Mercenaries: Adrenaline. The replacement of Brave Reactions!

[LastingDawn]

A member of ours by the name of formerdeathcorps made quite a few impressive ASM hacks, among them was the ability to change Reactions to Anything on the Formula Hacking page. I decided that this should be put to Great use, and now Reactions are now set to something else.


That something else is Wall's CT. In the coming days I will remove Wall's "benefits". And give it 80 CT (or however much is needed to balance about 10 turns worth through each patch). Wall will be then be called Adrenaline.

What Adrenaline will do is at the Very start of battle, there will be an 80% Chance of your reaction going off. As the battle wears on (to represent fatigue) your reactions chances begin to drop steadily, before "Adrenaline" is gone completely. This also applies to your enemies though, so it is just another layer of strategy to keep in mind.

[Dome]

So...
At the beginning of the battle, every reaction will have 80% of triggering
After some time, nothing will activate?

[LastingDawn]

Indeed, to represent Fatigue of battle, based upon CT, so 80 would fall to 79, and 79 would fall to 78 with the passing of another CT and so on and so forth. It would take some time before the Reactions become completely expired.

[mav]

Whoa, this is a pretty innovative idea. I like it a lot. Has it been tested out at all or are you just looking for our feedback at this point?

[LastingDawn]

It's been tested with Another status (Haste, and it seemed to work fine) the only hurdle is to remove all of the oddities revolving around Wall, if that doesn't work... well I have another idea, if it can be managed. (Which is to turn Regen into Mist that restores MP rather than HP for a time before it too wanes and have that linked to reactions, but for now I want to try and dismantle Wall)

[Smitson]

What does this to with bravery then? Does the reaction have an 80 % chance of activating even if your bravery is 60? Or does it go down to 70?

[LastingDawn]

Bravery is now Fury, a hack made by Zodiac. Where it is more akin to a Faith like system. The more Fury you have, the more powerful you are But the more damage you take in return. The less Fury you have the less damage you do But the less damage you take.

What this system does is tie Brave Reaction to Wall's CT. With a CT of 80 it decreases as the match goes on, to where it eventually reaches 0 altogether, hence the new name of Adrenaline.

[philsov]

wouldn't it be easier to try and dismantle Cursed status?  it does nothing but recolor the unit.  Might be easier strings to snip?

And, while I do like reaction% moving away from Brave/Fury, I don't really care much for the motiff because there is no grand CT counter anywhere.  The kicker is that most other candidates suffer from scaling issues... Current HP, for example, would be fitting in that the more damaged you are the less likely you are to react, but even then at level 1 the odds are abysmal.

[Skip Sandwich]

Why not tie it into CT directly? The closer you are to acting, the more likely you will be to react if targeted, where as if someone manages to catch you very soon after you just took an action, you won't be prepared, and are less likely to counter.

[Lijj]

This is a very interesting idea. We all know what adrenaline feels like few know what bravery does. Hmm tied to CT's not a bad idea either

[LastingDawn]

CT can be done, and it was a possibility. I don't like the idea though, mainly because CT easily fills to 100CT and the AI has no way to arrange for such (not that it had a good idea on how to deal with Bravery...) I think that tying it to a status CT makes a bit more sense. It's much more arbitrary and adds another level of strategy. CT you know exactly what it is at. While with Adrenaline you can only pray that your reactions has whittled down to nothing.

Curse, hmm... if we could get rid of that palette change, I would definitely consider that in its stead.

[Skip Sandwich]

I wonder if you could tie reactions to the attacker's Brave instead of the defender's. It makes sense on a conceptual level, with high brave you take more risks, so you are more likely to trigger a counterattack, with low brave you are more cautious, so you are less likely to trigger a counter.

[LastingDawn]

I wonder if you could tie reactions to the attacker's Brave instead of the defender's. It makes sense on a conceptual level, with high brave you take more risks, so you are more likely to trigger a counterattack, with low brave you are more cautious, so you are less likely to trigger a counter.

Not to my knowledge. I'm willing to bet it would be an easy "reversal of target" once all of that was figured out. All in all though, I'm still not fond of that idea. There would be no reason to keep high Fury than. Everyone would run with High Faith, low Fury. Since better to take a bit more magic damage, than holding High Fury with foes with actual reactions.

I think the Wall CT (Or Curse CT) idea represents it a bit better, there's no way to get it back once it begins to drop. In my opinion it shows a better term for "exhaustion".

[philsov]

ok, do you just want reaction rate to not be tied to Fury, or also to the fatigue thing too?

Because FFM just made an awesome ASM that establishes reaction rate as a flat number -- not tied to anything.  Which is quite awesome imo.

[MiKeMiTchi]

Adrenaline sounds pretty cool. I hope we could add new ASM hacks soon!

[LastingDawn]

ok, do you just want reaction rate to not be tied to Fury, or also to the fatigue thing too?

Because FFM just made an awesome ASM that establishes reaction rate as a flat number -- not tied to anything.  Which is quite awesome imo.

Well that method is what FFTA/2 uses, which has its uses, but I don't think it illustrates what I was looking for, all in all. I think the Adrenaline works well enough.