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Discussion / The RPGDL Card Game - Blame Djinn for this one

« on: December 20, 2023, 07:02:44 AM »

We had a topic a week or so ago where Djinn was musing about a board game or table top game in the shape of the DL. The discussion got pretty interesting, some neat ideas were mentioned, so now I'm just musing more on the idea and thought, "why not make a topic about it". So here it is (one of the mods can put this somewhere else if it is more fitting). What this topic aims to do is:

- Flesh out more of the idea of what a proverbial DL Board / Tabletop / Card Game might look like
- Balancing issues, pitfalls, things to watch for
- Game Mechanics and Rules

I'll basic kind of continue where I left off. I think this idea is probably best done as a Card game, maybe similar or taking its shell from Overpower. Some of you might remember this game - but to make a long story short to get everyone to pace - form a team of heroes, each with their own stats and abilities. Then the goal is to complete a certain number of missions OR to knock out your opponent's team. This has some obvious DL undertones to it. I think we can make do without the mission aspect and just focus on the KOing the other person's team - but if someone else has a good idea on how to incorporate these, I'm game.

The DL form of this which I proposed was to use a similar basis. Basically, take any character and give them stats in Physical, Magical and Agility scores along with a HP value. Hero / Villain cards can then have a passive ability which can create further synergy or reflect more about the character in question if their unique traits can't be easily reflected. Cards are divided into these categories:

Character Cards -
These are kind of each PC or Boss' vital stats and are always taken out of a deck and placed into the play area, representing one of the characters you are using for your team. As noted, this card shows the PC's stats, along with any notable passive ability belonging to the character.  Using our example in chat, let's use Tidus for a shell. He might have Physical/Magical/Agility scores of 5/2/7, which feels pretty reflective of his in-game stats. We then give him a HP value...maybe something like 18 (assuming 20 HP is the average). One of the concerns I had was reflecting Turn speed is very hard or complex I think for most people, but one of Tidus' noticeable strengths is his ability to Double Turn. So I think an adequate substitute might be to give him a Passive ability like: Spry Striker - Whenever Tidus plays an attack card, you may play a 2nd attack card of lesser value. That way, it reflects Tidus' ability to strike quickly. If someone has a good way to map CTB like system into a card game (or table top game) form without over complicating, this is your time to shine.

Ability Cards -
So these Cards would reflect a character's ability or skill set. The DL uniqueness bit essentially. Again using Tidus, these Cards might be something "Haste", "Slow","Quick Hit", "Spiral Cut", "Blitz Ace", etc. You can modify each ability as you see fit to do damage, play extra cards, disrupt an opponent etc. The key here is that because these cards are specific to Tidus, you need Tidus alive in order to play them. So if he gets knocked out, then all of his ability cards become dead cards. This way you can give Abilities powerful flavor tools and keeping it somewhat in check. That was the basic idea in Overpower anyway. I think it makes sense on a deck building perspective and probably a game play one too. One of other cool thing is that in a Card game format, you can also design cards around a character's traits, personality or story beats. So for Tidus, you could also create a card called "Enthusiasm" or "I hate you, Dad" and make them have differing effects (although the latter is probably harder)

Equipment Cards -
Djinn mentioned he liked PCs having weapons/armors reflective of their in-game stuff. So here, I think you could create cards similar to Ability Cards in that they can only be used by a character, but also make this a separate class of cards. The way they would function is that it would be similar to enchanting a creature in magic. Since enchant creatures have a natural weakness, you'd probably need to make these pretty strong to compensate. For Tidus, an example might be a card called something like, "Caladbolg - Tidus Unique Weapon. When this weapon is equipped, Tidus can no longer be dealt physical damage. Damage dealt by Tidus decreases by 1 for every 4 damage". That would be pretty reflective of the 2 unique properties of the weapon in-game. Magic mentioned giving cards certain factions or tags, so that people with the same tags can all use something similarly classed. So for this, you would Class Tidus maybe with the tags, "Fighter", "Sword", "Speedster". Caladbolg would then certainly be classed as "Sword". My main train of thought was to make these unique to the character because I think weapons if they are unique enough to be part of a character's DL default, probably does something that another character's doesn't. Not always, but we want to make people feel different.

Common Cards -
To prevent a series of dead draws, I think it is important to include something like a Common Card pool that anyone would use. Basic Physical and Magic attacks for example, should be able to be utilized by any character. In Overpower, the way this worked was each character's grid reflected the maximum amount of power they could use of a particular attack type. I think for our little thought experiment, this makes sense too. So in our sample, Tidus could use physical cards up to 5 power. These would just be generic cards (don't need unique names here) so any other character with 5 or higher physical stat could also use it. You can then also add Items to this notion, although just like in-games, I think Items need to be carefully designed and balanced in this case.

Healing and Revival -
This is tricky. I think healing and revival are probably not great ideas on paper because they prolong a game and can make KOing an opponent's character a chore. However, flip side, these are basic common things in RPGs. I think the way around these is to make it such that there needs to be some sort of drawback or cost so they a) can't be spammed and b) puts you at a momentum disadvantage when using it. One example I had of this is for a character like Elie. One of Elie's strengths in her game is her S-Craft Aura Rain, which can be deployed at anytime and full restore the entire team. As strange as it might be, I think if you really wanted, you could implement something similar. Maybe make it something like, "Aura Rain - Play this at anytime, including during your opponent's turn. Discard 3 cards from your hand. Then revive all characters on your team and restore their HP to full. Elie loses her next turn". This would be pretty reflective of the ability in-game, requiring a significant CP cost and having noticeable recovery lag. I dunno if "full revive" makes it fun to play against though. CERTAINLY, in RPGs, enemies reviving each other is a huge pain in the rear.

Formations and Positioning -
Difficult to implement, but I think worth it to add a strategic element to the game. I imagine the board space being like Front/Mid/Back for each player and you can put characters into each lane. You have to take out characters in the front before being able to attack those in the back - which is pretty rudimentary. How do you give those in the Front and Mid an advantage? I haven't thought of that yet. But certainly, there should be something so you aren't just putting 1 in the Front and 3 in the back to concentrate damage on one person.

Status Conditions -
I know Djinn was excited to add a bunch of status just like characters can in the DL. However, I'm more reserved and realistic. I think having status that rips turns away from people is pretty hard to balance around. Turn economy is real, and having something like Arnaud's Sleep be 50% on multiple targets (which it can be in-game) would be really devastating in this format. So instead, I think you need work arounds. Having multiple characters does mitigate some of the "lose turn" effects, but I'm not sure it does enough to outright justify them without some additional drawback. Certain status such as Poison and Blind though are easy enough to implement.

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Unranked Games / Trails to Reverie - Bad Stat Topic Ideas: The Game

« on: October 18, 2023, 04:05:51 PM »

Yep, you knew this was coming. I'm at the end of the game now, more or less. Just what appears to be one final battle. So I can start gathering details soon enough AND because I still have my CS2 Excel, plop those in there and start getting actual numbers down on paper. It goes without saying but SPOILER ALERT for the rest of the topic.

Random - If you are reading this, do you have the damage formula on hand? That'll help my work significantly. I do have access to what I think are the Delay values for each action thanks to the GFAQs character analysis topic. Okay, on with the show.

Unlike CS4, Reverie is actually relatively straightforward. There are no bonding events, no super unique Rean accessories, no mecha summoning...just characters, their skills and abilities. And on some level this makes sense as it is mostly a combat focused game compared to the others in the Erebonian arc. However, this doesn't mean it doesn't have its own issues:

Ranking Characters:
Good news - Characters can be easily separated into two groups and there largely is no issue regarding Guests, Pseudo PCs or what not. Once a PC joins up, they basically join up for good. Even if they are not available in the main story at the time, you can access them at the Reverie Corridor. The best way to think of the Reverie Corridor (RC for short) is that it is like P3's Tartarus. It's basically a giant, randomly generated dungeon that is separated into what the game calls stratums. Stratums open up over time as the game progresses until the end of the game, at which point the entire dungeon fully unlocks.

Exploration of the RC is completely up to the player. You can do it as the floors open up (what the game expects), not touch it at all or grind like you are OK and stat max every PC if you want before the 3rd Chapter. Because the RC is pretty much a free-for-all, you can use any and all PCs you've acquired so far. HOWEVER, there are some PCs which are RC only. They unlock as you progress up the Stratums and unfortunately, their unlocks are not fixed. Rather the way it works is that each Chapter adds a set of available RC only characters to a pool. Then, from Floors 1-3, you can unlock 1 of the available characters up to that time. Floor 4 lets you recruit two addtiional characters, and at post-game, you can get whichever other characters you are missing. The characters for each pool is as follows:

Available Starting Chapter 2 - Alfin, Angelica, Roselia
Available Starting Chapter 3 - Toval, George, Victor
Available Starting Chapter 4 - Aurelia, Olivert, Vita
Post-game only - McBurndonalds

In case it wasn't clear, here's an example. You reach the 1st Stratum, you can unlock one of Alfin, Angelica or Roselia. Say you unlock Angelica. This means that on the 2nd Stratum in Chapter 3, your available characters are Alfin, Roselia, Toval, George and Victor. There is no preference or order in which RC characters unlock. I will however make a special note regarding Aurelia because she has a unique distinction where she serves both as a guest in Chapter 3 but unlocks only in the RC via gacha. Since she joins up with the same quartz set up as in Chapter 3, she's also one of the few characters where she's immediately usable out of the box. It is easy to treat her as just a regular PC like the others for this reason.

Long story short, unlike CS4, I think there is a very easy to go about ranking in Reverie. The available 40 characters in the main game + Aurelia are obviously all rankable and averaged against each other into the main topic. For the additional 9 RC only PCs, they will be added on at the end of the topic and averaged against the entire cast. This seems to be the fairest way to get around the gacha nature of their unlock but still take into account their possible availability. The only character who I think shouldn't be ranked is McBurn as he is 100% a post-game unlock only. All other characters can show up any time before the end of the game and be part of your roster so it seems a bit silly not to include them at all.

Starting Values: Craft Points (CP)
Also a much more simplified version in Reverie due to the access of the Celestial Tree. In the RC, there is a tree which when examined will restore the entire party's HP/EP pools. As you progress through the RC, you can get upgrades to it, which allows it to restore CP, Brave Points (BP), Assault Gauge (AG) and the frequency at which it can full restore you. At the max upgrade level, there is no downtime and you can full restore yourself after every fight if you wish. Now for the duration of the main game, you are unlikely to unlock the full upgrade until during the final act but before the last dungeon in the game as there are some better upgrades you can unlock first (the Max BP capacity being the key one).

This means that for most of the game, there is some concern regarding CP maintenance. And let's be honest - even after unlocking it to the max level, there is still CP maintenance because it doesn't make sense for you to go back to the Celestial Tree after every fight. However, what it does mean is that for major confrontations, you are always going to walk in with full resources because the RC is pretty much accessible at any point in the game. So on the surface, it looks like 200 CP would be completely reasonable.

This interpretation does have one major weakness - it hugely incentivizes PCs to hoard their CP and not use any crafts because then it drops the multiplier on the S-Craft by 50%. S-Crafts, like in any other Trails game, can be deployed at any time once you reach 100 CP. So these things are great for burst damage and pretty much staple as part of the damage average. Unfortunately, the hoarding it creates basically kills off a lot of PC uniqueness because while part of a character's identity comes from their craft (skill) set, nobody wants to end up losing that much damage. As such, I'm not a huge fan of a 200 CP interp. Rather, I think a more reasonable approach is 150 CP as a starting value. It matches what I consider stable CP maintenance values for most of the game while also keeping that 200 CP max within reach. You'll recall in in CS2, it made more sense for PCs to start at 100 (or 115 for Dhyer), so this CP inflation is also inline with the CP inflation that happens during CS3, CS4 and now Reverie.


Starting Value: BP
You already saw this in CS4's topic, but just as a recap: BP is used to fuel Brave Orders; powerful field wide effects that hit all allies. You can use them even if you are alone and they are unique to each PC. However, you can only Brave Orders so long as you have the BP to pay for it. Unlike in CS4, the max BP is 8 but to get there, you have to unlock the additional capacity slowly through the RC. Otherwise, the maximum BP pool is 5. Note that some Brave Orders cost more than 5, and as such are pretty much inaccessable if you hold them to some no RC interp. For BP maintenance, it is a similar story as CP maintenance here. Harder at the start of the game, but very easy towards the end once you fully powerup the Celestial Tree. So no issues of keeping BP at 5 or 6.

On the other hand, the question of whether or not PCs can gain more BP still remains. As noted in the CS4 topic, BP can be gained primarily from staggering and triggering a link attack. This is obviously impossible if you are fighting solo and there ARE solo fights in-game where your BP is limited to how much you had going into the fight (excluding item use). Allowing phantom PCs as noted previously does replicate more of what happens in-game, so I'm okay with keeping this line of interp open. The issue here is that it weakens the strength of +BP crafts in game. Things such as Renne's Zodiac Code are pretty great in-game because other than just self buffing, it also restore this very valuable resource that is otherwise unrecoverable unless you have another PC around (and even then, it's a bit random depending on staggers). So, YMMV. You do reward the good physical attackers in-game if you allow Phantom PCs because they are more likely to trigger a stagger, so the dial goes both ways.

PC Skillsets: Trial Doors
Pretty easy work around here too. Only Alisa has a call bigger Laggy button, so it should be easy to see how this works. However, the main thing to consider here is that some PCs will not have access to their full potential without completing a Trial. The complication is that not all trials are available at end game and require you to do the post-game RC exploration. In this case, it's probably easier to ignore these for the main cast. I will make note of which characters are affected since once again, YMMV.

PC Skillsets: Sub-quartz
See the CS4 Planning Topic. But long story short - every PC can equip a Secondary Master Quartz which then shares its primary passive to the user and half of its stats. Since all PCs will typically gravitate towards the most broken MQs, this creates a situation which removes uniqueness and generates all kinds of offensive translation such as everyone with free Auto-life. Even if you apply elemental rules, this wouldn't really work because it just forces PCs to then gravitate towards the most broken MQ in their own element. Ergo, Secondary Master Quartz are banned / disallowed for the purposes of the topic.

PC Skillsets: Quartz schools
Reverie still utilizes the same ARCUS system for every PC, so everything in the CS2 and CS4 topic still applies. The complicating factor here is U-Materials. Essentially, Reverie goes the CS4 route and dials up the U-Material frequency to overdrive. You get a *lot* of these things but the consequence to that is everything worth equipping basically consumes U-Materials. So two schools of thought here as in CS4: One is to ignore these all together and just use the base quartz available. This is easier to stat topic but at the cost of possibly weakening uniqueness because each element has some cool stuff that is only available via U-Material exchanges. Yet at the same time, not everyone will want the same quartz. For example, Rage is Fire element but despite the regular version giving 10% Evade, it is clearly physical oriented so while it might make sense for Sara to equip this, it makes less sense for a pure Mage like Emma to use it. Therefore, the second way of thinking about it is to provide a "pool" of U-Materials and every PC can then spend this pool on their desired set up. As long as it is within budget, they can go wild. This is very similar to NEB's proposed way of looking at some recent FE games where Gold is a limiting factor on what is available to a PC. The major downside to this are the Bells. Bells are unique quartz that halve the recovery delay on a spell. Since Arts is very likely going to be once again the main source of big damage for characters, cutting down 1/2 of the recovery delay can become pretty huge. I'll be open to hearing opinions from others regarding what they think about this. You could also just do a ban on Bells but keep everything else available.

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Unranked Games / Marvel Midnight Sun - aka Tide' 3rd Attempt at doing a Marvel Game Stat Topic

« on: August 31, 2023, 04:18:31 PM »

I've been talking about doing this stat topic for months now. Somewhere around April, I lost the interest due to IRL stuff but I finally finished the game and am going over all the DLC stuff at the moment. Hopefully, should have that done soon and we can get some actual numbers and details down. For now though, I'm just going to set the topic up and prepare you for what's to come.

HOW THIS GAME WORKS
Marvel Midnight Suns is a SRPG that takes place in the Marvel universe (duh) featuring notable characters such as Iron Man, Captain America and Wolverine. As it was designed by Fireaxis, the core gameplay loop takes a page from X-Com. Fight battles on a selected mission and complete its objective using your heroes. When the mission is complete, you will return back to the central hub where the game then moves to Night time. Night time events such as hanging out with a fellow team member or participating in active club events exist. You can also explore the Hub grounds at night for unique events. When you are done, you end the day and the game rolls forward to the next day at which point you can debrief from the mission and collect new abilities, upgrade abilities, invest in new tech and so on. Then you pick another mission and the loop repeats. You lose if all 3 of your chosen characters are incapacitated on a mission.

COMBAT
Every character in a game has a set of abilities which are represented by a card and these cards make up that character's deck. Only the abilities (aka cards) set into the deck are usable and they must be drawn to be used. There are certain Deck restrictions to every deck. From the top of my head, these rules are:

1) Every Deck must have at least 1 Attack Card in them
2) Every Deck must have at least 1 Heroic Card in them
3) A Deck cannot have more than 2 of a particular Card
4) All decks must be 8 cards in total.

Once in battle, players take their turn, then followed by enemies. Repeat ad naseum until one side is dead or the mission objective is reached. Every turn, players are allowed to play up to 3* cards (so 3 abilities) spread across all 3 heroes. 5 Cards are drawn at the start of every round to maximum hand size of 10. When a card is played, it gets reshuffled into the "master" deck (ie all 3 characters's deck combined) and a card play is used. Players can also do 2* Redraws, which lets you discard a current card in hand and replace it with a new draw. Finally, Players also have 1 Move action. Moving lets you reposition a character on the field and can be used both offensively (to set up an environmental hazard) or defensively (to dodge an AoE). You can end your turn at any time, but unused Actions, Discards and Moves are normally not carried over to the next round unless otherwise noted.

The only thing that is carried over from each round of combat is your Heroic meter. Using basic actions and skills generates Heroism points, represented by a gold tracker in the bottom corner. To play a Heroic card, you must have the minimal Heroism required. Heroism can also be used to trigger environmental effects or play non-ability / tactic cards. Every map you play on will have sort of environmental effect that can sometimes hit both enemies and PCs. Since these effects don't cost a card play, they can be an action effective way to eliminate groups of enemies at once.

Enemies are divided into 3 types:
- Minions - these are junk enemies and basically have 1 HP. They die to anything that causes damage.
- Normal - Can be also classed as an elite enemy (more stats) but these enemies will have abilities, actual HP totals, etc.
- Bosses - Unique enemies, usually a famous Marvel villain. Have more abilities and the ability to Double Act on their turn. Notably, bosses in this game do not have much in the way of status Resistances, but they do recover faster from ailments due to double acting.

DL INTERPRETATIONS
For the purposes of this topic, we will assume a few things. First, I think it is pretty safe to take abilities at their upgraded level but without any mods. This should be self-explanatory. Ability upgrades are easy to do and you should have most if not all abilities upgraded by the time the game ends. Mods on the other hand are much more finnicky, random, and extremely costly if you are aiming to roll for an ideal mod. They also aren't unique, so best to just rule them out. Next, PC levels and Friendship levels are assumed to be maxed. These open up a PC's ultimate ability card, their 2nd level passive and the levels just make it easy to determine end game stats. You're going to be at around level 23 anyway by the game hits the final level and 25 is the maximum. Even doing just a bit grinding will easily get you to 25. Finally, I'm going to assume that no PC has gotten any sort of passive or stat increase OTHER than Hunter. This is because these are also random and very hard to determine what a fair value is. The exception to this is Hunter because participating in any sort of event, character request or quest can generate passive stat boosts. It is completely unreasonable to assume that an average player is going to avoid these, so I think baking in a flat line boost for certain stats is probably more reflective of actual reality. PCs in this topic are scaled back to Level 25. On my file, most PCs have already reached prestige levels, which add +1 Offense and +5 HP for each Prestige level gained.

As for damages and a PC's DL variant - I think it's pretty safe to allow all PCs to take 3 actions a turn but with only their own set of cards. This is analogous to what actually happens in game when a PC is isolated. It does create room for cheese, but I think this cheese is also 100% reflective of what happens if you are solo. As a result some of the cast are not great at damage, but they have some excellent tricks that basically turns the into Godlikes. Fun! Since the mechanics of the game let you basically see 7 cards more or less from your deck, I think most of a PCs strategy will also be fairly consistent, so this view I think, works.



TERMS
Just a glossary for terms used by the game:

Quick - If the attack kills a target, card play is refunded

Chain - This attack has multiple hits equal to its Chain value. So Chain 3 = 3 attacks total

Full Combo - In a Chain attack, a Combo is when all attacks of that chain are launched on the same target. This usually gives a benefit of some sort.

Knockback - Pushes an enemy away back some distance in a cone shape from the character's current facing. Does no damage on its own and requires a wall, barrier or other hazard to do damage. Distance of pushback is also modified by a character's Power stat. The higher it is, the farther the pushback.

Forceful Knockback - Same as above, but pushes a target twice as far and has double the impact damage.

Free - This does not consume a card play when used.

Block - Additional health that is separate from HP. If you've read my SWGOH topic, it's basically Protection. It acts as an overheal but isn't actual HP and must be taken down before HP starts to deplete. Some status such as Bleeding will ignore Block and directly hit HP.

Exhaust - Removes Card from deck after use

Final - When played, this character can no longer take any other actions for the rest of the current round.

STATUS EFFECTS
Bleed - Speaking of. In a nutshell, it's Poison. Triggers at the end of the target's turn. Deals damage equal to the Offense value of the target.

Banish - Target is ejected until next turn. Does not work on boss targets.

Bound - Target cannot take any action until duration expires. Note that the enemy version of this considers Bound PCs to be "dead". So if all PCs are bound, the game is over.

Conceal - Becomes untargetable until duration expires. Note that you can still damage a Concealed target with AoE by aiming for something around him/her. Explosives, other targets, etc. all work. However, because it ignores targetable attacks, the AoE in question needs to be either full MT or free targeting. A simple example: Something like Aerial in CS2 would work because Aerial just targets a space. However, Flare Bomb in the same game would not as that requires a specific target.

Corruption - Enemy only. It's POIZN. Deals 10% of MHP at the start of a round it appears. Stacks with Bleed. Also can bounce to new targets if they are close by at the start of a round

Counter - Automatically counter attacks if struck. No range limit.

Dazed - Cannot act until the duration expires. Duration only goes down via Card Plays or enemy actions. So if a PC gets dazed when alone, they are in big trouble.

Drop - Creates a pitfall from either a character or enemy, which non-boss enemies can be knocked into. If successful, instantly KOs them.

Fast - Reduce Heroism Cost by 1 on cards requiring Heroism

Frenzy - This character will act after X amount of card plays, where X is the Frenzy number.

Marked - If target is KO'd, refunds a card play. DL useless like 99% of the time.

Lifedrain - Parasitic healing. Damage dealt = HP Recovered

Resist - Nullifies damage received for 1 attack. Note that this effect does not stop damage from status effects (such as Sleep) and does not ignore environmental damage such as knockbacks and wall slams.

Stunned - Different then the above in that this expires once damage is taken. Otherwise, still makes you unable to act until it disappears

Slow - Increases Heroism Cost by 1 on cards requiring Heroism

Taunt - Draws targets to attack a specific character

Strengthen - Increases damage dealt by 50% until duration expires

Vulnerable - Increases damage taken by 50% until duration expires

Weaken - Decreases damage dealt by 50% until duration expires

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Discussion / Marvel Snap - Cards, Analysis, etc.

