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New Ability Poll #1: Alex
🕑 Added 2022-08-26 20:27:07 +0000 UTCGreetings! I've finished making the fights 10.1 and am now at work on the final part - writing the scenes/skits for the release. There's not a ton of writing involved in this release, so I'm hopeful I can still have it out before the end of the month.
Arena Fights
I've changed a few things about the fights since the last post. I'd originally planned to have the fights be "waves", where you basically have to clear some trash mobs before fighting the boss, but after thinking about it some more, it seemed like that would be more annoying than anything, so I went with just the boss fights. Also, only one of the fights has a minigame component rather than the 2 I'd originally planned on.
One cool thing I hadn't previously planned is the 3rd encounter, where you face off against another team of 3 fighters. I spent a fair bit of time (and a little code) tweaking the AI so that they would play in an intelligent way, and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out! It's actually kinda challenging to beat, and it's the first fight where you'll actually need to use Emily's Sap ability that puts enemies to sleep - but be careful not to wake 'em up!
I'll probably try to think of ways to work a need for crowd control into future fights, as well as better AI. I had a lot of fun with this one!
Poll Question: New Combat Abilities
The reason for this post, however, is to solicit some feedback on which combat ability you'd like to see Alex get next. I plan to give each of the main party members at least one new ability in the 10 -> 11 arc, and I'm curious which you'd like to see next.
First up: Alex. I'm considering 3 abilities:
Heal over Time (HoT): This would provide a small amount of healing to a character over 3-4 rounds. I still have to think about how I want to balance it, but all the "ticks" added together will probably provide modestly more healing than Super Heal.
Group Heal: This would heal all party members for a a relatively high mana cost. It'll probably heal each party member for about half of Super Heal (maybe a little less), and cost twice as much.
Barrier: Just like Yulia's ability, this would provide a barrier to the target, which would absorb a certain amount of damage before attacks would get through to the character's HP. The barrier would probably last 3-4 rounds (or until depleted.) Haven't thought about the mana cost for this one yet.
Future boss fights will probably require you cleverly use these abilities, so think carefully about which one you'd rather have! Resurrection and attack/defense boosts are already on my list for later on, and I'm not giving Alex any offensive abilities (yet) for story reasons - but if you have any other interesting ability ideas, please let me know! Thank you for your support!
Comments
Proxxie
There's a few interesting things about HoT: first, its healing is applied during the "regen" phase, so it heals after the character has already taken damage for the round. Second, it functions as a pre-heal, so if you think someone's going to take damage, but you think you might not be able to get back to them for a while, you can HoT them. Third, it allows you to do more total healing in a round than you otherwise could. If Ana, say, is really getting the stuffing beat out of her, maybe your heals can't keep up - but if you HoTted her beforehand, maybe they could. Barrier is sort of similar. You could think of what it does as a pre-heal, but under certain circumstances it could also give a character a larger effective HP pool, allowing them to survive attacks they otherwise could not.
MuteButtonHero
On the arena fights, if the opponents have some unusual behaviors or attacks perhaps 1 trash mob before the boss fight would be good so we can get a feel for how to fight them.
MuteButtonHero
Considering the mechanics of the fights I think group heal will seldom be worth the cost but it's also the one that can save a party when multiple characters are hit by a high damage attack. It's scary when that happens because Alex is multiple rounds from thing able to heal them. You can suck down a lot of potions when that happens, if you have them. HoT seems pretty pointless unless we will be facing opponents or mobs doing a little damage to lots of characters. IMO Barrier is somewhere in between. I could see a badly damaged party using it to survive a round or two while they suck down potions or Alex heals them but I would not expect it to stop any big boss attacks. Of course, whatever you add I expect you'll also account for that in setting up the fights that follow so it's kinda zero sum.
