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In a number of games, I've seen mages be counterbalanced to the point of uselessness. One major example is from Final Fantasy Tactics (and its remake, War of the Lions), where magical abilities usually had massive amounts of casting time that could either briefly trip up your opponent, or be the end your no-deaths run.
To counterbalance casting time in my game due to YEP: Battle System - ATB, I've made several abilities that mess with the ATB gauge upon resolution. There's the Time Magic spell, Quicken, which instantly fills either the speed gauge or the charge gauge to full depending on which is filling currently. There's the Unbalance status, which interrupts casting time and delays turns.
Most importantly, I made several changes to Final Fantasy's standard Red Mage class. Whereas squeenix made it the ultimate jack of all trades, I saw its signature ability Dualcast, and ran with it to make an out-and-out speedblitzer. It's the class with the highest base AGI. Most of its spells have moderately short casting time to compensate for low base power. One offensive spell, Blitz, lets you take a turn immediately once it resolves. One ability, Pre-Charge, lets you start the battle with a turn instantly, with or without first strike, and compensates by doubling the cost of whatever you use that turn for. And of course, it retains Dualcast.
As an admittedly-hilarious result, Red Mages in my game's cast are absolutely ridiculous, specializing in quick, painful bursts of magical death. The only reason anyone else got turns was the casting time mechanic endemic to Yanfly's ATB plugin! It got to where I had to heavily nerf their defensive viability so they couldn't take physical hits worth crap, and had almost negative critical hit avoidance just to make them remotely balanced in that state, and it's still not enough to overcome the absurdity of their constant turns!
tl;dr. I've created a game breaker as a base class by messing with action economy.
My main question here is this: Have I reached the limit to the brokenness of action economy in pseudo turn-based games? Have you seen action economy break things before? If so, where and how badly?
To counterbalance casting time in my game due to YEP: Battle System - ATB, I've made several abilities that mess with the ATB gauge upon resolution. There's the Time Magic spell, Quicken, which instantly fills either the speed gauge or the charge gauge to full depending on which is filling currently. There's the Unbalance status, which interrupts casting time and delays turns.
Most importantly, I made several changes to Final Fantasy's standard Red Mage class. Whereas squeenix made it the ultimate jack of all trades, I saw its signature ability Dualcast, and ran with it to make an out-and-out speedblitzer. It's the class with the highest base AGI. Most of its spells have moderately short casting time to compensate for low base power. One offensive spell, Blitz, lets you take a turn immediately once it resolves. One ability, Pre-Charge, lets you start the battle with a turn instantly, with or without first strike, and compensates by doubling the cost of whatever you use that turn for. And of course, it retains Dualcast.
As an admittedly-hilarious result, Red Mages in my game's cast are absolutely ridiculous, specializing in quick, painful bursts of magical death. The only reason anyone else got turns was the casting time mechanic endemic to Yanfly's ATB plugin! It got to where I had to heavily nerf their defensive viability so they couldn't take physical hits worth crap, and had almost negative critical hit avoidance just to make them remotely balanced in that state, and it's still not enough to overcome the absurdity of their constant turns!
tl;dr. I've created a game breaker as a base class by messing with action economy.
My main question here is this: Have I reached the limit to the brokenness of action economy in pseudo turn-based games? Have you seen action economy break things before? If so, where and how badly?
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