« on: August 23, 2023, 04:28:21 PM »

I like talking about things that interest me (don't we all?). I've been meaning to write down my thoughts regarding the game for a long time now but wasn't sure where to go with it. Certainly didn't want to hijack MC's thread again. Since the only other space I use that could talk about it is reddit, I'm creating a thread here. I've been playing for a good 10 months now. Game is good, you should try it, etc. I'd go into a bit more details but the point of this thread isn't to advertise the game. Instead, I want to talk about cards, types of plays, analyze/document games that I've had and so on. And hey, if you get into Snap or are already playing it, feel free to use this thread to.

SNAP'S GAMEPLAY -
So before I start into any real card/play analysis, I think it's important to talk about how Snap plays since that will then open up certain concepts without them just appearing with no context. Marvel Snap is in some ways, quite rigid. In every game, there are 3 lanes. Each lane has an effect (a famous Marvel location) and 4 playable spots. Normally, each player has a deck comprised of exactly 12 cards and each game goes on for 6 rounds. Every round, you gain +1 Energy which is basically your Mana/Casting ability and can play cards up to whatever max Energy you have. The goal is to win 2 of the 3 lanes by the end of round 6. To win a lane, you simply have to have more Power in that spot than your opponent. It is important to note that cards will flip over based on PRIORITY (more on this later) and that location effects happen AFTER card effects themselves. These little nuisances give Snap some complexity and the constantly changing lane locations and deck types are what keeps the game fresh.


SNAP CARDS -
Every card has a casting cost (Energy) and a Power value. These two numbers combine together to give it its stat-line. Most cards will also have an ability effect, which can interact with itself, other cards, the play board, and so on. These effects are divided into three major categories:

- On Reveal: The effect happens immediately as soon as the card is flipped
- Ongoing: The effect stays in play as long the card isn't disabled in some way
- Passive: This card has this effect and cannot be interacted with except in rare circumstances.

Abilities then also have sub-categories, which then put them into their own archetype. For example, certain cards when played will Discard a card from your hand. Other cards when played will Destroy a card on the board, etc. An archetype is usually the basis for how a deck is built. Most decks will have a core crux of cards that make up the game plan or primary condition and other cards will be in there to either give a sub-archetype or just function as support.

As of today, here are all the major archetypes that I am aware of:

- Lockjaw Lotto - A deck that specializes in playing cards from the deck instead of in hand.
- Zoo - A deck that focuses on going wide by flooding space with low-cost cards (typically 1 cost) and then buffing them in late rounds.
- Spectrum Destroyer - An deck that primarily uses Ongoing cards, then buffs them with Spectrum if wide, or plays Destroyer if going tall.
- Apoc Discard - Focuses on Discarding the namesake card (Apocalypse) and uses Dracula/Morbius as Anchors.
- Hela Discard - Focuses on Discarding many cards in hand, then plays them all at the end of the game with Hela
- Dino Handsize - Focuses on holding as many cards as possible in hand to buff up the titular card, Devil Dinosaur
- Ronan - Focuses on denying an opponent the ability to play their cards from hand to increase their hand size and thus buffing Ronan the Accuser.
- Darkhawk - Focuses on increasing your opponent's deck, to buff the titular card, Darkhawk
- Movement - Shuffles cards in your lane area after play. Normally, this is prohibited
- Shenault - Named after two key cards: She-Hulk and Infinaut. This deck focuses and utilizes float to create explosive Turn 6-7s
- Generic Destroy - A deck that focuses on destroying cards played to get bigger and bigger values
- Nimrod Destroy - Focuses on buffing the titular card (Nimrod), which you then dupe by destroying it
- Shuri - Uses the titular card to create a giant powered card, which you then clone afterwards.
- Wong Combo - Uses the titular card to basically combo one or two On Reveal effects by having them activate multiple times.
- Negative - Uses Mr. Negative to invert the cost and power values of cards remaining in the deck
- Negative Jane - Same as above, but runs Jane Foster to then fetch all 0-cost cards remaining in deck.
- Control - Reactive deck that focuses on countering your opponent's plays
- Lane Control / Lockdown - Similar to above, but does so by shutting lanes down (effects both players).
- Bounce - A deck that pumps up its cards by replaying them over and over from hand.
- Ramp - A deck that aims to play cards of higher cost earlier then they are intended
- Junk - Similar to lane control but instead of completing shutting a lane down, you slowly deny an opponent play space in their lanes.
- Patriot - A deck that buffs up cards played that are ability-less
- Cerebro - A deck that buffs up cards with all the same power value
- Surfer - A deck that is focused primarily on 3 cost cards
- Agatha - Named after its titular card. Lets the AI play the game for you.
- High Evo (HE) - Named after its titular card. Alters the way certain abilityless cards function
- Thanos - Named after its titular card. Adds 6 Infinity Stone cards into your deck.
- Galactus - Named after its titular card. This card focuses on building tall in one lane and one lane only.

SNAP CONCEPTS AND TERMS -

Some of this should be common terminology in other card games. Others are specific to Snap:

Float - Unused Energy at the end of any turn

Mill - To get rid of an opponent's card, either in hand or deck. Note that Mill isn't particularly strong in Snap right now because of the limited number of ways to do so.

Tech - A card that is used primarily to counter another card or type of card

Anchor/Establisher - A card that is meant to win a lane for you when played.

Enabler - A card whose main purpose is to create plays that are otherwise impossible or to expand a given play window.

Support - A card whose primary worth is its synergy with another card, aimed to aid with the primary win con in the deck.

Curve - Describes your general lines of play and play combinations for a given turn, given the cards available in deck. Cards that cut cost alter your standard curve since it effectively gives you more energy to spend.

Tempo - To play cards close to the "par" stat-line for a given turn in a game. So if you play something smaller, you'll be playing under Tempo. Generally speaking, playing under Tempo is bad because you are effectively being energy inefficient and will lose if you just then play cards that match up to what par should be.

Token - Cards that spawn or create other cards (usually abilityless) when played. These cards can be interacted with.

Play Window - Describes which particular turn is the most effective to play a card. Not all Play Windows are equal. Specifically Turns 3 and 4 are usually the most important. Turns 1 and 5 are usually the least important.

Real Estate Agent - A card that alters a lane's location effect

Series - Describes when in the game the card is introduced. Marvel Snap's cards are not all introduced at once. To prevent a newbie from being trounced by a veteran player, players are slowly introduced to more and more cards through different release Series. So Series 1 describes a card available from the get-go. Series 5 describes an "Ultra-Rare" card, usually those released just recently.

Snap - The game's namesake mechanic. Every game, you "bet" cubes. If you win, you get double your ante. Lose and you lose double your ante. Snapping is to raise essentially. You can only do this once, but it doubles your base Ante of 1 to 2 and hence winnings from 2 to 4. If both players snap, the you can win up to 8 cubes in a single game. 

Cube-Equity - The number of cubes the deck wins compared to it's losses. A deck with good cube equity means it will regularly gain you cubes. Note that gaining cubes isn't the same as winning. Due to Snaps, you can have some games where you win way more cubes then you lose.

Retreat - Forfeit, Conceding, Surrendering a game. You lose cubes equal to your ante basically.

Priority - Determines who reveals their cards first. This is particular important because cards that are unflipped are not considered to be "In Play". Since On Reveal effects happen only once, if you have a particular effect that you absolutely need to hit, you need to make sure you have the right priority, otherwise your play basically whiffs. A good example of this is with Shang Chi. Shang is normally used to counter cards over 9 power since he destroys them. However, his effect only happens when revealed and then is considered to have expired. So if you reveal SECOND in this case, Shang will miss your 9+ power card completely. Priority is determined by who is currently winning the game, so it can be manipulated every round. Experienced players are aware of this and will fight to win OR lose priority depending on the deck.

Reach - Describes a card being able to access lanes that have otherwise been restricted or locked, which would normally prevent further play

Restricted Location - A location that forbids you from being able to directly play cards into it. Sometimes, these are very obvious such as Sanctum Sanatorium which just states "You can't play cards here". Sometimes, they are more nuanced such as Death's Domain, which destroys cards played into the lane. In the latter case for example, you can get around the location effect in several ways.

DEFINING RANKS AND TIERS -
Probably should've outlined this earlier, but I should probably explain how I'm also ranking the cards. Outside of personal experience, a card's "rank" is basically how versatile or useful it is in the grand scheme of the game. Metas will come and go, but the really good cards will maintain relevancy across multiple seasons. It goes without saying, but I also don't look at Cards in a vaccuum. Like Mystique is a great card, but without any other good Ongoing synergies for example, she'd be useless. Ideally, you'd probably be evaluating based on the deck archetype, but there are sites that actively track win rates for that. So, for me, ranking and tiering a card is more about "how useful is this card overall?". Here's how I'd go about reading it:

S Tier - This card is a game defining card in that it alters the way one should go about thinking about the game. They enable many other combos/decks or change up the way one can go about playing a particular deck. These are very rare.
A Tier - A card that is often very relevant for the meta game. Essentially, you play the game and think, "Does my opponent have this?". Often very versatile and can be slot in easily.
B Tier - A strong card that has a few drawbacks, but still played pretty frequently and is quite strong on its own. Most cards are around the B-C tier.
C Tier - Cards that are a bit more niche and weaker individually. Needs the support of other cards to really do well.
D Tier - These are cards that are almost always combo reliant. They are very narrow and are either often dead on draw or just don't do anything most of the time.
F Tier - Pretty much unusable card or cards that have always been bad. Lots of issues and generally, no one plays them as a result.

5

Unranked Games / Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children - aka the Korean lovechild of X-Com and FFT

« on: December 31, 2020, 05:32:20 PM »

What do you get when you cross two great strategy/tactics games and mix in some Korean anime? Apparently a pretty damn good game. In my ever continuing quest of starting stat topics (and eventually getting around to finishing them), I've decided to lay a placeholder topic for this game, which some of you might recall I've been advertising for you to play.

Troubleshooter is a SRPG that takes it roots from X-Com in terms of combat gameplay, FFT for it's skill system and adds some originality here and there. What we end up with as a result is a very diverse cast of PCs who all play relatively differently. This leads to a pretty good DL translation (at least I think...) so creating a topic for it and adding it to our ranks seems like a good idea. There are of course some big interp issues to be resolved, but we'll get around to those when we cross them.

THE EASY STUFF:

Damage numbers - All the damage equations are shown in the game. On top of that, the devs have released the formulas for pretty much everything else, so it's actually pretty easy to get the numbers once we know what the set ups will be. "Set Ups" in this case being skills + equipment.

Levels - All PCs are pretty either at 50 or close to 50 by the time I was done the DLC. The exceptions here are Leton (for joining very late) and Bianca (who not only joins late, but has a level penalty). For sake of ease, I just got everyone to Level 50. If you want, you can apply a small penalty to the late joiners (2-3) but in general, levels don't do much stats wise. The biggest impact it has is it can seal off certain slots on that character's mastery board for skills. 

THE HARD STUFF:

Primary Classes for PCs -
Sion/Irene/Anne/Leton/Bianca all end up sharing an Advanced Class or two, so for these 5, things end up being slightly messier. I'm aware that Albus and Alisa both share a base class as well, but their advanced classes are fairly different so I'm not as worried about the two of them as a result. The main person who I think has a problem here is probably Irene. Both of her classes focus on being a tanky frontliner, although one focuses more on her magic stats compared to her physical ones. Sion and Leton both encroach on this territory by sharing the tanky class, but Leton has a unique one to go to. Sion also shares a class with Bianca, but since she much rather go Witch most of the time, I'm okay with Sion taking Black Mage as his primary. These leaves Anne/Bianca sharing a class, but like Albus and Alisa, they play quite differently, so I don't too much of an issue here. As an aside, Anne has a unique class here (White Mage) but she probably never wants to actually be in it for DL purposes because it's a largely supportive class. YMMV on this of course, but this seems to be the most reasonable take on primary classes. Whether on not you want to give the other PCs that secondary option (which they do have in-game) I think will be a judgment call, so I'll leave it up to the reader.

Skills -
The game has a plethora of skills (called masteries in-game - 658 total) that are utilized by everyone. The skills can be divided into the following:

Common Skills: Have no limitations. Can be used by everyone, including monsters
Species Skills: Can only be utilized if that character in question is the corresponding specie (ie: only Humans can use Human skills)
Genus Skills: For monsters only. Can only be utilized by the corresponding monster type.
Class Skills: Only those belonging to that class family can use these skills (ie: Magic Knight Albus can use Mage Skills. Great Swordsman Albus cannot)
Elemental Skills: Only those that have the corresponding elemental affinity can use these skills (ie: Only Albus and Bianca can use Wind skills. Only Sion can use Lightning Skills)
Personal Skills: Unique to that particular character (ie: Only Giselle can use Precision Sniping, Bianca Wind Witch, etc.)
Mastery Sets: A set of 4 skills when equipped, creates a bonus effect that can be independent or additional effects of skills equipped.
Individual Skill: This is a free passive that is given to each PC based on their in-game character, backgrounds, etc. Each PC has three to choose from and each are unique. You literally cannot unequip and individual skill, so like Personal skills, these are 100% DL Legal.

After giving it much thought, here's where I stand on DL legalities:

Common Skills: Are not unique, and therefore not legal. Simple enough. The exception here is if a Common Skill creates a unique Mastery Set that cannot be utilized otherwise. I'll generally allow in that case. If you want, you can try to only allow the bonus effect granted by the mastery, although this may not be possible in some cases.

Species Skills: Are also for the most part not unique. You do get a Beast Tamer so monsters can be controlled, but all 11 PCs are humans. Like with Common Skills, the exception here are the humanity skills. These skills enhance your mastery limits, allowing you to hold more skills. For DL purposes, this basically means more space for more unique skills generally. In short, every PC generally wants them. In addition, they don't actively change any PCs stats or abilities on their own, so the notion where "if you give a PC this, you have to assume all PCs get this" doesn't serve as a check/deterrent. I mean, you could opt NOT to use these skills, but the number of PCs who can generally become more unique with versus without is favored heavily in the camp that does use them. As a bonus, it also means I don't have to muddle around for ages with my set ups because I can generally just assume they are in play and attach them as needed. I don't claim to have the best knowledge of set ups though, so be warned that the skill set *could* be sub-optimal.

Genus Skills: These are unique to the monster and for the most part, feel more like class skills then anything else, so I'm okay with these.

Class Skills: I generally see these as okay. They might be shared across multiple PCs sometimes, but that's unique to the class itself. You might consider banning the ones that are shared by multiple classes (Elementalist is the big one, being shared by 5/11 PCs. Fighter is also pretty bad at 4/11) but I'll suggest taking a stance similar to Common Skills in that case. You can ban the skill, but if it produces a unique effect, see if you can just allow the unique effect instead.

Elemental Skills: Normally, this would be a ban, but because PCs generally don't overlap on Elemental Skills (other than Spirit), there's no reason to ban these here.

Personal Skills: Easiest one other than Common. Obvious Allow. Basically the other end of the spectrum.

Mastery Sets: A set of Masteries that when equipped together generate a unique effect. I'll allow Class/Elemental/Personal mastery sets since these are usually unique and can't be copied (for example only Albus and Alisa can use Retaliation - nobody else can because it is a Swordsman Mastery Set).

Individual Skills: The only issue with these skills is that changing them costs a little more than changing other skills in-game. Removing a mastery in-game is usually between 1-3 training manuals, with 4 manuals being on the more fringe end. An Individual Mastery costs 10 training manuals - so 2.5x more expensive. This most likely isn't an issue - I can't say for sure 100% though because since I've had the game since the beta, the developers have been kind enough to drop me thousands of manuals (I have like 6600 or something), so for me, these changes are practically free. YMMV on how much you want to penalize a change in individual skills if any. Note that some of them aren't terribly useful (Albus' Opportunist for example, is awful) but a couple of characters may want to swap these for different matches (Sion and Heixing immediately come to mind). 

In the end, Skill legitimacy will always be a translation issue. This topic will actually show a screen shot of the setup (because its much easier that way) along with a description of all the relevant skills. Adjust what's allowed versus not as you see fit.


Equipment -
Troubleshooter utilizes a randomized element for equips. Every piece of Equipment can have some random factors on it. The easiest assumption here is to just go with no random factors added as it saves a whole of trouble trying to figure out what factors should be rolled versus what isn't. You can buy or craft most equips, so the topic is going to go with that. I'm aware that bosses drop rare equipment as well, which can be PC unique. However, as the drops are random and never guaranteed, I'd largely disallow them. The game does assume some level of grinding though, so if you think PCs should have boss drops, well, that's another can of worms and potentially much messier.

Status types -
This is actually a bit of a mess - don't ask me why they decided to go with such a complex status system. Major thanks to the in-game encyclopedia here because there are lots and lots of status names in this game. Generally though, the game breaks them down into three main groups, which can then be divided into 3 main types, followed by property types and then the individual status.

The three groups are:
Buffs - Positive status changes
Debuffs - Negative status changes
Affixed - Status changes that cannot be altered or dispelled normally. Instead, they must run their course or be changed on the PCs own turn.

The three main types are:
Physical status - As it suggests. These are conditions that effect your body and include Bleeding, Burns, Bruises, etc. Most conditions analogous to the DL are physical in nature.
Mental status - Conditions that are based on feeling on the state of mind. These include Rage, Excitement, Panic, etc. These conditions are the weirder ones and may not have a DL based equivalent.
Non-Type status - Neither of the above. Similar to Mental status, may lack a DL equivalent.

Property types under Physical:
Bleeding, Bruise, Disease, Fire, Electric, Ice, Earth, Water, Equipment -

Property types under Mental:
Rage, Excitement, Concentration

Property types under Non-Type:
Stun, Confusion, Silence, Luck, Noise, Information, Fragrance

For DL purposes, it's probably easier to imagine the status property types instead as follows:
POISON type status: There are several of these in different elemental forms. BURN, SEVERE BURN, SHOCK, HIGH VOLTAGE SHOCK, POISON, BLEEDING, SEVERE BLEEDING, are all classified here. Note that Water in this game is associated with Poison, so Water resistance helps fend off Poison status in Troubleshooter.
STAT UP/DOWN status: Lots of these under various names. These include most mental status such as BRAVERY, FAITH, RAGE but can also include elemental ones such as FROSTBITE, WIND VEIL
AURA status: These are status conditions that don't apply unless the ally or opponent is within range of the stated tiles (hence an aura type effect)
UNIQUE status: Those that don't fall into the above three categories.

For DL purposes, here are all the relevant types of status that can be inflicted by the PCs:

Chance to Win: Adds 1 Speed, 1%Hit, 1% Crit and 1% more damage per level. Stacks up to 10.
Bleeding: 10% MHP damage at the start of a turn. Also lose 3 Move. This damage can be fatal. Lasts 3 turns.
Severe Bleeding: 20% MHP damage at the start of a turn. Same as Bleeding otherwise
Wind Veil: Melee Evade +20%. Adds +5 Vigor Recovery, +10 Speed, +50 Armor/Resistance and +100 Wind Resistance.
Slowdown: Speed -25
Strong Slowdown: Speed -50
Stun - Target cannot Act for the next turn. Dodge and Block go down to 0
Shock - Deals 50 Electric damage at the start of the turn and decreases Lightning Resistance by 50
Iron Wall - Increases Armor by 100, Vigor Recovery by 10 and Sets Block to 100%. Become a landmark that other characters can use for cover
Concentrated Magic Power: Improves Vigor recovery by 1 and ESP by 20 for every level. Can stack up to a max of 25 Levels
Furious Lightning Gale: Become immune to delay effects and reaction attacks. Gain 30% Melee evade, +10 Speed and +15% attack damage.
Hero: Speed+15, Evade +15%, Block +15%, Crit+20%, Crit Damage+50%. When KOing an enemy, CT-30
Burn: Deals 50 Fire damage at the start of the turn and decreases Fire Resistance by 50
Armor Disabling: -5% Evade, -5% Block and -25% of Resistance gains from armor per level. Stacks up to 4 levels.
Regeneration: Restores 15% MHP at the start of your turn.
Blind: Deactivates Overwatch, Sight -5, Move -2 and Hit-50%
Starlight Shield: Guards against 1 Physical attack
Constricting Root: Target cannot move. -20% Block and -20% Evade
Silence - Can't use Magic Abilities
Confusion - Randomly acts/attacks allies and enemies
Frozen - Same as Stun. However, as the name implies, this is Ice element in nature so a Fire attack can de-thaw you. It's basically Pokemon Frozen
Rampage - Lose control of your character. Target then attacks randomly. Similar to Confuse but this wears off if there are no longer any enemies within sight.
Death Verdict - Doom
Knockback - Pushes target back X number of tiles. If the target cannot be pushed back due to a barrier or another target behind them, they can become stunned.

Subject to change if I see anything wrong but for now, this feels like a good descriptor.


STATS AND THEIR MEANING -
HP: Lose these and go back to start. Do not collect $200
Speed: How quickly a PC gets their turn. Note that this Speed value is converted to Clocktick value, which becomes the real speed to measure when PCs get their turn. The Clocktick formula is 36 * (.5 + 100 / X) where X is your speed.
Vigor: Character's Stamina. Almost ability in this game consumes some. If you do not have enough Vigor for the given ability, you can't use it. Another way to think of it, is that it is similar to MP, only restoreable. Characters all have the "Vigor Restoration" command, which refills Vigor to the Max, but it has a long delay time (+100 CT).
Vigor Recovery: Amount of Vigor a character recovers at the start of their turn

SP: The type and maximum pool of energy the PC can hold during battle. SP is utilized for damage in some attacks, but also gives the PC access to Overcharge once they are at max, which gives them the ability to use their supers. The type of SP can modify certain parameters during battle as well. SP generation is based on the amount of Vigor spent. So for example, Albus using Wind Veil costs 20 Vigor. This would result in 20 Wind SP being generated.

Although by default, PCs can access their supers at 100 SP, most damage formula are modified by SP. Meaning that as battles go on, characters will deal more and more damage and a smaller max SP pool isn't necessary better. The amount of damage added varies depending on the skill. I plan to post the damage formula for each skill so you can see how much of an effect it has. For now, the damage listed is damage done at the start of a fight - when SP is at 0. The exception for this are Supers, which require SP to be maxed. In this case, SP is taken at the max value that character has listed.

Move: Number of tiles a PC can cross in an action. Note that using both actions to Move gives the PC 2 additional tiles of momentum. In addition, diagonal spaces are still counted as 1 space in Troubleshooter.
Sight: See above, only this is the maximum sight range a PC can see.
Overcharge Duration: Once you are at max SP, how long you have before it goes back to 0. A PC cannot hold their Overcharge (barring some circumstances) so, it's a use it or lose it type of deal.
Threat: Move + Max Attack range basically

Attack Power: Use for calculating base physical power
ESP Power: See above, only for magic
Base Hit: Accuracy. Impacted by skills, bonuses and penalties
Base Crit: Chance of doing extra damage on an attack
Base Crit Dmg: Damage multiplier when a critical hit is scored.

Armor: Physical defense power. This + Physical Resistance type = Defense Value. Note that Defense Values in this game work slightly differently than normal. Instead of being purely subtraction or division, the defense value is adjusted by a level mod, which is then compared to a chart to determine the damage cut. Specifically, the damage reduction formula is: 100 * (x /(x +100+10 * Y)) where X is the defense value and Y is the attacker's level value. In summary, defense has diminishing returns. It doesn't take a lot of armor to bump up the damage cut to maybe 30-40%. However, getting to 60-70% take like a 500 points inbetween. For reference, here's the Defense / Resistance Value needed in 5% increments:

5% - 31
10% - 66
15% - 105
20% - 150
25% - 200
30% - 257
35% - 323
40% - 400
45% - 490
50% - 600
55% - 733
60% - 900
65% - 1114
70% - 1400
75% - 1800
80% - 2400
85% - 3400
90% - 5400
95% - 11400

Resistance: Magic Defense power. This + Elemental Resistance type = Magic Defense value. Note that all magic attacks in-game have an elemental property. See above.
Base Block: Chance to block an attack, which reduces damage by 50%. Block also directly reduces Crit. So higher block chance = lower crit chance
Base Dodge: Chance to evade an attack outright.

