Useful, useless and too many skills

[Azurecyan]

So we all have skills and magic in a game that begin to lose its shine, such as a Firaga spell would be used in favor of a Fire spell because of higher damage output, a Curaga spell over a cure spell, an instant-death spell that doesn't see much use in many battles, or a character has too many skills that seem overwhelming and you'd either go for the higher combo attack or the higher damage output ones. 

How would you combat this?

As for me, in my game, I intend to make even the first skills learned, just as useful as the ones learned last:

A simple fireball attack can damage the enemy, but why stop there when you can add status effects to it as well, such as add a Burning state to the attack?

A wind healing spell, Aromatherapy, can recover HP but with some small side effects, such as adding an ailment like sleep.

Or healing spells that add some sort of buff, or a buff that increases ATK but decreases DEF.

A melee attack that not only just deals damage but can knockback, stun an enemy etc.

I got the idea from playing the Atelier Series games where each skill not only deals damage or heals but their usefulness with status effects, or changing the course of battle, is what makes you want to use them more often. Even though the games did not have many skills to learn, the skills themselves proved useful in battle, providing more strategy.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

A simple fireball attack can damage the enemy, but why stop there when you can add status effects to it as well, such as add a Burning state to the attack?

But how about the 2nd fireball spell in case you make one? If that basically just improves the first fireball, then you still have the same problem

 

[TheoAllen]

I don't have skill tier. All skills damage output is simply scalled by percentage. Say that Solar Strike damage output is 150% than normal attack. Learned new skill only give the actor to use many possibilities. And stronger skill requires TP more and has longer cooldown as well. So in that way the previous learned skill will still useful even you leveled up and learned many skills

 

[Azurecyan]

Well, it depends on spell versatility. A new spell such as Eruption can be casted, where as a result, spews flaming chunks of rock up into the sky that can come back and damage the enemy later on, but with a slightly lower chance to add the burn state to the enemy.

 

[TheoAllen]

When I'm playing game, I never consider something like burn and such because it just a bonus. I only concern with the damage output. So that I will usually use Eruption than your simple fireball I guess.

 

[Kes]

In my current project I have made many (though not all) of the skills increase in strength as they are used, i.e. the skills level up.  This has 3 advantages:

1)  it encourages the player to use skills rather than just spam attack - if you don't use the skill it stays weak, and you'll be in trouble later on in the game when fighting stronger enemies

2)  early skills stay relevant.

3)  it reduces the number of skills required.

The skill description tells the player what the maximum level is, and in the skill list the current level is shown, so the player knows when they've maxed out and when they can improve still further.

Of course there are issues about how much TP or MP the skill should cost, what the opening strength should be, how much the strength should increase at each level, and what the maximum level should be.  However, I think that the extra work involved is well worth it.

 

[Azurecyan]

I like to add strategy to battles just so things don't get too repetitive with just attacking with the highest maximum damage or just hack and slash, especially with boss battles or just some regular enemies. Though this can get annoying and eventually repetitive(if you linger in the same area for too long)with regular enemies and prolong the battle, not all enemies will need to have specific strategies to be defeated.

I intend to have status effects be just as important in battle since I've seen many games where negative status effects are overlooked by the player(either because the boss has too high of a resistance or adding status effects just don't prove useful enough in battle to make the cut), such as FF games where you can get spells such as Poison, Blind, Silence, which are just purely status effect spells that prove not so much use, since they can't do anything else.

Sure the boss can add afflictions to annoy you but why can't you add status effects to possibly turn the tides as well, depending on the effectiveness.

 

[kerbonklin]

1) Make new skills with different situational uses that aren't much stronger in damage (especially if it suits your battle system and used for strategy purposes - applies to old and new skills)  Instead general damage is dependent on weapon/stat factors and not really skill damage ratios.

2) Have old skills scale for damage somehow (upgrades/improvements/etc.)

 

[Milennin]

My game doesn't have spells that only do 1 thing (like, only deal damage). Lower spells still have side effects or can be used as utility. Also, not one spell has simply a stronger version -- every new skill the characters learn does something different. As an added bonus, skills have 5 tiers which upgrade every few levels, making the skill stronger and more effective to prevent low level skills from becoming useless.

I think it's a good way of not having your characters' skill lists fill up with tens of skills that all kind of do the same.

 

[kj3400]

You could always have higher tier skills apply some sort of debuff (much like pokemon, where a move could be really powerful, but decrease attack or defense or speed, or the mon loses a turn in battle), which would make less powerful skills more attractive, especially if you give them secondary effects.

 

[Matseb2611]

This is a good topic and well worth the time for the devs to think about. I think this is something that comes to us with experience of making our own games and also trying out the games made by others. We start to notice what sort of skills are useful and which aren't.

