#most of the other characters get bonuses if there are multiple Thems on the team

[fisheito]

Lost Relics keeps auto-forming this team bu...t

.Does me no good to have an all-yakumo team.... no Clone bonus ...

[the-monkey-ruler]

Street Fighter Duel (2020)

Date: November 26, 2020 Platform: iPhone / iPad / Android Developer: Topjoy Publisher: Tencent Games / Capcom Genre: Role-Playing Theme: Fantasy / Martial Arts Franchises: Street Fighter Type: Crossover

Summary:

Street Fighter: Duel is a free-to-play mobile game with gachapon systems, using the Capcom license to portray various characters and locations. The core of gameplay consists of assembling a team of four fighters, which can be supplemented in various ways. Three of those characters are active in battle, while the fourth is sidelined and only tags in for a Super move or when one of the main roster falls. Super moves are activated by performing regular attacks that fill a bar. An initial Super can be combo'd by up to three more special attacks, though the same fighter cannot follow up on themselves. It is, however, possible for characters to perform multiple Supers in the same chain, granted that they are the fighter who starts the chain, as long as they have that skill unlocked and it is not a consecutive combo.

In addition to the four fighters, up to two more can be attached to the roster as assists. These appended slots do not appear in combat but do boost the stats of the active line-up. Up to three more Ex Moves can be slotted into the party, which are powerful modifiers that can be activated during combat, but at the cost of a heavy cooldown cycle. Ex Moves can be acquired through very rare currency or by achieving a set of demanding missions. Most players will only see a few of these special attacks, which either destabilize enemies or heal the active party.

Each fighter on a roster has a specific class, such as Tank and so on, along with an elemental trait. There are six of these elements: Wind, Thunder, Flame, Infernal, Master, and Legendary.

The three regular elements can synergize with their respective trait, boosting stats on the roster, while the three specials work slightly differently. Legendary does not synergize at all. At best, the roster can have a synergy score of four members from one element, enhanced with two members of a different element that's equal to their respective trait. For example, four wind units and two fire units have a perfect synergy. As there are only four active slots, these fighters do not need to appear in the active roster, but can be placed as an assist as well.

As with any gacha games, characters range from a rating of C up to SSS, with an additional '+' subset. For instance, to get a unit from C to B, they would first need to be brought up to C+, before restarting the process from C+ to B.

Along with traditional leveling systems, which require a set of currencies, a fighter also comes with four equipment slots. As with most other systems in the game, the equipment can additionally be leveled by feeding leftover gear into them. Equipment levels up three times, raising more stats for that unit. Some gear has a certain element attached to it. One of the dozen or so microtransactions possible, but also one of the more egregious ones

Currency is acquired mostly by clearing objectives, as well as the act of idling. Resources, as well as gear, will actor accrue the longer a player waits to collect them, up to a certain amount of time. The premium currency of gems can only be acquired through various objectives, as well as obtained by purchasing them through microtransactions, naturally.

Other microtransactions can include a Battle Pass system, login bonuses or the purchase of fighters with a different cosmetic look than their main counterpart. Some transactions can go upward to three figures.

Source: https://www.giantbomb.com/street-fighter-duel/3030-84502/

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZMb6ggHE_8

[wainwrightjakobshammerlock]

this flopped on reddit so i hope y'all like it more

So, hi. It's been a very long while since I've talked about my OC Vault Hunters here, and, well... things have changed. And I'm better at wording things.

Here's my... well, I wouldn't say propositions, more like full blown concepts for the entire BL4 VH team.

Basics

First thing: there's 8 classes, and not 4. The Watcher did say we'd need as many as we can get.

In my head, 6 of them are base-game, and the last two are DLC. Coincidentally, the last two are mechanically unusual classes compared to the rest of the team (and even to the rest of the Vault Hunters across games), and happen to essentially be multiple people in one playable character - to keep the gender balance, you see: the team already consisted of two dudes, two dudettes and two buddies before I realized I wanted to add more, so the last two are "multiples".

Second thing: I am a lore guy, so I know barely anything about game balance... but I do know some things about game design, and I do in fact have played these games (wow!), so I'd like to think I know what I want to see in these games... BUT I can't escape bias, and I love the way TPS skilltrees were designed, so if you don't like skilltrees encouraging you HEAVILY to use a very specific weapon type, this is probably not the post for you.

Third thing: This is going to be long, but I tried to make it as readable as possible.

Fourth thing: I will be using the BL3 multiple action skill/augment system here, since I like it a lot.

With that out of the way, let's actually get into it.

Lazarus as the Prodigy

Once an urchin scrambling for zir life in the alleyways, now adopted child and protege of the most notorious powercouple in the galaxy (Alistair Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs, if it wasn't obvious by zir Jakobs-style attire). Also, ze likes bugs.

Key Words: Sniper, "Soft" Melee, Non-Elemental, Bleed/Stun

Action Skill: Sheer Focus - essentially, an activated gun boosting ability similar to Fade Away, but instead of automatic criticals, it grants Laz the ability to focus shots for a duration. Focusing - or rather, charging - takes a bit of time, but when focused to the maximum, it can do insane damage. The catch is that the "Focus Bonus", even when charged to the max, will be divided by both the pellet count of the weapon and the burst-fire count if it has one, meaning you are heavily encouraged to use those good ol' semi-autos.

And let's not even talk about what happens when you use a fully automatic...

Gimmick: Swappable melee overrides. Each tree has one "starter" override, and additional ones are unlocked the further you go down the tree.

Sheer Focus has a long cooldown and pretty much just exists to boost damage - the overrides are where the real utility is, and are usually available more often. It's sort of like a secondary action skill that you don't really sacrifice a button for.

Do you want to reflect enemy fire with a single stroke of a rapier? Do you want to throw gunpowder in their face and watch them explode when you shoot them? Or maybe take out a banjo and smack them on the head? Lazarus can do all of that.

Additionally, Laz has two other somewhat unique things that aren't unique to specific skill trees:

something called Deadeye Skills, which trigger on crit (or crit-kill, if it's a Deadeye Kill Skill) and are grouped up in a manner similar to Fl4k's Hunter Skills.

great usage of bleed and stun status. Bleed is the same as it was in TPS, a non-elemental damage over time effect. Stun disables the enemy, preventing them from moving or attacking - for obvious reasons, badasses and bosses cannot be stunned and will simply take a bit more damage if they would be stunned by an attack.

Skill Trees: You're in luck here, because I actually made a full detailed skill tree for the Prodigy already. Read it here if you like walls of text.

If you don't, here's a summary:

Green Tree: Legacy - Critical hits. Loads of Deadeye Skills. Major bonuses to Sheer Focus. Not much to say here.

Red Tree: Tradition - Gun damage, heavily favoring non-elemental weapons. Get those FAT one-shots, as the slogan says.

Blue Tree: The New Path - Melee focus. Staying on the move, weaving melee strikes between gunshots, and the bleed/stun status effects I mentioned above. Maybe it's not fair, but who really cares when you can make your enemies into but a fine red mist.

Bartholomew as the Butler

An old model of Jakobs brand butlerbot, deactivated many years ago and only recently turned back on by an unknown variable. Took up vault hunting as a means of... venting his frustrations, so to speak.

Key Words: Berserker, "Hard" Melee, Support, Health Management

Gimmick: Everyone else has a skill-related gimmick, so Bartholomew's gimmick is not having one. Let me know if you can think of one for him.

Action Skills:

Gearshift - fully heals the player and reloads all weapons. Grants a movement and weapon swap speed buff for a short time afterwards

All Out Attack - a large dash with a punch at the end. Has multiple charges. Can be cast multiple times on the same enemy or chained to others.

Overclock - large damage and fire rate buff at the cost of constantly taking damage.

Skill Trees:

Green Tree: Servitude (Gearshift) - A very strange twist on a support tree. Servitude has an entire swathe of team support skills, all of which activate on (mostly) controllable actions such as reloading a gun or reviving an ally. The thing is, upon these buffs activating, Bart takes health damage.

Red Tree: Rage (All Out Attack) - Melee damage, with a focus on increasing melee speed, taking/healing/ignoring damage, not having a shield and mashing that V button into oblivion.

Blue Tree: Restraint (Overclock) - Remember Nisha's Order? This is basically that, to 11. Upon losing a percentage of health, Bartholomew will gain a Restraint stack. Stacks give a variety of buffs, and can even be spent for certain triggered abilities.

Scylla as the Siren

A member of Junpai-7's pirate royalty, disgraced from her home when she became a Phasesight siren. For many decades, she's been wandering the galaxy as a hermit wizard of sorts, and now in her old age she returns to find the Vault, in hopes of preventing some sort of war that she foresaw.

Key Words: Siren, Shock Damage, Crowd Control, Mobility~~, Discount Spellshot~~

Gimmick: Can equip two action skills at once at the cost of sacrificing her grenade slot. Unlike Zane, she has no real way to use grenades, because who needs them when you can electrocute your enemies to death with your bare hands?

Her skill trees also contain (sometimes radically different) variants of the tree's main skill just like Amara, so you can really customize your setup.

Action Skills:

Phasemancy - mind controls an enemy, making them fight for you for a reasonably long duration. Also makes them invincible, though they die instantly when the effect ends. Badasses and bosses can't be mancied, for obvious reasons.

Phasestasis - spawns a large dimensional field, slowing down everything in its radius for a medium duration and causing shock status. Can be re-cast in a different place as long as it's active, but you can't spam-move it.

Phasebolt - a simple shock damage projectile that is precise and deals high damage. Multiple charges.

Skill Trees:

Green Tree: Clairvoyance (Phasemancy) - Mind and some battlefield control, with a bit of sniping for brainy flavor - but rather than using sniping for damage, you'll be using it for utility. Tons of status effect bonuses. Stealing enemy shields and staying ahead of the battle's speed by manipulating it.

Red Tree: Storm Terror (Phasestasis) - Mobility, with a little twist. Rewards not just moving fast, but also staying airborne, jumping, sliding and whatnot. Double jump. Sprinting and shooting. Amp shots for free.

Blue Tree: Wizardry (Phasebolt) - Action skill damage spam, and rewards for doing so. The main deal of this tree is Flow stacks, gained upon using action skills. At base, they don't do much aside from bonus Shock damage - the deal is, you can spend them for other things. Electromagnetic flight, ignoring FFYL and various techniques too strong for those not versed in the arcane arts.

Samuel as the ~~Problem~~ Primordial

Before the incident, he was just a normal Tediore employee working in R&D. Now, he is a vessel of the Vault Monster Uyrru, a locust-like ancient horror. He seeks the Vault both for his "other self", and to figure out what the f/ck is going on.

Key Words: Wildcard, Radiation Damage & Status, Survivability/DR, Ammo Economy, Armor

Gimmick: In a manner similar to Moze, Sam has only one Action Skill, which at base does almost nothing aside from disabling all means of attack. But when you equip Mutations onto it, that's when it gets interesting.

Action Skills: Transform - turns Samuel into his Vault Monster-ish form. As said above, at base it only gives some damage reduction. But when considering Mutations, one can turn Samuel into a:

pestilent master of disease, spawning hordes of bugs from his body.

miniature black hole, hovering over the battlefield and emitting huge waves of radiation.

feral creature, slashing at the enemy with humongous claws.

variety of other things.

Transform does have augments too, but they are not specific to a certain Mutation.

Skill Trees: I have a full skill tree for him as well... but it's still a heavy work in progress, so I won't be sharing it here just yet. Here's the summary:

Green Tree: Resourcefulness - Ammo/grenade stuff. Unlike Moze's tree, this one actually somewhat encourages reloading. Instead of gaining ammo in your mag, Samuel simply picks up more ammo from pickups or even gains back a bit of a weapon's mag when he reloads. Sometimes you need to make most of what you get instead of summoning it out of thin air.

Red Tree: Eldritch Potential - Radiation damage and utility tree, with a bit of splash. Curiously enough it encourages Samuel to get statused, and keep rad status on enemies. Power at a price. But you do get immunity to Radiation!

Blue Tree: Perseverance - Survivability tree. Not that special, aside from the fact it tends to give DR instead of the usual health/shield capacity like most survivability trees. Tends to be more effective the closer to death you are. Also, allows you to gain armor, because it'd be funny to have a VH with three health bars.

Val as the Fanatic

Former member of the CoV, Valor was given the role of Saint of Sparks and Honor. Even after the Calypsos fell, they try to find spiritual guidance and enlightenment in the Vaults. Half blind, has taken a vow of silence and speaks through a floating drone which follows nearby and relays messages through neural uplink.

Key Words: Splash Damage, Support, Healing~~, BIG DAMAGE ALL THE TIME FOREVER~~

Gimmick: Has the option to equip two grenades at once, which synergizes extremely well with their skills, as many of them activate on grenade thrown.

Action Skills:

Battle Prayer - somewhat minor team gun stat buff, but lingers for a reasonably long time.

Dodge Roll - exactly what it sounds like, gives i-frames. Does not trigger "action skill start" effects, not that Val has any of those in their skill tree.

Deep Pockets - forsakes an Action Skill entirely for the ability to equip two grenade mods.

Skill Trees:

Green Tree: Spirit (Battle Prayer) - A variety of team-wide support skills that reward the team for actually sticking together and helping one another. Buffs Val themselves too, of course. Has a few health restoring abilities as well.

Red Tree: Faith (Dodge Roll) - Insane fire rate! Mag sizes that would make Moze weep! Melee damage! All for the low low price of your enemies' lives and all of your accuracy! Vault-Gods, take the wheel!

Blue Tree: Piety (Deep Pockets) - Splash damage, especially grenades. Mostly focused on radius and spamming rather than the splash damage itself being big. Insert Holy Hand Grenade reference here.

Alkimia as the Trooper

A mysterious, brooding woman who defected from an elite, secretive cyborg division of the Maliwan army upon being ordered to kill civillians. Is a poet-philosopher with an unusually calm demeanor for her line of work.

Key Words: Corporate Soldier, Elemental Damage, Status Effects and Interactions, Versatility, Gadgets/Utility, Mild RNG

Gimmick: May swap the element of her Action Skill, similar to Amara. Defaults to Corrosive, but can be changed to Cryo or Incendiary with enough skill point investment.

Action Skills:

Asclepios - a hovering drone shaped a bit like a snake which flies at enemies and attacks them with its elemental beam.

Reaction Globule - Alkimia throws a big ball of elemental sludge that bounces around and deals damage.

Traversal - dashes/teleports Alkimia forward like a Maliwan Flash trooper, dealing action skill damage to anything in her path. May ragdoll weaker enemies at the endpoint.

Skill Trees: I am also working on Alkimia's skill tree. Trying to figure out something really neat. Here's what I got so far.

Green Tree: Catalyst (Asclepios) - Elemental damage and status effects, with a small twist. Instead of just applying status, you want to combine status effects and react them with one another. Burn them with corrosive damage, electrolyze their skin, or abuse the laws of thermodynamics to combine Cryo and Incendiary.