The accuracy formula is actually quite complicated. It is written as:

Hit - Evade, where...

Hit = Base accuracy + Elevated Position Bonus + Still Stance Bonus - Terrain Penalties - Weather Penalties + Mastery Bonuses
Evade =  T * (L + R * X) + Base Evade + Elevated Position Bonus + Cover Bonus +/- Terrain Bonus/Penalties + Mastery Bonuses

T - Type of attack. Each type of attack has an accuracy penalty applied when the target is not within melee range (3 or less). The penalties for each: Melee -3.2%, Thrown -1.5%, Shooting -1.25%, Fall (Overhead) -0.25%
L - Long Range penalty. If a target is over 10 spaces away, then L = 15%. Otherwise, L = 0
R - Range away from target. This is equal to the number of squares away from the target from your starting position that turn. So a melee attack here has to count all the squares away before reaching (and isn't just 1)
X - 0 if in melee range (less than 3 spaces), 1% if in mid-range (3-10 spaces) or 2.5% if long range (>10)
Elevated Position Bonus - If one target is higher than another, their hit gains +20% accuracy. Flip side, attacking from lower ground gives the defender a +10% Evade bonus. Relevant maybe against FE flyers or other Flying type enemies.
Still Stance Bonus - If an attacker does not move before attacking, Hit is increased by 20%
Terrain Bonus / Penalties: Hiding in shrubbery adds +20% evade. On the other hand, attacking on icy roads, water or lava reduces both hit (as an attacker) and evade (as defender) by 10%
Weather penalties: If attacking in Snow, Fog or Heavy Winds, ranged attackers lose 10% Accuracy. In Rain, the penalty extends to all attacks. So go, go Ludicolo or something
Cover Bonus: Adds 20% Evade for low cover or 40% Evade for high cover. Note for the purposes of the DL, cover bonus is going to 0 about 95% of the time. I'll note if it is relevant
Mastery Bonus: Certain Masteries when equipped will give a bonus to Hit/Evade based on certain criteria. If those criteria are met, then it increases the Hit/Evade scores

tldr version - Fall or Overhead attacks are generally very good because they have the least amount of accuracy penalty applied to them. Ranged attacks or starting off range are a bit more problematic as they eat a lot of penalties the farther the distance. So if you're the type that considers kiting, melee PCs are generally worse as a result. Both accuracy and evade are very good because they are straight up added or subtracted and apply to all attacks (physicals or spells).

Elemental Resistances: Includes physical resistances (Slash/Blunt/Pierce) and elemental resistances (Fire/Ice/Water/Electric/Earth/Wind). Note that most resistances for all PCs is fairly homogeneous and quite low. To save space, I will only note the resistance if they are noticeably higher than average.

6

Unranked Games / Trails of Cold Steel 4 - Planning topic aka Abandon all hope, ye who enter

« on: November 27, 2020, 07:53:29 PM »

In my apparent quest to stat topic every Trails game since Zero, this placeholder/planning topic should be no surprise to anyone. Needless to say before we go any further, this topic (and the actual stat topic) will have SPOILERS galore due to listing down the PCs. If you have not passed Act 2 of CS4, it is advised that you stop reading here unless you just want to gander at the list of issues.

FINAL WARNING!

So Cold Steel 4 brings a *host* of issues that didn't exist in 2 and probably 3 (although tbf, I didn't think much about 3 in general). I'll start with the basics, then work my way down to all the various issues we should hash out before any work is started. In the meantime, if someone has the formulas for the game, we can share them and start doing some number crunching. Given the number of PCs available, this is going to be a *lot* of work.

Ranking Characters:
So the first starting issue is also the most obvious: Which characters are we ranking? I have already expressed in Discord of my disapproval on ranking bosses given the huge division split that will be likely present as there is no way to really account for Boss durability. I can list the number of ways the game can be split open, but that's for another time. Just know that bosses face similar issue as in Cold Steel 2, except earlier and with way more cans of worms to cover ground on. There are one or two bosses that do appear to be rankable, but the vast majority are just going to be so headache inducing, it seems like a better idea just to skip it for now unless someone has a good way to cover them.

However, even discounting the bosses, CS4 has 15 PCs (as of where I am) that are all available. Then there are Pseudo PCs and true guests. Pseudo PCs are those who have a locked MQ and a locked weapon, but everything else is open for adjustment. This means, aside from their main quartz, they are functionally a PC anyway. These are definitely ranks IMO - in which case, the number of PCs jumps up to 20 (add: Angelica, Duvalie, Tita, Sharon and Randy). Note that pseudo PCs leave before the final dungeon, at which point, they become regular guests and have fixed set ups. For the most part, this shouldn't matter too much since you can just take everyone's stats before the final dungeon.

Guests are similar to guests in previous games. As of right now, unlike say the final dungeon in CS2, true guests have fixed load outs. Pretty much nothing can be changed. Adding all guests results in the number of PCs to 37 (add: Estelle, Joshua, Renne, Agate, Lloyd, Elie, Tio, Celine, George, Roselia, Ennea, Ines, Xeno, Leonidas, Aurelia, Victor, Toval, Vita). Unlike Pseudo PCs, true guests often have limited stints of time where they are available. So after a brief join period, they become unavailable for some time. There are more reasons to veto the Guests other than their join period but for now, just know adding them adds a lot of work to an already growing list. This should definitely be decided before the main topic comes along.

Starting Values: CP
Another obvious question that needs to be addressed but is present in every Trails game is what the starting CP value should be. Unlike in CS2, this time, 200 CP might actually make more sense. There are still reasons to use 100 or 150 (for balance reasons), but maintaining max CP is not as difficult as it seems this time around for a few reasons:

1) Unlike in CS2, the Operation phase of the game is more muddled and sometimes, there are easy ways available to fully replenish your CP before a fight. Take Act 1.2 for example. Before heading to the main area of the basin, you can activate the checkpoint at the save point nearby, Quick Travel back to an Inn and fully rest, then go straight to the boss fight. I haven't checked if this is possible in other acts, but I suspect there are more than one exception.

2) About 60% of the way through the game, you'll pick up the Emblem MQ. And unlike in CS2, Emblem in CS4 is like Emblem in CS1. Which is to say, it restores your HP/EP/CP very quickly. The description says 4% a second, but as a practical example, running down a corridor to the next room can full restore all 3 pools to max. As if that wasn't enough, you don't even need to move. As the description suggests, waiting around still triggers this passive, so everything after this point means you can have full CP before serious boss fights.

3) Spell slinging is once again, the way to go for randoms if you want to mass clear them. Crafts have their uses of course, but groups are often better handled with large AoEs, which magic does handily. 

4) CP maintenance in general is easier due to accessories and MQ passives. I find CP often sits at 100+ as in CS2 so despite the inflation in cost, certainly 150 starting or higher would also be reasonable.
 
Starting Value: BP
Unlike in CS2, where BP didn't do much, here, BP is used to fuel Brave Orders; powerful field wide effects that hit all allies. You can use them even if you are alone and they are unique to each PC. However, you can only Brave Orders so long as you have the BP to pay for it. Your maximum BP pool is 7, and some orders are effectively OPB. The trouble here is figuring out how many points you should start with here. Note that BP maintenance is trickier than CP Maintenance, but for the most part, being at 5 points is fairly easy (and gets easier the later in the game you are). This has the added bonus of making every PC able to access their Brave Order from the start, so no one gets hosed off the bat.

Whether or not PCs can gain more BP is another area of discussion. In-game, you build BP by either using specified craft, using an item or trigger a link attack via a crit or a stagger. The last of these is the most common but requires an additional PC to activate. On their own, a PC cannot trigger a link attack. Needless to say, in the DL, this would imply you cannot gain more BP than what you start with. Yet, this BP mechanic is pretty integral to the gameplay, so I'll be certainly up for discussion regarding whether or not we should allow phantoms PCs, for example, so PCs have a chance at least to recover BP.

PC Skillsets: Summon Bigger Laggys
One of the things that most people allowed in CS2 returns in CS4. Except this time, because it was so cool the first time, multiple different party members decided to join in on the fun. Outside of Rean, the following PCs can all summon their gundams into normal battles: Crow (duh), Juna, Kurt, Altina, Musse, and Ash. I haven't actually used this command yet, so I don't know if it functions exactly the same as it did in CS2 (3 turns worth of actions). Just know that there are more PCs now who can summon a big giant robot to crush enemies. It does share similar drawbacks as in CS2 - most notably that it cannot be called during an Operation phase (namely against any human boss) and tends to consume a bunch of EP on use. However, since it is similar in nature, you'll have about one third of the cast, whose best opening move will usually be to use this thing from the onset and most likely wreck an already pretty wonky damage curve.

As an aside, Alisa can also summon a Mini-Gundam thing, which is similar to how Tita fights, except hers might be on a timer. Again, I'll have to play around with this. Depending on how they work, I'll have a lot more to add regarding their similarities and differences when used, which might make all the difference on a uniqueness perspective. 

PC Skillsets: Sub-quartz
In CS3 and CS4, all PCs can equip a secondary master quartz. A secondary Master Quartz (sub-quartz) shares its primary passive with the user, its spell list and half of its stats. In CS3, this was restricted in that each quartz can only serve as the Sub-quartz to one PC. So if Laura was using Brigid as a sub-quartz, then Fie cannot do the same. CS4 removed this restriction altogether, so now a single MQ can serve as the sub-quartz to multiple PCs. Needless to say, this creates big uniqueness issues because there is no way to divide the quartz up in a logical manner. Almost all PCs will want to share in Sophia's primary passive - 2BP Auto-Life; which is just gets really silly. Even if you apply elemental rules, it still doesn't work. All Space element secondary node users will take the Sophia, all Wind element secondary node users will take Oberon for status immunity, etc. I've done a ton of thinking trying to see if there is a reasonable way to apply this and I just can't think of one. Therefore, my primary opinion is that NO ONE gets a sub-quartz. An alternative is to remove the passive provided from the sub-quartz and just use the spell-list and stat boosts but I think you'll probably end up running into similar issues.

PC Skillsets: Quartz schools
CS4 utilizes the same ARCUS system for every PC, which means every PC has the 3 elemental nodes things going. That's good and it means we can use a similar method as the CS2 topic to designate skillsets and such. Unfortunately, complicating this are a) True Guests and b) U-Materials are not as restrictive this time around to be a limiting factor. That's bad.

First the problem with True Guests: As noted, you cannot change their set ups at all. Everything about them is fixed, which means that all the quartz cannot be adjusted in anyway. You can see how this creates issues right away if you use the CS2 topic style to assign quartz. Why should guests with fixed set ups, a clear disadvantage in-game, have a leg up by being able to utilize all their quartz slots and fill them in with a wide variety of quartz when the regular PCs cannot? One option here is to just ignore what's equipped in all the different nodes other than that Guest's elemental nodes. A second option is to just not rank any true guest characters altogether since their is more limited availability here anyway.

On the second problem, the increase in U-Materials means that accessing Rare and SR and even powerful trade quartz are not so difficult or OPB anymore. This problem is then further expanded thanks to Emblem doubling drops, making rare drop farming off bosses way more likely. For example, in my current game, I have 5 Rage Quartz. The fact that not everyone is going want the same quartz + applying the elemental restrictions means its way more likely that these SR quartz become available. As a silver lining, allowing them DOES add a level of uniqueness normally not available (since every element this time has some good stuff in general) but it complicates set ups. A few options here of course. You could still apply the CS2 method and just don't allow any Rare/SR type quartz period. A second option might be to set U-Materials as restricting factor, giving every PC say 99 U-materials to work with. While this might be more complex, it will also wind up with more variety, which could be a good thing. 99 pieces sound a lot, but keep in mind that forging a Rage gem for example, costs like 64 U-Mats or something, which severely hinders how much more a PC can customize their set up. This might be a bit of "wait and see" to see how it works in practice.

Character Equips: Rean, the ladykiller
Having looked ahead of where I am, apparently, Rean gets access to a bunch of powerful accessories unique to him at end game. Problem is, these are all pretty much OPG. More specifically, Rean can only walk away with 1 (I think), which is determined based on who his final partner is. You can have a game set up where Rean can be with multiple partners, but at the end, he can still only get one of these super accessories. At the moment, I'm not sure the best way to approach this problem. There are a few schools of thought though. One method is to just give Rean available access to all/none of them. Simple enough. A second more reasonable method IMO, might be to assume the most powerful ones available at Rean's choosing, and then lock him in with that one for the season. There are a few staple choices here such as Duvalie's, which gives a whopping +30 Speed, or Towa's which adds Accuracy/Evade and gives Rean status immunity. In the end, I believe this advantage should be reflected somehow since it is something unique to Rean, although doing it in a fair way is a bit of quandary at the moment.

7

Unranked Games / Trails to Azure - Planning topic

« on: January 13, 2020, 07:11:17 PM »

What is says on the tin. As I am what I believe to be one fight away from the game being completed, I'm thinking about laying some ground work on the game for building a stat topic. This is going to be a bit of WIP like with CS2 where things will just build on each other until we have some answers/opinions on the questions at hand. I'll start off with some easy stuff first:

1) End game levels are assumed to be 110-112;. It's probably that the main cast of 4 may be 1 to 2 levels higher, but due to Trails XP scaling, it will be very difficult for them to be any more ahead than that, assuming some degree of usage during the final dungeon.
2) Master Quartz equipped by the characters are assumed to be maxed out.
3) Penu-ultimate weapons are assumed versus Ultimate ones as the ultimate ones require extremely limited materials (2PG) to be made. For the most part, the PCs don't care too much about this. There are a few chars who would like the ultimates but that's more due to the side effects than the actual stats.

Some immediate questions that come to mind:
1) There are 4 PCs who do not have definitive Master Quarts: Lloyd, Elie, Wazy and Noel. Between these 4, it seems to be implied by the game that Pixie and Claw are for Elie and Wazy while Shield and Force are for Lloyd and Noel. However, which one goes to whom for DL purposes isn't clear. My assumption for this is that Pixie is for Elie and Claw is for Wazy, while Shield seems to be for Lloyd and Force for Noel. However, I'm open to arguments around this.

2) Quartz options available to each PC. Each Master Quartz has a primary element and a secondary element that is usually at half the effectiveness of the primary. Due to the way the game is set up, Having a high primary element doesn't give you all the spells available in that school. You often have to mix and match up different elements to get different spells. How do people want to proceed with this? My interp is to offer primary and secondary elements to the PC but that can severely limit access to what spells they do have available.

3) For the most part, each PC has an element associated with them other than Lloyd due to having one locked element slot each in the Orbment grid. So related to the above, another option for Quartz options is to give that PC access primarily to the element they are associated with. This gets messy with Lloyd due to him not having an associated element (as noted before) and Wazy as his primary element is Space and nobody has a Space Master Quartz to start with.

Share any thoughts you might have on the above + other potential issues!

8

Tournaments / Draft team tourney thingy

« on: November 23, 2018, 05:00:15 AM »

So I was going through old threads, and remember this?: http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=6819.0

I was wondering if people wanted to do another draft run, perhaps have a little more fun with it by adding some restrictions/matches this time. Post here if you're interested.

9

Discussion / Anyone up for a DL podcast?

« on: May 28, 2018, 03:41:52 PM »

Just trying to see if there is any interest, especially now that we have a Dischord set up. It would just be a way for people to talk about certain DL matches, conventions, interesting battles and so on by being able to talk about in real time. We've spoken about having a round table before, and this is a similar idea, just a bit more informal I guess. I realize that the DL's glory days are over, but there is clearly some of us who are still up for fantasy type battles and who knows - maybe there are others out there that like this sort of thing.

If there is some interest for it, I'll see if I can find some information on how to set one up and we can do a couple of test runs. Some things people can talk about IMO:
- Concept of scaling
- DL History and past changes. What's different now
- New/Unseen DL matches
- DL team matches. What are some differences from a duel in a team fight
- Ranking idea, how we decide on ranks
- How the divisions work
- Character profiles/strengths/weakness of the dueler

So don't worry about that. I'd say interest is more important at the moment.

10

Discussion / DLC2018 or whatever

« on: September 26, 2017, 02:37:58 PM »

I'm not usually the one to start this, but thought that this might be a good time to start planning if people want to get together the next year. Everybody had stuff to do in 2017 amongst other things so maybe having a topic up earlier would help.

I'm open to ideas. I was thinking a DLC Toronto would be cool, but realize that since I'm the only one living here, I probably can't take a huge group. A mini meet might be possible though.

11

Unranked Games / Tokyo Xanadu - Placeholder soon to evolve

« on: July 25, 2017, 03:23:59 PM »

Yes, yes, EX+ is coming out sometime later in the year and will probably overtake this akin to how we have a CS2 topic but not a CS1 topic. I digress though, since an earlier version of the topic can still have value (and in CS1's case would have helped a certain character). So yeah, I'm starting up a topic for this game if nothing else as a placeholder. That way if someone else decides to create an EX+ topic, there is already some basics that this one would cover as well as any DL translation issues. Of course, this topic will have its own entries and data as well (since there doesn't seem to be one online).

Game Flow:
The flow of Xanadu is very similar to that of Cold Steel except having things maybe done a little out of order. Game is divided into overall 10 chapters (last one being a bonus) and each chapter goes through several phases: An introductory phase, a free phase, and then an operation phase. The introductory phase leads off the chapter and plays out what the episode will be about. The free phase occurs immediately after, which allows the player to explore the town, complete quests, talk to PCs and the like. When the player decides that they are done with the free phase, they can proceed to the chapter's event trigger and begin the operation phase. The operation phase brings the story forward and has several different objectives that the player is required to do, usually involving at least one dungeon and at least one boss. When that is completed, the game will play out the end of the episode and the next chapter starts.

The operation phase will require players to explore at least one new dungeon (in later chapters, often more than that). For about 85% of the game, you can select 3 characters to explore a dungeon with but you can only control one at a time. Switching between the 3 characters while exploring the dungeon is an integrated mechanic and one you are actively encouraged to do. Within the dungeon, the player is required to go through multiple obstacles and enemies. In some areas of a dungeon, the game will force an encounter and require the player to defeat the enemies. At the end of a dungeon, there will often be a boss creature that needs to be defeated before it is considered complete.

During combat, players will use their active character and various attacks to defeat the enemies. You have basic attacks, which can be performed at any time and special attacks, which requires the use of your special gauge. The special gauge will recharge with time, at a relatively quick pace. Between the two types, specials are more damaging so you will be using them quite often during any fighting. If your active character runs out of HP, your partner characters will sub in and become the active one. Dungeon progression continues until you either reach the end and defeat the boss or your entire party's HP is reduced to 0.

Attacks
All characters have the same command inputs for attacks (think Smash). Just that attacks between characters are all a little different in either animation or property. As such taking what a DL legal turn should be is both easy and hard at the same time. It's easy because whatever you choose will be homogenized between the cast and you just grab those numbers from everyone. It's hard because there is no active turn counter or timer to use between the characters as base.

For the record, I would imagine taking average damage to be something along the lines of basic combo until finisher, then charged attack. This seems to be largest attack chain you can get but even this is a little fuzzy because enemies in this game do not regularly flinch when hit. The attacks which everyone has available:

Base combo - These are your regular attacks on the ground and run off your physical attack power. Every base combo has a finishing hit after about 3-4 attacks. After the finisher, you are vulnerable for a very brief amount of time during recovery.

Base aerial - Your normal attack while in the air. Unlike the base combo, base aerials tend to be only 1-2 hits each. The only character who kind of breaks this mold I believe is Rion.

Ranged attack - A projectile attack that runs off your special gauge and is determined by your ranged attack power. These are basically spammable, with low recovery and relatively low special cost. Their disadvantage is that without locking on, they tend to be inaccurate (DL irrelevant for the most part) and they tend to be the weakest of the three specials.

Charged attack -  A big powerful attack that takes a second or two to charge up but deals a lot of damage and often has a special property or two. These tend to cost the most special meter and have a longer start up before execution. Some of them also have a notable lag period to make up for the power.

Aerial Dash attack - A rushing, charging attack that hits multiple times. Some characters need a slight wind up for this (Mitsuki), others do not (Rion). They tend to leave you vulnerable during the end, but less so during initiation.

X-Strike - A super attack that uses a special icon that is different from your special gauge. The gauge is broken into 6 segments and is shared by the party. You can stock up to 2 supers at a time.  It takes about 5 completed attacks to fill one segment (so 30 total attacks to complete a gauge). You get more super meter the longer you've built up your combo counter. For the most part they are all the same AFAIK. They do big damage (usually full screen) and you are invincible while it is executing. Of note is that in-game, you can get a supporting character in the party to co-op use their super attack as well. This does not consume extra gauge and has the added effect of essentially doubling your damage. For DL purposes, this is obviously irrelevant. Why would you ever not do this in-game? Well, mainly because the option to co-op is locked behind your Soul Level/Affection with that character. It is a non-issue late game but matters early on.

X-Drive - A third gauge that is charged whenever specials are performed. When this one is full, characters can enter Drive mode, which gives them unlimited special power, increased HP regen and every attack gets the weakness bonus (50% more damage). As a side note, characters that have reached Soul Level 2 also receive another secondary boost which is dependent on the element that a character has set. See below. Drive mode only lasts for a short time (about 10 seconds).

Element Bonus:
Fire - +25% Crit
Spirit (Ice) - Regens up to 50% Max HP
Steel (Earth) - Reduces incoming damage to 10% of their original value
Wind - Speeds up the rate of acquiring X-Strike meter by 4x
Shadow - Special Damage increases by 15%

If this all sounds complicated, you don't need to worry because Drive Mode's application in the DL is extremely niche and pretty much limited to only 2 characters. This is because the Drive gauge charges extremely slowly. The normal way to gain Drive gauge according to the in-game manual is to either break objects or to damage enemies. However, the drive gauge gain from damage is pitiable - you're more likely to defeat the enemy before building up 1%. To put things more into perspective, I was going through a late game dungeon and killed like 7 enemies and only got 35% of the Drive gauge charged. Note that you get a bigger bonus on kills so yeah, these two methods are pretty much non-existent for DL purposes. The last method is to equip a S.Rare element which will charge the gauge periodically. The catch to that is that the charge rate is very slow, so only stallers will really be able to access this. Still, it's documented if it ever comes up.

Element Grid
Every character has a separate grid which they can use to fit elements. These are the equivalent of like quartz in Trails game or Materia in FF7. Like Trails, characters often have an elemental restriction on some part of the grid. The exception to this rule is Kou who doesn't have any restriction. You can take this one of two ways, either Kou can get access to any combo of two elements OR he gets jack all. Both of these I can see as reasonable interps. The big takeaway though is that that not all characters can take advantage of the same build (whether due to restrictions or number of available slots), and as in the CS2 topic, this will be taken into consideration.

Element grids between characters have 2 parts that are the same. 3 three passive skills (Combo Boost, Auto Recovery and Brave Soul. Auto Recovery is useless for the DL while Brave Soul is basically P4 Endure BS. I will not be considering these since the skills are the same regardless of character) and a Master Core which determines that character's elemental affinity. Elemental affinity is a big part of the game which is meant to force you to swap between characters since each character can only be of one element at a time. Every PC has only two elements they can choose sans Kou, who can use any element. When set, the Master Core infuses the PC with that element on attack and on defense (which gives them some resistance to attacks of the same typing). These choices will be listed, along with their primary element. Note that you can equip the same master core on two different characters in game, so the only restriction should be limited to just what element they can set.

