Make Mages Matter

[BloodletterQ]

Ah the mage, a staple of the RPG who can get killed by a cat at level 1. Without his or her magic, a mage can only hit things with a pitiful stick until it dies. How does a mage become useful? By expending a precious resource.


How can the mage be salvaged so that he's not too broken and not too feeble?  

 

[Andar]

You're limiting yourself to a DnD-type spellcaster - there are a lot of other games where a mage is defined differently and better balanced.


You basically need to use a different scaling - give him more mana (or reduce the mana cost) so that he can use spells more often, including spells that protect him from attacks and so on. The DnD-Type spellcaster started useless because that was part of the balancing against him becoming overpowered at higher levels in DnD,

 

[Niten Ichi Ryu]

And with his big sword and metal armor, the Knight makes a perfect conduit for a lightning spell.


A spellsword is an interesting concept for example, or maybe, if it's for a character, give him an item that helps him overcome his initial weakness.


I will take the example of the Emperor-Sorcerer Elric of Melnibone. The Badass mage.

 

[JosephSeraph]

well, lots of games do it away from MP mechanics choosing, say, cooldown mechanics (like in Valkyrie Profile) or, heck, there are even mages in fighting games.


A mage is not a role, it is just a character archetype. The role you're looking for is the Glass Cannon. How to make a Glass Cannon the way benefits your game the most?

 

[LightningLord2]

Mages get pretty much all the tools of the trade ranging from elemental damage, status problems, buffs and debuffs and occasionally even healing in their skillsets. The fact that they're low on HP and Defense is not an issue in most RPGs since enemies have terrible damage and the ones that do have enough damage to matter are so excessively powerful that even your tank won't live them. It's the fighter that gets hosed as soon as an enemy has status effects, resistance to physical attacks or an attack debuff, since most of them don't get any options to handle enemies that have any such traits (if they have skills at all, that is).


As for the glass cannon role, I don't like it too much - in pretty much any game that lets me influence the party in some way, I stack my team with glass cannons that can bulldoze all enemies before they get to move (occasionally even bosses).

 

[LaFlibuste]

Disclaimer: I'm winging this, so it may not be canon lore and it might be improved on.

I think in designing classes, we could consider that there are three main poles: Damage, Utility/Support and Durability. Then you can think about it like you've 100 - 150 points to spend around and their respective maximums are 100. So if your classes are going to be balanced, you can't rock more than one pole. You could be reasonably good at two, or suck at all three. But you definitely can't rock two or more, because it would likely break your game. In this system, mages usually rock dps and have a fair bit of utility (or, for white mages, rock utility to death but have mediocre score in the other two). In the end it's all a question of balance. If your game had a class that gave tactical flexibility, could one-shot most bad guys and take significative punishment, why would anybody play as anything else? Who needs knights if the mage can rock that plate mail like a boss?

 

[Wavelength]

Gating a mage's usefulness by MP isn't always a bad decision.  While they may be the most powerful member of your team in some scenarios and the worst in others, that doesn't necessarily mean they're broken or feeble in general.


The problems start coming when the game fails to account for the incomparability between a resource-reliant character (the mage who uses MP for anything significant that they do) and a resourceless character (the fighter that might have MP, but doesn't need it to be effective).  If dungeon length or resource recovery systems aren't balanced around making both of these characters interesting and useful to play, things fall apart.  It's a tricky balance that results in bad design if you don't hit the right equation - either the player will need to save the mage's MP for the dungeon's presumed boss (meaning they're uninteresting and useless in standard encounters) or the resource will be too plentiful to bother conserving.


There are tons of ways around this, though:

• You could give all of your characters resources but have those resources work differently (Guild Wars and League of Legends provide great examples of how to do this).
  
• You could gate skills by cooldowns instead of resources (as @JosephSeraph mentioned).
  
• You could have a limited MP pool for mages that refreshes after every battle.
  
• In a real-time or action battle system, you could allow mages' basic attack power to be every bit as powerful as melee characters, but give them less movement or combo potential (Tales games from TotA onward often do this effectively - Jade and Cheria being good examples).
  
• You could give them some spells that are free or extremely cheap to cast, balanced fairly against the damage/utility that a fighter's basic attack would provide.
  

None of these are hard to do!