Red Tree: Evolution (Reaction Globule) - General damage, with some Claptrap-esque randomness. The joke is that evolution is an organism trying to gain advantage in an unfavorable environment, and in this case the organism is the player. You better own a variety of guns. That's the price of experimental tech.

Blue Tree: Adaptability (Traversal) - Utility and some survivability (mostly elemental focused). Almost all of the passive bonuses in this tree change either with Alkimia's Action Skill Element, or with the conditions present on the battlefield.

Kat & Dawg as the Partners in Crime

A one-for-two Vault Hunter deal, Katherine and her tink wife Desmond have been sharpening their teeth (and blades) on heists big and small for ages, with Kat being the brawn and Dawg the mastermind of their operation. However, when they caught wind of the Vault, they immediately embarked on their biggest heist ever, the one that might just set them up for life.

Key Words: Pet Class, Inventory Management, Incendiary Damage, Stuns, Mild RNG

Gimmick: As said above, these two are a package deal, do not separate. While the player controls Kat, Dawg just piggybacks on top of her, occasionally commenting on combat or story beats.

The real deal is when these two enter combat. Kat may deploy Dawg with the action skill button, and the latter will stay deployed until she dies or is picked up. If she dies, she respawns back on Kat's back ready to be deployed again, somewhat similar to Fl4k's pets.

While Dawg is on the field, Kat can use her own action skill. (If Dawg dies, she can't, until Dawg is redeployed anew!) She has three, just like most others, but which one she equips also determines what kind of weapon Dawg will be wielding in combat.

Action Skills:

Trust Throw - summons Dawg back to Kat, then she immediately throws her back into the battlefield with a damage boost for a short time. Enemies hit ~~by THE TINK CANNONBALL~~ are stunned. Also heals Dawg back to full, because.... the power of love, or something.

Whirl 'Em - Kat gets out her trusty scrap-axe and spins it in a manner similar to the Brrzerker from Wonderlands, but with incendiary damage instead.

Mystery Bag - Kat takes out Dawg and her's bag of loot, and checks it for anything useful. The pool of what she can find is around 20ish different items with various small beneficial effects: free grenades that are thrown immediately, health hypos or even ancient Eridian doohickeys.

Skill Trees:

Green Tree: Battle Bond - Buffs the living daylights out of Dawg, and makes it more rewarding + easier to coordinate your movements with her. Pretend you're playing co-op in solo!

Red Tree: Destruction of Property - General damage, mostly in incendiary form. Rewards hard hitting weapons and attacks, maybe with a melee strike in there or two. A few kill skills for good measure.

Blue Tree: Larceny - Damage buffs and other benefits... dependent on picking up loot, eridium and cash. Gives a new meaning to the word "shloot". Additionally, a few "underhanded tactics" such as lowering vendor prices and increasing backpack space (to fuel a damage buff scaling off the fullness of your backpack). Think Timothy's Free Enterprise, but even weirder.

The Triad

Actually a trinity of Guardians inhabiting a nanobot swarm body, a corporate experiment at controlling these ancient constructs gone wrong. It tries its best to get along, and find itself in this strange world.

Key Words: Stances, Jack-of-All-Trades

Gimmick: In lieu of an action skill, the Triad switches between its three constituents - Supplicant (highly loyal to the Eridians, to the point of fanaticism), Seeker (neutral, but also the most sapient) and Sorcerer (Vault Monster cultist, corrupted by their influence eons ago) - in a way similar to stances in other games.

The switch itself does nothing, unless a certain skill is specced into that provides a short burst of beneficial effect when it occurs. However, a lot of the Triad's skills have different effects, elements or drawbacks depending on its current stance.

Action Skills: Spirit Switch - see above for details.

Skill Trees:

Green Tree: Supplicant - Focuses on team support, usually at the cost of damage. Can still reliably solo, however, thanks to having crowd control options.

Red Tree: Sorcerer - Focuses on pure damage, usually at the cost of survivability. Has elements of health management, as no price is too great for dark power.

Blue Tree: Seeker - Focuses on survivability and utility. Fairly scrappy, can manage ammo and identify enemy weaknesses.

Closing Words

I hope you all enjoyed this little creation of mine. I'm not... really sure what else to say here besides I love this series, and I love making things for it even more.

If you're curious what these Vault Hunters might look like, I drew all of them a while back.

Thank you for reading, and if you have any feedback regarding these concepts, or maybe your own fanmade Vault Hunters, feel free to comment.

[callmearcturus]

Out of curiosity, what would the premise of your dream Persona game be?

Well, let's see. What were the strong points of each game?

Persona 3 Portable: Girl Route. Team members have important relationships with each other instead of just orbiting the MC. Extremely strong theme. Structured in such a way that the player doesn't control what day they have a mandatory dungeon/plot event, making for better pacing. Best final boss. Best music. Greatest of the Best Friend guys. My favorite UX by far.

Persona 4 Golden: Best cast. Most interesting mystery. Was extremely queer, especially for the time. Most naturalistic writing. Best villain (not final boss). Easily the most polished script. Combat had the best balance of things to do and friction without being overcomplicated or simplistic.

Persona 5 Royal: Most interesting, sprawling location. Social link bonuses that matter. Jawdroppingly good bonus campaign. Best exploration. Only MC that fully feels like his own person. And I'll admit it, it has the best social links for NPCs.

So, the best Persona game would have:

A protagonist with as much personality as Joker but not gender locked. For the love of god just make a gender neutral protag.

Set it in another city that's based on a real place since it feels like real life designs better locations than Atlus does off the dome.

Honestly at this point I would love to see Persona do a game that doesn't take place in high school. I wanna see some young adults getting up to shit. If you absolutely need the school structure, then have it set in university/college. But the need for structure for the calendar can come from anything.

When everyone is cishet, the cast suffers. P5R proved it. (Okay, it's also because P5R literally has more teammates so no one gets properly developed but the cishetness does not help.) Lets get some queerness back in the cast, it does absolute wonders.

Morgana should be in it again. I don't know why or how, but I do know that carrying a cat around everywhere made Persona 5 was part of why I finished that fucking game.

I personally like the structure of having a central mystery with uncertain mechanics to solve, I think that's really engaging and helps with the episodic nature of Persona. However, once the mystery is solved, DO NOT ADD IN ANOTHER MASTERMIND CHARACTER WHO IS "REALLY" BEHIND IT ALL. JUST FUCKING STOP! GOD I HATE IT. Stop having a really cool set up and then deciding in the last 5 hours that a Mean God Did It All, I'm so DONE with that shit. Fuck Izanami and Fuck Yarblegarble.

While we're at it, if one more Persona game turns out to be a parable on how them kids are on their phones too much, I'm done.

Regarding music, either: A: Create multiple main battle themes so if they Fucking Suck again like in P4 it doesn't make your players want to scream by hour 30. B: Just use "Wiping All Out" again for the main battle theme. We're never going to surpass it, why not accept that.

LET THE PLAYER START A ROMANCE SEPARATE FROM SLINK RANKS. If I hit level 10 on someone and decide later I wanna date them, I should be able to do that. That way I can actually meet everyone, THEN decide who I wanna kiss.

Just gimme back Igor using shiny key of solomon shit to combine personae, fuck P5's edgelord bullshit. Also Margaret bc she was funny and also really hot and flirty.

Bring Maruki back just for funsies.

there we go, the perfect persona game

[miloscat]

[Review] 7th Dragon III: Code VFD (3DS)

The coolest RPG on two screens.

I’m not going to lie, the first thing that brought this game to my attention was the fact that one of the character designs is a big, clear, direct Jet Set Radio Future reference. But from that starting point I found lots more to love about it too. It has Sega legends Rieko Kodama (producer, director of Phantasy Star IV) and Yuzo Koshiro (composer) involved. I saw it recommended independently for its (somewhat) progressive queer representation, and just for being a solid RPG. And upon playing it I enjoyed the variety in combat, the side content, and the stylishness.

The 7th Dragon series started on DS, in what was essentially an Etrian Odyssey spinoff, with old-school dungeon crawling and customisable party members. The PSP sequel (and its direct follow-up) rebooted the setting to a probably Persona-inspired modern Tokyo along with an aesthetic refresh that saw manga artist Shirow Miwa take over as character designer, plus a shift to 3D graphics. Due to the demise of the developer Image Epoch, Sega gave the series to one of its in-house teams to wrap up the story on 3DS. This final instalment feels like a close continuation of the PSP games (reusing many assets as it does) but brings in time travel to revisit the original game’s setting.

It’s also the only game that was officially localised, although the other three have fan translations. I hadn’t played the others; knowing a little about them helps to bolster this game’s story but it does its best to fill in new players. The primary setting is 100 years after the PSP games in a semi-post-apocalyptic Tokyo. Otherworldly dragons have devastated Earth and you find yourself employed by a video game company which is a front for training dragon hunters. Later you travel to the past of ethereal Atlantis and the first game’s fantasy era, which is now established to be 5000 years in the future. There’s some twists and “turns out”s as you might expect, some of them pretty interesting, but it all eventually descends into faux-high-minded philosophising about evolution and the well-worn JRPG trope of a handful of teenagers defying destiny and killing God.

Oh well, at least getting there is fun. RPGs with time travel are my jam, and so is the theme of bringing together different eras and different people to a common cause. I liked expanding the office building hub zone as you progress, unlocking new functions and side activities with a little corporate satire thrown in. This includes housing refugees from the disparate time periods, so you’ll see your home base become more populated and people interacting through the side quests, not to mention the fleshing out of the main casts’ tragic backstories (but not the blank-slate PCs). You even rescue cats in dungeons to fill out a cat cafe!

The Etrian roots persist in the party composition mechanics; you can make new characters at any time, and while they are designed after the specific classes available, appearance is not tied to their role. There’s a decent range of appearances, all with two gender variants, and a host of known seiyū providing their voiced barks. I started my save from the free demo, which carries over to the full game and gives you some bonuses; this meant my initial team had default settings but I liked them and was attached to them at that point so continued with them (the demo line-up also includes the most JSRF guy—the logo is even on his shirt!—so I was happy). Later you get two backup teams that you can swap between on the fly, and which enable various in-battle support mechanics. This also unlocks new class types and appearances for further customisation.

There’s a lot of depth to character abilities. Every class feels versatile with their own buffs and debuffs, and multiple types that have healing skills. My main party had the schoolgirl samurai, the Jet Set “agent” with hacking and gun skills, and the all-around combo attacker/buffer/healer “godhand”. Experimentation is encouraged, and building your skill trees how you like is satisfying. The game isn’t too difficult but fights do require some strategy as you go on. Luckily there’s a difficulty toggle you can change anytime outside of battle, and if you lose there’s a Mario and Luigi-style option to restart the battle immediately. My ultimate party maybe wasn’t the most tactical, as I just wanted one of everything, so the very final postgame dungeon and DLC quest were beyond my scope; you need some really tailored parties and careful play to get through those marathon battles, even at level 99 with the best gear. Speaking of DLC, I recommend at least the “seed outbreak” mission pack for efficient grinding (you will very soon have to pirate this on custom firmware due to the shutdown of the 3DS eShop).

I’m pleased I took a punt on this. It’s a slick modernisation of the dungeon-crawler format with an interesting setting and some memorable characters. It makes good use of the second screen for maps, and your backup parties in battles. It took me a breezy 35 hours, with all sidequests done. I recommend it, even without playing the previous games!

[conrad-browne]

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[hiram-evelina]

Boost Your Gameplay with a Genesis Crystal Purchase in Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact has quickly become one of the most popular free-to-play games since its release in 2020. As an open-world action RPG, players are immersed in the visually stunning world of Teyvat and its seven nations, each offering rich stories, characters, enemies, and secrets to discover. While the core game is free, to truly enhance your adventure, purchasing the in-game currency Genesis Crystals can give your gameplay a big boost.

What are Genesis Crystals?

Genesis Crystals are the premium currency in Genshin Impact that can be used to obtain the Battle Pass, Blessing of the Welkin Moon, and convert directly into the non-premium currency, Primogems. Primogems in turn are used to acquire Wishes for unlocking new characters, weapons, and other rewards. As Genesis Crystals are the direct gateway to Wishes, purchasing them is the fastest way to amplify your gaming experience.

Key Benefits

Immediate access to Primogems for Wishes

Higher chance of getting rare characters and items

Unlock Battle Pass rewards faster

Obtain Blessing of the Welkin Moon bonuses

Making Your Crystal Purchase

When looking to purchase Genesis Crystals in Genshin Impact, it’s important to find a reliable and secure third-party seller. This ensures you receive your crystals safely without risk of scam. LootBar is a highly trusted marketplace for gaming currencies and items. They offer Genesis Crystals at cheaper rates than direct in-game purchases.

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Enhancing Your Adventure

Here are some of the key ways you can spend your purchased Genesis Crystals in Genshin Impact to unlock new adventures:

Obtaining New Characters

Without a doubt, the highlight of Genshin Impact is building your dream team of characters. Each has their own playstyle, personality, and backstory to discover. Using your Crystals to acquire Wishes gives you more chances to obtain 5-star and 4-star characters from the rotating banners. This lets you try out new party combinations and combat strategies.

Upgrading Weapons

As you journey through Teyvat, you’ll collect an array of weapons for your characters to equip. Like characters, weapons also have a rarity tier. Using Wishes, you can obtain 5-star and 4-star weapons that offer large attack bonuses and secondary stats boosts for your characters. This makes tackling enemies and bosses much smoother.

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Unlocking Constellations

When you receive duplicate characters from Wishes, you obtain their Constellation which offers buffs to various attributes like HP, attack, and critical rate. Unlocking multiple Constellations can transform an average character into a powerhouse in combat. More Constellations also unlock additional skills and gameplay perks.

Start Your Adventure Today

Whether you’re a new player stepping into Teyvat for the first time or a seasoned veteran, using Genesis Crystals to unlock new characters, weapons, and upgrades will greatly amplify your adventure. With reliable sellers like LootBar offering safe Genesis Crystal transactions, you can boost your Genshin Impact gameplay without worries.

So gather your party, stock up on precious Crystals, and let the exploring begin! The magical world of Teyvat awaits.