As for what elements are allowed, that gets interesting. Unlike CS2 where the limiting factor to rare and S.rare stuff was from U.Materials, in Xanadu, the limiting factor is actually money. Sure, some elements require the combination of other parts, but many of these parts can actually be purchased with cold, hard cash either at the Antique shop or other facilities. Equipping an entire party with a full set of S.Rare elements is actually really hard so that's one factor to consider. Another interesting element is that the number of nodes available for each character is different. For example, Sora has only 4 nodes but Yuuki has 6. This is a distinct advantage/disadvantage that should be reflected in someway for the DL. It doesn't have to come down to money but it is the most obvious solution. Another method similar to CS2 is to restrict the elements that can be equipped to just their typing and allow them something  like 2 S.Rare for the locked nodes, and just normal/rare for the other open slots.

For the record, here's the list of available elements that the PCs can equip. Note that you cannot equip 2 elements of similar types - meaning that you cannot equip 2 Shield elements, 2 Raid elements, 2 status attack elements and so on:

FIRE
- Force III - Atk +20
- Mayhem III -  Atk+ 16, MAtk+16
- Fire Raid III - Increases fire attribute, increasing damage to Wind type enemies  by 30%
- Fire Shield III - Increases fire defense, reducing damage from Wind elements by 60%
- Fire Blade III - 45% chance of adding 'Burn' Status per hit
- Double Axe - Crit Rate +12%. Weaker versions of this exist and boost crit by 8%
- Suzaku - Increases Crit Damage by 50%. Weaker version of this exist and boost Crit Damage by 25%
- Hyobi - Increases Damage dealt by 25% when at max HP
- Shishiou - Increases X-Drive duration by 50%
- Ryuuki - Charges X-Drive gauge without action. 1% is charged every 2 seconds (Full bar in 3 minutes 20 seconds)

SPIRIT (Ice)
- Life III - Max HP+400
- Ryujin III - Max HP+200, Def/MDef+24
- Spirit Raid III - Increases Spirit attribute, increasing damage to Fire type enemies by 30%
- Spirit Shield III - Increases Spirit defense, reducing damage from Fire Elements by 60%
- Spirit Blade III - Adds 'Frozen' status at a 30% chance per hit
- Arc Bolt - Increases Ranged attack damage by 30%. Weaker versions of this exist and increases ranged attack damage by 20%/10% instead.
- Holy Blessing - 25% more gem drops (money). YESZ
- Murasame - Max HP+800, reduces status conditions to 1/10th their duration. Weaker version of this exists and boost HP by 400 and cuts status ailment duration by 1/2.
- Seiryu's Scale - Constantly regens HP at a very rapid rate (11.11 HP/sec). A weaker version of this exists (8.33 HP/sec)
- Archer's Marksmanship - Increases Ranged attack damage by 100% but decreases other specials to 50% of their power.

WIND
- Veil III - Mdef+45
- Thunder III - MAtk+32, Mdef+32
- Wind Raid III - Increases Wind affinity, increasing damage dealt to Steel type enemies by 30%
- Wind Shield III - Increases Wind defense, decreasing damage dealt by Steel elements by 60%
- Wind Blade III - Adds 'Paralysis' at a 30% rate per hit.
- Hawk Wing -  Increases damage dealt by Flying specials by 30%. Weaker version of this exists and increases Flying special damage by 20%/10%
- Kusanagi - Increases chances of getting enemies to flinch by 60%
- Byakko - Collects items with a bigger radius
- Full Gallop - Increases Movement speed. The slower the character, the more pronounced effect
- Joy of Flight - Increases flight specials by 100% but decreases power of other specials by 50%

STEEL (Earth)
- Shield III - Def+40
- Adamantine III - Atk/Def+24
- Steel Raid III - Increases Steel affinity, increasing damage dealt to Spirit type enemies by 30%
- Steel Shield III - Increases Steel defense, decreasing damage dealt by Spirit elements by 60%
- Steel Blade III - Adds 'Unburden' at a 45% rate per hit.
- Sledgehammer - Increases damage from Charged specials by 30%. Weaker versions of these exist and boost charge damage by 20%/10%
- Kotetsu - Gives the character 'Iron Stance' preventing them from being knocked down
- Genbu Shell - Nulls damage received 20% of the time. Weaker version of this exists and blocks damage 10% of the time.
- Fortitude - When HP is 80% or higher, damage taken reduced by 50%
- Position of Strength - Increases damage from Charged specials by 100%, but reduces damage from other specials by 50%

SHADOW
- Wand III - MAtk+40
- Shadow Raid - Increases Shadow affinity, increasing damage dealt to Shadow type enemies by 30%
- Shadow Shield III - Increases Shadow defense, decreasing damage dealt from Shadow elements by 60%
- Poison Blade III - Adds 'Poison' status at a 45% chance per hit
- Shadow Blade III - Adds 'Blind' status at a 45% chance per hit
- Chaos Mirage - Def/MDef+50, Greatly improves invincibility from dodging.
- Ikagura - Increases combo counter at 3x the normal rate
- Moonlight - Reduces damage by 50% when sprinting
- Onimaru - Absorbs 6% of damage dealt as HP recovered. Weaker version of this exists and absorbs 3% damage instead.
- Yatagarasu - Increases damage dealt by 50% if enemies is suffering from a status effect

This topic will be taking characters with combinations of the two elements within their grid. The locked nodes will be at S.Rare while other nodes will be regular/rare elements of the PC's typing.


Equips
All PCs will want a copy of the last storebought armor and footwear available - Variable Gear. These are a little expensive, but its affordable for the entire party even without grinding. The equip gives them good defensive scores, some boost to offense and a HP boost as well. If you are the type that likes to see random plot stuff as character specific, Kou has an argument for the strongest footwear and armor in the game as only he can initiate the process to get this (through his personal parameters).

As for status blockers, there is only one the PCs want: the Mythology Locket. It boosts a fair bit of defensive stats (HP notably) and blocks all status. End of story. It costs 10,000 Yen, which in game, is not super cheap but at the same time, not super expensive either. If you are willing to forgo some last minute element boosts for example, outfitting your entire party with these isn't unreasonable. With that in mind, PCs still have 1 free accessory slot which should be able to fit anything else they can legally set (for the record, I can't think of anything). If for some reason they have to remove the Mythology Locket, it costs them 800 HP, 40 Def/Mdef and some offensive stats. Needless to say, they will never want to do this.


Status Effects
Poison - Reduces HP in periodic intervals
Burn - Reduces HP at a constant rate. Functionally is the same as Poison, just different element and maybe more damage overtime.
Unburden - Reduces movement speed by ~70%
Frozen - Cannot move or attack
Paralysis - Cannot attack
Blind - Reduces screen visibility and character receives a hit penalty
Instant Death - This is more of a plot trick than an actual status, but the mechanics of it do exist. In the game, only the final boss has this attack and it's used to eliminate your entire party until you are down to 3 characters (which is used for the final phases of the fight) at which point it stops being used. Works the exact same way as ID in other games.

Stats
HP - The relative amount of damage a character can take before they are incapacitated.
SP - The special gauge which is shared universally between the party. SP does not grow but powering up abilities reduces their cost, allowing you to use your specials more often.
Atk - Base physical power. Used for base physicals and most charged specials
Def - Base physical defense. Reduces damage from physicals
M.Atk - Base magic power. Used for base specials and air dash attacks
M.Def - Base magic defense. Reduces damage from magic

Range - How strong your regular base special is. Higher is better.
Power - How strong your charged physical is. Higher is better.
Flight - How strong your air dash attacks are. Higher is better.

Invisible Stats - These are notable characteristics about each PC but not listed in the game

Movement - How fast the character is at moving around on the field. To test this, I basically ran that a straight corridor with all 8 characters without holding down the run button. I used a timer to get a reading on how quickly each character was able to complete the straight dash. I chose this because it is the simplest method without introducing obstacles which can mix up the pathing/approach that can cause slow downs. Results are as follows:

1. Sora (10.82 seconds)
2. Asuka (10.92 seconds)
3. Rion (11.20 secondss)
4. Shio (11.30 seconds)
5. Kou (11.43 seconds)
6. Gorou (11.57 seconds)
7. Yuuki (11.58 seconds)
8. Mitsuki (12.18 seconds)

Average: 11.375 seconds

Attack Speed - How fast a character is at executing their attacks. This one is actually a little harder to measure because of the different attacks each PC can do. I will break this down into 4 separate parts which corresponds to the 4 attack types available (minus air normals). Attacks were timed from start to finish, until character regains control. Results:

Normal Combo Speed

1. Kou (1.63 seconds)
2. Asuka (2.02 seconds)
3. Sora (2.16 seconds)
4. Yuuki (2.25 seconds)
5. Mitsuki (2.65 seconds)
5. Gorou (2.65 seconds)
7. Rion (2.89 seconds)
8. Shio (3.5 seconds)

Average: 2.47 seconds.
NOTE - Kou's Normal combo is faster primarily due to only having 3 attacks instead of 4. On the other hand, Sora actually has 5 attacks in her normal combo. If you consider that, then Sora probably ends up faster since she gets in more hits per second. Shio also has 3 hits instead of 4, but he's already dead last, so this doesn't change much.

Ranged Attack Speed

1. Yuuki ( <0.5 seconds) - This was so fast that W-Split can't time it properly.
2. Asuka (0.71 seconds)
3. Sora (0.83 seconds)
4. Rion (1.05 seconds)
5. Mitsuki (1.13 seconds)
6. Kou (1.20 seconds)
7. Gorou (1.65 seconds)
8. Shio (2.21 seconds)

Average: 1.16 seconds

Charged Attack Speed

1. Asuka (1.15 seconds)
2. Gorou (1.23 seconds)
3. Kou (1.52 seconds)
4. Yuuki (1.74 seconds)
5. Rio (1.80 seconds)
6. Sora (1.81 seconds)
7. Mitsuki (1.83 seconds)
8. Shio (2.62 seconds)

Average: 1.71 seconds


Air Dash Attack Speed

1. Sora (1.47 seconds)
2. Yuuki (1.51 seconds)
3. Mitsuki (1.54 seconds)
4. Asuka (1.56 seconds)
5. Rion (1.62 seconds)
6. Kou (1.65 seconds)
7. Shioi (1.77 seconds)
8. Gorou (1.79 seconds)

Average: 1.61 seconds
NOTE - Includes for everyone about 1 second in the timer for jumping before dashing. If you take that 1 second out, then everyone's time drops by that second, which makes the differences more negligible.

Attack Range - Distance a character can cover with their attacks. Similar to above, this can be broken down into the 4 most frequently used attacks. Unlike the above, this was really tricky to quantify because enemies will move in this game so it's very tough to pin down specific distance units. Eventually, I came up with this idea:

In one of the dungeons, there is a circular area with a tile floor pattern and 8 boxes on the perimeter. This worked out great because the boxes are won't move, and the tiles gave me a unit of measure to determine how far away I can be before things were missing. It's not perfect (because there are obstacles in the center and the pattern doesn't extend to the center either), but it works pretty well in terms of gauging distances.

Results are as such:


Normal Attack Range

1. Gorou (14 Tiles)
2. Mitsuki (11 Tiles)
3. Kou (4 tiles)
3. Yuuki (4 tiles)
3. Sora (4 tiles)
3. Rion (4 tiles)
3. Shio (4 tiles)
8. Asuka (3.5 tiles)

NOTE - Kou's Normals actually arc, so at the very center, they gain a little distance (about 4.5), but not enough for a full tile. Gorou's Normals are weird. He has very long reach with his 1st and 4th attacks due to them being from his gun, but his 2nd and 3rd attacks (coming from his bayonet) have less range. Mitsuki has a more consistent long range pokes as she shoots energy spheres when she attacks. The actual staff of her attacks have the standard 4 reach. .


Charged Attack Range

1. Sora (6 Tiles)
2. Asuka (5 Tiles)
2. Shio (5 Tiles)
4. Rion (4 Tiles)
4. Kou (4 Tiles)
4. Yuuki (4 Tiles)
4. Mitsuki (4 Tiles)
4. Gorou (4 Tiles)

NOTE - Rion's Charged attack actually travels about 4 tiles. So it starts at 4 but moves to 8 tiles before stopping. Shio's Charged attack starts at 5 range, but the last hit has massive extension. It reaches up to about 11 tiles. He's listed as 5 though because he will want to get all the hits in if he's using a special, but just keep that in mind if you consider things like kiting.

Air Dash Range

1. Shio (13 Tiles)
2. Kou (11 Tiles)
2. Rion (11 Tiles)
2. Sora (11 Tiles)
5. Mitsuki (10 Tiles)
5. Gorou (10 Tiles)
7. Asuka (9 Tiles)
7. Yuuki (9 tiles)

NOTE - Length/range of dash doesn't correlate to attack speed. I suspect this has to do with the forward momentum gained from the air dash and how far each character rolls, or drops from recovery before returning to neutral.

Up next - Damage figures and set ups.

12

Unranked Games / Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes: In which Jawas > Luke Skywalker

« on: April 12, 2017, 05:10:00 PM »

So yeah, I've joked about how if NEB ever made a stat topic on FE Heroes, I will go out and be dumb and make the Star Wars gacha game topic.

I did not expect that to actually happen

Right now, this post is mainly a placeholder. There is a database that has all the details of the game, with every character at max level and max ability level, etc. This is what I will be basing this topic off of. Needless to say, some traditional DL soft rules needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Getting one character to the max level and max gear along with maxed out abilities takes a couple of months at least. Is this reasonable for the norm? Maybe based on the average length for phone games!

Some quick notes about this game.

- It is largely squad oriented or team oriented. As a result, many characters by themselves will not do much. So expect to see a lot of Lights/Low Middles. There are a couple that come to mind as possibly making Heavy, but this is not the norm.

- Because it is a squad oriented game, some characters have leader abilities. These abilities are sometimes allocated to an entire faction or group. Whether or not other DL characters may fit into these groupings is questionable. For example, should Lando's +15 Speed/29% Crt Damge to all Scoundrels/Rebels also apply to characters like Locke? At the very least however, they should always be in effect for that particular Hero in a duel. You may consider an exception in other team matches when someone else has a leader ability (like say Ike10) since only one leader can be set.

- The game has two health bars. One is actual HP and the other is Protection or Shield. Traditionally, the Protection of a character must be reduced to zero before HP can be damaged. This is not always the case, but is true about 99% of the time. So as a result, average HP can be viewed as either: Summation of HP + Protection or treat them separately. Treating them separately would mean characters have grossly inflated HP pools in the DL (which seems odd), but makes skills that heal HP better. Treating them as one pool means that healing skills are worse since Protection usually cannot be recovered. While the in-game mechanic treats them as two pools, in practice, it really is only one because healing in-game is very underwhelming and reflecting the state of things as they are seems to make more sense to me than just the theoreticals.

- Speed is linear. Characters receive a turn when they accumulate 1000 CT.  Important to note is that there is no residual CT. What this means is that Speed ends up working similarly to FFX. You can get turns faster if you break certain tiers of speed, but higher speed within that tier only ensures that you beat the tie (still in important but means double turn speed is weaker).

- An crucial mechanic in the game is the Assist. Several characters have abilities where they call another ally to do damage. In game, this is usually a guaranteed skill but obviously useless in the DL where there is no assist to call. So one way of doing this is the phantom assist or you can treat as no assist possibly. Just to be clear, I would be onboard with phantom assists it does not require a named character. You will always have 5 characters in a squad, but there is no guarantee that you will always have K2SO in the same squad as Cassian.

- Turn meter changes are a big deal in the game's current state. Many characters have the ability to influence turn gauges. You can treat these as similar to delay effects. An important note is that these turn meter attacks are treated similarly to status in that it CAN be resisted. In-game, there is a stat called Tenacity that increases status resistance. You may see the average tenacity as being average delay resistance since its so prevelant in the game to casts across other games.

Stats and their meanings:
- Protection: The amount of shielding before actual HP is hit. Protection is essentially a second, non-recoverable life bar (in 95% of the cases).
- HP: Lose these and become Bantha fodder
- Speed: Linear. First to 1000 gets a turn. See above.
- Potency %: Base effectiveness with status. The higher this is, the more likely status will be applied. Potency % is added to the attack's base status rate and then reduced by the target's tenacity.
- Tenacity %: Base effectiveness to resist status. Higher this is, more like status will be guarded. There is always a base resist chance of 15%
- Strength: Influences HP and defenses primarily and a little bit of attack power. High Strength characters will often be tankier than others
- Agility: Influences Damage and a little bit of speed. High Agility characters will hit harder and tend to be faster
- Tactics: Influences Special damage and special resistance. High Tactics characters do more special damage and take less from their attacks.
- Health Steal: Amount of HP healed from attacks if any. Many characters have this, but the effect is usually neglgible as it cannot restore Protection.
- Evade/Deflection: Base chances of avoiding physical/special damage type attacks
- Accuracy Bonus: Any bonus to hit rate. Goes directly against Evade/Deflection
- Crit Rate: Chance to score a crit
- Crit Damage: Damage multiplier from crits.

Relevant buffs / debuffs:
- Stat Up/Down (HP/Power/Def/Speed/Evade/Potency/Crit/Tenacity): What it says on the tin. For Power/Def/Potency, the effects are +/- 50%. For Crit and Speed, +/- 25%. For HP and Evade, +/- 20%. Tenacity Up/Down is different than the others in that Tenacity Up pretty much makes you status immune while Tenacity Down reduces your status resistant chances down to base minimum of 15%.
- Damage over Time (DoT): Basically poison in other games. Of particular note is that it can stack. 5% MHP damage at the end of every turn for that character.
- Ability Block: Shuts down special commands while active
- Heal Immunity: Obvious
- Buff Immunity: Also obvious
- Daze: Prevents the character from being able to assist, receiving turn meter bonus and counterattacking
- Expose: Every hit deals an additional 20% MHP damage. Can stack.
- Deathmark: See above, but every hit does 50% MHP damage. In addition, a deathmark'd target is auto locked on to (meaning your characters must attack that target)
- Stun: Incapacitated for the current turn (cannot act/counter/assist)
- Shock: Heal/Buff Immunity and Daze rolled into one.
- Stagger: Target loses all current CT if hit by an attack
- Instant Death: Duh. Note that unlike status, ID in this game cannot be resisted. Those that have it when used will always hit the target.
- Advantage: Guarantees the next attack has a 100% critical hit
- Foresight: Guarantees that the next attack will be evaded. Loses to ITE.
- Crit Damage Up: Increases damage from crits by 50%
- Taunt: Forces enemies to attack the target
- Stealth: Removes character from being targettable. In addition, stealthed characters cannot be countered.
- Retribution: Guarantees a counter attack if struck while buff is active
- Protection Up: Grants additional Protection (25%) over the current amount
- Heal over Time: Regen. These can restore varying amounts of health (from 5% to 20%) and like DoTs, can stack.

More later. For now, enjoy the coming apocalypse.

13

Discussion / Speedrun thoughts / Learning log - because I don't want to keep a blog

« on: December 01, 2016, 02:16:42 PM »

So yeah, I've thought about posting something like this for awhile. This is basically just kind of a record for me as I note down some of the difficulties and frustrations as I learn through various speedruns. I mostly speedrun RPGs anyway, so I figure this is fitting enough for the forum. Eventual goal is to hopefully learn how to do a majority of PS2 jRPG speedruns one day with some odd bits here and there so also a good monitor of my progress overtime! If you're ever wondering how someone learns to do a speedrun and it seems impossible, well, consider this a de-mystifying thread and more a general exploration of the insanity/work needed to produce a decent enough run.

Some things I've since learned about myself since I started doing speedruns:

1) I seem to have developed this amazing knack of patience. That's not to say I don't get frustrated, but when you do enough runs where RNG plays a factor, you eventually do reach a point whether your only choices are to try again or quit forever. If you do decide to try again, you realize there is a chance of running into the same problem again so not getting discouraged is part of the challenge. But if you do decide to hold out, you may eventually luck out and get a great time out of it. So having the patience and fortitude to sit through lots and lots of failure becomes necessary

2) I don't mind losing as much. It still sucks when you lose a PB or your time gets beaten or whatever, but given this is pretty commonplace with speedruns, you get more used to it. Records are meant to be broken after all - either by yourself or someone else

3) There is a lot of introspection and self-learning/de-briefing which is often where a good chunk of the learning comes from. Death doesn't bother me as much. No one likes wiping, but this happens so often that you kind of just become accustomed to it and then learn from the mistakes. In fact, sometimes winning (in complete BS ways) is more troublesome cause I don't know how to replicate it!

4) Because of speedruns, I actually end up spending less money on games than I think >_>.

Every runner brings different strengths and weaknesses to the table and they have different qualities that may make them better in one area than another. Two things that I value over most other runners are a) consistentcy without the need for large sacrifices in time and b) playing out runs as far as possible. I don't like resetting if something bad happens because that occurs way too often. Knowing how to adapt and changing tactics on the fly is hard, but being able to do it makes you much more knowledgeable about the game and allows you salvage situations otherwise not possible. As for my personal strengths, I find myself creating more back ups since I'm less good than other runners so I consider myself more as part of the routing side. Actually doing runs for me is a chore outside of a couple of games that I do like running (believe it or not!).

So where to start? Well, I do have a list of stuff that I want to do and try to get through. These goals are:

a) Finish learning Resonance (technically done). Start working on runs
b) sub 3:50:XX in Shadow Hearts: FTNW
c) Finish routing Mana Khemia 2 (about 50% done?)
d) Get notes for XS2, Cold Steel 2
e) Finish routing Wild ARMS XF (retirement project?)
f) Do a run of Wild ARMS ACF
g) Sub 5:10:XX in Wild ARMS 4
h) Update notes in Wild ARMS 3, do a run, sub 9:00:XX
i) Finish notes for MMXCM
j) Start learning XS3

In no particular order ofc, although a-d) are more on my priority list. The other stuff are varying degrees of "I want to do this". Energy levels and motivation are sometimes a problem, but hopefully I will get around to fully completing everything on my list at some point.

14

Tournaments / Proving Grounds Interm - L/M - I promise not to pull a Super! I hope.

« on: November 21, 2016, 07:16:17 AM »

See the H/G topic for raison d'etre

Duelers in this pool:
Towa Herschel (CS2) - The completely adorable, capable student president/acting Captain. Sadly, plot powers don't translate
Fengalon (WA3) - Awful defenses and low damage but amazing agility based stats to the rescue?
Tatan'ka (SH3) - Causes more game overs in speedruns than anything
Melia (XBC) - All the damage but no durability whatsoever
Mirdyn Walhorn (TO:PSP) - Flip side! Tanky, can stall but probably wishes he had more damage.

Towa Herschel vs. Yosuke Hanamura
Towa Herschel vs. Ryudo
Towa Herschel vs. Clive Winslett
Towa Herschel vs. Sceptile
Towa Herschel vs. Alexia Lynn Elesius
Towa Herschel vs. Barret Wallace
Towa Herschel vs. Yangus
Towa Herschel vs. Miakis

Fengalon vs. Yosuke Hanamura
Fengalon vs. Ryudo
Fengalon vs. Clive Winslett
Fengalon vs. Sceptile
Fengalon vs. Alexia Lynn Elesius
Fengalon vs. Barret Wallace
Fengalon vs. Yangus
Fengalon vs. Miakis

Tatan'ka vs. Yosuke Hanamura
Tatan'ka vs. Ryudo
Tatan'ka vs. Clive Winslett
Tatan'ka vs. Sceptile
Tatan'ka vs. Alexia Lynn Elesius
Tatan'ka vs. Barret Wallace
Tatan'ka vs. Yangus
Tatan'ka vs. Miakis

Melia vs. Yosuke Hanamura
Melia vs. Ryudo
Melia vs. Clive Winslett
Melia vs. Sceptile
Melia vs. Alexia Lynn Elesius
Melia vs. Barret Wallace
Melia vs. Yangus
Melia vs. Miakis

Mirdyn Walhorn vs. Yosuke Hanamura
Mirdyn Walhorn vs. Ryudo
Mirdyn Walhorn vs. Clive Winslett
Mirdyn Walhorn vs. Sceptile
Mirdyn Walhorn vs. Alexia Lynn Elesius
Mirdyn Walhorn vs. Barret Wallace
Mirdyn Walhorn vs. Yangus
Mirdyn Walhorn vs. Miakis

15

Tournaments / Proving Grounds Interm - M/H - 100% Tied approved obscura

« on: November 21, 2016, 06:58:11 AM »

See the H/G Topic.

