RPG Maker Forums

Hey everyone,

In the game I am working on I have a character who has the ability to call his pet wolf to his side for 6 turns.
He is the first character you can get to join your party.

I balanced out the summon as follows:

- Only lasts 6 turns.
- You can not control the Wolf. It is independent. It will attack or use an ability at random.
- The Wolf costs FP (TP) to call to your side.

Later in the game you lose the ability to call the wolf due to the character and his pet under going some major changes....
NOW the problem I have is I have a second "PET" that the player can find and the player can summon to their side. In this instance lets call it a WISP.

The Wisp is designed to be playable. So no random moves. It lasts also for 6 turns. It does not know any offensive damage dealing moves and is only meant as a support character (I don't have a healer character in my game and its only much later when a Paladin joins that you have access to heal while a hunter type character has access to a Health regen spell..)

The balance issue comes as such: I want the player to gain access to the wisp early on (through a series of Easter eggs that lead up to it.) which means that the player can summon it before the other character loses its ability to summon the wolf. Meaning the early part of the game which sees 2 characters join at various parts goes from 2 man team/3 man team to a 4 man team/5 man team respectively.

Now, I have put some thought into the wisp character and I am going to make it more of a teach-your-pet-moves. Either through finding items, buying items or talking to people the Wisp will learn new moves rather than the conventional based on the level and level up. I have done this to help provide some balance. The Wisp itself is pretty weak in physical attack and defense. Its only damaging move being the base attack.

In terms of skills the wisp will have:

- Confusion song (Confuses all enemies)
- Heal I, II, III ( various levels of healing)
- Recover I, II (heal all party)
- Cure I, II (Cure status aliments)
- De-buff attack (Lowers enemy attack)
- De-buff Defense (Lowers enemy defense)
- De-buff Magic Defense (lowers enemy magic defense)
- I was also thinking off adding in skills which boost party defense and magic defense.
- Other things I was thinking of adding include MP recovery spells and drain MP from enemies.

As you can see thats a large amount of skills for a support pet. I was thinking of reducing the amount of skills but I don't want to make it useless as the player will never summon it. Some of the playable characters have supporting skills such as lower attack, poison, blindness and what not so I don't really want to give the wisp those.

I also thought about adding in offensive spells at the cost of lowering the summon time from 6 turns to 5. I also debated about making the Wisp summon-able via item only. So you would need the item in order to summon it. Once summoned it would consume that item and you would need to find/buy another one.

What are your thoughts? Does it seemed balanced? Should I add it in after the ability to summon a wolf is lost. Perhaps give it some offensive magic?