[cometcrystal]

oh dang man i’m sorry 😅, idk peanuts characters in highschool

peppermint patty, marcie, and franklin go to a different school in the strip, but i'm hcing they all go to the same high school once theyre older so i can have them all in one place. more convenient.

charlie brown is a very average student. straight Bs and Cs. he is on the football team but does a lot of benchwarming. starts struggling even more with his depression but it leads to him starting meds in college so it turns out ok this is just a rough patch for him

linus still carries his blanket but in some modified form where it's smaller and fits in his hand easier while he's in class. maintains a lot of his old habits actually. he changes the least i think. the ONE thing i will take from dog sees god is that linus is a stoner bc it just fits him but not the way they did it.

lucy is very involved in multiple clubs and such. taking as many AP classes as possible (or whatever the 1960s equivalent of that is). people outside her friend group tend not to like her very much. gets into the occasional fistfight which always draws a crowd. at least two of them are with frieda. she ends up the valedictorian of her class

schroeder is still quiet and doesn't really talk to anyone outside his immediate circle, nor does he feel the need to. gets good grades but also doesn't really aim high since his main focus is getting into a music college. people are always surprised when they realize he's not in the marching band

sally is 2 grades behind the rest of the gang but insists on hanging out with them anyway. she’s 10000% the type to pass notes in class and does so frequently with eudora. she still calls linus her sweet babboo despite not being interested in him anymore. her grades would be terrible if charlie brown didn’t help her with her homework.

peppermint patty is on every sports team the school will allow her to be on. she's always failing at least two classes but some of her teachers will try to work with her cause they see what a talented athlete she is and don't want her transcript to suffer. she's pretty popular by virtue of being a fun person, definitely the most universally-liked out of the gang, but she's still stubborn

marice is in the same camp as schroeder: gets good grades but doesn't aim very high. she's in more honors stuff/clubs than he is though just for the resume bonuses. she's still very deadpan and has not learned an ounce of social grace but gets a boost from being associated with her all-star girlfriend

violet and patty behave like they roll with the "popular" crowd but they are still very much a part of this loser clique (and the peanuts gang IS the weird kid group). they're still inseparable and are generally thought of as a single unit when making plans for get-togethers. until 12th grade they are both ignorant to the fact that they are gay, specifically for each other, and a lot of unnecessary, unconscious pining happens

that's all the main kids i think. charlie brown starts spending more time with both franklin and heather and bonds with both of them a lot. pig pen still goes by pig pen and corrects the teachers when they call his real name on the roll. honestly not a lot changes except for the fact that some of them can drive now and they're generally more self-aware of themselves as human beings (not completely, but theyr'e getting there).

[iturbide]

Is there any game you really like but never had the chance to talk about?

gosh I have a lot of very quiet game interests that just never come up because basically all the asks I get are about Fire Emblem (not that it's bad, because I certainly write a lot of it)

The big ones I've already talked about at least in brief. The main ones are Pokemon, which I keep doing crossovers for; and Ace Attorney, which I think I've been into longer than Fire Emblem (and I have at least a hundred thousand words of ancient fic to prove it). But I've also been a big fan of the Assassin's Creed series since the first game, and that's definitely not something that comes up all that often: I do have one crossover between Awakening and Assassin's Creed generally, taking a lot of elements that make the series what it is and weaving them into the Awakening setting, but that's about as close as I've come to really talking about it.

The really big one at this point has to be Dragalia Lost, though. It's another Nintendo mobile game that doesn't seem to get a lot of press, but it's somehow everything I really wanted in a mobile game I think?

There's actual meat to its story: it takes a while to play through even one chapter because there's so much to read and engage with, and it has an interesting plot that develops through both the main story chapters and the other events

The events are also amazing. They do some really interesting, really unexpected things with their events, including several that are basically Lovecraftian horror stories (lookin' at you Accursed Archives) -- and they're gradually making these old events available to all players at any time through the Event Compendium, rather than forcing newer players to wait for a re-run or just retiring them entirely

It doesn't do the dark is evil thing. The Shadow roster is incredible and I love the main Shadow Dragon so much I can't even also the main dragon pseudo-deity is handled in a way that seems like it was basically made for me

It gives out a lot of free characters, both through the story and through a specific class of event, and they hold up well in the game's meta

They also put in the effort to keep old characters relevant rather than just phasing them out: the power-ups from those upgrades have made some of the free and launch characters the best in the meta for certain content

Virtually every character has a unique story that you can read to get a better understanding of who they are as a person, and some of them are really intensely emotional

They also show their main story characters a lot of love. Not only do they feature in every chapter, giving attention to the bonds and interactions between their core cast, but most of those main story characters have multiple alts at this point (which is good for me, because I love Luca so much he's a character I will always go for broke on when I see a new alt)

It's primarily co-op rather than competitive, meaning you're working together with other players from around the world to achieve a common goal

The developers actually pay attention to the game's balance and address issues, up to and including boosting the power of all characters outside of the Shadow roster when they realized people were just using their Shadow teams to clear everything because they were so outrageously overpowered compared to every other element

The developers also pay attention to feedback and overhaul old systems to make them more streamlined, intuitive, and user-friendly (which they've done with both branches of the equipment system within the past two years)

The game is constantly updating with new challenging modes for high-level players to take on and newer ones to look forward to meeting once they progress

Those same modes also keep throwing new challenges at players that can cripple some of the main meta contenders, letting characters that might have fallen out of use to find a niche where they excel.

It's unbelievably generous when it comes to summoning, compared to other games I've seen. They set new players up with a 5-star character and give them challenges to earn guaranteed 5-star vouchers for dragons or adventurers to get them started on solid footing. On top of that, not only do they give out a free tenfold summon voucher with every major update and for pretty much every major event, they give players TONS of single summon vouchers, lots of wyrmite (including log-in bonuses, new quests on every difficulty level, returning events, adventurer and dragon stories, and endeavors), and not-infrequent free summon events -- there's one starting Monday where we basically get 250 free summons (14 days of free tenfold summons and one day of 100 free summons). AND THERE'S A SPARK SYSTEM.

There's no advantage for whales. No, seriously: when you summon a duplicate adventurer, you get Eldwater instead of the character, which is used to promote 3- and 4-star adventurers, enhance their abilities, or upgrade equipment. If you see someone with a strong character, you can rest assured that with enough effort, yours can be exactly as strong as theirs without paying a cent (which I know because that's literally how I did it).

I could go on for ages about Dragalia okay it's just a really enjoyable game and I engage with that more eagerly on a daily basis than I have with Heroes in several years.

[fridge-reviews]

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

Developer: The Bearded Ladies Publisher: Funcom Rrp: £29.99 (Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic) Released: 4th December 2018 Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard Approximate game length: 20 Hours

The world ain't what it was. Least, that's what the elder says. In the time before, before the bombs, before the plague, before the melted caps... the Ancients stood tall. Proud of their world of steel and glass. They were like gods. But those times are gone. And now here we are a couple of mutants picking for scrap among mud and metal marvels that we'll never understand.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a tactical squad based adventure game that is based on a tabletop role-playing game from Sweden bearing the same name (that being Mutant Year Zero). The game is set in the remnants of a world that had been bathed in nuclear fire hundreds of years before. In that time the world has recovered somewhat, with lush foliage reclaiming most of the world. At the start your team consists of Dux and Bormin, who are a very large bipedal, smart mouthed water fowl and a tough talking, rough and tumble walking boar man. More are added to your team as you play, but you can only have three active in the squad at a time.

The members of your squad are known as 'Stalkers', which is a term I've heard a lot of European countries, Russia and its surrounding nations use. I believe the term originates from a book called 'The Roadside Picnic'... not a particularly relevant fact to this review but I thought it interesting.

The game uses real time exploration of its maps while having turn based squad combat similar to that of XCOM. However, unlike XCOM this game isn't mission based. Instead there is the world of 'The Zone' to explore that consists of multiple small maps that can be traversed through. Throughout the game you will likely find yourself needing to return to your home base known as 'The Ark' in order to modify your weapons and gain special perks. Thankfully there's a fast travel system so you don't have to manually travel through areas you've been to before, unless you really want to.

While you wander The Zone you'll find quite a lot of scrap and weapon parts scattered around. Scrap is the currency used to buy goods while weapon parts are needed to upgrade your weapons. Along side these are artefacts. Artefacts are items from the time of the Ancients that are traded in for special abilities and bonuses (they serve no other purpose) these can range from a permanent discount at the store through to increasing your chances for a critical hit.

Certain characters are better for certain situations, for example Dux is almost entirely geared toward being a sniper while Bormin is much more about taking the brunt of the enemies attacks and distracting the enemy. This is mostly down to the mutations that unlock as your squad levels up. Each character has their own 'mutation tree', similar to the skill trees found in the Borderlands series, and what skills you pick will somewhat dictate how you use the character.

When you encounter a hostile, which is extremely regularly, you'll see that each on has what I call a 'zone of awareness' that surrounds them. This zone represents how far they can see or hear. When you enter into stealth you can decrease the zones size, this is done by simply turning off your torch. Doing this will slow down your movement but also allow you to plan how to ambush the enemy... or sneak past.

This game suffers from some, what I like to call, eurojank. Which is some small elemental of the game that doesn't quite work as intended. A fine example of this is when you control a character and sneak, if your companions are following you the enemy AI will ignore them so long as your character is hidden regardless of how obvious they are.

The game ends abruptly after what I think is a major plot hook, I assume that this is explored in more depth in the DLC (which I will be getting) or perhaps a sequel. Still, I have to say that the time I got out of this game I thoroughly enjoyed, I must admit though that the difficulty ramps up extremely quickly so be prepared for a challenge.

If this appeals to you perhaps try;

The X-COM Series The Fallout Series

[baphomet-media]

Getting Psyched - A The World Ends With You Retro Review

Genre: Adventure Subgenre: JRPG Developer: Square Enix, Jupiter Publisher: Square Enix Platform(s): DS Release Date: July 27th, 2007 Hours Played: 42 hours this playthrough

You’ve almost certainly heard of this game, especially if you’re into JRPGs. When a game advertises itself as being “from the team that made Kingdom Hearts,” I was sold instantly as a kid. One look at the game’s box art confirms that Tetsuya Nomura had a hand at this game with his distinctive bold art style. But the game itself was something that nobody at the time had predicted. The game has an urban fantasy story unlike much that had been told at the time. Furthermore, the game was made to push the DS to its limits and create a battle system that could only work on the DS’s two screens. Does this cult classic live up to the hype, or is it just a janky mess? Let’s find out.

Story

TWEWY opens by introducing our protagonist, an antisocial teen named Neku Sakuraba. Neku unexpectedly awakens in the iconic scramble crossing of Shibuya, Tokyo. To his surprise, the crowds seem to walk right through him, and a strange pin appears in his hand that allows him to read the thoughts of passersby. Neku quickly learns that he has been thrust into the Reapers’ Game, a seven-day death game where the Players are the recently deceased that must partner up to fight the Noise, hostile part-animal-part-tribal-graffiti creatures that seek to erase the Players. What’s more, each day Players must complete missions given to them by the Reapers within strict time limits while avoiding the reapers themselves. If they can make it to the end of the week, they might just be able to return to life.

Along the way, Neku will meet a chaotic cast of characters including Shiki, the headstrong seamstress who is eventually able to get Neku out of his angsty shell, Beat and Rhyme, a pair of street-smart siblings with heavy 2000’s skater vibes, Joshua, an abrasive, sarcastic, literal Christ figure who’s somehow a good guy? Or maybe he’s a bad guy? Or… maybe he’s a good guy again? On top of that, the Reapers themselves vary wildly from the contrasting duo of the laid-back Kariya and the high-strung Uzuki to the lone radical Minamimoto. The game does a good job of having a full roster of characters without overloading the player. Furthermore, while most characters seem wacky at first, they all have motivations and layers behind them that become clearer as you progress through the story.

Without spoiling anything, nothing is as it seems in the Reaper’s game, and multiple parties are vying for control for different reasons, meaning the whole thing feels like one big political intrigue story on top of an urban JRPG. Even on my most recent replay after having played the game countless times over the years, I was hungry to put the pieces together. While the main storyline mostly follows Neku’s perspective and doesn’t explain a lot of the behind-the-scenes interactions and motivations of the secondary characters, the game fortunately has a Secret Reports feature, which are written by a certain character who seems to know way more than they let on. These Secret Reports are near essential to understanding the game’s true story, and reveal whole layers to the plot and world that the main story doesn’t even touch on.

Needless to say, I loved the story of TWEWY. Everything feels perfectly crafted, leaving no loose ends, while still leaving the player wanting more. If anything I wanted to see more of Neku and his friends after the game’s conclusion just hanging out in real life.

Gameplay

TWEWY is a JRPG, but in the loosest sense possible. In the overworld, the player controls Neku, guiding him around the various streets of Shibuya on the touch screen or with the face buttons. Unlike in traditional RPGs, outside of story events the player must deliberately initiate combat with the Noise. By scanning their environment they can read the surface thoughts of passersby, but also reveal noise symbols in the environment. By tapping on these symbols, the player can queue up battles with the noise, and can even chain multiple battles together for back-to-back fights that multiply your drop rate.

In battle, Neku and his partner are sent to separate Zones, with Neku on the touch screen and his partner on the top screen. Neku fights the noise by activating the abilities of pins he has equipped, called Psychs. Each psych has its own activation method, from swiping on an enemy to tapping empty space, to scratching on the screen, to shouting into the microphone, and more. It’s up to the player to equip Neku with the best pins, though pins level up as they are used, becoming more powerful and sometimes evolving into even stronger pins.

On the top screen, Neku’s partner fights the noise by using the DS’s face buttons to move through a combo map and select certain finishers. By selecting the right finishers, you can charge your Sync gauge to perform a powerful special attack. Both characters share an HP gauge, damage to each character subtracting from each side. If you’re following along, that means the game expects you to control both Neku and his partner at the same time. This can be tricky for new players, but you quickly get used to it. Additionally, you can have your partner auto-fight with a customizable delay, meaning you technically don’t have to control your partner at all. However, if you really want to deal major damage and wipe the floor with the Noise on higher difficulties, you’ll want to master battling with both characters at once. When I first played the game in 2007, I found the parner battling to be too difficult to keep up with, but now that I’m older and more experienced, I find the combat to be incredibly deep and rewarding. Additionally, the game rewards back-and-forth control of Neku and his partner with the Light Puck mechanic. Essentially, when one character performs a combo finisher, the light puck is passed to the other character, and passed back when that character does a finisher. In this way, you can build up a damage multiplier based on how quickly you rally the light puck. This creates a natural back-and-forth flow of using Neku until his psychs discharge, then getting a few hits in with his partner, and so on.

My only complaint about battles is that in later fights on higher difficulty the Noise will attack so frequently on the partner’s zone that it’s difficult to get attacks off with them at all. Your partner has a limited block/dodge, but it only does so much and there’s often tons of Noise attacking at once. It’s not insurmountable, but it can be frustrating at times.

Outside of battle, the player must constantly keep up with a few things, food, swag, and difficulty. Both Neku and his partner can eat food and wear clothing purchased from many shops around Shibuya. Food offers an up-front bonus as well as a permanent stat increase once the food is digested by completing battles. However, you can only digest so many times per real-time day, meaning you have to prioritize high-calorie foods before smaller snacks. I found the digestion limit to be a bit too limiting. It can be removed in the post-game, but it still makes food hard to deal with for someone that is effectively bingeing the game.