Duelers in this pool:
Elliot Craig (CS2) - Timid musically inclined kid, with massive healing reserves and stalling tactics
Gespent (WA3) - Prays for no FF5 Bards
Igornak (SH3) - A non-scrub Iggy that's also an early game boss!
Jude (WA4) - Shoot, boost, Car-slicer
Ryoma (FE: Fates) - Lobster Lord Raijinto Ryoma


Elliot Craig vs. Lady Harken
Elliot Craig vs. Lyon (S5)
Elliot Craig vs. Ike
Elliot Craig vs. Geno
Elliot Craig vs. Alicia
Elliot Craig vs. Fujin
Elliot Craig vs. Vayne Aurelius
Elliot Craig vs. Margulis

Gespent vs. Lady Harken
Gespent vs. Lyon (S5)
Gespent vs. Ike
Gespent vs. Geno
Gespent vs. Alicia
Gespent vs. Fujin
Gespent vs. Vayne Aurelius
Gespent vs. Margulis

Igornak vs. Lady Harken
Igornak vs. Lyon (S5)
Igornak vs. Ike
Igornak vs. Geno
Igornak vs. Alicia
Igornak vs. Fujin
Igornak vs. Vayne Aurelius
Igornak vs. Margulis

Jude vs. Lady Harken
Jude vs. Lyon (S5)
Jude vs. Ike
Jude vs. Geno
Jude vs. Alicia
Jude vs. Fujin
Jude vs. Vayne Aurelius
Jude vs. Margulis

Ryoma vs. Lady Harken
Ryoma vs. Lyon (S5)
Ryoma vs. Ike
Ryoma vs. Geno
Ryoma vs. Alicia
Ryoma vs. Fujin
Ryoma vs. Vayne Aurelius
Ryoma vs. Margulis

16

Tournaments / Proving Grounds Interm - H/G - New Blood

« on: November 21, 2016, 06:37:53 AM »

So yeah, follow up to this: http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=6847.0

Our duelers for this pool:
Alisa Reinford (CS/CS2) - Reinford scion with 2PB full restore. Has unavoidable SMT approved style bullshit damage. Oh and a cool skillset too!
Salamandra (WA3) - Imagine if Rubicante owned a pet reptile
Procyon (SH3) - 1947 can kiss his shiny metal ass
Terra (FF6) - Pyro's suggestion; how badly do recent view changes hurt her (if at all)?
KOS-MOS (XSes) - Similar to above; except with a new Dhyer stat topic. Does form choice help keep her within the border?

Alisa Reinford vs. Sephiroth
Alisa Reinford vs. Lavos
Alisa Reinford vs. Yu Narukami
Alisa Reinford vs. Xorn
Alisa Reinford vs. Chris Lightfellow
Alisa Reinford vs. Lambda Zellweger
Alisa Reinford vs. Wugui
Alisa Reinford vs. Jowy Atreides

Salamandra vs. Sephiroth
Salamandra vs. Lavos
Salamandra vs. Yu Narukami
Salamandra vs. Xorn
Salamandra vs. Chris Lightfellow
Salamandra vs. Lambda Zellweger
Salamandra vs. Wugui
Salamandra vs. Jowy Atreides

Procyon vs. Sephiroth
Procyon vs. Lavos
Procyon vs. Yu Narukami
Procyon vs. Xorn
Procyon vs. Chris Lightfellow
Procyon vs. Lambda Zellweger
Procyon vs. Wugui
Procyon vs. Jowy Atreides

Terra vs. Sephiroth
Terra vs. Lavos
Terra vs. Yu Narukami
Terra vs. Xorn
Terra vs. Chris Lightfellow
Terra vs. Lambda Zellweger
Terra vs. Wugui
Terra vs. Jowy Atreides

KOS-MOS vs. Sephiroth
KOS-MOS vs. Lavos
KOS-MOS vs. Yu Narukami
KOS-MOS vs. Xorn
KOS-MOS vs. Chris Lightfellow
KOS-MOS vs. Lambda Zellweger
KOS-MOS vs. Wugui
KOS-MOS vs. Jowy Atreides

17

RPG Stats Forum / Shadow Hearts: From the New World Boss Topic - Game of git gud

« on: November 19, 2016, 08:04:57 AM »

Tide is still insane part 3. So yeah, I've been debating on starting this up and finally decided to go for it. I'll be covering most of the bosses (although all the plot ones we have details for - I suggest you use that one for more traditional numbers) in this topic. Unlike the WA3 one, this is significantly shorter since there are only about 12 bosses in-game! Gathering the data will take a bit more time since spell power isn't listed and I have to number crunch a bit more for numbers.

Assumptions
So what should you know about this topic? Well a few things actually. First, I'm not the average FTNW player (as in, I hit blind tech rings regularly cause runs require me to), therefore, I am going to assume a few extra things in the damage numbers. Most of these are just multipliers, so you can back these out pretty easy, although I suspect I may include them in brackets or something to show what they are.

Second, I don't have the base stats gained from Shania's Fusions. I know what the gains on subsequent levels are, but not the L1 totals. As such, I have *assumed* for now that the stats are +2s across the board except for that fusion's good stat, which starts at +4. An additional note regarding Fusions is that, because Shania can swap fusion forms over the course of a fight, I will be averaging out the Fusion stat gains and assuming they are all at the same level. It's just a little easier this way, and probably gets a wider representation of what the stat average looks like (for all that, I assume this probably doesn't matter too much).

Finally, I play this game pretty much with very little encounters mixed in. I will be bumping up the levels a bit for the DL topic, but you can assume for the most part that I may be 2-3 levels below what you might expect as standard.

Damage Figures
Damages received from the boss is assumed to be based on the cast's average stat. For things like armors, this can get tricky. FTNW has accessories that boost defense, so equipping these will make boss damage look a little worse. I won't be assuming these as the norm. Likewise, there are also belts, which boost physicals, so Frank/Shania and Natan to an extent presumably should have these if you go physical. Similar to the defense boost though, I won't be assuming these as the norm as there are often better accessories to slot in. YMMV of course. FYI, the belts offer about 3/5/7 and so on more points of offense every tier, while defense boosting is similar. You can factor these into the numbers given if you think they should be part of the regular damage figures.

As noted above, I am going to assume that you can use standard rings at a very good rate, so most of the damage will have the additional 20% noted somewhere. Once tech rings are available, this jumps up to 44%. Base damage figures will be noted with [ ] for those of you that are less good. The only problem with this is that physicals are more complicated since they are comprised of several hits. In general, the additional strike bonus is spread across all the hits of the ring. This means that to get the full 20% on a standard ring with 3 hits, you have hit 3 strike zones, which is much more demanding than just hitting one. It's actually better than to hit 1 strike zone with a tech ring for the full bonus, even though you lose bonus damage on extra hits. As such, expect Frank to start using a tech ring hit at some point. Bosses generally don't like this since it makes their durability a little worse.

For the rest of the cast, they will generally be casting magic since it can hit weakness, doesn't miss and is generally better than a physical. You will likely run one physical person, but this means that as the game progresses, you can expect damage figures to be largely magical in nature sans maybe Frank and Shania. I will also largely be using L1/L2 Magics, since they typically have lower recharge penalties and the stronger tiers aren't that much more powerful anyway (tier 1s/tier 2s are sufficient to beat the entire game with).

Multipliers
The thing that makes FTNW great is the amount of damage lying around, allowing you to build a big enough numbers to even topple bosses over in one shot. I will assume certain multipliers to be available, so back these out if you aren't comfortable!

Warlock/Demon Earrings - 20% boost to the stat in question.
Entrance - This is a 125% boost to the next magic attack. On a strike, becomes 150% with standard rings or 180% with Tech rings.
Arc Rage/Arc Surge - This is a 30% boost to the stat in question. 36% with strike standards or 43% with strike tech.
Mind's Eye/Magic Mind's Eye - Doubles damage dealt of the corresponding type.

As a general rule, stacking mults is better than spreading them out. So similar to the WA3 boss topic, you can expect one or two chars to have really good damage, while the others will typically have scrub fights with Euram. I will be listing damage for the characters being used though to give a sense of how much worse they are.

Formulas
As noted in Dhyer's SH3 topic, formula for Physicals is:

(Atk-Def)*RNV*(1+(No.hits-1)/10)

Where RNV stands for  Random variable (assumed to be 1 for DL purposes). Atk and Def are the true stats used by the game to get the damage figures. To get there, make sure to multiply a character's base stat by 2, then add his or her equipment bonuses.

Magic formula is similar but varies a little:

Spell Power+ Sp-Atk - Sp.Def

Presumably, there is a random variable somewhere as well, that for DL purposes is also 1 (so who cares). The Spell Power varies per spell it appears (even for those in the same tier) so this is a bit of a work in progress to figure out what the power is for each attack.

Multipliers are applied after Defense unless otherwise noted (such as for Surge or the Earrings where they boost the stat directly).

Universal Boss Bonuses
Being a FTNW boss has some cool advantages! First, as noted in the first SH3 topic, bosses that are not fought solo or Lady have a bonus recharge factor of 1.5x after the first turn. This means that they are much faster than what their listed AGL stat may imply. In addition to this, bosses also have varying recharge rates, with certain moves such as status or buffs stacking on top of this recharge bonus. This makes them capable of recovering within say 1/3 of the time as normal and triple turn average.

This really starts to matter because bosses also have another passive bonus, where they will gain about 30% of their stock gauge at the start of every turn they get. Thus, it is completely possible for say Gilbert to spam Panic repeatedly and build stock while recovering at nearly triple the rate as normal. As you will quickly see, FTNW bosses have massive damage output, so this is actually a legit strat they can take if they want to burst out overkill damage. Of course, recharge penalties apply to them as well, but their passive recharge bonus tends to help mitigate this somewhat.

All bosses also have an affinity (sans Lady) which gives them a resistance to the corresponding element and a weakness to the opposing one. This affinity bonus is +/-25%. That's about it for universal bonuses.

Status Susceptibilities
Bosses either have immunity or are susceptible to the status in question, with no resistance in between. The odds with which they can be hit are solely based on the attacker's chances. So something like say Pokemon's Psychic with its 10% chance to lower Special Defense will have the exact same chances of inflicting the stat down on any boss that is vulnerable to it. On the other hand, something like say Wakka's Silence Buster hitting something with no Seal susceptibility will fail everytime.

18

Tournaments / Obscura Proving Ground Ideas

« on: November 18, 2016, 02:15:07 PM »

With the Cold Steel 2 topic and the Wild ARMS 3 boss rando topic done, this seems like a good time for an Obscura/lesser known duelers PG. Especially since CKDL has recently concluded. Since Pyro and myself kind of want to see how some of the CS2 characters are in practice (with CK to soon joining the group to have completed the game), and Snowfire has asked me if I had interest to set one up (which I do), ideas for who else should go in?

Chances are, probably run pools with one CS2 character, one Wild ARMS 3 rando boss, but then past that, I dunno. If I get around to drafting a SH3 rando boss topic, I'll throw one of those in for good measure. Otherwise, I'm open to ideas.

19

RPG Stats Forum / Wild ARMS 3 Random Boss topic - PLAN YOUR BACKSTABS CAREFULLY RICHARD - DONE

« on: November 02, 2016, 06:26:49 AM »

So it occurred to me that we do not have a Wild ARMS 3 random boss topic. The other stat topic is pretty cluttered with information all over the place, so I thought I would create a new one for the various random boss encounters you come across in this game! Trust me, it will be pretty loaded by the time we're done, so making a new topic should make things easier to follow.

There's some good news and some bad news for Wild ARMS 3 bosses. The bad news is that scaling them can be quite difficult. Not so much for Chapter 1 and early Chapter 2, but for late Chapter 2 all the way until the end of the game. The main reason for this is because in Chapter 3, the game becomes open ended at one point and lets you tackle objectives in a variety of different ways. This means that what you have on one playthrough maybe different than what another person has. Later on it gets compounded by the elephant in room, Finest Arts. In late Chapter 2, you also need to consider how to take Valiant into consideration. Then of course, there's the always present Lucky Cards in Wild ARMS games. It's much more of an issue here due to the variety of different things you could do and that FP values are super important for determining damage taken/dealt. Since starting FP is based on levels, well, the bosses don't like it if you end up like in the original topic at level 61! As if that wasn't enough, since FP builds up as battle progresses, bosses tend to do less and less damage as they go on so finding out how much they do on average is tough as well. If you're expending more FP, they will deal more. If you're expending less FP, they will deal less. 

So what's the good news? Well, most Wild ARMS 3 random bosses (and even some plot ones) are largely based on their gimmicks. Some of these gimmicks are very good (Angolmois)! Some of these are awful (Monoeye Titan). However, due to the fact that they are largely gimmick based, the stats/damage that they have matter a bit less since most of how they work in the DL is going to be largely from their gimmick anyway. Second, lucky for them, this topic is being drafted by yours truly. As a reminder, I do know the speedrun route of this game, so I am familiar with a few things that could otherwise hurt them. This includes (but is not limited to):

1) Excessive Lucky Card use. End Levels by Nightmare Castle will be 50.
2) Negates possibility of being over leveled from getting lost/excessive grinding/etc
3) Capable of ending battles quickly, which means less likelihood of ballooning your FP pool and reducing their damage notably. Since the speedrun kills most bosses within 4 rounds, I know approximately what the damage should look like (and can note the cheese strat, which at least notes where possible overscaling could occur).

The one downside is that because I am so familiar with the game, their durability is possibly going to look a little worse for the wear. However, this isn't exactly too much of a concern because some of these durability issues will exist regardless of who does the topic (Valiant/Gold Mediums/Finest Arts).

Medium Boosts
Mediums provide stat boosts when set. However, the boosts provided are relative to how good the PC are at those stats on base. Setting Gale Claw on Clive versus putting it on Ginny produces a big change in the raw actual number of the RFX set since Clive's base is so low. So where do the mediums go to determine where the average is? I've conversed with Tal briefly about this but we both agreed that Medium Boosts should be taken at a point that is generally going to be a little harsher on the bosses (so no putting your Aqua Wisp on Jet and taking damage from spells there). I also subscribe to what I call the "set theory", which means that Mediums are grouped together by function and not just going to which character is good at the stat. So for example, since Fiery Rage and Brave Seal both boost attack, they should stick together. This results in a medium distribution that looks somewhat like this:

Physical - Fiery Rage/Brave Seal/Lucky Hand
Magical - Aqua Wisp/Lust Jaw/Love Charm
Defensive - Terra Roar/Hope Shard/Flash Hit
Miscellaneous - Cosmic Cog/Moon Spark/Gale Claw

The 4 mediums at the tail end of each set are the least important and will typically move around. However, as is usual  for me, I'll note down the mediums used so people can reverse engineer stuff it they want to. These sets I find are usually true for how you want to play the game more efficiently because it stacks boosts of the same stat and purpose together, which maximizes offensive and defensive capabilities. As to who gets what set, well, Clive/Gallows are typically better at bosses while Jet and Virginia are better on randoms. So the Physical/Magical sets are typically given to Clive/Gallows and Virginia usually takes the defensive set, while Jet takes the Miscellaneous one for utility. But again as noted before, this may not always be the case. As a general rule, stacking is a very effective way of playing, especially early, because the game doesn't expect you to load someone down with all your mediums. Note that since PC damage tends to improve as the fight goes on, I might end up doing a three turn average for what the approximate damage you can do looks like. We'll see.

Finest Arts
The elephant in the room. Dealing with this sucker is an issue in and of itself since it is so centralizing in late game strategies. Should you factor it in? I'm of the opinion that yes, you should. It's right there in the game and the main issue that comes up is that using it might be a little confusing. However, the DL typically assumes that bosses are fought against somewhat who knows what they are doing in general so the instructions of using Finest Arts shouldn't cause you to ban it. But if that's the case, how exactly should you take it? Well, remember how I mentioned that one of the advantage of this topic being drafted by me is that I am quite familiar with the game? Here's where this issue has a simple solution as well.

The actual problem here comes from Gardening. The Secret Garden is a subquest that can be taken and lets you generate healing/restorative items. Typically, people will do this quest, which is fine. However, the degree of the amount of farming done afterwards for crops varies from player to player. If you farm a lot of Full Carrots, then all bosses starting about Mid Chapter 2 start sucking hardcore as a Mystic Full Carrot pretty much doubles offensive/defensive power. Most importantly, these carrots provide 100 FP, which is the cost needed for this ability. Without it, it's actually not too terrible for bosses because it takes a while to reach 100 FP. Since I am a speedrunner and mock having to grind for crops (as its not even efficient - the route doesn't do it and is a waste of time), this topic assumes that there is no garden use. Unfortunately for bosses though, there are other set ups that let you utilize Finest Arts - most notable amongst them late is Force Charge, which generates 25 FP when you guard. You also have Mini Carrots, which the game gives you a fair handful of and a few Full Carrots, so using it within a short period of time is certainly not out of the question.

So then, how does one factor Finest Arts then? The most logical method to me is to take it as the damage dealt by Finest Arts divided by the number of character actions needed to set it up. So with Carrots, this number will typically be 3-5 (2-4 for Clive to unload his ARM, 1 person to throw a Carrot on Clive before Finest Arts). This number should not exceed 5 as 5 character actions are all you need to set up Finest Arts (Clive Guards twice with Force Charge, then unloads two shots) even without carrots. It's not the most elegant of solutions, but it does allow you to see the damage being dealt per effective action that sets up the kill. Another is to divide it by the total number of character actions. I'm not 100% onboard with this idea because due to the stacking, its typically more effective to have the two characters loaded with your offensive mediums to be the damage dealers. All it really does is inflate boss durability. I don't think most people have Virginia poke bosses to death for 50 damage a round or whatever. You're going to do some set up and then blast it with a Summon/Gatling. Which speaking of, I believe Clive/Gallows' damage should really represent the damage average, similar to how Raquel represents the average in Wild ARMS 4. You're just much more likely to have the two of them do most of the offensive pot shots when not setting up for a Gatling/Summon kill.

Formulas
As a reminder, damage formula for the game is  (((Mult * ATT - DEF) * RNV) * (1+FP/100+Q))*K).

When using magic, replace ATT and DEF with MAG and MGR. RNV stands for Random Number Variable which for these purposes is always 1. Q stands for additive multipliers after defense (mainly Hyper). K stands for Elemental modifier, which is either 1/3, 0, 1 or 3 (depending on Resist, Null, Neutral or Weakness).

Formula for damage taken is calculated as ((Mult * Attacking Stat - Defensive stat) * RNV) * (100/(100+FP)). Basically the same thing as above, only you swap the FP multiplier from the numerator to the denominator. And yes, for those of you that are good at math, this is why Wild ARMS 3 defense is largely garbo. Due note that most attack multipliers are 2, so it *is* of some use against basic physicals. It just sucks against anything really dangerous (Rising Nova/Calamity Jane/etc.)

Accuracy is kind of nebulous and I'm not 100% certain, but I wager that it is determined exactly as Attacker's HIT/ Target EVA. I know that PC accuracy is determined in this fashion (which is why Hit > Eva means everything hits), so logically, enemy accuracy should be the same. My calculations kind of confirm my suspicions, so I'm sticking to this hypothesis for now.

Anyway, that's about it for the framework. I'll post more once I have more stuff laid out. For now though, enjoy the horrors to come . And yes, I promise, there is a reason the title in the thread is what it is.

20

Unranked Games / Trails of Cold Steel 2 Stat Topic - 100% Rean x Towa OTP Shipping Inside - DONE!

« on: October 19, 2016, 03:54:17 PM »

Welcome to the actual stat topic of this game! I'm in the process of getting some numbers (namely multipliers on crafts) and will hopefully have a completed spreadsheet at some point that will become available so people can play around with the numbers as they see fit.

These are the base assumptions and interps that I will be taking into this topic. If you need a frame of reference for some of the stuff in this topic, go here: http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=6832.0

1) PC Levels are taken at the Epilogue dungeon and are between 140-142, with Rean being about Level 144. Each level is worth about 100-150 HP, 6-7 Strength, 2-4 Defense, 11-13 ATS and 11-13 ATD. Speed goes up irregularly, but about once every 3 levels.
2) Starting CP is assumed to be 100
3) Chrono Burst is allowed after some discussion with Pyro. It doesn't have a huge effect as originally anticipated due to the large EP cost, so there doesn't seem to be further reason to restrict it.
4) Physicals/Crafts that can stagger are assumed to be going up against an enemy with average vulnerabilities in the final dungeon. A phantom copy of the PC is assumed to be involved for link attacks. No other link functions are assumed otherwise.
5) Standard Delay Value for now is assumed to be 2500. This is the approximate average delay of all available commands in-game (2598). It also reflects more closely to an in-game "turn" which is usually used with crafts or spells that have a greater delay value than 2000.
6) Master Quartz (MQ) levels are assumed to be all Mastered and each PC is equipped with his/her starting MQ.
7) Secret characters are not assumed into the averages for now due to the cost prohibition and additional interp issues.
8) Other than Toval and Angelica, all other PCs are assumed not to have any accessories. This gives them 2 free slots for status blocking.

As a reminder, here's some of the stuff that I'm porting over so you don't have to swap back and forth between topics:

Gameplay Overview
Game is essentially divided into separate Chapters and in each chapter, there's also a few different phases. There's the introductory phase, which often deals with getting to the location or reaching the first objective at the start of the chapter. Following that is a free phase, where you're allowed to explore the map/area you're allowed to go. This is the period where you usually have side quests, which can involve solving riddles to beating up bonus monsters. Once you manually decided that the Free Phase is done, you go into the Operation phase, or the main goal/objective of the Chapter. There is usually a boss at the end of each Operation and once that plays out, you go to the last phase, which is the Bonding Phase. There's no combat here; just talking to NPCs/your party members to get more character development. When you manually declare this to be done as well, then the game moves onward to the next Chapter. In total, there are about 10 Chapters, with 2 Gaiden Chapters. Other than the guest PCs in one of the Gaiden Chapters, I believe its best to take the PCs in the Last Chapter where everyone is available. This avoids issues such as scaling temp PCs since at this point they all become playable. Thanks to Trails' EXP scaling, it's not too difficult to keep everyone within the same ball park either, so should make gathering data easier too.

When you're in a map area, random enemies will be walking around the field. Making contact with one initiates a fight, where PCs are positioned on a field shaped like a circle. While positioning is important as attacks have different area of effects, there are no terrain penalties or bonuses. There is however, an event wheel that can offer different bonus/penalties on specific turns. Battles works on a CTB system, so players can smartly place their characters along the turn order to gain the best advantage. The event wheel by and large benefits the players(and therefore the PCs) over the enemies since the enemies won't actively try to line up their turns properly. Since it's a Trails game, it has 3 bars for each character: HP, MP (called EP) and CP. CP stands for Craft points but are basically the currency you use for using special techniques or abilities. It works the exact same way as in previous Trails games (so it increases when you attack/take a hit and goes down when consumed), so do check out Pyro/Snowfire's Skies topics. I'll be going some specifics afterwards, but again, by and large, its the same thing. Once combat is initiated, characters take turn according to the turn order and the fight goes on until one side is completely incapacitated.

