing to certain skillset will requiere to have a higher Vitality to use them for a longer time.

 

[velan235]

make luck actually has a true purpose as a stats. most LUK are used for "a little extra things for your action" such as crit rate , lucky evasion , item drop sometimes , or extra factor in the end of state/damage formula (like extra resistance or extra variance), which sometimes the number is really low that you could neglect it completely (or you wanted to aim those 999 LUK for a broken build in some cases)

I prefer to give LUK a purpose that doesn't overlap other main stats , ie.

ATK for melee physical
MAT for magical
AGI for ranged physical
LUK for DoT

 

[bgillisp]

I rewrote the state rate code so that LUK meant more for status ailments. The code I used was:

1.014 ^ (your luck - the target's luck) (The ^ means raise to the power of)

This worked out so that about every 50 points of LUK doubles your chance of a status ailment sticking. And, if your LUK is around 50 points below the enemy, then the chance of the status ailment sticking is about half of normal.

This actually allowed me to make LUK pretty useful for enemies. If I want them to have a lower chance than default to hit you with a status ailment I can still use the default skill, just lower their LUK. Or, if I want them to have a higher chance, same thing, just raise the LUK. And if I want them mostly immune to all status ailments, set the LUK to 999.

 

[Titanhex]

Honestly the best way to make LUK more relevant in battle is to eliminate it completely from the game.

If it does nothing for your battle system, get rid of it. Don't strain yourself and go out of your way to include it in the game. There are better stats that can better express your games battle mechanics.

 

[Zemtax]

I've seen the LUK stat used as a way to increase your critical strike chance in multiple games. Depending on the skill archetype you could also use it in the damage formula, as people here have said.
I personally enjoy number crunching and stat scaling, so I'm going with LUK = crit chance, could also be a boost to crit multiplier or something else entirely. It has to be decided on a game to game basis.
Good luck!

 

[lianderson]

Same, I use it for critical rate and some damage formulas, as well as the state inflict/resist. (actually had to nerf it not too long ago)

 

[Kes]

I use it in the ways others have already mentioned, but in addition, in my current project, I have a character who can give additional EXP to the party at certain times. How much each receives is determined by their LUK stat. I find it a useful stat for odd things like that.

 

[lianderson]

Additional EXP? Never thought of that one. That's kind of interesting.

Oh, that reminds me, I remember Oblivion's arena you could place bets on which fighter would win. Apparently, your luck directly translated into added HP for the hero you bet on.

Long story short, be creative. Luck is the most freeform stat there is.

 

[M.I.A.]

In one of my miniprojects, I just turned LUK into MND, and used it as a base of some skills and item use.

Because MND was different than M.ATK or WIS in some circumstances.

Example:
Spell Damage = M.ATK
Spell Defense = M.DEF
State Success = WIS
Item Efficacy = MND
Psi-ATK and Psi-DEF = MND

Hope this helps!
-MIA

 

[esterk]

@bgillisp that is exactly what I want my Luck stay to do, among a couple other things. Think you could possibly go over this more in depth either here or in a PM?

I also use Luck as a way of affecting critical rate and critical evasion. Certain item drops are also determined by the party’s Luck total.

 

[Milennin]

What I did in one of my games was having Luck tied to the chance of triggering the effect on a certain equipment slot. Higher Luck would give higher percentage of triggering the effect. Effects ranging from healing small amounts of HP or MP per turn, to cleansing of conditions, increasing defence for a turn, or attacking twice.

 

[Wavelength]

What I did in one of my games was having Luck tied to the chance of triggering the effect on a certain equipment slot. Higher Luck would give higher percentage of triggering the effect. Effects ranging from healing small amounts of HP or MP per turn, to cleansing of conditions, increasing defence for a turn, or attacking twice.

That's a really cool way to integrate it!! You can get away with putting intriguing and game-changing passives on Equipment, because they'll only trigger occasionally, based on the character's Luck. It also allows the Luck factor to change the complexion of each battle, and provides a good way to "opt in" or "opt out" of playing the Luck game, assuming the player has a lot of control over building their characters' stats.

 

[AMGLime]

I changed LUK into MST, or Mastery for my game. It's been changed to impact a few things. For one, Skills in my game can be boosted when you reach 100TP, changing them to new skills, like Healing Dew, becomes Healing Rain and heals for more, and gives the party a Regen. Normally Healing Dew only comes from M.Atk, but when changed to Healing Rain, it is M.Atk+Mastery. Making it noticeably more powerful, Mastery also increases the damage of Critical Attacks, and when a status effect like Burn, is inflicted on an enemy from a skill, it's damage is also impacted by Mastery.

 

[chobokid]

Personally i use LUK in my damage formulas as well as using it to balance enemy encounters, similar to using enemy levels. As for crit every actor has the same base crit rate only affected by equipment