Swag are articles of clothing that offer flat stat increases, but also have abilities that are unlocked by showing it to the right store clerk. Each clerk can unlock the abilities of specific clothing, and you can unlock more by buying enough stuff from them to fill up their Friendship Gauge. I thought it was fun to slowly make friends with each store clerk, and I felt bad that I couldn’t hang out with them or reciprocate some of their obvious advances, though I’m sure it’s assumed that Neku cherishes his friendships with them after the game’s conclusion. However, you can’t just equip any old piece of clothing to any character. Neku can’t just pull off a dress and cargo shorts right off the bat. Each piece of clothing has a Bravery rating, with characters whose bravery is below that rating being unable to wear the clothing. Fortunately, bravery increases as you level up, and can also be increased by eating food. By the end of the game, you’ll be able to have Neku and company wearing whatever clothing you want.

Lastly there’s Difficulty. The game has four main difficulty levels, being Easy, Normal, Hard, and Ultimate. You begin the game in Normal, but once you unlock a difficulty, you can change it on the fly from the pause menu. On easier difficulty enemies have less HP and deal less damage, but you get fewer XP and worse pins. The reverse is true on higher difficulties, with some of the best pins in the game being available exclusively as drops on Ultimate difficulty. To aid you in this, you can also change your level at any time. Unlike in a standard RPG where your level is immutable to the player aside from leveling up, in TWEWY you can freely choose your level from one to the highest level you have achieved. For each level below your max that you set your level, you get a multiplier for drops. This can be combined with the battle chaining multiplier to get ultra rare drops, some of which have less than 1% and even less than 0.1% drop chances normally. This gives the player an incentive to level up aside from just stat bonuses, and rewards players who go out of their way to engage in battles. As above, battles are largely optional, but it heavily behooves the player to battle as much as they can, not only because you get drops and experience, but increasing your level gives you more wiggle room for harder fights such as bosses.

There are tons more smaller features, but these are the main ones. I thoroughly enjoyed the vast depths of the game’s mechanics and found the difficulty settings to be really engaging and a novel approach to RPG player advancement while still affording accessibility. I was enthralled for multiple hours as I struggled to get the best gear, feed my team the best food, and equip the best pins to get as strong as possible. Until the very end of the postgame, it never felt like mindless grinding, as you can just breeze through the story on Easy if you really want to, but where would be the fun in that?

Presentation

TWEWY is probably best known for its vibrant and bold incredibly urban street-art-themed style, which shows in not only the art, but the UI, music, and writing. The character art is that hard-outlined and overdressed Nomura art style that fans of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts have come to love, and the backgrounds are all vibrant and stylized to fit. The pixel art of the character sprites and Noise are all incredibly expressive, with Neku’s idle animation as he jams out to tunes on his headphones being one of my favorites.

The game’s music is unabashedly lyrical, covering a vast array of genres including JPop, Punk, and Hip-Hop, with many different styles of each. I loved almost every song in the game, though I found one of the overworld themes to be a bit grating at times. Other than that, the music is pretty great, and what’s even better is you can buy CDs of each of the game’s songs in the game to have your own personal sound test right from the menu, even going as far as to allow you to set the background music on the menu itself.

The game even has voice acting, though it’s limited mostly to battle quips and wordless expressions for cutscenes. I actually really enjoyed the voice acting and thought they nailed each character. I was honestly surprised at the audio quality the developers were able to pack into this game. The music was a very slight bit tinny through the DS’s audio chip as is to be expected, but barring that the vocals and voice overs were super clear and the instrumentation of the songs were well mixed.

Overall, the game’s presentation is about as good as it gets on the DS, giving even home console games a huge run for their money.

Conclusion

Honestly it’s hard to say anything bad at all about TWEWY. The game was a bit hard to approach at the time, but it’s aged magnificently. These days, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it’s the best (at least non-Pokémon) game on the DS. Honestly though some might be turned off by the game’s quirks, I think TWEWY is a masterpiece that everyone with a DS should pick up and play. I can’t wait to see how the newly-released sequel stands up, but honestly the original is a tough act to follow.

Score: 10 / 10

[electronicdelusionstarlight]

Here’s the idea.

An RPG where you play as the most passive character possible.

It’s turn based and JRPG in style, and it’s pretty simple in concept.

You have no way to defeat anything alone. You are a Support Character and you have only moves to buff, heal or debuff characters. You CAN, possibly, use status effect to harm something of course but even that’s super gimicky. You can also use Items on people but that’s also either gimicky or another buff/debuff.

You basically cannot do shit alone, but you also need to survive the harsh fantasy world you are in.

In order to do so you need to get someone to fight alongside you.

The Isekai setting makes this easier to achieve but basically the start would be you getting thrown into a random, wild starting area with low level enemies and no contact with traditionally friendly NPCs. You cannot possibly survive alone with your level 1 powers either, but you start one scripted battle against three generic enemies, a Slime, a Goblin and a Wolf.

This initial battle works as tutorial for the game of sorts. Via the use of contextual cues, items, speech, powers and actions on your part, you’ll need to calm down at least one of the three enemies and have them switch to your side. When they do that for the battle, 

At the end of the battle the enemy will either leave you alone or do other action based on your actions during the battle and your reputation with their faction, among other things. The Goblin will have a reputation based on his tribe, while the Slime will have a race wide reputation since they are an hivemind. The wolf will have a reputation with his pack AND his race, and raising either of those will in turn lower other reputations and shit.

With enough personal reputation obtained in the first battle you meet them AND the post battle scene, you can gain them as a Minion. Minion will follow you in battle and will have their reputation of you fluctuate based on what you do from then on, and will be the ones who will do most of the damage in battle.

EVERY CHARACTER would be of course befriendable, not just hostile NPCs but also every single other NPCs in the game, but it’s all based on who or what you do during your game.

For example, befriending the wolf but not the slime and the goblin will lower the Slimes reputation of you since they felt their kin die through the hivemind, but the Goblin’s tribe will not lower their reputation until they find the body, and EVEN THEN they’d blame the wolves for it since it would have been the wolf killing the Goblin, lowering the reputation they have for the wolves. At the same time, the wolf you’ve just recruited (probably by using raw meat from your inventory) will in turn expect to be fed, groomed and sheltered by you from then on, and you’ll only gain a boost on the wide pack and wolf reputation when meeting other wolves, higher if belonging to the same pack, lower if just wolves, with a small gain on dogs or canid races such as kobolds or werewolves.

You cannot order the wolf to attack other wolves unless you’ve taken precautions for that (such as training, or creating magic items, or sending him against a rival pack for example) and at the same time it’s now difficult to recruit NPCs the wolf would attack on sight (so no bunny followers for you).

The NPCs you fight however also have reputations on an individual level of course. You can outright never recruit anyone and just convince any enemy you find that their friends are out to get them, or play on natural rivalries. You can also play on natural friendships between enemies to recruit multiple NPCs at once. You can for example convince the Goblin, the only one of the three first NPCs you can communicate with at first via its basic understanding of the common tongue, to join forces with you, and THEN have the Goblin tame the wolf since Goblins have a bonus on taming wolves. This way you don’t get two minions but you get the Goblin with a Wolf Mount, both of which untrained.

That’s all you can do. You can give some orders to the  NPCs you get on your side but in the end they’ll do their own thing, and all you can do it either buff, debuff, heal, use item or act (Think of this as a generic, Undertale act) with anyone in the field.

Your character is of course customizable the way you’d like for them to present themselves. First playthrough however will be locked behind the human race without any other affiliation but on following playthroughs you’ll be able to play as a race and affiliations and even classes you’ve befriended during the game. This will still lock you behind your set of options but you’ll now gain different starting reputations as well as some racial and class passive bonuses you’ll be able to use.

Reputation on a certain class/race/clan etc will also grant you passive bonuses mid game. If you had the goblin with wolf mount and you train them while outside of battle you’ll be able to give them buffs or new moves to use in fights. At the same time you’ll get the ability to barter with the Goblin Tribe of your starting goblin, access to their village, and a better understanding of their language, for starter, based on your reputation with the goblin and his tribe, BUT at the same time you’ll also gain levels in Wolf Rider based on your reputation with the one goblin rider you have, which means you’ll be able to befriend and tame wolves much easier, and will allow you to ride one if you are a certain size.

Having multiple Wolf Raiders on the team will then grant you not only more buffs but also the whole team a buff, and will unlock you specific orders to the combination (For example, with 5+ wolf rider you can order them to run down one specific enemy) as well as formations and shit.

Again, you cannot do ANYTHING outside this, you just get them and they do all the job, the best you can do is direct them as best you can and try to either keep them alive or recruit someone. You can’t even outright control their relationships with one another either, they’ll hate or love their comrades based on what they want, in fact if you have enough minions around not only this will spontaneously generate your own faction in the geopolitical context of the game BUT also internal factions or clans within your faction, such as the Wolf Riders Cavalry I mentioned before. And you need to keep everyone in check least they started getting strange ideas.

If someone dies they die. They can be brought back via several things. For example, getting a necromancer class follower will allow you to get back something out of dead minions based on how they died or who they were and necromancer level and all other shit, but will not outright resurrect them.

For example, if the Wolf Rider is beheaded in battle a low level goblin necromancer from the same tribe will be able to get a zombie wolf and a zombie Goblin, and a flying goblin head, but they will all three lose the ability to ride, will have some of their skills and shit locked, and their stats will change. The goblin will also be lacking a head, which makes the minion blind and deaf to commands.

If you’d raise the Necromancer level a bit via training and shit however, they’ll be able to get an headless wolf rider out of it, but in order to do so some time will have passed which means the corpse, unless maintained, will have decayed. This is not always a bad thing since now you’ll get a skeleton headless wolf rider (with skeleton flying head) in turn, which is functionally immortal BUT unlike the zombie it will now be dependent on the Necromancer’s continued existence to not crumble into bones.

Otherwise you can just skin the wolf for the pelt and turn it into a item for someone. Gift it to someone you want to befriend, or maybe to someone you want to trick, after all a wolf pelt if worn will grant some buff BUT will also lower the disposition of every wolf who see it being used toward the wearer, with annexed factions thereof, so all you need to do is just... make the pelt and not let your wolves find you you did it, gift it to someone you need to get killed and then tell the wolves he’s wearing their dead comrade’s pelt.

Game would be, potentially, a roguelike, randomizing each following starting battle and zone after the first of course so not to get repetitive. You’ll lose all minions, items and levels, but you’ll maintain (other then the ability to change race and affiliation now, which will also switch up possible starting places) your own learned skills based on your own level and what you’ve met before (which only raises when you befriend something, while your minion’s level will only raise when they kill something or do something, split among everyone involved), but even those are just either buff/debuff/healing spells you can only use on NPCs never yourself, or non-combat spells or other abilities you can use to more easily befriend NPCs.

To take a page off of Konosuba, befriending enough water affiliated creatures and reaching a certain level will give you the “Dazzling Display of Waterworks” which will allow you to bedazzle NPCs with a  water based magic trick, raising their disposition to you if not impressing them, especially if you manage to pull it off in battle against the correct type of NPC. Getting more plant NPCs as friends and then reaching that same level will grant you the passive ability to raise the quality of crops and other plants you can care for, thus allowing you to befriend farmers easier.

This way every new playthrough you’re pushed to befriend different people, while also maintaining a theme AND trying to reach as high a level as possible before dying. This will not punish you however if you, say, met only 4 crab monsters and befriended them but the fifth killed you before you could reach the level, since the game will carry over that statistic which means that befriending another water monster will grant you the 5 water monsters buff at level 5 buff, same for another crab monster on level 5 for the crab buff on the 20th playthrough after that (in case you really never met another crab till then).

So it’s a bit Darkest Dungeon, a bit Undertale, a bit a Pokemon Nuzloke, and a bit Overlord, so to speak, but I’d say this would be a great game.

[murasaki-murasame]

After a billion years of waiting, the 2nd anniversary digest is out, and even though it didn’t talk about quite as much stuff as I expected, the stuff it DID show off was extremely good on just about every level, and oh boy do I have some thoughts about it, lol.

I’m not even sure where to begin with this one, lmao. There’s so much stuff they talked about, and so much stuff they DIDN’T even talk about. Like how they didn’t talk about the October events and banners even though they’re teased at on the 2nd anniversary website, which I guess means we’ll have to wait longer for info on that.

we also didn’t get any info on a collab, but I assume they’re going to announce that at the start of November and have the collab itself release a few weeks later.

I’m kinda sad that they accidentally leaked out the existence of guns, but I still got to experience all the shock and surprise about it, so that was fun. I’m really surprised that they’re adding a new weapon type so late into the game. Especially since they don’t seem to be planning to retcon any old adventurers into being gun units, which means that they’re going to make up a super tiny portion of the pool. But I still really like how they work, from what we’ve seen of them.

It’s great that Joe got a new gun alt who everyone gets for free, but it really feels like they screwed him over by making him a 3-star, lol. He’s probably gonna get immediately replaced by any light gun units they introduce after this point. But it’s still nice to see him get some love. He was the perfect unit to go for to showcase the new weapon type.

All the changes to weapon and wyrmprints are extremely overwhelming, so it’ll probably be a while until I have an actual opinion on them. But thus far I think it’s fine, but we REALLY need the ability to save wyrmprint set-ups so we don’t have to spend so much time shuffling them about again and again.

It’s kinda sad that it’s such an eldwater sink if you want to equip the same print to multiple units, but it’s much cheaper to do that with event prints, so you can still fill your team out with some good prints. And on the other hand, this is actually why I’m fine with the fact that so many prints are almost identical now, since it means you have way less of a need to actually spend eldwater to get extra copies. There’s like 4+ different prints that all give 30% skill damage, so you’d never actually have a reason to bother getting extra copies of any of them, if you at least already had all these prints before this update. It does make it harder to keep track of if you end up using like 15+ different prints across a whole team, but still, the eldwater cost is more or less avoidable if you just use different prints with the same effects.

I think the weapon bonus thing is going to be the most grindy, long-term part of this update, but I’m cool with it. It gives everyone something to slowly work towards, like when you’re at the stage of leveling your dojos. The issue is that people will want to max their weapon boosts as quickly as possible, but it’s clearly not designed to be rushed like that.

It’ll all take a lot of getting used to, but I’m happy that they’ve drastically cut down on the amount of weapons in the game, and made the progression system more linear. Once everyone gets used to it and more people start playing the game after this update, it’ll become more natural.

We also got a bit of an overhaul to the textures and lighting/rendering for all the 3D models, which still feels like a really strange decision to me. It gives them a really different sort of aesthetic, and I have mixed feelings about it. I think if they made it a bit less ‘harsh’ I’d really like it, but at the moment there’s a bit too much contrast between the lighting and the shading, and the black outlining just looks a bit odd.

We also got the big adventurer balance change, and even though it’ll be a while before we’ve got all the new numbers and stuff for everyone, I already get the feeling that Vice is gonna end up way worse than he was before this. Which is sad, since outright nerfing people always sucks, but I get why they did it. It messed with the balance too much to have a 3-star be in like the top 3 for DPS units across the entire game. At the very least they gave him poison on his S1 so he can afflict that more often now, instead of it just being on his S2.