From my experience of playing and the feedback my players had given me on my games:

- Utilise character stats/attributes in the damage formula more than the flat damage. That way the skill effectiveness improves as the character is getting stronger and is not left behind halfway through the game.

- Add a strong payoff for the stronger versions of elemental skills. For example in my current project I have basic fire, ice, and lightning spells that cost a mere 5 energy to use. Halfway through the game the player can also get stronger versions of those, but they firstly aren't learnt through levelling but are granted by a certain staff, and secondly cost a whooping 40 energy to use. So the player can use them if they have lots of energy to spare, but if they are running low or want to save their energy up for other skills, they'd better use the cheaper spells (which are still not that bad by that stage of the game).

- Any skills that inflict states should have a high % chance to deal that state (unless it targets all enemies at once). What I noticed is that the one thing almost all players universally hate is gambling when it comes to battles. When they use a skill, they want to be sure it will work as described. If a skill only grants a 10% chance to inflict stun or poison and isn't all that powerful damage-wise, then they'll ignore it and favour a more damaging skill instead. They are not going to waste their turn on a skill that has an enormous chance to fail at what they want. Even worse if the state inflicting skill doesn't deal any damage whatsoever.

- Don't make your bosses fully immune to every state if you want those states to be useful. This is a classic feature, and I admit even I am hugely guilty of this in most of my earlier games. Whenever you give the player any skill to use, you have to ask when is that skill going to come useful. For example with states such as confusion and poison, it's almost no point dealing those on weak enemies who can be killed off in 2 turns. They become useful on stronger enemies which take a good chunk of turns to be beaten - bosses, mini-bosses, and tough regular enemies. So make sure you add plenty of enemies in the game that are not only susceptible to those states, but are also worth the use of those skills. If there aren't enough enemies for that, then no point giving those skills. I recently had to remove a skill that inflicts confusion from one of the characters in my current game, because I noticed that I wasn't comfortable making bosses susceptible to confusion, and the rest of the times it wasn't worth the use. So I replaced it with a more useful skill.

 

[captainproton]

I try to keep the spells and skills different enough from each other that the player can choose those skills which suit his or her style, or allow for some kind of strategy. Key word here being "try."

I have established a skill tier for straight-up attack spells. There are lower-level attack spells like Flame, Bubble and Aeroburst. They don't deal a lot of damage later in the game, but they don't use a lot of MP. High-level spells like Torch, Geyser and Windcutter obviously deal more damage, but use much more MP, and thus can't be used as often. Group-effect spells like Froth or Blizzard obviously affect all enemies, but do less damage to each individual. Summoning spells like Mab, Luxor and Meteor deal tons of damage, but use tons of MP but take a couple of turns to cast (thanks, Tsukihime!), leaving you vulnerable in the mean time, unable to attack or defend. You have to either risk your summoner getting wiped out while invoking their chosen spirit, or have your paladin guard him/her, sacrificing her attack turn.

I did manage to avoid skill tiers with the weapon skills, though many are similar in effect, just with a different weapon. The sword skill Feint is a weak attack that ups your evasion, while Dragonslayer deals heavy damage to dragon-type monsters. Flycatcher and Swatter both deal anti-bug damage, but with bows and hammers, respectively.

 

[Tai_MT]

Don't mind me, I'm just here to toot my own horn!

My solution to this battle problem has always been, "if it isn't going to be used, it doesn't need to exist".  As in, every single character of mine learns 6 skills (I have one that learns 7, but his seventh skill is a possible out of 3 choices, and it can even be missed by players).  Each skill is unique in some way so as not to just get people casting "the best thing all the time".

I wanted my battles to remain somewhat interesting, so I incorporated some unique flavors to spells and how my skill systems work.  At certain junctures, I allow players to "level up" the skill.  They complete a quest in the required manner and they are rewarded with the new version of the skill.  I completely delete the old version and replace it with the exact same named new version.  I then set two major "paths" for each skill.  I'm big on customization, so I think it suits the system well.  A player can settle on two versions of a "pure" skill, or two versions of "in between" of that skill.

Let me explain:

I have a skill called "Second Wind".  It's an Adrenaline Skill and so requires only TP to activate.  It costs 10 TP to activate and heals 10% of your HP (it's the only healing skill I have in the game).  However, it cannot ever be used on allies, only on yourself.  Early on in the game, the 10% HP recovery actually translates to about 2 HP.  Fairly worthless early on, right?  It's a situational kind of skill.  The more HP you have, the more it recovers.  Okay, so now you remember you can improve the Skill.  It has two major lines of improvement.  HP and Defense.  If you take it all the way down the HP line, it can eventually heal 40% of your HP at the cost of 50 TP.  If you take it all the way down the Defense line it can heal 10% of HP, provide a 50% Defense Buff for 3 turns, and grant Magic Reflect for those same 3 turns.  The two lines between those two absolutes are mixtures of the two lines.  One of them is 20% HP recovery with a 50% Defense buff for 3 turns and the other is a 30% HP recovery with a 25% Defense buff for 3 turns.