CP Gain
For the most part, this is the same as in FC/SC. Note that for a PC to gain CP, they must actually hit their target. These gain rates are on a 'per hit' basis. So someone like Sharon who has multi-hitting crafts will actually generate a little more CP from it than the others. CP doesn't tend to generate super quickly without the use of items/accessories and the Impassion spell, but one can certainly do stall type tactics and build it as enemies hit them. One way not noted below for PCs to generate CP in-game is with Linked Attacks. These count as a base physical, and the advanced commands will get other characters to join in. If you do this against a group, then you can hyper generate CP since hitting a group of 6-7 enemies means it multiplies the rate 6-7 times and is actually the fastest way to gain CP. The CP gain rate seems to also be multiplied by a bonus/penalty based on the enemy level difference compared to the attacker. So go hype them against Ness?
- Base physical attacks - 10 CP
- Casting offensive magic - 10 CP
- Crafts - 5 CP
- Taking damage - 10 CP
- Taking lots of damage - 50 CP (Unsure. This feels similar to Wild ARMS FP in that the amount gained is prorated against a maximum allowable which is probably 50. Taking a particularly strong hit increases CP by a notable chunk).
- Killing an enemy - 5 CP
- Using buffs/defensive magic/items - 0 CP
- Event Wheel Bonus - 10/50/100 CP or CP-0, based on the draw.

Linked Attacks/Bonuses
Characters in battle can be linked together. Physical attacks in this game have the effect of staggering enemies based on how vulnerable they are and the character's proficiency at that physical type. If an enemy is staggered, then the linked character can join in and add a base physical hit as well. There are advanced versions of these linked attacks where you can get 2 PCs attacking a small group or the entire party to attack all enemies at once. You can swap links between characters freely with no penalty, so it is possible in-game to be always linked to the strongest physical PC if you so wish.

S-Breaks
Like in previous Trails games, when a player character has 100 CP stocked, he/she can utilize their S-craft, which is basically a technique that hits much harder, often with a big multiplier and has a greatly increased rate at inflicting status. Some S-crafts do not deal damage. However, all S-crafts share the ability to cut into the turn order immediately at any point, which is called an S-break. You can use S-Breaks to snipe useful event wheel icons such as the Guaranteed Critical or +50 CP. Note that using a S-break doesn't increase the recharge normally associated with S-crafts, however, you are *locked* into using the S-craft. So even if it means you can  instant turn, it doesn't mean you can instant turn and do something freely. If a PC manages to get to 200 CP, the S-craft receives a 1.5x damage bonus.

Quartz
Each PC in CS2 has an ARCUS system which has 9 nodes in total. These nodes are used to slot in quartz, which are equippable items that can provide stat boosts, spells and other effects. 1 Node is meant for the MQ, so there are 8 nodes available. Of these 8 nodes, every character has 3 nodes that are elementalized, meaning that they can only be equipped with quartz of the corresponding element. These are different for every PC, so of course we should use them for PC differentiation!

There are several ways you can take quartz as noted in the other discussion topic. You can choose to ban all quartz period (the purist view), or you can try to do what Pyro/Snowfire have done and allow PCs access to spells in the schools that have access to. You can also assume PCs have the starting quartz they are equipped with. For this topic though, the stance that I'm basically taking on this is to allow only the elementalized nodes as customizable. Every other slot is upgraded, but assumed to be locked or affixed with something that is also equipped by every member of the cast (thereby creating no change in the average). This differentiates the PCs and provides as much of a in-game feel as possible. PCs with nodes of a certain element can often gain a specialty to that element because they won't be bogged down with irrelevant nodes compared to other cast members.

It is assumed that all purchasable quartz that do not require U-materials are available to the cast (since U-materials are rarer and are used for many other things). This provides them with the choice of stat bonuses or spells and creates some interesting trade offs. Certainly, the best "build" may be in question, but I like this idea because it means PCs have to give up certain things to access certain other choices that they may want. In many ways, it feels akin to say Pokemon move sets (where they have to choose 4 moves) or equipment (where equipping say the Judo Outfit versus the Black Costume is a trade in Str/Death Immunity for more HP/Stop Immunity).  YMMV of course, so I will list the stats/quartz I'm using. Once the Excel is uploaded, you can play around with the pieces for the modified numbers as you like and recalculate the average to your liking.
 
Note that quartz of the same effect can stack together. So Defense 2 and Defense 3 being equipped means your Defense increases by 130. Cast 1 and Cast 2 equipped means that casting time is reduced to 3/4*4/5 or 60%. However, the same quartz cannot be equipped more than once. Status infliction quartz and stat down quartz can only be equipped once per line. For the most part, this is largely irrelevant because the elemental nodes are often spread across a PC's ARCUS. However a couple of characters only have 1 line (Emma comes to mind), I will note this for the character as it comes up. Buffs/Debuffs also kick in only at the beginning of the next turn. For the most part, this isn't significant except in the case of Speed, since it means the slow effect isn't applied until after the target takes his next turn. Finally, some spells have fixed targeting (meaning it must be cast cast on a target), while others have free targeting (meaning you can cast it in empty positions). This may matter for things like FE counters since many spells are often GT, but I would certainly see free targeting ones as bypassing them (since enemies can in theory, walk out of the targeting zone).

For magic tiers, as a general rule of thumb, the higher the tier of magic, the more effective that magic is at inflicting damage per clocktick. This means that even though they take longer to charge, they are more damaging for Damage per turn. What they lose out on though is EP efficiency. In this case, PCs want to cast the lowest tiers of magic as they are more effective at doing damage per point of EP. If a PC doesn't want to burst out his/her damage, they will actually want to use lower tier magic although the nature of the battle may mean they don't have the time for it. Some PCs really can't afford the tier 5s in magic because of their low EP pool and how prohibitively high the cost becomes (it effectively shuts down their other spell casting).

The list of available quartz is as follows:

Earth
- Defense 1/2/3, which raise Defense by 20/50/80 points respectively
- Needle Shot: Tier 1 Earth Magic. Single target. 20% chance to Petrify.
- Earth Lance: Tier 2 Earth magic. Free target. 20% chance to Petrify.
- Grand Press: Tier 3 Earth Magic. Free target. 100% Chance to inflict Move-50%
- Yggdrasil: Tier 4 Earth Magic. Free target. 30% chance to Petrify.
- Ancient Glyph: Tier 5 Earth Magic. Free target. 20% chance to Petrify.
- Adamantine Shield: Nullifies one physical attack (includes Multi-hitting)
- Crest: Adds Defense+25% for 5 turns. If cast a second time, becomes Defense+50% and refreshes duration.
- La Crest: Same as above, but GT.
- Earth Pulse: 20% Regen for 5 turns
- Poison: 10% Chance to inflict Poison with physicals/crafts
- Petrify: 10% Chance to inflict Petrify with physicals/crafts
- Shield Breaker: 10% chance to inflict Defense-25% with physicals/crafts

Fire
- Attack 1/2/3, which raise Attack by 15/30/50 points respectively
- Fire Bolt: Tier 1 Fire Magic. Single target. 20% chance to inflict Burn.
- Heatwave: Tier 2 Fire Magic. Fixed target. 30% chance to inflict Burn.
- Flame Tongue: Tier 3 Fire Magic. Fixed target. 20% chance to inflict Burn.
- Volcanic Rain: Tier 4 Fire Magic. Fixed target. 30% chance to inflict Burn.
- Flare Bomb: Tier 5 Fire Magic. Fixed target. 20% chance to inflict Burn.
- Purgatorial Flame: Tier 6 Fire Magic. Fixed target. 50% chance to inflict Burn.
- Forte: Adds Attack+25% for 5 turns. If cast a second time, becomes Attack+50% and refreshes duration.
- La Forte: Same as above, but GT.
- Impassion: Restores 20 CP at the end of each turn for 5 turns
- Heat Up: Recovers from Stat-Downs and restores 10 CP
- Burn: 10% chance to inflict Burn with physicals/crafts
- Seal: 10% chance to inflict Seal with physicals/crafts
- Sword Breaker: 10% chance to inflict Attack-25% with physicals/crafts

Water
- HP 1/2, which increase max HP by 1000/2000 points respectively.
- Shield 1/2/3, which raise ATD by 20/50/80 points respectively. More importantly, adds Magic evasion at 10%/15%/25% respectively
- Aqua Bleed: Tier 1 Water Magic. Single target.
- Frost Edge: Tier 2 Water Magic. Fixed target. 20% chance to inflict Freeze.
- Hydro Cannon: Tier 3 Water Magic. Line Fire. Free target.
- Crystal Flood: Tier 4 Water Magic. Line fire. Free target. 20% chance to inflict Freeze.
- Maelstrom: Tier 5 Water Magic. Multi-target.
- Tear: Restores a low amount of HP, exact formula unknown. Influenced by ATS.
- Teara: Restores a medium amount of HP, exact formula unknown. Influenced by ATS.
- Tearal: Restores a large amount of HP, exact formula unknown. Influenced by ATS.
- Thelas: Small HP Revival, exact formula unknown. Influenced by ATS. Can be used to heal HP regularly too.
- Athelas: Large HP Revival, exact formula unknown. Influenced by ATS. Can be used to heal HP regularly too.
- Curia: Restores status condition to Normal (single target).
- Mute: 10% chance to inflict Mute with physicals/crafts
- Freeze: 10% chance to inflict Freeze with physicals/crafts
- Spirit Breaker: 10% chance to inflict ADF-25% with physicals/crafts

Wind
- Evade 1/2, which increase Evade rate by 5%/10% respectively.
- Move 1/2/3, which improves movement range. Numerically, it goes 5, 10, 15.
- Air Strike: Tier 1 Wind Magic. Single target.
- Spark Arrow: Tier 2 Wind Magic. Line fire, free target. 20% chance to inflict Seal.
- Aerial: Tier 3 Wind Magic. Free target.
- Judgment Bolt: Tier 4 Wind Magic. Line fire, free target. 50% chance to inflict Seal.
- Ragna Vortex: Tier 5 Wind Magic. Multi-target.
- Breath: Restores a low amount of HP to a group, exact formula unknown. Influenced by ATS.
- Holy Breath: Restores a medium amount of HP to a group, exact formula unknown. Influenced by ATS.
- Recuria: Restores status condition to Normal (large group target).
- Blind: 10% chance to inflict Blind with physicals/crafts
- Sleep: 10% chance to inflict Sleep with physicals/crafts
- Leg Breaker: 10% chance to inflict Move-25% with physicals/crafts

Time
- Impede 1/2, which adds AT Delay to physicals by 2/4 Delay respectively. Also provides a 30%/60% chance to cancel spell charging with physicals/crafts.
- Cast 1/2, which improves casting speed by 20%/25% respectively. Can be stacked together.
- Action 1/2/3, which raise Speed by 4/8/12 points respectively.
- Soul Blur: Tier 2 Time Magic. Single target. 30% chance to inflict Faint
- Demonic Scythe: Tier 3 Time Magic. Fixed target. 30% chance to inflict ID
- Grim Butterfly: Tier 4 Time Magic. Fixed target. 50% chance to inflict Nightmare
- Shadow Blade: Tier 5 Time Magic. Fixed target. Drains 5% of damage as HP.
- Chrono Drive: Adds Speed+25% for 5 turns. If cast a second time, becomes Speed+50% and refreshes duration.
- Chrono Break: Hits the target with Speed-25% for 5 turns (if not a boss) and adds 15 Delay. If cast a second time, becomes Speed-50% and refreshes duration.
- Chrono Burst: Allows user to take an extra action. Stackable.
- Nightmare: 10% chance to inflict Nightmare with physicals/crafts
- Speed Breaker: 10% chance to inflict Speed-25% with physicals/crafts

Space
- EP Cut 1/2, which reduces spell cost by 20%/25% respectively.
- Hit 1/2, which improves DEX by 50%/100% respectively.
- Golden Sphere: Tier 2 Space Magic. Free target. 30% chance to inflict Blind
- Dark Matter: Tier 3 Space Magic. Free target. 100% chance to inflict Mov-50%
- Cross Crusade: Tier 4 Space Magic. Multi-target.
- Altair Cannon: Tier 5 Space Magic. Multi-target. 100% chance to inflict ATS-25% and ADF-25%
- Seraphic Ring: Full healing + 3 turns of 20% Regen
- Fortuna: Adds ATS/ADF+25% for 5 turns. If cast a second time, becomes ATS/ADF+50% and refreshes duration.
- Shining: Adds Insight status to the target, boosting Hit and Evade by 50%. If cast a second time, refreshes duration.
- Vanish: 10% chance to inflict Vanish with physicals/crafts
- Voice Breaker: 10% chance to inflict ATS-25% with physicals/crafts

Mirage
- EP 1/2, which increases Max EP by 100/200 respectively.
- Mind 1/2/3, which raise ATS by 15/30/50 points respectively.
- Luminous Ray: Tier 2 Mirage Magic. Line fire, free target.
- Silver Thorn: Tier 3 Mirage Magic. Fixed target. 40% chance to inflict Confuse
- Phantom Phobia: Tier 4 Mirage Magic. Fixed target. 100% chance to inflict a random stat down.
- Claimoh Solaris: Tier 5 Mirage Magic. Multi-target.
- Analyze: Scans enemies. Gdlk.
- Saintly Force: Adds Attack/Defense/Speed+25% for 5 turns. If cast a second time, becomes Attack/Defense/Speed+50% and refreshes duration.
- Crescent Mirror: Adds ATS/ADF+25% and will reflect one Magic based attack back to the attacker (even Magic based physicals!). Casting it a second time strengthens the buff but does not add anything to the reflect portion of the spell.
- Confuse: 10% chance to inflict Confuse with physicals/crafts


Weapons / Armor
As is the case for Trails games, weapons is easy. Just take the penultimate for every character. The best weapon is limited to 4 the first game, but the last one you don't even get before the final boss, so in practice, its 3 at most. As a result, the most fair way is to just take the 2nd best one, which is available at the last shop in the last dungeon. These can be bought for money and are relatively affordable.

Armor is trickier. Like in the case of SC, DEF/ADF are not terribly great stats from experience. In general, these are the equipment available that characters would be interested in (and are universal):

Genderless
Armor
Red Jumper - +25 Str, +800 Def, +540 ADF, 10% EVA
Patterned Shirt - +350 Def, +150 ADF, 20% EVA
Gorgeous Gown - +30 ATS, +500 Def, +800 ADF

Footwear
Red Boots - +400 Def, +7 Speed, +3 Move
Jeweled Boots - +250 Def, + 15 ATS, +3 Move

Males Only
Armor
Platinum Jacket - +45 Str, +880 Def, +590 ADF

Females Only
Body
Crystal Dress - +30 Str, +30 ATS, +870 Def, +600 ADF

Footwear
Crystal Heels - +15 Str, +15 ATS, +435 Def, +4 Move

tl;dr version: By default, pretty much all fighters want the Red Jumper. It provides strength and gives them a little bit of evade. For Fie and Sharon, their default is likely the Patterned Shirt, since they have great base evade and the extra 10% Evade is likely more meaningful to them than increases to Strength/Defense. Gaius and Toval may opt to use the Patterned Shirt depending on the situation. Mages are similar. By default, they probably want the Crystal Dress (if female) or the Gorgeous Robe (if male). Footwear though is easy and assumes everyone is equipped with the Red Boots. +7 Speed is no joke when Speed is like the DL god stat.

Status Blocking
There is a nice plethora of status blocking equipment that is available. I know recent DL trend has been to make the characters give up other default accessories for the blockers as a trade off. Cold Steel 2 is a little messy in this regard because most of the status blockers have an upgraded version that provides stat boosts! So, is there really a trade off then if you can equip the blocker that boosts the stats anyway? Well, in fact, yes. While these stat boost blockers are available, in my experience from playing the game, they aren't a high priority buy or exchange item because there are better things you can get. What's the more realistic in-game picture?

Typically, you can get one of the colored pendulums which will block a group of status effects. This is what you typically use in-game for  status blocking. There are upgraded versions of these of course, but the line is easier to draw because the upgraded versions are much rarer and take more materials than the standard blockers to improve. Obviously, the upgraded versions in this case are illegal. As for what you give up to equip a pendulum? The in-game cost is about 5000 Mira, which is an improved basic blocker. So the stat cost is easy - just use the stats on the improved basic blocker. A second alternative is to default to the Warrior Badge. This costs 150 Fishing Points in-game, but is reasonably quick. It provides 1000 HP/15 STR/15 ATS, which is actually surprisingly close to the first level improvements on basic blockers.

For reference, here's a list of status that can occur in-game:

Poison - Lose ~10% MHP every round
Blind - ACC and EVA - 50%
Seal - Cannot use physical abilities (Attack or Crafts)
Mute - Cannot use magical abilities (Arts)
Sleep - Target cannot act until damaged or duration is over. All hits on the target (phys/mag) are guaranteed crit (crits are 50% more damage and guaranteed stagger) until target wakes up.
Burn - Lose ~20% MHP every round
Freeze - Lose ~15% MHP every round. Target cannot act until the duration is over.
Petrify - Target cannot act. If attacked, 30% chance for the target to be instantly incapacitated.
Faint - Target cannot act until duration is over. All attacks on this target are guaranteed critical hits.
Confuse - Target will attack any allies in range. If no allies in range, than move about randomly
Nightmare - Target cannot act until damaged or duration is over. All hits on the target are guaranteed crits. Adds a random status effect that is not ID, Vanish or Delay when target wakes up.
Instant Death - What it says on the tin. Target is incapacitated
Vanish - Target is ejected.  Can return after a period of time with 0 EP, but is functionally dead until return
Delay - Target takes additional clockticks for his next turn, where the number of clockticks is equal to the Delay value. If a PC can receive a turn faster than the Delay inflicted, they will be able to act again. Most notably, the Delay inflicted is cumulative, meaning net gains in Delay stack and can allow a PC to perform other actions safely before the target recovers. Success rate can be increased with more Speed.
Stat Down - Target is debuffed in the corresponding stat.

Here's the list of Pendulums and what they block:

Red Pendulum - Petrify, Stat Downs, Freeze
Yellow Pendulum - Seal, Mute
Blue Pendulum - Blind, Poison, Burn
Green Pendulum - Sleep, Nightmare, Confusion
Black Pendulum - AT Delay, Instant Death, Vanish

I need to check the amount of HP lost from the various poison type status, but the rest should be accurate. Also take note of the following. While PC status blocking is 100% immunity, boss status resistance is divisive/multiplicative. Meaning that if an attack has a 70% chance at inflicting something but the boss is susceptible to it only 20% of the time, it means that in practice, there is a 14% chance for the status to land (70% * 20%) instead of 0 (70% - (100%-20%)). I don't know if we'll ever get around to getting boss stats due to the complications noted above, but its worth mentioning. This is why there are attacks in game that have say 300% chance at something. Typically this means it awards high status resistance and penalizes lower status resistance. How you want to take this against PCs with status attacks is up to you. Personally, I would just take it as addition/subtraction for the sake of ease. But maybe someone else has a better idea of how to get the better representation.

Most status effects are rarely blocked against weaker monsters. Stronger monsters usually have some resistance (~50%) to certain lethal statii (like Petrify) while bosses tend to have heavy resistances across the board. The only thing that bosses tend to be unanimously vulnerable to are AT Delay and Stat Downs. Remember that status resistance in this game works on a multiplicative basis, so it tends to work better against randoms (who even if they have resistance, tends to be lower) than on bosses (although bosses may still be effected). Enemy damage tends to be quite high across the board, so even weenies can still do quite a bit if you leave them unchecked. Status effects are typically about 3-5 turns, but large monsters/bosses will tend to recover in 1.

Stats
HP - Lose these and get rekt
EP - Used for casting Arts/Magic. Stands for Energy Points
CP - Used for utilizing crafts/S-crafts. Stands for Craft Points. Max for every PC is 200. Assumed to be at 100 for this topic.
Atk - Increases the amount of damage dealt by physicals
Def - Reduces the damage taken from physicals. Each point of defense reduces 1.25 points of damage
ATS - Increases the amount of damage dealt by magic/arts
ADF - Reduces the damage taken from magic. Each point of ADF reduces 1.25 points of damage.
DEX - Influences Hit. Presumably, used to determine base Accuracy
Hit - The bonus modifier to DEX presumably. So 100% Hit = double the DEX score. A high score here means you are more accurate.
AGI - Influences evade. Presumary, used to determine enemy's base Accuracy
Eva - Effective Physical Evade. From experience, likely subtracted directly from accuracy and can be taken as a literal evade percentage.
Move - The amount of ground that a PC can cover. You need about 16 move to move from one end of the field to another. Most PCs have 9 move.
Range - The attack range on basic physicals. Note that magic has infinite range and some crafts effectively have infinite range (the PC doesn't have to move). Other crafts have their own range / area of coverage and may require a PC to move first before executing.
Threat - The numerical value of how much effective ground a PC can reach across the field with basic physicals. So the higher this is, the more distance they can be away from the opponent (lets them kite more effectively if you're into that).
Speed - Determines how fast a PC gets a turn and how fast PCs recover from every action. Used also for spell casting. Linear if all PCs are using the same move.

In case it wasn't obvious, defense and magic defense stats are not very good. You need to increase them in large chunks for them to make any real difference. A +50% defense boost only raises effective P.dur by about 30%. So PCs will rarely if ever want to trade in other stats just for defense values. In terms of range, the game is pretty clear cut on this thanks to the weaponry used by the PCs. You can effectively summarize this into 3 areas, which can then be translated to other games:

Short - Swords/Knives/Rods/Fists (1-2)
Middle - Spears/Staves (3-4)
Long - Guns/Bows (5-6)


Formulas
Special thanks to Random for pulling / deciphering some of these for me. We have both the base damage formula as well as the speed formula, so its a good start to figuring out damage values without needing to completely test everything (hopefully).

For the most part, CS2 uses the same formula as CS1 and from the sounds  of it, Azure and Zero (the Crossbell arc games). Only difference is, the multiplier stacking can get really silly, which also explains why the damage numbers are larger. Oh, and speaking of stacking, you can stack stuff that normally isn't stackable in the older games. That also probably explains why the later entries are a little easier (more broken being handed out? Hell yes).

Base damage formula:
<+RandomKesaranPasaran> ((Atk * 5 * mult) - (Def * 2.5)) / 2

Note that Towa, Alfin, Elliot and Emma have base physicals that use Magic and hit M.Def instead of Def. The formula above is the exact same for magic, except swap out Atk for ATS and Def for ADF.


Base speed formula:
Delay value / Speed = CT until next turn.

A note regarding this. Since every action in this game has a delay value, I'll be directly translating this into the Delay (CTs) needed for the PC to take their next turn after that action. The game doesn't note how much delay a "normal turn" is, so if you change what you consider to be the standard, it will universally effect all the PCs. For the purposes of this topic, as noted above, a standard turn is considered to take 2500 Delay. The PC speed average (after quartz) ends up at 97.44. Taking this into the formula means a normal turn is 25.6 CT. Delay values are truncated (since you can't have half a clocktick) in-game, so for the purposes of a 3 turn average, I have assumed the same thing. Keep this in mind as you are reading about CTs. If you want to know how fast/slow something is relative to normal, just divide the CT of the move by 25.


Evade and Accuracy
No notes on these other than personal experience unfortunately. From many other players and in-game performance though, Evade is very much what the stated number translates to. My current assumption is that DEX and AGI values are used to determine the base accuracy of the character, and then evade is subtracted directly afterwards. This means that evade is very potent at dodging Evadeable attacks, which is certainly the feel in-game. This is likely the same street for enemies, so enemies that do have evade are likely to feel much more evasive. Unfortunately, there are are no enemy Dex/Agi stats that I can test against, but suffice to say, in order to hit reliably with physicals, PCs will want to boost Hit. With even a single Hit Boost of 100%, enemy dodging is greatly reduced.