Just going by what they’ve said, and what we can see in-game, one of the really big changes seems to be how basically all of the healers except Grace now have strength buffs on their S1s, which basically all seem to be 15% for 60 seconds. Which is a really interesting way to make healers more relevant, but I like it. I think it doesn’t stack, so you won’t get as much buff uprime as with dedicated buff units, but it at least means they contribute SOMETHING to the team’s DPS.

One other notable change is how T-Hope now has a 15% strength buff on his S1, which makes it pretty much exactly the same as Patia. So that should make auto eCiella a lot faster, with how often he gets that skill off, lol. This was something I expected him to eventually get via a spiral, but in general a lot of stuff in this balance patch feels like mana spiral upgrades in all but name, which is neat.

Lots of characters also got more status punisher stuff, which should hopefully at least make more units stronger. Most of it’s all pretty self-explanatory, but it’s kinda interesting that Norwin is now a poison punisher unit. I guess it’s one way to make him somewhat relevant to the shadow meta, lol.

They also buffed the older gala units, which is great. At least this way they can put off on establishing the precedent of gala mana spirals, by just directly buffing the old ones. We’ll see how it turns out when all the exact numbers have been datamined, but it seems like they’ve addressed the main isseus with G-Mym, G-Sarisse, G-Ranzal, and G-Euden. 

I also noticed that they added defense debuffs to a fair amount of units, and made a lot of existing defense debuff moves land more often, so that’s interesting.

I’m also pretty excited to try out Pipple with this balance patch, since he now gets a 30% strength buff for himself with his S2. It at least makes it so that it’s always worth using whenever you can.

They didn’t announce anything about new endgame bosses like we expected, but it does sound like we’re still getting some eventually, and it’ll just come up later. Which is a good idea, probably, since we need some time to keep focusing on Agito stuff.

And on the note of the Agito fights, and current endgame content in general, I really like the addition of solo versions of all of them. For one thing it means a new wave of first clear bonuses, but it also means that you can pretty much entirely avoid co-op if you want to. The solo fights seem to give less rewards, but hopefully still enough that you can just stick to doing them exclusively if you want to. I haven’t tried any of it out, but it sounds like they’re all balanced around solo play, which should make it way more easier to do them than it was to try and solo fights that were designed for co-op.

It’s also kinda funny to me that even though they said we’re getting another tier of difficulty for the Agito fights, the only thing we know that we’re getting from it is fancier skins for the Agito weapons. They’ll probably still get stat boosts, but I could see them pretty much just being cosmetic upgrades.

They also upgraded the amount of weekly chests for HDTs and Agitos to five, and it sounds like we’re gonna start getting double drop events for them soon, so that’s great. In general I think this whole update will make it way easier to actually do endgame grinding, especially with the solo fights.

And then there’s the elephant in the room, which is the new battle royale mode. I haven’t tried it yet, but honestly I actually like the sound of it, lol. I absolutely never expected that they’d add something like this, especially since it’s effectively PVP, but it actually sounds perfectly fine. It’ll probably get tweaked as time goes on, but it sounds like you barely even get any extra rewards from it by winning compared to just dying immediately, and the whole mode is designed to have you start from a blank slate where you and everyone else are at the same playing field, so it’s basically entirely skill-based, and you don’t even need to be good at it to get rewards.

I wasn’t even sure how they’d handle PVP in an action RPG like this, but I think this is a good way to go about it.

We’re also getting a return of the time attack mode, which is . . . worrying, but hopefully now that people are much more familiar with both HDTs and Agitos, it’ll go by a lot more smoothly.  I’m surprised they’re even touching this concept again after how badly it was received the first time, but I’m curious to see how it goes. I know a lot of people really liked it, so hopefully it’s balanced so that you can ignore it if you want to, without feeling like you’re missing out on too much.

They also finally got around to adding sparking, which is great. I honestly wasn’t really expecting it at this point, but after the patch notes got revealed yesterday I figured this was probably gonna happen. I know some people would wish it had been introduced earlier, but I’m glad it’s finally a thing. I still don’t think it’s as much of a make or break issue for me as it is for others, but it’s still pretty much an objective bonus over the old/current system. My main concern with sparking, though, has always been that it might lead them to notably tanking the amount of summons we can do each month as F2P players, which would cancel out the good parts of sparking, but I doubt they’d do that.

Either way, it seems to work in exactly the same way as GBF, in that each summon gets you a unique bit of currency, and when you get 300 of it, you can trade it for a featured unit of your choice. But also like with GBF, your sparks reset after each banner and turn into different items that you can exchange at a store for regular in-game items, so your 300 summons all have to be on the same banner, and you can’t just accumulate a spark by summoning across several banners. Though one thing that seems to be different to GBF is that summons done with diamantum give you twice the amount of sparks, which is really interesting, since it really cuts down on the amount of money you’d need to spend to get a spark that way. It’d still be super expensive to do an entire spark just through diamantum, but 150 summons with diamantum is still way cheaper than 300, lol.

If they keep our monthly summon income about the same as it’s been thus far even after they add sparking, I think that we’d be able to do a spark every 6-8 weeks just from event and log-in bonus rewards. At the moment we get around 150-200 summons per month just from all that, so it seems like it’ll be WAY faster to save for a spark than it is in GBF [where outside of specific holiday periods that have free summon events you’re probably looking at 4+ months of saving to be able to spark].

This at least means it’ll be way easier to plan out my hoarding, since I know that as long as I have 300+ summons saved, I can at least spark a new unit I want. And there’s always the possibility of just getting them early and being able to quit while I’m ahead.

And on the note of summons, we’re also getting 330 free summons total between the anniversary and the end of October, which is absolutely insane. Sadly you can’t save up sparks across banners, so you won’t be able to do a spark JUST from that, but it’d go a long way to helping supplement a spark on a specific banner.

It looks like we’re gonna get a short pre-gala of sorts soon that’ll contain all the previous gala units, but I’m probably gonna skip that, outside of the free pulls. The only one I don’t have from that set is Gala Alex, and at this point I’d rather just chase her when she’s in a future gala remix. If it’s anything like the same type of bonus gala we got for the first anniversary, all the featured units on this banner will probably have lower than normal rates to make up for how many of them will be on the banner, so it’d just be a really low-value banner for someone like me who already has all but one of them. I’m also not even sure if I’d be able to get all the way to 300 summons that quickly.

Either way I’m more interested in saving for stuff like Halloween, Christmas, new gala dragons, and New Years.

We’re also getting Gala Zena on the anniversary itself, and I think everyone saw her coming, lol. She’s not a gun unit, though, which is actually a bit lame, even though I figured it wouldn’t happen. Her being an attack-type light staff unit is really interesting, at least if she ends up working like Heinwald, but I’m still not sure if I’d be interested in actually spending resources to try and get her.

The gala banner is also going to have the new girl from the anniversary event, and a Midgardsormr alt. Though it sounds like he’s going to be non-limited, so he’s not our wind gala dragon.

The anniversary event also sounds extremely interesting. It sounds like we’re time-traveling back 1000 years to when Ilia created her religion, and she seems to basically be a punk biker girl, which is extremely cool on so many levels. It also kinda looks like Zethia is going to be the MC of this event, and it might not even feature Euden and co, which would be a nice change of pace.

I thought Ilia might be our new welfare unit, but going by the preview image for the event it looks like it’ll be Mordecai, who looks like he’s gonna end up possessed by Morsayati or something, since he looks a lot like Morsayati’s human form we’ve seen a few times. I hope he’s a gun unit, just so we can get more of them, but we’ll see how it goes.

I’m guessing that Ilia will eventually be playable, but maybe just for the 3rd anniversary event or something.

We also got a tease at the next three main story chapters, which all look really interesting. It seems like the Archangels event is going to pretty immediately become important to the story, and now we’re heading off to North Grastaea. We’re also going to be going to the fairy kingdom eventually, which is cool, especially since the teaser for it heavily implied that Notte will become a playable character then.

Which also reminds me that we’re probably eventually going to get a gun unit from the main story, since we have all the other weapon types already, but I doubt Notte will be a gun unit, lol.

Going by the teasers, I also get the feeling that Leonidas and Chelle will be our next two gala adventurers, and at least one of them, if not both, will probably be a gun unit. I think one of the shots of Leonidas had a gun visible in it, but Chelle’s also apparently the one who introduced guns to the world, so who knows how that’ll turn out. At the very least they did say that we’re gonna start getting new gun units soon, and we might get a lot of them really quickly to help fill out the pool. Which also means that some of the new holiday units might end up using guns, so that’s also worth saving for.

I also get the feeling that we might take a break from gala dragons for a while, since we’ve basically run out of good options for them. But who knows. We still need ones for water and wind.

Hopefully with the spark system in place I’ll be able to spark on at least the Halloween and New Years banners, since those are my top two priorities, but we’ll see how it goes. It’s always scary to enter limited holiday banner hell season, but at least they introduced sparking right before it all starts. At the moment I think I’ve got like 150 summons saved up, but I’ve still got most of my reset co-op rewards to go through, and I haven’t touched the Halloween event they added to the compendium, so that’ll add a lot. I think the anniversary log-in bonus will also give us like 2k wyrmite, and if the retweet event succeeds we’ll get an extra 1.2k wyrmite. So as long as they don’t tank our monthly summon currency, I should be able to spark on Halloween if I can commit to saving for it. Which is much easier said than done, lol.

All in all I think I really love this update, but it REALLY changes the entire game, so it’s gonna take a long time to get used to. And thankfully even with the introduction of stuff like sort-of-PVP, it doesn’t look like they’re going in any sort of P2W direction with the game.

Also, there’s still the 45-minute Game Live presentation set to come later tonight, but I’m not expecting that to tell us much, since it’ll probably be targeted at new players. I’m still holding out hope for a Switch port announcement, though.

[magiamemoriareview]

Twin Shadows Sneaking Up

Obtainability: “Happy New Year at Mizuna Shrine” event shop (sometimes purchasable during other New Years events). Single Effect: Anti-Evade [100%] & Blast Damage Up [40%] (Self / 1 Turn) MLB Effect: Anti-Evade [100%] & Blast Damage Up [45%] (Self / 1 Turn)

Anti-Evade is a Granted Effect that causes the unit to ignore enemy Evades. Evade is an effect that will let a unit dodge attacks. Anti-Evade stacks multiplicatively.

Blast Damage Up is a straightforward buff that means Blast Disks will deal more damage. Blast Damage Up has a capped percentage at 100%.

“Twin Shadows Sneaking Up” used to be the champion of Active memoria for Mirrors, back before Magia teams became better than Blast ones. How does it fare now? Who knows, this blog doesn’t focus on the Mirrors side of things. As for PVE, this memoria is good, though not great. 

What is important to note here is that Anti-Evade memoria has bonuses and weaknesses when considering Evades-- it’s a guaranteed method of negating them, but it means that you’re forgoing other active memoria in its favor. For example, an active memoria that inflicts a status ailment has the benefit of adding an offensive/defensive effect onto the target, along with the fact that it means anyone on the team can now attack them-- unlike the Anti-Evade effect will only apply to one character. On the other hand, the Anti-Evade effect is also more reliable, as status ailments are not always guaranteed to stick.

Another issue with this memoria is that it only lasts for one turn. Luckily, “Twin Shadows Sneaking Up” also has a secondary effect of Blast Damage Up-- which means, on a unit with three blast disks and a puella combo, it’s possible to murder the evading target in that one turn. It will be a problem if you can’t. A possibly better unlimited and easy-to-acquire option for Anti-Evade might be “A Fine Day to Cool Down” which has the effect for three turns instead of one, giving yourself more time. 

As for Blast Damage Up, there are other memoria in the game that give higher percentages for longer turns, but “Twin Shadows Sneaking Up” is still fine at 45% when considering its three-star status. Blast Damage Up is actually easy to hit the 100% cap with, so one could use this memoria to avoid overcapping and use more powerful Blast Damage Up memoria on other units.

Overall, this memoria isn’t bad-- it can be very useful when you want to annihilate a dodging character within one round-- it just requires a lot of set up to make sure you are getting the most use out of it as possible. It can serve as a decent Blast Damage Up Active memoria for free-to-play players and is best used on a character with two or more blast disks.

TLDR: This isn’t a bad memoria, but it can be tricky to get the most use out of it. You can completely destroy an evading character with “Twin Shadows Sneaking Up” if you have the right setup and a blast puella combo.

[tabletoptrinketsbyjj]

Running the Numbers: On Balancing Homebrew Masterwork Weapon Bonuses

Hey folks,

My name is JJ and since March 2017 I’ve been working on this blog of D&D related homebrew content for your looting needs. I’ve gotten lots of positive feedback from people and I’m very appreciative of everyone who has written to me or shared the tables on their own blogs or with friends and gaming groups. I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has taken the time and energy to read through my tables, I know people lead busy lives and homebrew content is everywhere online. What I would like to talk about right now is balance for this blog’s homebrew material and how I decide what to include or not include in the tables and how that might help a DM justify using homebrew my homebrew material in their campaign without breaking the game or providing a wild power imbalance between their players.

To start off, I’d like to say that I have a decent background in RPG games in a variety of different systems with most of my time playing, Pathfinder, D&D 3.5 and 5th Edition. For balance purposes for this blog I have tried to be system neutral, talking about skills, benefits and mechanics in general terms so that the trinkets (Especially magic objects) can be easily worked into D&D, Exalted or Numenera alike. For general bonuses and negatives I have taken language from 5th edition D&D, namely the Advantage/Disadvantage system because I find it simple and straightforward. Since I primarily play D&D 5e now I gear a lot of the wording of objects towards it and d20 systems in general. Although this article can be used to talk about balance in a number of different systems, any specifics are usually aimed at D&D 5e.

While I'd like to talk about all of the different types of trinkets I have on my blog, this post will focus exclusively on Masterwork Weapons. While this concept was standard in D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder (And similar ideas can be found in other systems), it does not exist in 5e, which I find disappointing because I like the idea of an exceptionally crafted weapon that is mechanically better than average but weaker than a +1 weapon. To talk about masterwork weapons we should also talk about magic weapons so we have a clear comparison. Magical “+1 weapons” are a staple in D&D and are an easily benchmark for what a “standard” magic weapon looks like. A +1 weapon has four different bonuses that set it above a typical weapon, It grants a +1 on accuracy rolls to hit, a +1 on damage rolls, it counts as magical for bypassing the resistances of enemies and it is much harder to break or damage. When the concept was used in 3.5 and Pathfinder, a masterwork weapon gave a +1 on accuracy rolls to hit. In my interpretation, this means that the value of a masterwork weapon was about ¼ of a +1 weapon and I have tried to keep that in mind while writing. It is no accident that the first four masterwork bonuses are each different aspect of a +1 weapon. While researching what other people have done for their version of a homebrew masterwork weapon in 5e, the common theme I've found seems to be a +1 on damage rolls. Due to the bonded accuracy in 5e, a +1 on accuracy would be to strong and we’ll talk more about this later. A +1 to damage rolls for a price of 100gp (Which is the same price as getting a weapon silver plated) seems like a fair enough trade, especially if masterwork weapons are rare and can only be purchased in large cities or commissioned from master weapon crafters, requiring a side quest or roleplay scene. In short, I found a general consensus that a masterwork quality that grants a +1 on damage rolls is balance and therefore it will serve as the benchmark against which all the other masterwork bonuses are compared against.

