FFT Arena: Tiered Play

[LastingDawn]

Yes, yes, I know that things are set to 35 for balance issues, but We control the balance now, do we not? My idea will solve the problems with the "useless tiers" of weapons and bring a bit of variety to mix up the tried and true method of the Tourney setups.

My idea is to change the lower tiers of weapons into starting (or near game beginning) weapons from other FF's (Or what have you, anything is better than the generic 1 WP sword). In addition to this is to reconfigure the stats of all classes so they are all usable at Level 5. Furthermore the JP cap would need to be immensely lowered, if these classes are meant to mimic the start of game, maybe 300-650 at most.

For instance instead of Dagger (1 WP 5% Ev.), how about

Spark Dagger 2 WP, 5% Ev. Lightning Elemental, 25% Don't Move. Not very effective against humans, but against certain monsters it may make or break the team.

Shadow Blade 4 WP 5% Ev. Dark Elemental 50% Hit: Demi, Innate Blind This weapon has a few uses, especially so early when Ev. won't get higher than 20.  

It's a very simple system to bring up creative solutions to what would be the earlier tiers. I'm not the best balancer around, but I believe this idea has some merit.

Lv 5 Tier (Rank 1 Weapons)
Lvl 10 Tier (Rank 2 Weapons) So on and so forth.

[philsov]

that's an excellent idea, LD.

In fact, it's probably best to establish 3 different teirs of weapons/armor:

- low level -- a handful of equips, used for level 5 (I suggest 7, based on stats )

- normal -- level 35, contains a large pool

- high level -- level 52 or so, using the more legendary-ish weapons and armor and expanded JP cap.  This is also probably the most difficult to balance, but if done properly can also be the most competitive thanks to all the options available.

[Xifanie]

I'm against it. You people and kokojo think low numbers are a good idea, but all it does in the end is prevent having a nice damage range. Ex: A male squire with 4 PA uses accumulate, here you go: +25% damage. It just creates huge leaps like that.
Other than that, it makes defense/mdef up and protect/shell horribly broken and makes Attack Up/MA Up completely worthless.
Also I don't see how it would be remotely easy to balance weapons... 3WP vs 2WP: that's 50% stronger dammit.

[Zaen]

Zodiac has a point. Large numbers don't hurt, and they just make it for more in between values so that you can fit things into range easier without MA/PA/WP having too much influence but still keeping some importance.

[Dome]

Tiers exist in games where things are not balanced
Pokemon, Super smash bros, are just some examples of games where you have to BAN things in order to make things balanced
What's the purpose of banning things/creating tiers if we can edit almost EVERYTHING of the game?

[philsov]

What's the purpose of banning things/creating tiers if we can edit almost EVERYTHING of the game?

Because theres no way to have 12 different swords that are balanced, worthwhile, AND unique.  Why not use this spare space to create a few different modes of play?

Oh, and tiers like we're (and least I am) referencing has nothing to do with a teir list like you'd see in SSB.

[Dome]

What's the purpose of banning things/creating tiers if we can edit almost EVERYTHING of the game?

Because theres no way to have 12 different swords that are balanced, worthwhile, AND unique.  Why not use this spare space to create a few different modes of play?

Oh, and tiers like we're (and least I am) referencing has nothing to do with a teir list like you'd see in SSB.

If you mean it's hard to have 12 different balanced swords it's ok, but it's not impossible at all

[philsov]

balanced, worthwhile, and unique.  All three.  

And doing stuff like "10 WP, fire elemental, procs fire 2;  10 WP, ice elemental, procs ice 2; 10 WP, earth elemental, procs titan" is... lame.

[Dome]

balanced, worthwhile, and unique.  All three.  

And doing stuff like "10 WP, fire elemental, procs fire 2;  10 WP, ice elemental, procs ice 2; 10 WP, earth elemental, procs titan" is... lame.

I can give some idea if you want

Let's suppose that 10 WP and 10% evade are the "Base" stats for a sword

- Iron sword: Base stats (Player needs to have something as a base, without pro and cons)
- Rainbow sword: High WP (15-20 maybe?) Has EVERY element in it (so if you absorb only one of them you absorb the sword damage)
- Poison sword: 5 WP, 30% evade, Makes the wielder immune to poison, every time it hits it casts the black magic
"poison" on the target (The black spell has AoE, so it can potentially poison more than 1 enemy at time if they are near)
- Blazing sword (Got the reference?) 8 WP, fire elemental, 0% evade, 1-2 range (IDK if it's possible to give 1-2 range to a sword) absorb fire
- Defender: 3 WP, 50% evade, Always protect and shell (Maybe only protect?)
- Rotten sword: 13 Wp, PA/MA +1, Always: Undead, poison, blind, draining effect of the blood sword
- Cleric sword: 7 WP, 20% evade, heals on hit, always regen on the wielder
- The whole set of the elemental swords as you suggested: Even if they are "Lame", every element should be equally aviable to the player

Those are some of the ideas I have ATM
They will surely be unbalanced, they will need some tweak, etc...but if I managed to throw in 6 ideas, the whole FFT:Arena team should be able to give birth to more ideas and to balance them all

[The Damned]

Although I still have yet to do extensive testings (ugh), one of the goals of my patch was try to make the most equipment usable that I could since there's just a sickening amount of stuff that is straight up obviated by something down the line (I'd say 80% of everything even with 1.3's changes) and a lot of the stuff that's left over (mainly the few elemental stuff) is straight up obviated by the sheer lack of WP (especially since I wanted to get rid of and did get rid of Accumulate).

Even with the sizeable shift in class abilities, the massive shift in monster qualities and the nuking of three entire categories of weapons (Ninja Swords, all but one Katana and Bags died, though Ninja Swords ended up being something else that I still have to test), I still ended up with quite a few things that were redundant and, I figured, that should be fine (for the purposes of a normal game).

That said, I also pretty much quickly figured that what Zodiac said: that making things drastically different in terms of WP is rather unnecessary, especially for something like that this (and if you're keeping Accumulate around). As long as weapons within the same group are different enough from each other, then they should be perfectly fine having the same or similar WP. There's no real reason to go below 5 WP for anything except for maybe Cloths or Bags IMO.

Of course, devising weapons within a void is also relatively impossible and just makes things more difficult. It's kind of difficult to say how you want something to interact with monsters without having made any changes to monsters of late. Hell, it was difficult even after that for me (partly because I still haven't finished monsters or, at least, I haven't finished monster skills) and I made it easier for myself by adding a lot of elementals.


TL;DR: Figure out the classes and monsters first and equipment should come more easily. It's difficult to do everything you want with equipment as it is, especially since there's so few Item Attribute slots, and you WILL NOT be able to make everything useful, much less equally useful. That's fine so long as something doesn't wildly out class something else.

[FFMaster]

TL;DR: Figure out the classes and monsters first and equipment should come more easily. It's difficult to do everything you want with equipment as it is, especially since there's so few Item Attribute slots, and you WILL NOT be able to make everything useful, much less equally useful. That's fine so long as something doesn't wildly out class something else.

Unfortunately, this is the real case. That won't stop us from trying though. Not much more needs to be said, Zodiac explained it perfectly well. This is why I'm also against lower move for the time being.