Magic evasion works the same way and is additive. By default, Toval and Emma are the only two characters who have Magic Evasion (50%/75% respectively). The Shield series (a regular Water Quartz) also provides some minor Magic evasion as well as M.Def if you allow those for the PCs with Water nodes. Generally though, they will probably want HP over it unless they can stack the Magic Evade. Unlike physicals, Magic is always 100% accurate barring forms of evade on a PC. Note that CS2 doesn't have any elemental resistances on the PC end, so Magic Evasion is the best that they get. 

The Insight status adds +50% Hit, +50 Evade and +10% Unbalance chance. This is added to the raw score by the way, so a PC with Insight gets to take their base evasion and add it to the boost provided. Alisa/Angelica/Gaius can all cast Insight due to their MQs, and in Gaius' case, he starts with Insight beginning every battle.

Evade is still active while PCs are charging spells. The main disadvantage from that though is that they will not counter attack as long as they are charging. Note that Counterattacks in this game are similar to Suiko5 in that they do not occur unless the PC evades and when countering, the counterattack is unevadeable. Counterattacks can only be launched if a PC can reach the attacker with his/her attack range. The exceptions to this are Sara and Fie, who will have a counter attack range of 6, despite regular attack ranges of 1.

Elements
Not too complicated for the most part. There are the 4 basic elements in game: Fire, Water, Earth and Wind. Fire and Earth spells are self explanatory. Water and Wind spells house 2 elements based on flavour (Ice and Lightning respectively). The game also has what it refers to as Higher elements. This comprises of the 3 more advanced schools: Time, Space and Mirage. How you want to treat this is up to debate. Many areas in the game do not have higher elements functioning so for all intents and purposes, the majority of the time, these spells are non-elemental. If  you go by flavor arguments though, Time is most closely associated with Darkness (Colouring, ID type spells as well as names and animations of their spells) while Mirage is most closely associated with Light (Colouring, many attacks focus on brightness and are light themed). This leaves Space which doesn't really have an analogous element. It has attacks that use gravity and light and is probably the one true non-elemental typing. YMMV of course on how you want to take this. For the purposes of this topic, it is assumed that Time = Dark, Mirage = Light and Space = Non-Elemental.

EDIT: All character data is up! Special thanks to Snowfire and Pyro for overlooking the topic as it was being drafted and for various suggestions/corrections. Especially the catch on Alfin.

EDIT 2: For frame of reference, enemy averages, based on a total of 40 random monsters at the last dungeon:
Defense: 3532
ADF: 2578
Slash Vulnerability - 1.85 stars
Thrust Vulnerability - 1.68 stars
Pierce Vulnerability - 1.40  stars
Strike Vulnerability - 1.50 stars

RELEVANT AVERAGES -

Damage (3 turn average /w Valimar) - 17971
Kill Point (/w Valimar) - 44926

Damage (3 turn average /w out Valimar) - 16808
Kill Point (3 turn average /w out Valimar) - 42020

Damage (5 turn average per Pyro) ~ 17000
Kill point - ~42500

HP - 18084
Speed - 97

Move - 9
Threat - 12

21

Unranked Games / Trails of Cold Steel 2 - More overly ambitious stuff that will never be complete

« on: October 01, 2016, 09:06:35 AM »

So yeah, I'm starting this topic as a placeholder. If at some point, someone else comes in hijacks it or creates a new one like Pyro did with XF, then all the more power to them. I just wanted to post down some thoughts as well as general stuff that I think is cool to think about. Even though we rarely rank anything nowadays, I guess the theorycrafting side of me is interested in looking at how the PCs in the game would work DL wise so I'm creating a topic. Random/Snowfire/Niu - would love to hear your opinion on some of this stuff as well since I think it would help to portray a view that isn't completely lopsided in one side or another. Or throw your interps into the pool, let people choose, etc.

Anyway, gonna do what I traditionally do, which is talk about some of the overview, how I think the game would work DLwise and then some interp stuff before any real notes. I may be all over the place, so bear with me. But I will try to remain focused and keep a general flow within the topic. On with the show then:

Gameplay Overview
Game is essentially divided into separate Chapters and in each chapter, there's also a few different phases. There's the introductory phase, which often deals with getting to the location or reaching the first objective at the start of the chapter. Following that is a free phase, where you're allowed to explore the map/area you're allowed to go. This is the period where you usually have side quests, which can involve solving riddles to beating up bonus monsters. Once you manually decided that the Free Phase is done, you go into the Operation phase, or the main goal/objective of the Chapter. There is usually a boss at the end of each Operation and once that plays out, you go to the last phase, which is the Bonding Phase. There's no combat here; just talking to NPCs/your party members to get more character development. When you manually declare this to be done as well, then the game moves onward to the next Chapter. In total, there are about 10 Chapters, with 2 Gaiden Chapters. Other than the guest PCs in one of the Gaiden Chapters, I believe its best to take the PCs in the Last Chapter where everyone is available. This avoids issues such as scaling temp PCs since at this point they all become playable. Thanks to Trails' EXP scaling, it's not too difficult to keep everyone within the same ball park either, so should make gathering data easier too.

When you're in a map area, random enemies will be walking around the field. Making contact with one initiates a fight, where PCs are positioned on a field shaped like a circle. While positioning is important as attacks have different area of effects, there are no terrain penalties or bonuses. There is however, an event wheel that can offer different bonus/penalties on specific turns. Battles works on a CTB system, so players can smartly place their characters along the turn order to gain the best advantage. The event wheel by and large benefits the players(and therefore the PCs) over the enemies since the enemies won't actively try to line up their turns properly. Since it's a Trails game, it has 3 bars for each character: HP, MP (called EP) and CP. CP stands for Craft points but are basically the currency you use for using special techniques or abilities. It works the exact same way as in previous Trails games (so it increases when you attack/take a hit and goes down when consumed), so do check out Pyro/Snowfire's Skies topics. I'll be going some specifics afterwards, but again, by and large, its the same thing. Once combat is initiated, characters take turn according to the turn order and the fight goes on until one side is completely incapacitated.


Special Commands in Battle

Swapping
In battle, there is the option for the player side to swap out PCs. Only one swap can be done per character turn and the character swapping in takes a +50% Recharge penalty.

Linked Attacks/Bonuses
Characters in battle can be linked together. Physical attacks in this game have the effect of staggering enemies based on how vulnerable they are and the character's proficiency at that physical type. If an enemy is staggered, then the linked character can join in and add a base physical hit as well. There are advanced versions of these linked attacks where you can get 2 PCs attacking a small group or the entire party to attack all enemies at once. You can swap links between characters freely with no penalty, so it is possible in-game to be always linked to the strongest physical PC if you so wish. Linked characters also provide support effects to those they are linked with including stuff like restoring MP, CP or Covering for another character when an enemy attacks.

Overdrive
A new function added in CS2 is called "Overdrive". Only members of Class VII can Overdrive with each other and to do so requires clearing a trial boss. It can only be activated if the character who is activating is not suffering from a status that removes control (so for example, you can be poisoned and activate it, but you cannot be confused). When it is triggered, it will clear all negative status on the 2 linked characters, restore 40 CP and 30% of Max EP. It will then provide the 2 linked characters with 3 free actions, the first of which has zero recharge. During this time, spells can be insta-cast and any physical attack made automatically staggers the enemy regardless of their vulnerabilities. Rean is special in that he is an exception and can freely link with anyone, even guests and without needing a trial boss.

S-Breaks
Like in previous Trails games, when a player character has 100 CP stocked, he/she can utilize their S-craft, which is basically a technique that hits much harder, often with a big multiplier and has a greatly increased rate at inflicting status. Some S-crafts do not deal damage. However, all S-crafts share the ability to cut into the turn order immediately at any point, which is called an S-break. You can use S-Breaks to snipe useful event wheel icons such as the Guaranteed Critical or +50 CP. Note that using a S-break doesn't increase the recharge normally associated with S-crafts, however, you are *locked* into using the S-craft. So even if it means you can  instant turn, it doesn't mean you can instant turn and do something freely.

DL Relevance
Why is all this important? Well a couple of things come to mind immediately. First, is whether or not you want to reward people with good physical proficiency. Physical attackers in CS2 are quite pronounced because of the fact that they may be able to effectively hit different vulnerabilities with greater success rates. This in turns grants you a linked attack, which can double the physical damage you are doing that turn. If you get enough Linked attacks off, you can also use the advanced versions, which can multiple enemies multiple times, so it increases the damage output done by fighters. Because of this, in-game, physical attacks and crafts tend to be a bit weaker than magic since its anticipated for you to stagger enemies and pull off linked attacks. One idea I had was to have phantom PCs; meaning that someone who is good at unbalancing will still get the bonus damage from a linked attack, even if there is no other dueler beside him/herself. And of course, this Phantom PC only provides linked attack support, not any defensive support.

Second and more importantly is how you want to factor this in for the bosses. Of course, on the PC end, it doesn't matter much more than the first point because the DL is about individual strengths and uniqueness. So things like Overdrive and Defensive Link Bonuses and Swapping all don't matter. However it does a number to bosses in game, letting you pull off strategies normally not possible and of course, greatly diminishes their durability. Many late game bosses have huge HP pools, but because of some of the stuff I just mentioned, a large part of it is inflating it to deal with the broken. This is only scratching the surface so, yes,it gets worse for the bosses (or better if you like breaking things)

EDIT: One complication arising from Linked attacks is that proficiency and chance of staggering is not displayed in percentages in game. Instead, it uses a 4-star system to show vulnerability and a letter grade for each PC's proficiency at a physical type. This means that this is a huge pain in the rear test. From personal experience, when a S-class character hits a 4 star vulnerability, the chance of staggering is 100%. If we assume that S-class represents 4 star rating in proficiency (the in-game manual does!) then we can assume that each "star" or rank is a +12.5% chance to stagger. When an enemy has multiple vulnerabilities, each proficiency is checked, so a character who can strike multiple of them at once (and well at that) will perform better than those that may strike only one. Since enemy vulnerabilities are largely random, one possibility of determining the chance to stagger is to take the number of ranks a PC has and weight them across an enemy that has a 2 star unbalance rating (the average) on each vulnerability. This is the simple way of doing it, but uses more assumptions. A better way, assuming I can find the time, is to average the vulnerabilities or stars across the enemies in the final dungeon and then compare PC ranks to that. Both methods are largely guesswork, but they should work for our intended purposes I think.

Master Quartz and Regular Quartz
Pretty easy in terms of the DL for Master Quartz. PCs get the copy of the  Master Quartz that they either come with or are equipped with when they join the party. This extends to guest characters as well (heck,the game re-equips them with their starting MQs in the epilogue if its not being used  by someone else). The only person who may be screwed here is Alfin, but I'll check up on that pretty soon. As for where to take the MQ levels, taking it at Level 5 (Max) seems appropriate. While you may not be using the starting MQs for all that long, the game is long enough that you will typically be able to fully level up 10-11 MQs without too much of a problem. At that point, it really is just easier to assume all the MQs are maxed out since getting the additional 5 other ones to that point is easier and avoids sandbagging someone arbitrarily. You have 6 party members accompanying for most of the game (4 in the front, 2 in the back) and those in the back still get equivalent experience to building MQs. So leveling up weaker MQs is pretty simple. The final two dungeons in the game are also quite long with quite a bit of EXP, so getting an extra 4 MQs maxed out seems reasonable to me. Besides, the weaker MQs typically are already punished in the DL by having passives that are not as strong, so no point in really hurting them a second time.

Regular Quartz on the other hand, is more complex. The basics is that quartz are like materia. You can slot them into open nodes in a person's ARCUS, which gives them abilities, stats or other neat effects. So the absolute purist view of this is to just disallow all other quartz other than starting ones and update the starting ones to what is available at the end. This tends to favor the guests because when they rejoin in the final chapter, they tend to have better stuff equipped on them. This is certainly the easiest way, but I'm not too comfortable with this.

The thing that makes quartz different then materia are elemental nodes. These are unique amongst *each* PC's ARCUS. For example, Rean has 2 Time, 1 Fire while Gaius has 2 Wind and 1 Earth. Every PC only has 8 nodes with 3 of them being elementalized, so elemental nodes play a huge part in game in determining what a character is good at and what they can equip as well as even the type of MQ they should set! In the above case, Time nodes emphasize on speed so setting up Rean to be a delayer/fast striker is much easier and something he is better at than Gaius. If you use the first interp, then you basically kill of this branch that also separates the PCs away from each other. Since every PC in game is capable of doing something unique (helped by these elemental nodes), it feels strange to just say remove it for the DL. The most basic way to keep this in tact without overpowering PCs IMO is to give them access to the base level stat boosters and spells of the same element.

Let's be clear. I'm not proposing to give them rare stuff or one of a kind quartz in game. Not even the quartz that requires U-materials and give stat boosts. I'm talking about quartz that can be easily forged from a shop which at the end game, is very easy to do.  Typically, this means that the fighters will prefer stats as opposed to spells since they don't have the magic stats to really stand out. I'm okay with this because this is a legitimate advantage that fighters have in-game. Since they don't need spells, they can concentrate on bumping up attack/defense/speed/evade and so on. For mages, they may want the extra spells for variety and because they will have more EP to fuel the abilities. This is also relatively true to in-game where you don't want your mage to be a one trick pony and get walled by an enemy blocking the element. For spells though, many of them have added low status odds. I personally don't see these as too much of an issue (we're talking about stuff like 30% chances - typically low), but one option is to just give them the damage so they have access to another spell avoids distributing status around to every one. So the basic elemental quartz on their specific nodes + starting quartz is what I propose as a DL 'set'. It seems the most fair way to me, though I'm curious of course to see what other people want to do. I know Snowfire and Pyro's topic already have different ways of handling this and it's probably the most complex issue with Trails games.

Chrono Burst
Most support spells are relatively straight forward...except for this one, which needs its own section because it existing creates a huge amount of problems for DL interps. What is Chrono Burst? This is a time elemental spell that when cast gives a PC an extra turn. In essence, it is very much FF Quick. However, there are several things that make it absurdly silly:

1. Unlike FF Quick, you can recast Chrono Burst immediately within itself. This allows you to chain Chrono Burst'd turns repeatedly until you run out of EP (the only saving grace in the DL)
2. Chrono Burst has 0 Charge time, meaning it's actually instant-cast.
3. Chrono Burst is very easy to access: 600 Time Sepith, 150 Space and 150 Mirage. In the words of Random: Falcom, please fix your shit.

These 3 things creates a variety of issues. First, if we're using my proposal, this awards all PCs with Time Elemental nodes access to this spell. Granted, this is only 4 out of 16 PCs (Rean, Fie, Elise, Sharon) but the principal remains that is it over-rewarding them? Fie naturally has it on her MQ, but Rean and Sharon don't. Rean also doesn't have enough MP to cast it more than once, so I'm not too concerned on the surface for it to be overpowering. A secondary thing you could do is to just ban Chrono Burst from being allowable unless its on that character's MQ. This actually isn't a bad idea; it works very similar to tournaments where a card or character is too powerful so there is a universal rule to disallow it. We could so something similar with this spell for DL purposes (it IS a tournament in theory!).
 
On the boss end, well, let's just say this spell is the bane of their existence. Both in-game and for interpretation DLwise. Remember, in-game you can restore your EP and EP restoring items aren't super rare since you can also do cooking. There's also link support bonuses as I mentioned earlier that help restore EP along with the event wheel, so all together, bosses can basically be eating 10-20 player turns in a row before being allowed to act (and if you know what you're doing, essentially never acting). You also have to deal with the Moebius MQ which ups item efficiency. It gets hosed in the DL, but in-game, you can eventually turn items to have double the efficiency and have an AoE effect, allowing you to restore multiple characters' EP at the same time. The sole thing sort of holding this back is that Chrono Burst costs 400 EP without any reduction, so for most characters, this is OPB. In-game however, you can stack EP Reduction Quartz together, making it only cost 240 EP (or in 1 character's case, 160 EP). When you have like 1200 EP at the end of the game, 160 EP for an extra turn is dirt cheap. It gets worse because of everything I mentioned before, to the point where it is possible to net gain EP on the casting turn as well (EP restoration link bonus + event wheel bonus). So Chrono Burst chains can literally go on for ages.

DL Relevance
Chrono Burst is really the main cog that makes a lot of things silly. One of the more powerful crafts in the game is functionally GT Turn Shift. This works in conjuction with Chrono Burst, so you can actually give everyone an instant turn this way at only 160 EP cost, and then still take a second action. You also have food items that can give you major buffs in a single use versus needed to cast it. With Chrono Burst, you can use this item instantly. But don't spells have Area of Effect? Well yes, they do. But when used in conjunction with a Mastered Moebius, items become GT as well and instant. This now makes it superior to spells since you can't chain spells through Chrono Burst (the first turn makes your casting delay zero, but the second turn is spent casting the magic). So getting super buffed the boss even moves is really easy. Then, there are quartz that double the power of the first spell/attack you use, which with the above is easy to set up. The end result when you factor all these things in is that boss durability becomes a thing that is as lopsided as FF8/VP2/Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Bosses can be at 1.5 PCHP or higher! Or they can be sub Jeremy tier! With a potential vote split that massive, ranking bosses becomes a headache.

Boss Rankings
The good news for the antagonists is that many of them have an alternative form they could use before they get hit with the cheese in game. My thoughts regarding this is to use the earlier forms for the majority of the antagonists as many of them have usable forms and there's none of the interp issues that's present with the late game ones. Just for clarification, here's what I think works for the bosses. Note that this is SPOILERS territory, so stop reading if you haven't completed the game (or CS1 for that matter). I'll be using some code names as a result:

Reno (Xeno) - First form. Always fights with Rude. You have to take out about 70-80% of their HP anyway, so just cut their HP back by about 20% of the stated value works.
Rude (Leonidas) - See Reno. Same deal.
Lolita (Altina) - She actually 2 forms that would avoid the cheese - either her 1st form or her Gaiden form. 1st form is generally better. Fights with Tuxedo Mask and must be actually killed.
Tuxedo Mask (Bleublanc) - Well the later forms summon worse reinforcements! But due to the cheese, he wants his 1st form anyway. See Lolita above.
Valkyrie (Duvalle) - Uses her 2nd form. 1st form is based on a timer and you don't actually need to do any damage. 3rd form has to deal with cheese. 2nd form might too! But it is much earlier than the final series of fights so the broken might not be as silly.
Pyro (McBurn) - Has to use 2nd form because 1st form is a plot fight (you can't win and it's a timer based fight). Which means he is our first victim of Chrono Burst cheese! Congrats Pyro, your DL life is probably gonna suck (I have no issues with this).
Jade Rook (Rufus) - Ahaha, never mind. Unrankable. His 1 form is actually timed. So even if you can't do enough damage to him to unleash his super move, you can just sit there and wait until the fight ends.
Azure Knight (Crowe) - Quits and uses his CS1 form! If you take him in CS2, he either gets his 1st form which is garbage or his 2nd form which gets to deal with the cheese. He also has a secret epilogue form, but there are problems with this that he probably doesn't want it either. More on this later.
Witch of the Abyss (Vita) - Same boat as Azure except she doesn't have a CS1 form. So, she's uh...also kind of screwed like Pyro. Her secret form might be okay? Maybe? I dunno which form would be worse since one has to deal with the cheese and the other gets to deal with secret character problems. See below.

Secret Characters
Sekrit characters?! That's right. In the final dungeon of the game, you can buy an accessory called a Lady or Gentleman Mirror, which when equipped changes that character into the secret character. So why are they secret? Well, aside from only being usable in the final dungeon, the mirrors cost 200,000 Mira. Each. In case you're wondering how much this is, let me put it this way. In the time it takes for you to get the money for a mirror, you could have instead spent the money on two copies of an accessory that give you +20 speed (so +40 speed total) and still have money left over for other great accessories. Since speed is linear, 40 speed is huge. End game speed on average is somewhere between 100-110, so you're giving up a lot of cash that could be spend making your main team a lot better. Since it's 200,000 mira per mirror, getting all the secret characters takes 1,000,000 Mira, which is a crazy amount of grinding. These forms, IMO, if used should be penalized in a similar way as FE:Fates characters might, where you take the party with a higher average due to being able to spend funds more freely. To their credit though, secret PCs also have powerful bonus effect on them where they get +10 CP Regeneration per turn that has passed along with +50 Crit rate. So, don't feel sorry for penalizing them if you agree with me that 200,000 Mira is quite a bit of money!

There are 5 mirrors in total: Lolita, Azure Knight, Witch of the Abyss, Lloyd and Rixia. Lloyd and Rixia are PCs in the Crossbell games and have perfectly usable forms if they really want to be part of Cold Steel thanks to the Gaiden chapters. They actually have surprisingly *less* issues as a result. Lolita as I mentioned, can fall back to her 1st boss form, and not worry about the problems associated. Azure Knight has his CS1 form as I mentioned, so the only person who really has any issue really is Witch of the Abyss. Note that secret characters do not have a status screen or a way to change their quartz. They instead take them off the character who they are replacing from the mirror, which can make them quite a headache for an interpretation anyway. Personally, the only person I would consider this a valid form for is Witch of the Abyss (and even then, I'm not sure if its better).

Starting CP
In Pyro's topic, starting CP was at 50. Snowfire had averages listed for 3 values (50/100/150). Note that max CP is 200. Obviously what value PCs start as is important since it determines what options they can do at the start of a fight. So where does it feel right in CS2? My gut instinct tells me that the answer is 100. Here's the arguments I can think of for this:

1) CP is relatively easy to keep up, unlike say, Limit Gauges or even Grandia 3 SP. You gain SP on linked attacks too, so a smart player can swap links with faster/better proficient attackers to get CP back on those who may be consuming it a lot.
2) CP gain is calculated per enemy hit. So a +10 CP on hit, hitting 5 enemies means you actually get 50 CP back. Since many randoms are fought in clumps, you don't drain CP as quickly as you would think since its possible to hit multiple enemies in game to keep CP relatively high before tougher engagements.
3) After story events or certain triggers, the game automatically will refill your CP to 100. Even if it was originally at 0. CP higher than 100 doesn't get reset.
4) Once you get the airship, you can return to Ymir and freely use the footbath, which freely restores your CP. It doesn't take long to get a maxed CP gauge as a result even if you consumed all of it in a tougher boss.
5) CP Restoration items exit. Most of won't restore your gauge to full. BUT, since most of these restore between 20-40, its relatively easy again, to remain afloat within the 100 point mark.

The biggest issue with 100 CP actually is figuring out how to take the damage average. Since it gives everyone access to their S-craft immediately, it could be in the PCs best interest to use it immediately. But I have some doubts regarding this, since S-crafts have very long recharge times and if they aren't buffed, don't do as impressive damage as you would want. Guess we'll cross that bridge once we actually have numbers.

EDIT: Random has confirmed for me that 200 CP S-crafts get an additional 50% damage boost. This is most likely irrelevant for a large part of the cast (since they will want to be using crafts or casting magic), but is important for Rean and Alisa, who have MQs that provide 200 CP as a limit.

EDIT 2: Some further conversation has me believing that a 3 turn average is the way to go for comparing PC damages as a result of the starting CP. This prevents the case of grossly over killing people with dropping S-crafts instantly but also factors in a character's ability to maintain their damage levels as both EP/CP are consumed through a fight.


Weapons / Armor
As is the case for Trails games, weapons is easy. Just take the penultimate for every character. The best weapon is limited to 4 the first game, but the last one you don't even get before the final boss, so in practice, its 3 at most. As a result, the most fair way is to just take the 2nd best one, which is available at the last shop in the last dungeon. These can be bought for money and are relatively affordable (unless you are trying to save for a mirror, in which case, you get to hose like 10 characters!).