Keeping “+1 to damage rolls” in mind as a benchmark for how strong I wanted a masterwork bonus to be, I created and cannibalized more than a dozen options for DM’s to use for introducing masterworks into their own campaigns. I will be going point by point crunching numbers to show how each bonus lines up with one another. For those that want to do your own math, feel free to use https://anydice.com/ or http://rumkin.com/reference/dnd/diestats.php to double check the work. I will be using 1d8 as an example for most damage rolls to make it a little more standard. For context going forward, a d8 has a minimum damage of 1, a maximum damage of 8 and an average damage of 4.5. Please note that with one or two exceptions these benefits only affect the default weapon damage dice themselves, not additional dice such as sneak attack, divine smite or spell effects.

I will be going through one at a time through each Masterwork Bonus I currently have written up and talking about them and showing you how their specific benefit effects damage rolls so you as a DM have a better idea on how strong it actually is. To save space I have cut out the fluff descriptions of the Masterwork Bonuses but they can be read here if you’re interested.

Keep reading for a point by point analysis of the Masterwork Bonuses.

This paragraph outlines the Advantage / Disadvantage system from D&D 5e, because some of the bonuses use it. If you're already familiar go ahead and skip this. When a character is given help from a tool, other character, magic effect, etc. they gain Advantage on the dice roll made to accomplish the task. This means that they roll 2d20’s and pick the higher result to determine the outcome, thereby increasing the overall dice roll, slashing the chances of critical failing and boosting the opportunity to critically succeed. Disadvantage is the opposite, the player rolls twice and has to use the lower result increasing the odds of failing. The real great parts about this system is if a character has advantage and disadvantage, they cancel out and only one roll is made so you cannot get “super advantage”. If the character is gaining advantage or disadvantage from multiple sources he still only rolls twice and picks the higher result. This makes circumstantial bonuses very simple to apply on the spot and prevents players from having to calculate a +1 or +2 from half a dozen different sources at a time. Personally I like it because it’s quick and simple allowing everyone to roll fast and move on, in a game where play time is often hard to schedule. Plus, bonuses and deficits just cause the player to roll more dice in a game where players typically love any excuse to roll dice.

1, Precise: Grants a +1 on attack rolls to hit targets

In many systems a bonus to accuracy rolls can deal more damage than a boost to the actual damage rolls. Logically, more accurate attacks hit more often and all damage resulting from a hit that was only successful because of the +1 accuracy bonus can be considered extra damage. In D&D 5e this would bonus would probably be considered the most powerful due to bonded accuracy (Which you can read more about here) and would probably end up doing more damage than the +1 benchmark, especially if the wielder had class features such as sneak attack that further increased damage on hit.

2, Balanced: Grants a +1 to all damage rolls.

The simplest and most reliable damage dealing bonus. A flat +1 damage increases the minimum, maximum and average amount of damage that can be dealt by the attack by 1, making it a nice choice to quietly provide a small benefit for the player that can be added to the damage roll’s math and otherwise forgotten about. For damage bonuses, an average damage increase of +1 is what we are looking for in terms of power and serves as our benchmark.

3, Spellbound: The weapon is considered magical for the purposes of overcoming resistances, damage reduction and other defenses.

This provides a nice compromise to DM’s who want their players to go up against more varied enemies that might have resistances or immunities to non-magic weapons but who don’t want the players to have a full +1 weapon yet. The weapon’s bonus will only provide a benefit when dealing with a small number of enemies (Like elementals, ghosts or fiends) that have that resistance. On the resistant enemies it effectively doubles damage (Compared to a non-Spellbound weapon whose damage would be halved by the resistant monster) granting the wielder and player the time to shine in combat. Against the majority of low and mid-level enemies such as humanoids and beasts who aren’t resistant to non-magic weapons, the weapon provides no benefit at all and is just as useful as a regular weapon.

4, Impervious: The weapon is five times more durable than normal, never breaks, chips or dulls as a result of casual use and is all but impossible to break or damage as a result of combat, even when targeted by enemies who attempt sundering or weapon breaking techniques.

This allows a player to feel comfortable in the knowledge that their sword isn’t going to explode on a natural 1, leaving them unarmed and useless in combat. Furthermore it encourages players to use the sturdy weapon outside of combat for roleplaying or problem solving reasons. Perhaps a war pick is used to dig a foxhole in rocky terrain, a warhammer is used to break down a door, a quarterstaff is wedged against a door to brace it, or a sword is used in place of a crowbar to pry open a stuck chest. Other than resisting being broken in combat, this bonuses has no real offensive capacity making it a great thing to give to your players with almost zero risk that it will upset the team’s power balance or make them too strong in combat.

5, Relentless: Instead of a single damage die when the wielder successfully hits a target, the player instead rolls two dice that equal the value of the original damage die and add the results together.

This grants the player the ability to roll two dice when they would normally roll one, which will probably increase their level of happiness right there. This is a good benefit for raising the minimum damage the wielder does, and in the event of a critical allows the player to roll a multitude of small dice, further raising the minimum damage dealt. If our 1d8 example die is turned into 2d4 with this, the weapon now has a minimum damage of 2, a maximum damage of 8 and an average damage of 5. This increases the minimum by 1 which is nice but only provides an average damage bonus of +0.5 which is not much, but can allow players to feel like they are getting more from the weapon than they normally would. Since this average damage increase is less than our benchmark +1 damage this makes it a balanced addition to the masterwork bonus list.

6, Superior: The weapon’s damage dice increases by one step to the next largest die.

This is a nice and simple benefit with a clear but small increase in damage potential. If our 1d8 example die is turned into 1d10 with this, the weapon has a minimum damage of 1, a maximum damage of 10 and an average damage of 5.50. This increases the maximum by 2 which allows for slightly bigger hits and provides an average damage bonus of +1. This has a slightly higher than normal damage cap but with the drawback of no increase to the minimum damage. Overall the average damage is increased by +1, the same as our benchmark and thus of comparable balance.

7, Cruel: Whenever the player roll a 1 on a die to calculate the weapon’s damage, they can reroll the die until they receive a result that is not a 1.

Like the flat +1 damage, this bonus was also very common on homebrew sites discussing how to implement a masterwork mechanic. Raising the minimum damage the player can deal on hit is a good things for them, since nobody wants to roll a 1. Applying this to our 1d8 example gives it a minimum damage of 2, a maximum damage of 8 and an average damage of 5. This increases the minimum by 1 which is nice but only provides an average damage bonus of +0.5 which is not much, but can provide the player a great sense of relief and excitement when they do roll a 1 and can reroll it into a much higher number. Since the average damage increase of +0.5 (Which is the same regardless of the size of the die) is less than our benchmark +1 damage this makes it a balanced addition to the masterwork bonus list.

8, Defensive: The weapon grants +1 to the wielder’s armor class / defense value / dodge rating or other system mechanic that decreases the chances of being hit with an attack.

Similar to Precise, making homebrew changes to the accuracy and armor class system can be risky for the mechanical balance of the game. In D&D 5e, a +1 to armor class is a big deal and hard to come by and the potential damage prevented by virtue of being harder to hit can add up. This kind of bonus is meant to evoke the idea or a parrying dagger, sword breaker or boar spear, deflecting attacks and keeping enemies at bay by nature of their design.  Although it doesn’t directly compare to our benchmark +1 damage, a Defensive weapon can be a Godsend to a squishy melee striker like a rogue or bard who would definitely appreciate the increased armor class.  

9, Vicious: Whenever the player roll a 1 or a 2 on a die to calculate the weapon’s damage, they can reroll the die and must use the new roll, even if the new roll is a 1 or a 2.

D&D 5e players should be familiar with this bonus because it is taken straight from the Great Weapon Fighting style. Due to this, lots of other people have done the math in detail and you can follow this link for nice graphs about the statistics. In short, this bonus on our 1d8 example keeps the minimum damage at 1, a maximum damage of 8 and an average damage of 5.25. That is only an average damage increase of +0.75 which is lower than our benchmark value of +1. It is important to note that the damage changes based size and number of dice and that if the weapon dealt 2d6 damage (Which has an average of 7) was affected by this, the average damage would be 8.33. An improvement of +1.33, which is slightly higher than our +1 benchmark.

10, Brutal: Whenever the player rolls the maximum result on a weapon damage die (I.e. a 6 on a six-sided die.), they can roll that die an additional time and add both results to the total damage dealt. This ability can trigger multiple times per turn but only once per attack.

This is one of the swingy bonuses that either provides either a lot of extra damage or none at all. Based on the concept of “exploding dice” from Shadowrun and some White Wolf systems, if you roll the maximum result, you’ll be rewarded with another die to add to the damage total. I like the idea of having a slim chance to do extra damage since it’s like a mini critical hit. On our example d8 there is a 12.5% chance (One in eight) to trigger the Brutal effect, which adds an average of +4.5 damage (Another d8) to the damage roll. This means that a triggering hit deals a minimum of 2 damage, a maximum of 16 and an average of 9 damage. Although this seems like a lot, remember that the effect only happens on 1 in 8 attacks, so if we take the 4.5 extra damage and average that across of 8 attacks it’s only an average of +0.56 damage per hit. This trend holds steady for different die sizes as larger dice deal more damage but less often and vice versa for smaller dice. A d12 grants an average of +0.54 damage per hit while a d4 grants +0.63. It is important to note that this math is conducted in a vacuum and wielders with the power to reroll damage dice (Especially 1’s and 2’s) can make this bonus more lethal. Though even if on a d8, if the wielder was capable of rerolled all 1’s and 2’s, it would still be 4.5 extra damage once every 6 attacks which is an average increase of +0.75. Since the average increased damage bonus will always be less than our +1 benchmark, I feel like this is a reasonably balanced effect. This can be more fun than a flat +1 to damage because it trades the dependable and boring damage would be represented by a 1d8+1, into an unreliable and therefore exciting 1d8+?, with the possibility on every damage roll of getting an 8 and having your damage explode into high numbers.

11, Mighty: Whenever the wielder scores a critical hit with the weapon, the player can roll one of the weapon’s damage dice one additional time and add the result to the damage dealt by the critical hit. This is in addition to the standard bonus damage of a critical hit.

Drawing on weapons mechanics from D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder this is essentially the idea of an “increased critical multiplier”, which allowed weapons to deal more damage on a critical hit. In terms of damage output on hit, this is similar to Brutal but provides even less average damage per hit because critical hits are rare. In a d20 system where you only critically hit on a 20, you have a 1 in 20 (5%) chance to critical hit on every attack. If you use the example die, you turn the regular critical hit from 2d8 damage (Minimum 2, maximum 16, average 9) into 3d8, (Minimum 3, maximum 24, average 13.5) which does increase the average damage by 4.5 on a critical, but across 20 attacks it averages to +0.225 damage per hit. Comparing that to the benchmark’s +1 damage per hit, this masterwork bonus is very weak but makes up for it with spikes of high damage on critical hits.

X, Inexorable: Whenever the player rolls to determine the weapon’s damage, he may roll the weapon’s damage die twice and choose either result to use.

This bonus allows the player to effectively roll damage twice and choose the higher amount, essentially granting advantage on damage rolls. On our example d8, this bonus keeps the minimum and maximum at 1 and 8 respectively and changes the average to 5.81 damage. Although the minimum and maximum don’t change, the increased average damage by 1.31 per hit, which is slightly higher than our goal of +1. The improvement to damage is magnified by the size and number of dice. On a d12 it grans an increased 1.99 damage per hit and on 2d6 it’s a 2.34 increase. This bonus would also affect the additional damage dice from critical hits making this benefit very powerful.

Inexorable by our +1 damage benchmark is actually too strong to be a Masterwork bonus. To be honest, I added it in here originally to pad the original Masterwork list out to 12 entries so it could be rolled on a d12. Since it doesn’t belong here I have moved it over to the Minor Weapon Enchantments Table (Which was nowhere near ready at the time the Masterwork table was introduced), where it’s magical theme and stronger bonus better fits in.

12, Silvered: The weapon’s business end is covered in a durable layer of alchemically treated silver of incredible quality. Although unnaturally processed, the metal is pure and effective at dealing with undead, lycanthropes and fey creatures. The weapon’s grip also sports discrete bands of intricately worked silver which prevents the wielder’s supernatural enemies from handling the weapon and using it against him.

Silvering weapons is a staple in most RPG games that have monsters that are vulnerable to the metal. This benefit is similar to Spellbound as it really only has any benefit when used against a certain set of enemies and otherwise has no effect on a typical attack. The only change that this blog provides are the silver bands on the grip, preventing monsters from wielding it properly. If your system already has rules for silvered weapons you can just use those instead. See Spellbound for how it compares to the +1 damage benchmark.

13, Tactical: Using an action equivalent to making an attack or casting a spell, the wielder can attempt to perform one of the previously mentioned combat maneuvers. Whenever the wielder could make an attack with the weapon, he can instead perform one of the previously mentioned combat maneuvers... Furthermore, the wielder is able to take advantage of lucky blows and turn them into skillful maneuvers rather than simply powerful attacks. Whenever the wielder lands a critical hit, he can choose to cause it to be considered a normal hit instead and immediately perform one of the previously mentioned maneuvers (With advantage because of the weapon’s design) on the target.

I really like the idea of combat maneuvers, tactics and strategies in RPG’s that contain more than just mindlessly attacking the enemy. A frontliner who effective at tripping, disarming or grappling the enemy can be just as, if not more effective than a wizard specializing in battlefield control, because the fighter can do it more often. Unfortunately it can sometimes be hard to justify attempting maneuvers, as it’s often far more efficient to just focus on dealing damage, especially when both take the same type of action. This bonuses grants players an incentive to attempt maneuvers because they automatically gain advantage and gain access to a larger range of said maneuvers. Furthermore they can trade the extra damage from a critical for the chance to disarm / grapple / trip / etc. the target, which can let a player think strategically and provides some new combat options. As a roleplaying experience it can allow for better teamwork, granting a supporting bard a better chance of tripping an enemy, allowing the two handed fighter to attack the prone target at advantage as well as reducing their chance of escaping. This bonus doesn’t deal damage directly so it doesn’t compare to our benchmark +1 damage, but it does grant the wielder a few benefits and options at the cost of making a regular attack or additional critical hit damage.