A mage is not a role, it is just a character archetype. The role you're looking for is the Glass Cannon. How to make a Glass Cannon the way benefits your game the most?

While I agree about a mage being an archetype rather than a role, in my eyes @BloodletterQ is not describing a Glass Cannon (very high DPS but very low durability) - this role is usually filled by the Assassin/Thief archetype.  The role of most pure "mages" are in traditional RPG combat (particularly JRPGs) are Utility (white mages) or Resource-Reliant DPS (black mages) - they have fine durability, but very low DPS when they can't or don't want to use their limited resources.

 

[Feliaria]

Well, the way my game is working is that I set the Basic Attack to deal both atk and mat damage (it's still a physical hit, but I don't know how to fix it so that it's both. I'm literally using def and mdf as purely for Physical/Magical Damage Rate, they're not even in any of the damage calculations (except that mdf is also my healing stat). I also have it set so that all magical abilities consume MP and all physical abilities consume TP (which has been changed through the aid of a plugin. @SumRndmDde's TP Upgrade, if I have the guy's username right. Might be thinking of someone else, though (and if I am, I'm sorry for tagging you, haha XD)).


Anyway, the premise in my game is that mage classes have more MP and non-mages have more TP, their abilities consume some of either (or both), and that Attack is feasible for both archetypes. The damage of their skills are roughly equal because I'm using a dice-rolling system coupled with a lack of leveling.


Conversely, as I believe has been mentioned earlier, you could go DnD/Pathfinder-esque with your game and give the spells a certain amount of uses per encounter.

 

[SumRndmDde]

Well, the way my game is working is that I set the Basic Attack to deal both atk and mat damage (it's still a physical hit, but I don't know how to fix it so that it's both. I'm literally using def and mdf as purely for Physical/Magical Damage Rate, they're not even in any of the damage calculations (except that mdf is also my healing stat). I also have it set so that all magical abilities consume MP and all physical abilities consume TP (which has been changed through the aid of a plugin. @SumRndmDde's TP Upgrade, if I have the guy's username right. Might be thinking of someone else, though (and if I am, I'm sorry for tagging you, haha XD)).


Anyway, the premise in my game is that mage classes have more MP and non-mages have more TP, their abilities consume some of either (or both), and that Attack is feasible for both archetypes. The damage of their skills are roughly equal because I'm using a dice-rolling system coupled with a lack of leveling.


Conversely, as I believe has been mentioned earlier, you could go DnD/Pathfinder-esque with your game and give the spells a certain amount of uses per encounter.

Oh rest assured, you spelled it right. XD


Welp, now that I've been summoned here, I might as well give my opinion.


In my opinion, really the only best way to solve this is to just have a reliable source of MP that the player can rely upon. MP/Magic Points has always been a stable in RPGs, and I think it's a pretty bad one. It encourages the player to not use any of their skills out of fear of running low on mana and being in a situation where they have truly no way of attacking. Whenever I create a game, I usually make it so MP is completely regenerated every battle so that it doesn't become a global resource as much as it becomes a local-battle resource that the player can use freely without worrying about suffering through later, though I know that infinite MP is sort of a controversial idea that not a lot of people like to use.


I also recall Yanfly having some Tips and Tricks videos for things that help with this. I remember there was a video that made it so characters were rewarded MP by defeating enemies in a battle, thus giving them the ability to keep max MP if they planned things perfectly (wasn't able to find this video again though, completely forgot what it was called.).


Though I did find the Runic Blade video which also has an MP healing effect:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHTP-9ltX6E

 

[Feliaria]

Oh rest assured, you spelled it right. XD

Haha- sorry for summoning you, just didn't wanna give them the wrong person if they decided to give your plug-in a try. It's actually really helping mine, so thanks for making it XD


But yeah- I wanna find a way to fully heal MP after battle. My guess is that it could be done through event scripting.

 

[Wavelength]

I'm literally using def and mdf as purely for Physical/Magical Damage Rate, they're not even in any of the damage calculations (except that mdf is also my healing stat).

I'm really intrigued by this in particular... are you saying you actually have your DEF and MDF stats go down as your characters level up and put on the best equipment (meaning they will have a lower Rate and therefore take less damage)?

 

[BloodletterQ]

I decided that at the moment my mages will have staves deal magic damage. I'm worried this might be a bit overpowered though.