Armor is trickier. Like in the case of SC, DEF/ADF are not terribly great stats from experience. I'm sure they reduce damage, but the effect isn't great unless you're missing loads of it. There's a variety of end game equips that's available although depending on how much stats are worth, this can certainly vary. For reference, one level in CS2 gives you about 6-7 points in Atk, 2-4 points in Def, 11-13 points in Magic, 11-13 points in Magic Defense and about 100-150 HP. Speed growth is somewhat irregular but occurs about once every 3 levels. So if Atk and Magic are strong stats, then it certainly makes sense for fighters to take armor that may have more attack power over evade. In general, these are the equipment available that characters would be interested in (and are universal):

Genderless
Armor
Red Jumper - +25 Str, +800 Def, +540 ADF, 10% EVA
Patterned Shirt - +350 Def, +150 ADF, 20% EVA
Gorgeous Gown - +30 ATS, +500 Def, +800 ADF

Footwear
Red Boots - +400 Def, +7 Speed, +3 Move
Jeweled Boots - +250 Def, + 15 ATS, +3 Move

Males Only
Armor
Platinum Jacket - +45 Str, +880 Def, +590 ADF

Females Only
Body
Crystal Dress - +30 Str, +30 ATS, +870 Def, +600 ADF

Footwear
Crystal Heels - +15 Str, +15 ATS, +435 Def, +4 Move

tl;dr version: By default, pretty much all fighters want the Red Jumper. It provides strength and gives them a little bit of evade. If the stats are meaningful,then switching over to the Platinum Jacket/Crystal Dress might be worthwhile to squeeze out all the offense possible. For Fie and Sharon, their default is likely the Patterned Shirt, since they have great base evade and the extra 10% Evade is likely more meaningful to them than increases to Strength/Defense. Mages are similar. By default, they probably want the Crystal Dress (if female) or the Gorgeous Robe (if male). If the stats aren't that meaningful, then they would rather trade it in for Red Jumpers instead. Footwear though is easy. I think pretty much everyone wants the Red Boots because +7 Speed is no joke. The other shoes don't provide as large of a boost as the armors (+15 to 30) so this one is probably pretty simple.

Status Blocking
There is a nice plethora of status blocking equipment that is available. I know recent DL trend has been to make the characters give up other default accessories for the blockers as a trade off. Cold Steel 2 is a little messy in this regard because most of the status blockers have an upgraded version that provides stat boosts! So, is there really a trade off then if you can equip the blocker that boosts the stats anyway? Well, in fact, yes. While these stat boost blockers are available, in my experience from playing the game, they aren't a high priority buy or exchange item because there are better things you can get. What's the more realistic in-game picture?

Typically, you can get one of the colored pendulums which will block a group of status effects. This is what you typically use in-game for  status blocking. There are upgraded versions of these of course, but the line is easier to draw because the upgraded versions are much rarer and take more materials than the standard blockers to improve. Obviously, the upgraded versions in this case are illegal. As for what you give up to equip a pendulum? The in-game cost is about 5000 Mira,which is an improved basic blocker. So the stat cost is easy - just use the stats on the improved basic blocker. A second alternative is to default to the Warrior Badge. This costs 150 Fishing Points in-game, but is reasonably quick. It provides 1000 HP/15 STR/15 ATS, which is actually surprisingly close to the first level improvements on basic blockers.

For reference, here's a list of status that can occur in-game:

Poison - Lose ~10% MHP every round
Blind - ACC and EVA - 50%
Seal - Cannot use physical abilities (Attack or Crafts)
Mute - Cannot use magical abilities (Arts)
Sleep - Target cannot act. Next hit on this target wakes them up, but is also a guaranteed crit (crits are 50% more damage and guaranteed stagger)
Burn - Lose ~20% MHP every round
Freeze - Lose ~5% MHP every round. If attacked, 30% chance for the target to be instantly incapacitated.
Petrify - Target cannot act. If attacked, 30% chance for the target to be instantly incapacitated.
Faint - Target cannot act. All attacks on this target are guaranteed critical hits.
Confuse - Target will attack any allies in range. If no allies in range, than move about randomly
Nightmare - Target cannot act. Next hit on this target wakes them up, but is also a guaranteed crit and adds a random status effect that is not ID, Vanish or Delay
Instant Death - What it says on the tin. Target is incapacitated
Vanish - Target is ejected.  Can return after a period of time with 0 EP, but is functionally dead until return
Delay - Target takes additional clockticks for his next turn, where the number of clockticks is equal to the Delay value. Success rate is influenced by Speed.
Stat Down - Target is debuffed in the corresponding stat.

I need to check the amount of HP lost from the various poison type status, but the rest should be accurate. Also take note of the following. While PC status blocking is 100% immunity, boss status resistance is divisive/multiplicative. Meaning that if an attack has a 70% chance at inflicting something but the boss is susceptible to it only 20% of the time, it means that in practice, there is a 14% chance for the status to land (70% * 20%) instead of 0 (70% - (100%-20%)). I don't know if we'll ever get around to getting boss stats due to the complications noted above, but its worth mentioning. This is why there are attacks in game that have say 300% chance at something. Typically this means it awards high status resistance and penalizes lower status resistance. How you want to take this against PCs with status attacks is up to you. Personally, I would just take it as addition/subtraction for the sake of ease. But maybe someone else has a better idea of how to get the better representation.

Notes Regarding Guests
These are just some of my crib notes for the guest PCs. As I noted, taking them in the Epilogue makes the most sense since at that point, they all become permanently playable. Also avoids scaling issues and availability. This is just to note down what they start with, levels and so on. Goes without saying but SPOILER Territory, this is.

Elise Schwarzer
MQ - Aries
2 Water, 1 Time node affixed.
Quartz: Starts with Silver Thorn, Altair Cannon, Athelas, Holy Breath
Level - 115

Toval Randonneur
MQ - Wing
2 Wind, 1 Space node affixed.
Quartz: Starts with Yggdrasil, Chrono Drive, Ragna Vortex, Analyze, Cross Crusade
Level - 130

Note: Toval is permanently affixed with the Quick Caliber accessory, which cuts Casting Time by 1/2

Claire Rieveldt
MQ - Moebius
2 Water, 1 Space node affixed.
Quartz: Starts with Crystal Flood, Altair Cannon, Spirit Breaker 2, Hit 2
Level - 130

Sharon Krueger
MQ - Juggler
2 Time, 1 Mirage node affixed.
Quartz: Starts with Shadow Blade, Tearal, Impede 2, Mind 3
Level - 130

Alfin Reise Arnor
MQ - N/A (Ouch)
2 Fire, 1 Mirage node affixed.
Quartz: Starts with Seraphic Ring, Fortuna, Purgatorial Flame, Shining, Impassion, EP Cut 2
Level - 115

Angelica Rogner
MQ - Emblem
2 Space, 1 Time node affixed.
Quartz: Starts with Voice Breaker, Wrath, Action 3, Attack 3
Level - 125

Note: Angelica has a slight claim on the Lightning Belt accessory, which provides Str+50, Acc+50%, Speed+5 and Crit+5%. During the time when she's guesting, this accessory is permanently affixed on her and in the epilogue, a forced quest that you do has her handing this to you upon finish with the indication that she's giving Rean a copy of the belt that she uses. YMMV obviously.

Towa Herschel
MQ - Scepter
2 Earth, 1 Water node affixed.
Quartz: Starts with Claiomh Solarion, Earth Pulse, Adamantine Shield, Holy Breath, Maelstrom, Ancient Glyph
Level - 125

Shakier claims exist for Sharon, Claire and Towa. In Sharon/Claire's case, there is a cutscene at the beginning of Act 2, where they see Class VII off and the person between them (and Toval) who has the highest affinity with Rean will hand a Rean an accessory, with the indication that the accessory is something they themselves once used. They do not have this accessory affixed while they are guesting and have free accessory slots otherwise, which means this is primarily a plot claim. Towa's case is even shakier. In CS1,when you receive the Medal of Charity, the instructor who hands you the Medal will comment that the person who received the distinction in the previous year was Towa, which indicates she should have a copy of this accessory (technically). For the purposes of the topic, I won't be assuming any of these since they are all relatively dubious IMO, but those of you that like to allow everything (Djinn, I'm looking at you) might want to chew on this for a bit. I will assume though that Angelica and Toval have their accessories. In Toval's case, there is basically no argument since you can't even remove it from him.

Formulas
Special thanks to Random for pulling / deciphering some of these for me. We have both the base damage formula as well as the speed formula, so its a good start to figuring out damage values without needing to completely test everything (hopefully).

For the most part, CS2 uses the same formula as CS1 and from the sounds  of it, Azure and Zero (the Crossbell arc games). Only difference is, the multiplier stacking can get really silly, which also explains why the damage numbers are larger. Oh, and speaking of stacking, you can stack stuff that normally isn't stackable in the older games. That also probably explains why the later entries are a little easier (more broken being handed out? Hell yes).

Base damage formula:
<+RandomKesaranPasaran> ((Atk * 5 * mult) - (Def * 2.5)) / 2

Note that Towa, Elliot and Emma have base physicals that use Magic and hit M.Def instead of Def. The formula above is the exact same for magic, except swap out Atk for Ats and Def for Atd.


Base speed formula:
Delay value / Speed = CT until next turn.

Delay value varies depending on the action taken. EDIT: Where to take the Standard Delay value is interesting because it alters the quickness of actions for the entire cast. My kneejerk is to default to base physicals as the standard since this constitutes a turn in many games. However, the catch here is that in-game, you are very unlikely to use a standard physical as part of your offense unless you are poking something to death or chipping. This is because the basic multiplier on physicals is really weak. Enemies also tend to appear in groups (so GT/MT is vastly better) so you're likely using crafts/spells which can hit more than 1 target at once. So if you're more likely to be doing pretty much anything else but using a basic physical, should it really represent what constitutes a normal turn? An alternative is to use 2500 as the Standard or even 3000 since these are the values where most crafts/base spell casting falls into. Random suggests another alternative where the Delay of all actions is averaged (so Move/Item/Crafts/S-crafts/spells, etc.) and grouped as 'General Delay', then compare PC speeds to that. All recovery is then expressed relative to the General Delay value.

Note that the Average Delay (factoring in Casting/Recovery) of all actions performable (Crafts, every single spell, Attack, Item, S-craft, Movement) is 3198. This is quite close to 3000 which in some ways is not surprising (as again, you're largely using crafts/magic for offense, so it makes sense they would better represent the average).

For now, I am assuming 2000 as the standard - this will  likely change in the actual topic.

As long as PCs are performing the same type of actions, Speed is linear.

Spells work a little differently because spells have both a casting delay and a recovery delay. Casting delay is the charge time before the spell goes off and recovery delay is the actual recharge value after the spell is cast. Both of these are influenced by speed so speed is quite important! Busting speed likewise has a very detrimental effect for casters. EDIT: I will try to summarize spell speeds without copypastaing the chart from GameFAQs. For the most part, they are largely the same as CS1. Some other quick notes:

- Wind spells tend to cast faster than the rest and Time spells tend to recover faster than the rest
- Because spells have a charge period, they can be interrupted by anything that has "Impede" in their description. So hype those Grandia cancel techs.
- Delay values are truncated and this is more significant for casters where it is possible to get very low delay values, allowing fast casters to take multiple turns. While theoretically possible to be reduced to 0, this should DL irrelevant as it requires some illegal stuff (even for Toval).
- Outside of spells, Moving (or passing a turn) is approximately 25% faster than using a basic physical. Most crafts are about 50% slower than a standard physical. This sounds bad, but basic physicals have junk multipliers so most of the cast will be using crafts if not arts.
- S-crafts have a delay value of 4000 (highest in the game) and are therefore 100% slower than a standard physical.
- Note that all basic elements have 5 tiers of offensive spells, while higher levels only have 4. For the sake of referencing, assume that the higher elements do not have a tier 1. This will make more sense why in below.

Spell Speeds (Casting)
- Tier 1 spells other than Air Strike have a Casting Delay value of 500 (0.25 of a turn). Air Strike has a casting Delay value of 400 (0.2 of a turn)
- Tier 2 spells other than Spark Arrow have a Casting Delay value of 700 (0.35 of a turn). Spark Arrow has a Casting Delay value of 600 (0.3 of a turn)
- Tier 3 spells other than Aerial have a Casting Delay value of 1000 (0.5) of a turn. Aerial has a Casting Delay of 900 (0.45 of a turn)
- Tier 4 spells other than Judgment Bolt and Grim Butterfly have a Casting Delay value of 1500 (0.75 of a turn). Judgment Bolt has 1400 (0.7), while Grim Butterfly has 2000.
- Tier 5 spells for Basic Elements other than Ragna Vortex have a Casting Delay value of 2000. Ragna Vortex has a value of 1800 (0.9 of a turn)
- Tier 5 spells for Higher elements (so Time/Space/Mirage) have a Casting Delay value of 3000 (1.5 turns).
- Purgatorial Flame (a Tier 6 Fire element spell) has a Casting Delay value of 2500 (1.25 turns). Yes, it's faster than most Tier 5s. However, in exchange, it costs more EP and has a smaller AoE.
- Tear has a Casting Delay of 300 (0.15) - the fastest in the game
- Teara has a Casting Delay of 400 (0.2)
- Tearal has a Casting Delay of 600 (0.3)
- Seraphic Ring has a Casting Delay of 1000 (0.5)
- Most buffs (Earth Pulse, Crest, La Crest, Chrono Drive etc) have a Casting Delay Value of 500 (0.25). Breath (Small GT Healing) and Thelas (small Revival) also falls into this category
- Holy Breath (Large GT Healing) and Athelas (Large Revival) have a Casting Delay of 700 (0.35)
- Both Guards (Physical/Magic) have a Casting Delay of 1000 (0.5)

Spell Speeds (Recovery)
- With the exception of Time spells, all Tier 1, Tier 2, Buffs and Tear, Teara, Seraphic Ring and both Guards have a Recovery Delay of 2000 (so standard recharge)
- With the exception of Time spells, all Tier 3, Tier 4, Tearal, Holy Breath and Athelas have a Recovery Delay of 2500 (1.25x Recharge)
- All Tier 5 except for Flare Bomb have a Recovery Delay of 3000 (1.5x Recharge). Instead, Purgatorial Flame takes the 3000 Recovery Delay spot while Flare Bomb joins the 2500 group.
- Soul Blur (Tier 2 Time) has a Recovery of 500 (0.25x Recharge)
- Demonic Scythe (Tier 3 Time) has a Recovery of 1000 (0.5x Recharge)
- Grim Butterfly (Tier 4 Time) has a Recovery of 1500 (0.75x Recharge)

In case it wasn't obvious, Casting Delay + Recovery Delay = length of time needed before the PC gets his/her next turn after the spell. So for example, casting a Soul Blur would take 1200 Delay in total, while casting a Luminous Ray would take 2500 Delay in total. So you can pull 2 Soul Blurs over in the time it takes to cast any other Level 1.

Evade and Accuracy
No notes on these other than personal experience unfortunately. From many other players and in-game performance though, Evade is very much what the stated number translates to. The percentages are additive, so 10% Eva + 20% Eva = 30% to dodge an attack (instead of say 0.9 * 0.8 or 72% chance for something to hit). Most PCs have a default evade value of 0. Sara, Toval and Gaius all get an evade bonus from their MQ (10/15/15 respectively), while Sharon and Fie have 30% Evade on base. Most enemies in game (probably about 95%) do not have any notable accuracy modifiers, so a stated evade rate of 100% is in all essence physical immunity barring ITE (which does exist in game).

Magic evasion works the same way and is additive. However, the only character who has Magic Evasion by default is Toval (from his MQ). The Shield series (a regular Water Quartz) also provides some minor Magic evasion as well as M.Def if you allow those for the PCs with Water nodes. Generally though, they will probably want HP over it unless they can stack the Magic Evade. Unlike physicals, Magic is always 100% accurate barring forms of evade on a PC. Note that CS2 doesn't have any elemental resistances on the PC end, so Magic Evasion is the best that they get.

As for accuracy, this is much harder to determine. Physical attacks in general tend to miss more in CS2 compared to CS1. This could be due to a modded accuracy equation or just providing more enemies with evasion. More specifically, flying enemies and agile type enemies (such as wolves) tend to be more evasive and dodgy. I estimate from experience that accuracy on these things with no boosters is about 60-70% at best. However, with even a single Hit boost (Hit 1 offers +50%), enemy evasion becomes relatively infrequent (maybe once in every 30-40 attacks). With 2 or more (so 100% Hit or higher), enemy evade is pretty much non-existent. For the most part, like with evasion, most PCs have a default accuracy boost of 0. Only Angelica (from the Lightning Belt), Sharon (from her MQ) and Claire (from her weapon) have modified Accuracy values in the order of 50%/75%/100% respectively.

The Insight status adds +50% Hit, +50 Evade and +10% Unbalance chance. This is added to the raw score by the way, so a PC with Insight gets to take their base evasion and add it to the boost provided. Alisa/Angelica/Gaius can all cast Insight due to their MQs, and in Gaius' case, he starts with Insight beginning every battle. This makes Gaius something of a massive evade tank (and he can BLIND you too), making him quite a pain to hit (which is true to the in-game Falco user).

Elements
Not too complicated for the most part. There are the 4 basic elements in game: Fire, Water, Earth and Wind. Fire and Earth spells are self explanatory, however, Water and Wind spells actually house 2 elements based on flavour (Ice and Lightning respectively). This is important because while PC spells have clear elemental attributes of hitting weakness/resistance, enemies don't as PCs in CS2 cannot get any elemental protection. So in practice, spells used by the enemy would be no different if they were non-elemental. Only if you attach flavor arguments do enemy spells get elements. I think most people do, so this shouldn't be a big issue.

The game also has what it refers to as Higher elements. This comprises of the 3 more advanced schools: Time, Space and Mirage. How you want to treat this is up to debate. Many areas in the game do not have higher elements functioning so for all intents and purposes, the majority of the time, these spells are non-elemental. If  you go by flavor arguments though, Time is most closely associated with Darkness (Colouring, ID type spells as well as names and animations of their spells) while Mirage is most closely associated with Light (Colouring, many attacks focus on brightness and are light themed). This leaves Space which doesn't really have an analogous element. It has attacks that use gravity and light and is probably the one true non-elemental typing. YMMV of course on how you want to take this.

End Game Levels
I finished the Epilogue with a party level of 140, so that's what I am going to shoot for with the PCs. In practice your characters' levels will likely be greatly scattered since you can only take 7 of the 18 characters into the party at once. If you don't plan on running up and down the final dungeon, trying new party combinations and sticking with one group, then that one group's levels will rise much higher than the rest.

For reference, all members of Class VII will be at a minimum level of 108, with Sara being the exception who will be at level 112. The game expects you to use the entire party for the last series of fights in the penultimate dungeon, so they graciously bump up everyone's levels to a point at the start. Similar to the final dungeon, if you don't swap characters out at all, then levels will tend to be somewhat lopsided as you should be finishing the penultimate dungeon at about Level 128-130, while those you aren't using will be stuck at the level minimum. Due to the large level disparity, I think its just fairer to take all the PCs at the same level of 140. Otherwise, you will have PCs at anywhere between 108-140 spectrum, which is quite a wide range and stats will start mattering when you're short 30+ levels.

As a result of this, this also means that Rean will be at a higher level than the rest, but I don't expect much of a difference (thanks to Trails' scaling) and whatever, he can take that advantage with him since he can't be removed from the party in the game. I've noted the level up gains on average, so you can dock him those few points if you wish. Since Alfin/Elise start at lower levels than the other guests, you could penalize them somewhat if you wish, but again I wouldn't bother. Due to the EXP system, catching up isn't terribly bad and since you can choose any set of PCs for the final dungeon (other than removing Rean and needing 4 members of Class VII for boss fights) there's no way to tell where the level disparity will be like say in ACF for Mariel.

22

General Chat / RPGLB 2016

« on: May 07, 2016, 01:57:14 AM »

Hello all,

Friendly reminder that RPGLB 2016 will be taking place next Monday. This is a speedrunning charity event which I am participating in again this year. If you have nothing much to do during the week, please do tune in and donate if you have the funds to spare . I will be on at 9 pm EST but this link should give you the converted times to your time zone.

https://horaro.org/rpglb/2016

I will be gone for a week as a result. Godspeed!

23

Tournaments / Heavy Team Tourney (Quarterfinals)

« on: April 02, 2016, 03:53:50 PM »

Last week results:
Winners - Dragons, Speedrun Special, Clones, Boss Rush

Apologies for any lateness; IRL stuff + lots of speedrunning events this weekend. Anyway! Coming down to the end now. 8 Teams lefts. Matches for this week:

Winner's bracket
Team Dragon Sandbags vs. Team Darkness
Guv (no Call Team), Angelo (DQ8), Cristo (DQ4) vs. Cthulhu (CStW), Athos (FE7), Sierra (S2)

Team Here Comes the Sun vs. Team Boom
Ho-oh, Groudon, Exeggutor (Pokemon; No Mega Forms) vs. Jowy Atreides (Suiko1), Lyon (Suiko5), Geno (SMRPG)

Loser's Bracket
Team DRAGONS vs. Team Speedrun Special
Zog (BoF1), Sara (BoF1) and Ryu (BoF1) vs. Jeremy (WA4), Tidus (FFX), Jet (WA3)

Team Clones vs. Team Boss Rush
Chaz (PS4), Claude (SO2), Cress (ToP) vs. Lassic (PSes), Marcello (DQ8), Jenova (FF7)

Expect this to close within a week

24

Tournaments / Heavy Team Tourney - Loser's Bracket (Round 2)

« on: March 25, 2016, 03:56:55 PM »

Results from last week:
Winners: Swordskillers, Speedrun, Clones, Boss Rush. Clean sweep for all.

Matches this week:

Swordskillers vs. Dragons
Agrias, Meliadoul, Beowulf (FFT) vs. Zog (BoF1), Sara (BoF1) and Ryu (BoF1)

Speedrun vs Ladies Men
Jeremy (WA4), Tidus (FFX), Jet (WA3) vs. Edgar (FF6), Zelos (ToS), Ronfar (Lunar 2)

Clones vs Valentines
Chaz (PS4), Claude (SO2), Cress (ToP) vs. Keith Valentine (SH1), Joachim Valentine (SH2), Hilda Valentine (SH3)

Boss Rush vs Ragnarok
Lassic (PSes), Marcello (DQ8), Jenova (FF7) vs Hrist (VP2), Ull (VP2), Surt (VP1)

25

Tournaments / Heavy Team Tourney - Loser's Bracket

« on: March 18, 2016, 02:32:56 PM »

Results of Last week:
Winners  -Dragon Sandbags, Darkness, Here comes the Sun, Boom

The other 4 teams will head down to losers in the coming week (Dragons, Ladies Men, Valentine Reunion, Ragnarok). Gags won the tiebreaker.

This week's matches:

Team Lightbringers vs. Team Swordskillers
Raze (MK2), Kurando (SH2), Serge (CC) vs. Agrias, Meliadoul, Beowulf (FFT)

Team Princesses vs. Team Speedrun Special
Princess Toadstool, Nina2, Clarissa  vs. Jeremy (WA4), Tidus (FFX), Jet (WA3)

Team Clones vs. Team Perfect
Chaz (PS4), Claude (SO2), Cress (ToP) vs. Wakka (FFX), Wugui (SH), Alfina (G3)

Team Gags vs Team Boss Rush
Decus (SO2), Precis (SO2), Chu-chu (XG) vs. Lassic, Marcello, Jenova