14, Poisoner’s: Even a bludgeoning weapon that is normally difficult to poison effectively can benefit from the grooves, allowing it to deliver the offending material with ease. The channels are always positioned in such a way that a creature can apply a solid or liquid material (Such as but not limited to: poison, holy water, flammable oil or animal venom) in them without any risk of accidentally poisoning themselves (Even if they are not proficient with poisons) and taking no more time than usual to coat an object with poison. Furthermore, the recessed pathways protect the material from the elements, keeping it from drying or spoiling and after it’s applied, the material remains potent for an additional hour longer than normal before becoming inert. Lastly and most importantly, the virulent trenches are divided and spread out, allowing a single dose of poison to be delivered normally and effectively while still having some leftover in a separate groove. The number of strikes the weapon may make before the poison is rubbed off is increased by one. Alternatively to being spread out, the blighting substance can be confined to a single groove which will deliver its payload in a single concentrated strike which causes the victim to suffer disadvantage on the save against the material, or the PC can roll the poison’s damage twice and choose the higher result. The bearer who applies the poison chooses whether the material will be spread out over multiple strikes or if it will be concentrated into a more lethal hit (And if it applies disadvantage or increased damage) when the material is applied.  

This bonus provides a few benefits in order to allow a lower level PC better make use of expendable items like flammable oil, holy water or poison before magical weapons and stronger spells render them too inefficient to use in combat. The DM should feel free to adjust any parts of this bonus to better fit with the specific poison mechanics of their game. Personally I love the idea of poisons, oils and alchemical coatings appealing as concepts but at low levels they are often too expensive to buy and once you have the money you’re usually better off buying magic items since a large number of enemies are either resistant or immune to poison.

In D&D 5e for example, a vial of “basic poison” can coat up to three slashing or piercing weapon or up to three pieces of ammunition. Applying the poison takes and action and on hit the target must make a fairly easy save (A Con DC of 10, about a 50% chance of failure on average) or suffer as much poison damage as a dagger deals. Once applied, the poison retains its potency for 1 minute before drying. Overall pretty weak but could definitely be useful in many situations, especially ambushes rewarding players who prepare and think ahead. However this vial of three-use poison costs an exorbitant 100 gold pieces, the same value as a suit of scale mail and a greatsword combined. A PC with 100 gold at low levels might get a silvered weapon (Which is also 100 gold), get better quality armor, buy healing potions or adventuring equipment or weak magic items. The 5e Player’s Handbook list’s the cost of a hired mercenary at 2 gold pieces per day, so you could hire a bodyguard to fight for you for 50 days (Or an army of 50 for one day) for the same price as one vial of basic poison. At mid-levels, enemies will pass the save more than not, taking no damage and even if they roll poorly and fail, a dagger’s worth of damage is not a substantial drain on their hit point pool.

If we apply this masterwork quality to a warhammer (Since it uses our d8 example die) in conjunction with 5e’s basic poison we can look at the benefits. Normally you wouldn’t be able to poison the warhammer at all (It deals bludgeoning damage) but now you can and without risk of accidentally harming yourself. Rather than drying out in one minute, the poison will remain potent for 61 minutes, a fantastic improvement, allowing the player to apply it with a greatly reduced chance of it being wasted due to drying out before the next fight begins. The wielder can also choose to spread the material out among multiple grooves, turning a three use-vial into a six-use vial of poison, making it much more cost effective. Alternatively the player could choose to force the victim to suffer disadvantage on the saves to resist the poison or roll the poison damage twice and pick the more lethal result, making the poison more viable at higher levels.  

In short this masterwork bonus provides a number of small benefits and options to allow a PC to make poisons and alchemical weapon applications more fun and a viable strategy that offers the player a range of options, rather than an ineffective money sink. As this weapon does not deal damage directly it is hard to compare against the benchmark. The goal of this masterwork is to increase the damage deal by poisons and similar materials but it is weighed against the fact that the player has to expend gold or resources buying and using the poisons to actually make use of the benefits (As opposed to the benchmark “free” +1 damage on every hit) so it seems balanced to me.

15, Bypassing: A wielder who makes an attack with a weapon with this bonus ignores any and all defensive benefits that an opponent’s shield would normally provide.

This bonus attempts to reflect the real world weapons such as the flail, sica, shotel, and war pick, all designed to get around armor and shields in order to reach the tender flesh of the enemy. Although this benefit does affect accuracy rolls rather than damage, I would compare this more to the Spellbound or Silvered bonus rather than Precise. In my experience as a player, I rarely run into to humanoid enemies wielding shields and typical bestiaries and monster manuals don’t have a lot of shield using enemies. If your PC’s are mostly fighting undead, elementals, beasts and aberrations this bonuses will probably not help them. In the rare instance when they do come across a heavily armored fighter or blackguard paladin or other hard to hit foe, this bonuses will let the wielder bypass some of those defenses and let that wielder shine. Handing out this kind of weapon in a military or war campaign where it would be used regularly, would be comparable to handing out a Silvered weapon in a werewolf heavy campaign. Since it doesn’t deal damage directly I doesn’t compare to the benchmark and you can refer to the Spellbound and Silvered for how this bonus works in play.

16, Resounding: Whenever the player rolls a damage die he must roll a second confirming die of the same sort. If the second die is the same result as the first, the player is considered to have instead rolled the maximum possible result for that type of die instead of the current result.

As the fluff description mentions, getting a resounding blow that triggers the maximum damage is rare. The value of this bonuses is odd to calculate because as the maximum damage output of the die increases, the odds of actually rolling two of the same number to trigger it goes down proportionally. Over the course of 64 successful attacks with our example d8 (every variation of the damage die and confirmation roll), the effect only triggers 8 times (A 12.5% chance) and only 7 of those times actually benefit the wielder since rolling two 8’s is already the maximum amount of damage possible. Over the 64 hits, the total increase in damage resulting from the bonus is 28, an average increase of 0.44 per hit with most of the damage coming from when the player rolled low and would have done very little damage.

This table is a chart of each result of the 64 hits possible with a d8 Resounding weapon. The leftmost column is the damage roll while the top row is the confirming roll with the middle being the actual damage dealt. The bottom roll is the sum of the total damage from that column which is compared to 36, which is the sum damage total on a non-masterwork d8 over the eight possible hits.

To demonstrate on a smaller die over the course of 16 successful hits on a d4, the effect triggers 4 times (A 25% chance) and the total increase in damage resulting from the bonus is 6, an average increase of 0.38 per hit. The sum of the total damage on a non-masterwork d4 is 10 over the 4 possible hits.

On a larger die over the course of 144 successful on a d12, the effect triggers 12 times (A 12% chance) and the total increase in damage resulting from the bonus is 66, an average increase of 0.45 per hit. The sum of the total damage on a non-masterwork d12 is 78 over the 144 possible hits.

In summation, this bonus gives the occasional burst of damage at the cost of providing no benefit most of the time. It grants an average damage increase of 0.45 per hit (on a d8), which is well below our +1 benchmark in terms of balance.

17, Chargebreaker: If the wielder has not moved yet on his turn he can take up a defensive position, which causes his speed to drop to 0 until the end of his turn. While in this stance, the wielder is able to make an attack of opportunity with the readied weapon against an enemy that enters his reach. The bracing stance ends if the wielder moves, attacks or at the start of the wielder’s next turn.

Much like Tactical, this benefit rewards players who think strategically and offers them options in combat, like the ability to plant themselves and defend a key position rather than just rushing the enemy and attacking. This does potentially allow the wielder to make an additional attack per round, possibly doubling the number of attacks they can make. However these extra attacks come at the cost of all of the wielder’s movement during that turn, which can trap him in an inconvenient corner of the battlefield, not be able to move to reach allies, render him unable to retreat or not be able to place himself between the enemy and the more fragile party members. The wielder gains no additional benefit against creatures already within his reach and is potentially worse off against ranged attackers and mobile enemies, since bracing himself means that he is not closing that distance.  

18, Parrying: Using an action equivalent to an attack of opportunity (See Note) the wielder may attempt to parry an incoming melee attack, increasing his armor class or physical defensiveness as if he was properly wielding a shield. The wielder may benefit from the armor class bonus (Typically a +2) even if he is already wielding a shield. —Note: If your system doesn’t use attacks of opportunity use the following rule: Once the wielder parries an attack he is no longer able to do so until the start of his next turn.

Similar to Precise and Defensive, this is a bonus that deals with armor class and attack rolls. Unlike defensive however, this bonus consumes the wielder’s resources in the form of costing an attack of opportunity to use. A player could use this ability every time he is able to but doing so forcing him to give up on attacking fleeing enemies or striking when they are vulnerable. Furthermore, the benefit only applies to one melee attack per round so the wielder is still just as vulnerable to multiple attacks and ranged attacks. This bonus doesn’t deal damage so it doesn’t compare against the benchmark, but I feel that it provides a benefit to player’s without being overpowered due to its cost and limited use.

19, Strategic: These modifications greatly improve the wielder’s ability to resist trips, feints, grapples, pins, being disarmed, pushed, shoved and other combat maneuvers... Whenever the wielder is targeted by one of the previously mentioned combat maneuvers, he can use an action equivalent to an attack of opportunity (See Note) to grant himself advantage on the roll made to resist the maneuver. —Note: If your system doesn’t use attacks of opportunity use the following rule: Once the wielder uses the weapon to grant himself advantage on the roll made to resist a combat maneuver, he is no longer able to do so until the start of his next turn.

Much like Defensive and Parrying, this bonus deals with making the wielder more resilient when facing combat maneuvers like grappling, tripping and disarming. These tactics can be brutally effective when used against PC’s and can make enemies orders of magnitude more threatening. A monster that can attempt a grapple or trip check with every successful attack can be far more deadly than one that deals an extra 1d6 damage on each hit. Like Parrying, this bonus consumes the wielder’s resources in the form of costing an attack of opportunity to activate which helps to balance out its use. A player could use this ability every time he is able to, but doing so forces him to give up on attacking fleeing enemies or striking when they are vulnerable. This bonus doesn’t deal damage so it doesn’t compare against the benchmark, but I feel that it provides a benefit to player’s without being overpowered due to its cost of an attack of opportunity.

20, Adaptable: When the wielder attacks, he may choose to have the weapon deal either bludgeoning, slashing, piercing or nonlethal / stun damage (See Note). Otherwise the weapon keeps its usual statistics and this does not change anything about the way the weapon operates other than its damage type.

This is probably one of the weakest bonuses on this list and provides more fluff and equipment management ease than anything else similar to Impervious. A PC now only needs to haul around their masterwork weapon and be capable of dealing several type of damage rather than a golf bag of different weapons for different resistant monsters. Like Silvered or Spellbound this would only be beneficial in a small number of situations. Even then, it’s not hard or even that expensive for a fighter to carry a mundane warhammer, longspear and longsword, (Plus one or two ranged weapons) it’s just annoying to have to for purposes of overcoming resistances.

21, Twinned: Whenever the player rolls a damage die he must roll a second confirming die of the same sort. If the second die is the same result as the first, the player adds both dice to the total damage rolled.

This bonus is very similar to Resounding in the form of the confirmation roll for extra damage. Similarly to Resounding, getting a twinned strike that deals the extra damage is rare and the value of this bonuses is odd to calculate because as the maximum damage output of the die increases, the odds of actually rolling two of the same number to trigger it goes down proportionally.

Over the course of 64 successful attacks with our example d8, the effect only triggers 8 times, a 12.5% chance. Over the 64 hits, the total increase in damage resulting from the bonus is 36, an average increase of 0.56 per hit with most of the damage coming from when the player is doubling their high roll.

This table is a chart of each result of the 64 hits possible with a d8 Twinned weapon. The leftmost column is the damage roll while the top row is the confirming roll with the middle being the actual damage dealt. The bottom roll is the sum of the total damage from that column, which is compared to 36, the sum damage total on a non-masterwork d8 over the eight possible hits.  

To demonstrate on a smaller die, over the course of 16 successful, the effect triggers 4 times (A 25% chance) and the total increase in damage resulting from the bonus is 10, an average increase of 0.63 per hit. The sum of the total damage on a non-masterwork d4 is 10 over the 4 possible hits.

On a larger die, over the course of 144 successful, the effect only triggers 12 times (A 12% chance) and the total increase in damage resulting from the bonus is 78, an average increase of 0.54 per hit. The sum of the total damage on a non-masterwork d12 is 78 over the 4 possible hits. Although DM’s may have some reservations on seeing the higher scale of this chart, remember that rolling two 12’s to deal 24 damage is 1 in 144 or a 0.69% chance.  

In summation, this bonus gives the occasion burst of damage at the cost of providing no benefit most of the time, with an average damage increase of 0.56 per hit (on a d8), which is well below our +1 benchmark.

22, Quickdraw: The bearer is able to draw the weapon as a free action whenever he rolls initiative as long as he physically capable of doing so… In the first round of combat if a hostile creature comes within the wielder’s reach (Or 20 feet for a ranged weapon) he is able to make an attack of opportunity against that creature but suffers disadvantage on the attack roll. Lastly, drawing and stowing the weapon is considered a free action.

This bonuses is supposed to allow PC’s to be able to evoke the incredible training and reflexes that come from a lifetime of having to react quickly to violent ambushes. For an easy comparison of what I imagine this looking like, take a look at Star Wars or Firefly. Characters like Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds carry their pistols in a low slung gunslinger’s holsters along their hips and are able to draw and fire within a second. This allows them to even out or even win fights before they have a chance to properly start. For a real life example look at videos of Bob Munden, a real life exhibition shooter has the title "Fastest Man with a Gun Who Ever Lived" bestowed on him by Guinness World Records. This Masterwork bonus enhances the PC’s ability draw the weapon as a natural reflex and instinctively (If not skillfully, hence the disadvantage) lash out at an enemy within reach.  If as a DM you are fond of ambushing your party, they will appreciate a weapon with this kind of bonus.

Damage wise, this bonus grants up to one additional attack at disadvantage per combat which may hit for some extra damage. Depending on the length of the fight, this may exceed the +1 benchmark or add nothing at all.

23, Unforgiving: When the player scores a critical hit with the weapon, he rolls all the dice associated with the damage as normal. After rolling but before damage is dealt to the target, the player may select any single rolled damage die of his choosing and that die will be considered to have rolled the maximum possible result for that type of die instead of the current result. —Note: This affects the weapon’s damage itself AND other sources of additional damage such as sneak attack, divine smite or spell effects.

I have seen this kind of this effect proposed as a variant critical rule for D&D, wherein anytime any PC or creature critically hits, the extra weapon damage dice are simply added in at their maximum result instead of being rolled. As it stands in D&D 5e, a player can score a critical hit and roll low on the dice resulting in a “critical hit” that deals less damage than an average hit. This makes the rare critical hits more potent by guaranteeing a high minimum damage. This bonus is all about raising the minimum damage on a critical hit, so that the wielder never rolls low and experiences a disappointing critical.

In a d20 system where you land a critical hit on a roll of a natural 20, you have a 1 in 20 (5%) chance to critical hit on every attack. If you use the d8 example die, Unforgiving turns the regular critical hit from 2d8 damage (Minimum 2, maximum 16, average 9) into 2d8[Dropping the lowest]+8, (Minimum 9, maximum 16, average 13.81) which does increase the average damage by 4.81 on a critical, but across 20 attacks it averages to +0.24 damage per hit.  Comparing that to the benchmark’s +1 damage per hit, this masterwork bonus is very weak but makes up for it with guaranteed high minimum damage on criticals, making each one a truly powerful blow.