Essentially, it's a skill I want players to use "in emergencies".  In fact, that's the whole point of my "Adrenaline" skill line to begin with.  They are highly circumstantial skills that could be useful if used properly, and they're so highly diverse that it's worth considering your options.

Second Wind heals the user only and can offer defense buffs.

Battle Cry provides a full party Attack buff that can even buff some of my other attacking stats (like Magic and Speed).

Painless grants the Immortal State at the cost of 80% of your total HP.  Immortal State can eventually last upwards of 5 turns, but starts at 2.  Or, you can make the state drain less of your total HP.

Last Stand grants a really large single hit swipe at the cost of all your TP and all of your HP.  It hits a single target initially for ATK * 4 (ignores defense).

Berserker adds the "Berserk" state which makes Defense practically zero and attack boosted for the duration.  You also lose control of the character while it is in effect.

Counter Attack adds state that gives a percentage chance of counter attacking each time the user is hit for a duration of time.

Those are just for my main character.  They're highly circumstantial and I want players to think about their uses and not about how to spam them.

My magic spells take on different roles depending on how you want them to work as well.  As an example, my "Fire" spell can either be turned into an uber spell with a 1% chance of causing "instant death" on anything not immune to the state or the element or it can be a State Infliction spell which can lay down the "Burn" status with almost every single casting.  My "Lightning" spell can either strike a single target more than once or it can strike multiple (random) enemies on the field (up to four).  My "Ice" spell can lower enemy speed or inflict the "Frozen" state which makes you weak to blunt weaponry.

I've got a "Magic Knight" that has "weapon skills" he can use.  Each Skill can only be used while he has certain weapons equipped.  The skills start out as essentially elemental versions of his basic attack.  They can be leveled up into "Versatility" Skills or "Support" Skills.  Versatility paths let you use more than a single weapon type to cast them (essentially adds a second type) as well as adds multiple strikes (one of the few classes with multi-target abilities).  Support paths add weaknesses to the element the enemy was hit with or special nullifying states (like turning Defense to 0 for a turn or two or inflicting Silence and Paralyze).

What I've been doing with my skills is really just filling niches in the RPG roles.  I've also been breaking a lot of the "conventional" ways of doing things for certain classes.  I want every skill to feel unique so that players are just swapping characters willy nilly because they've got certain stats.  I didn't want traditional "Tank, Rogue, Healer, Wizard/Ranger" parties.  I wanted players to discover that certain characters had synergy with other characters... or they could have their skills leveled up to provide Synergy with other characters.

I don't want to create a "useless skill", so I work hard on making every skill useful in at least some way so that players will seriously debate on what to use and how to use it.  I even did the same thing with "States".  I didn't want there to be a useless state.  I didn't want someone to go, "Awesome, I've got this Death Spell that kills instantly, but I'd never cast it on a basic enemy and all bosses are immune to it".  Instead, I simply made some bosses immune to certain states and susceptible to others.  I also removed traditional states that were "overpowered" or "unused" in most RPGs.

The problem most people have with Skills is that there's this weird need to leave players with older versions of the skills.  You don't keep a weapon you used at level 1 in an RPG for the boss fight at the end of the game.  No, you equip better stuff as time goes on and sell the worthless crap.  Skills should be the same way.  Skills should also not just be a way for someone with a high magic stat to do damage...  Or to force players to play Rock, Paper, Scissors with elements.  Skills can be far more interesting and circumstantial and unique!

Skills should always alter the flow of battle, not merely be a way to do a lot of damage in a short amount of time.

 

[Lowell]

You could look to the Persona games as an example of effective skill control.

Due to their mechanics, even the weaker skills were still useful due to the fact that exploiting the target would result in them losing a turn.

Aside from Golden, the latter two Persona games also made HP/SP management actually matter as it could be the difference between life and death.

Lastly, aside from the Fool, each character was strictly limited to having only eight (8) skills, including passive skills.

On a side note, skills that inflicted status ailments benefited from passive effects that boosted their infliction rate, both the damaging and non damaging ones, and my god status effects are just as important as exploiting weaknesses in that game.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

IMHO it's not really due to the weakness system but rather because of the fact that having a persona that only have higher skills is a hard thing to do (or simply time-consuming). Without that, you'd still end up with people only using the powerful skills... On P3 for example, the only persona that I've seen that has all final elemental skills was the Orpheus Telos used by the people who posts videos on the final optional boss fights, and that was really hard to achieve...