 

[Feliaria]

I'm really intrigued by this in particular... are you saying you actually have your DEF and MDF stats go down as your characters level up and put on the best equipment (meaning they will have a lower Rate and therefore take less damage)?

No, I run Yanfly's Extra Parameter Formula plug-in so I was able to make my own formula. The one I made was:


Physical Damage Rate = 1 - ((a.def - 10) * 0.01)


The formula means: 100% - 1% for every point in defense the character has over 10 (10 is the value I chose as my "base" stat: all the characters have base 10 in each stat, and their gear adjusts them. My game doesn't use levels.) Obviously, my game runs small numbers. I may change the formula a little: as it is, I'm not expecting any of my stats to make it over 40 or 50. Though, if they do I can always adjust my formulae later on if I have to.

 

[Feldschlacht IV]

This is an interesting topic because in many RPGs, in both JRPGs and WRPGs, mages are often hilariously powerful, especially at the endgame. With the ability to hit weaknesses, buff party members, multi target attacks, and asymmetrical options for dealing damage and winning battles (status effects and other weird ****), mages in RPGs usually get the best end of the deal. The only drawback many mages have is being physically fragile, which can be resolved via things like having enemy aggression in your game, or the ability to have your mages stay out of the front line or covered by meaty dudes/ladies.


Many designers go balls out and make mages a high risk, high reward package all in one.

 

[Mayuen]

As previous poster said the common trope in games seems to be that mages are the ones dealing lots of damage, at the price of their defense and alike. Which I don't think is a problem, would be kinda boring if they were a overpowered class overall, so I wouldn't call them overpowering since the balance is still there.


For example Etrian Odyssey IV and the Runemaster class, heavy elemental damage (and other types of magic? I think) but must be in the back lines unless you want them to die in one second flat. That stays throughout the game, a Runemaster was the one that dealt the most damage in my play-through at the end of the game, but they were also one of the weakest party members I had defense wise. The defense part made that the rest of the team didn't feel unnecessary, I still had the front line taking most of the punches and doing damage themselves, and my medic and arcanist with the runemaster in the backline supporting.


I think balance is the key here to still make them worthwhile.


However, it would be kinda interesting to see a different take on the class of some sort. I could see if you have a bunch of mages in your team they would need to be different, maybe if you go with the elemental route the fire mage is the heave damage dealer while the earth mage is a more defensive one?

 

[Feldschlacht IV]

The defense part made that the rest of the team didn't feel unnecessary, I still had the front line taking most of the punches and doing damage themselves, and my medic and arcanist with the runemaster in the backline supporting.

This is something that I didn't think of until I read this; the high offensive power that mages have can be buffered somewhat by the need to have your meatier characters defending them, negating the unbalance that a full nonstop damage dealing party could bring to bear.

 

[Chaos Avian]

Here's an interesting one; making a mage the tanker for the party. The mage would draw in all physical attacks, but instead soaking up the damage with their pitiful HP, they would use MP instead . Since Mage MP pools tend to be massive, while blasting away with spells and taking "MP" damage it could make them pretty viable. Sure their MP pool could drain quickly, but most mages or other party member could use an MP regen.


Obviously this would require a different party dynamic and balancing, but it's another option of making a mage matter outside of pure DPS.

 

[Feldschlacht IV]

Here's an interesting one; making a mage the tanker for the party. The mage would draw in all physical attacks, but instead soaking up the damage with their pitiful HP, they would use MP instead . Since Mage MP pools tend to be massive, while blasting away with spells and taking "MP" damage it could make them pretty viable. Sure their MP pool could drain quickly, but most mages or other party member could use an MP regen.

Be careful with this, though! Final Fantasy Tactics had this exact ability that the Time Mage could learn (Mana Shield) that pretty much made mages slam dunk ****in' broken, as long as you could keep their MP up, which wasn't hard.

 

[kaukusaki]

I decided to have fun with the glass cannon. Slapping armor on them made them stronger but their innate magic was nerfed unless they used wands that came with preset spells. Or they could use only magic armor and hurl that fireball and other spells to their hearts content, getting stronger as they leveled up. I also had a hidden condition where if the mage had no armor on at all they regen hp/mp. Holding a weapon increased spell cost while going barehanded allowed a new skill - creation. So they had a choice to create psychic weapons that lasted during that battle. It was whacky but beta testers found it interesting.