 

[captainproton]

I think a big part is making your enemies tough enough and wily enough that just spamming Inferno or whatever won't really work. And not just bosses--grunts should get the same treatment as you advance in the game.

The pokemon games are good examples of creating attacks and spells that are varied in effect. They do utilize a four-skills-per-character system, though, so if you want to learn something new, you have to forget an old skill. And while it may seem like a good idea to replace an attack like Flamethrower with the much stronger Fire Blast, Fire Blast has a very low accuracy, and can only be used five times before you run out of power points.

Then there is elemental type matching; ie: using fire against an ice enemy, ice against plants, plant against rock, and so on. Ghost types are immune to Normal or Fighting type attacks--which are pure physical attacks, for those not familiar with Pokemon--which makes a lot of sense to me. Why would an incorporeal spirit be harmed by someone's fist? And the pokemon Shedinja is immune to one-hit-KO attacks--and Shedinja only ever gets a single HP, making all attacks one-hit-KO. The only way to defeat it is to inflict a slip damage state like poison, or to le it hit one of your pokemon with a punishment ability like Rough Skin.

 

[Tai_MT]

Shedinja is also weak to anything that is super effective against it.  The only way to put it down is to hit it with something it's weak to.  You don't need slip damage or anything else.  A simple "Ember" kills it quite effectively at any level.

 

[kerbonklin]

Shedinja is also weak to anything that is super effective against it.  The only way to put it down is to hit it with something it's weak to.  You don't need slip damage or anything else.  A simple "Ember" kills it quite effectively at any level.

Not really good argument material in this case. Nobody is going to keep/have Ember on their pokemon just for the sake of multiple sheninja removals, especially since you will never encounter a sheninja until mid-late game progression.

At the same time you really don't want to use a lv5 pokemon with Ember against a ~lv30 sheninja, it'll go first always (unless you have that hold item) and one-shot the lv5 with like any attack.

 

[whitesphere]

I do several things to combat this in my games:

1. The only skills which do fixed damage are those which bypass defense.  All others always scale their damage output based on the user's Magical ATtack or physical ATK (for, say, Monks or Warriors combat abilities).  So they always grow with the party, doing maybe 200 damage at first, and 1000 damage at the end.

2. The more powerful a Skill is, the slower I make it in combat, and the higher the MP cost.  So the equivalent of Firaga would take longer to cast for a lot more MP.   In terms of damage output per MP spent, the "most powerful" spell might actually be more expensive than the lower level one. 

3. Enemy (non-boss) HP values don't scale ridiculously.  In the last game I made, they ranged from 400 (at the start) up to around 5000 (at the end).  DEFense and MDF values do grow significantly, but I try to make sure that all attack spells are useful even against the most powerful opponents.  Because the spells scale with MAT, the better armor and weapons for Spellcasters also boost their MAT and maybe increase the % of Magical Damage dealt, further boosting damage output for the same spell.

4. The biggest changes I give to "higher level" spells is they hit everyone in the group.  So they aren't actually a tactically stronger spell against, say, a boss, but can be great for clearing a horde of weaker opponents.  Except for the highest level spell which might totally bypass defenses.

5. Usually when I grant new Spells, said Spells use completely different attack Elements or attach unique States to the enemies.  So I don't have 4 Fire spells.  I might have, at most 4:  the "Low Level" Fire spell, the "Group Attack" Fire spell, the "Protect the Party from Fire" spell and the "Ultimate" Fire spell.

I make the bosses and powerful enemies a challenge through elemental resistance, absorption and reflection ("Yeah, casting Fire at that Demon wasn't a great idea..."), which force the player to find the right type of attack to use.

 

[Wavelength]

What I've done with my last few games is to make skills scale directly with a user's stats instead of giving them any kind of "base power" - much like the way that basic Attacks are calculated.  My basic skill formula for a medium-power skill would be something like "(15 * a.mat) / (10 + b.mdf)".  Therefore, a skill that's useful early on will be approximately as useful late, and it's easy as a designer to compare these early skills to the ones that the character learns later on.

With that kind of system in mind, the main challenge as the designer is to create a bunch of skills that are all interesting and situationally useful.  RPG Maker has the capability of doing that, especially if you get creative with calling Common Events or using scripting in the formula box.

One other good technique I've seen for designers who want to keep their skills useful throughout the game is to simply have "Cure" evolve into "Curaga" at a certain level rather than adding both skills to the character's skill set.