24, Reach: Melee weapons with this bonus add 5 feet to the wielder’s reach when he attacks with it, as well as when determining his reach for opportunity attacks with it. Ammunition, ranged and thrown weapons all add 20 feet to their normal and long distance attack ranges. Melee Reach weapons are cumbersome in close quarters and the wielder suffers disadvantage on attack rolls against targets within 5 feet of himself. Ranged weapons and projectiles...cause the wielder to suffer disadvantage on attack rolls against targets within 10 feet of himself.

Again drawing from D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder here is a weapon quality with a trade off in terms of benefit and drawback. Melee players who play a more mobile, kiting style with an emphasis of never being too close to the enemy will love this bonus. When surrounded by enemies however it forces them to attack at disadvantage or to drop the Reach weapon and fight with an inferior backup weapon. PC’s specializing in ranged combat will be able to hit targets father away but when in tight quarters such as dungeons, caverns or buildings, there may not be the option of being 15 feet away from the target in order not to suffer disadvantage on the attack roll because they’re too close. Even if that is possible, it forces that ranged PC to become more separated from the melee, leaving them open to ambushes, being surrounded or cut off from the rest of the party.

[megareviews]

Octopath Traveler Combat Review

Hello whoever’s reading this, I’m here to talk about Octopath Traveler’s combat system, and how it sucks. Now you might be wondering, why am I writing about this now, isn’t that game kind of old at this point? Yes, it is, but I only “finished” playing recently since I was working off of a borrowed copy and it’s more the level of disappointment I felt while playing it has stuck with me much more than many other games I’ve played. Since I want to go into game design and development, I thought that it would be good practice to do a deep dive on game mechanics, and it’s easier to write about something that I have strong feelings about to start with. While I have many issues with Octopath, the combat system is what the player is dealing with the most (which in itself is an issue), so the fact that it was lackluster dropped the enjoyability of the game more than if it were better balanced with story and exploration. I’ll try to hit everything that I had a gripe with, from minor things I personally would want changed, to what I view as major flaws that lower the enjoyment for everyone. I will be talking about the post-game boss, because a lot of my issues come into focus during it, so spoiler warning.

For reference, I’ll be talking about the game the way I played it, so I’ll give my main character loadouts in relation to the final boss. Team 1: Hunter Therion, Cleric Alfyn, Sorceror Cyrus, and Thief Olberic; Team 2: Warlord H’annit, Scholar Ophelia, Apothecary Primrose, and Runelord Tressa.

Now the big overarching problem with this game is its simplicity. Making a game simple can be a good thing, and definitely makes it more accessible, but there are a plethora of sub issues that I will be going into throughout this caused by how oversimplified many systems are in this game. For starters there is the lack of skill diversity, as in, there just isn’t very much that characters and enemies do over the course of the game. The offensive skills have 12 possible damage types, 6 weapons (Phys) and 6 elemental (Elem) and there’s only really 4 different ways these are implemented: single hit, multi hit, wide (hits all enemies) hit, and wide multi hit. Multi hits are generally just better due to the break system and damage limits, and wide hits are better the more enemies there are. Those of you good with numbers might have already multiplied those to get 48 ways of hitting an enemy, and I’ll add two, since the Merchant has an single hit untyped skill and the Starseer has a wide untyped skill, for a grand total of 50 that I can remember. Looking at that number I actually don’t know if that looks like a lot for somebody who hasn’t played the game, but the damage types only really matter in the break mechanic of the game and which stat is used for calculating damage. No particular type of damage is better for damage or accuracy skill wise, and the elem skills will do the exact same thing no matter which element is used since they’re only based on the user’s Mag stat. Phys attacks are a bit different since each one is affected by the weapon the user has equipped for that type, but they’re generally all +Str and then +Mag / +Acc / +Crit / +Spd / +Eva. Some Phys skills also have side effects that help differentiate between them, but the basic attacks are the same when the weapons are similar.

Since I brought it up, let’s talk about the two main mechanics of combat that this game has, the break and boost systems. Overall, these systems are pretty good on their own, and most of my issues are rather small here. First up is the break system: hit the opponent with their weaknesses a number of times, and they lose any remaining moves they have this turn, any they would take on the next turn, and all attacks against them deal more damage, though on the turn after the next, they are guaranteed to move first. This is where most of the fun of the game is, figuring out the enemy’s weaknesses, as they are hidden when you first encounter an enemy, only revealed when the weakness is hit, or with the Analyze skill, and then timing the breaks to be the most beneficial to your team. Many enemies belonged to groups with similar weaknesses, so it’s interesting to learn like winged creatures are generally weak to wind and / or spear attacks. The main problem I have with the break system is that once an enemy is broken, all damage types have the same effectiveness. Before being broken, an enemy that is weak to fire will take extra damage than if it’s hit with an ice attack, but while broken these attacks will do the same damage. Any accuracy bonuses don’t matter, since you can’t miss an attack on a broken enemy and speed bonuses only really matter if the order in which skills are cast is important, which there are some cases, usually with buffing allies. Then a bit smaller is how the weakness bar is always ordered, so some damage types are more useful to figure out all of the weaknesses. For example, if a weakness to staves is the leftmost weakness to be found, the player knows that there are no other physical weaknesses and to just start trying elemental ones. There were also some interesting extra mechanics that were only used a few times, such as shuffling weaknesses after a break, or, one mechanic used exactly once in phase 1 of the final boss, rotating through weaknesses when being attacked.

Then we get to the boost system, which complements the break system very well, with only minor annoyances. It makes the player decide between spending power against an unbroken opponent to break them faster, save up to deal massive damage to an opponent once they break, or how frequently turns need to be spent to cast buffs or debuffs. One issue that I have here is that magic users get the short end of the stick again, as basic attacks are the only moves (besides Bewildering Dance, the RNG move) that boosting will cause more instances of the move to occur. Boosting three times on somebody that will basic attack an enemy can cause them to lose 4 shields, while doing the same on a fire skill will just cause it to do more damage, which is objectively better to do when the enemy is broken. This usually isn’t an issue, as the BP can be spent on status effects and healing which will always be helpful, so besides Cyrus (laugh at him, he’s a nerd) there’s always something to spend BP on, thought your personal playstyle might dictate otherwise. Something that’s more personally annoying is how the limit is 5 BP max per character, since the most you can use is 3 per turn. What would be really nice and satisfying would be to break an opponent, have everybody spend 3 BP for full boosted whatever on the break turn, and then have everybody spend another 3 BP on fully boosted whatever else on the second break turn.

Next is another facet of the simple problem, is that there is significantly less character variability than the game wants you to think, and that’s not much in the first place. There are only 96 total skills for player characters, as there are 12 jobs with 8 skills each, and each character has their default job and may also equip a secondary job, letting each character go into battle with 16 skills, ignoring the path actions that grant others conditionally. The 8 base jobs can be simplified into 2 categories, DPS and Utility, 3 if you want to split the utilities into physical and elemental which I see as reasonable, or if you want to stretch it and split the 2 DPSs in the same way. I’ll stick with 3 since I can show how to best simplify them this way, watch. DPS: multiple damage type skills; Phys Utility: one weapon type set of skills, one single target elem skill, and a couple (de)buffs; Elem Utility: a single target elem skill, a wide elem skill, and a bunch of buffs. The advanced classes are even simpler, three of them being every attack type in either weapons or elements and then the remaining one being a bunch of buffs with one multi element skill so that every element had 5 related skills. I’m debating going into each individual job, but there are two that I will be getting into later for sure, Thief and Starseer, for opposite reasons.

Related to the lack of damage types and skills, is a lack of feeling of progression throughout the game. You gain access to 66% of the skills you will ever have by the end of the first quarter of the game, and the last 33% you won’t get until about the last quarter of the game. While the beginning of the a game it makes sense to give the players a bunch of tools rapidly, especially given the whole theme of versatility of the 8 different starting characters the game is based around, skills just scale up with the player’s stats, given through levels and equipment, otherwise they stay the same. While the middle half of the game can be used to mix and match secondary jobs on characters, it’s all just variations on the familiar. While this lack of progression just makes the game a bit boring until you start finding the advanced jobs, the actual issue is how SP scales through the game. The game ends up getting significantly easier as you progress further into the game since the SP costs become a smaller percentage of each character’s SP pools, and most forms of SP regeneration are percentage based, so characters get back SP easier too. For example, I had Ophelia with Second Wind (which I will get to in detail later) and a bunch of SP equipment, which by mid-game meant she could cast most spells and heal back more SP than they cost, and late-game everything was free outside of revive, which took two turns to fully heal. This is contrast to the beginning of the game, where a single skill cast could deplete a character’s entire SP pool, especially the physical jobs, as they usually came with smaller SP pools in the first place.

But where the runaway scaling is the worst, is actually on the thief job. Thief is a physical utility class, so it comes with dagger skills, the mandatory single hit fire skill, phys str and def debuffs, and some slightly more interesting abilities that falloff as the game goes on and you don’t need items or SP as much. All three dagger skills have special qualities, the divine skill uses the characters spd in the damage calculation, but HP Thief and Steal SP are the really broken ones. They both function the same way, hit twice with the dagger, then recover some percentage of the damage dealt to the stat in the name, 50% to HP or 5% to SP. The cost is also the same for each, 6 SP. There seemed to be a bit of a decrease in accuracy for each compared to just basic attacking with a dagger, so early on it was a bit of a risk to use it on enemies, especially if they were unbroken and not weak to daggers, as you would be losing SP to gain 30 health, or getting two dagger hits without boosting. But then, once the total damage of both hits reached 120, or even if you wanted to be safer, the damage of either hit, you start having a move that is free to use and hits more times than a basic attack without using BP, while also being able to heal yourself in a pinch. Now, the max damage you can deal in one hit without the Surpassing Power is 9,999, and you can very clearly see that a thief becomes an invincible slaughterer, as one can either heal themself for 9,999 HP, which is the max, or 999 SP, which is also the max, per turn. Now this might take a bit of set up, such as decreasing the enemy’s physical defense, which I remember mentioning is an ability that the thief job has, or increasing the thief’s physical strength, and there are a few ways to do that, but what I’m saying is it’s pretty much just all lined up for you to do way too easily with next to no drawbacks.

I’ve mentioned two support skills by now, so I should probably talk about them and the issues that they have. There’s 4 for every job, so 48 total, and each character has 4 slots that they can have support skills assigned to with no job related restrictions. This theoretically is about 200000 combinations, but since many support skills don’t synergize well with either the other ones or with the character or just are worse than others, there’s actually a lot less. The first way the options are culled are through support skills that are basically required. First on that list of required ones is that everybody needs Saving Grace, full stop. It changes the equipped character’s max HP from what is listed to 9,999, though if their HP is above their listed max, they can’t be healed any further until they have returned to a normal HP level. This gets very important for many late game bosses, and I feel like every paragraph is opening another two or more topics to go to, as most character’s 2k~3k isn’t enough. After that is some form of SP assistance, as the support skills are the ones with all the fancy %SP recovery. There’s 4 options to choose from: % max heal, heal % basic attack damage done, halve all SP costs, and heal % damage taken. Your magic casters will generally get the % max heal, since they have large mana pools to take advantage of that, and your DPSs will have the basic damage one, with much smaller mana pools and higher physical attack damage. Anyone with the Thief class can skip this, since as I’ve said, they will never run out of mana anyways. The % damage taken isn’t particularly useful as it’s such a small percentage and much less reliable than the others given it’s based on the enemy’s actions and targeting rather than yours. The Halve SP costs skill is situational, as some classes have higher SP costs, but losing the ability to actually regenerate SP makes the longer (and usually harder) fights more dangerous as you still run the risk of running out of mana. I used it on Tressa, since I played her as a caster and her mana pool is a bit lower than the other main casters, plus her Rest ability allows her to regain SP on her own. Third is either of the stat buff skills, once again the choice is based on how the character will be dealing damage. There’s Physical Prowess for Phys attack and defense or Elemental Edge for Elem attack and defense, and instead of being a stat boost like other similar skills from base jobs is that they permanently grant the combat buff to those stats, which means you don’t need to spend time casting the skills that do that AND that they can’t be dispelled by the enemy. What you do with the last slot (or two for thieves) is more open and is going to be where you can have ideas about different builds.

For me though, that last slot went to Surpassing Power on most characters, because by late game, most of my characters were hitting the damage limit pretty easily. Now the damage limit is just the fact that no single attack can deal more than 9,999 damage, because the developers said so. The support skill Surpassing Power, similar to Saving Grace, ignores that, and instead makes the max 99,999, though have fun trying to reach that before your character’s stats max out. Octopath unfortunately has a lot of these kind of arbitrary limits which only seem to exist to highlight an ability that can get around it, like purple treasure chests and Therion’s job ability. By the time I got to the post game boss 5 of my characters were consistently hitting the damage limit, and due to the sometimes absurd amounts of health that opponents had, Surpassing Power just made most of those fights so much faster.

Now a bit of time talking about enemies, because the difficulty scaling of the game is pretty boring, once again due to how simple the game is. This is really an issue among a lot of this type of RPG, since the game is just a numbers game and bigger numbers = harder fights. There’s two points specifically that make Octopath particularly bad with this, the lack of weaknesses on player characters, and enemy health. Since the player characters don’t have any weaknesses like enemies do, you really don’t have to pay attention to what specifically the opponent is doing, at most you can pay attention to whether you are taking physical or elemental damage, but the types are completely irrelevant. There’s a slight exception since there are accessories that reduce specific types of elemental damage, but as far as I could tell it was just better to use accessories that gave stat bonuses. Some enemies had abilities that could inflict status ailments, or had secondary abilities similar to player skills, but they were so few and far between that once again it doesn’t really contribute much. The other issue is with enemy’s health, in that they generally have way too much and causes the game to become so much slower. Fighting basic enemies is almost never a danger to your team assuming you are properly equipped, but the fights can still drag on for 5~10 minutes just whittling down their health. This even applies to fighting enemies that are much lower level than your own team, mostly due to the defensive bonuses that an enemy that hasn’t been broken has. This culminates to a final boss with about 700,000 HP, ignoring all the summons that it has and that it can’t take damage while the summons exist. Again remember that the maximum damage per hit is 9,999 in most cases and 99,999 in the other (which I’ve never gotten close to even with max offensive stats). Then also add in that you probably won’t be anywhere near that first max damage unless the boss is broken too, and you can see why the fights just take so long.

Ok, time to talk about the other job that particularly stood out to me, the Starseer. It’s a healing support job mostly focused around manipulating the party’s BP. Or at least the good skills it has are focused around BP. The divine skill is a wide untyped elemental attack dealing damage based around the whole team’s BP stock, and one of its utility skills also increases damage when the user uses BP, which you have to for divine skills. Another skill it has increases the BP gain of an ally to two per turn, rather than one. Unfortunately we’re already starting to get into the ok skill territory, as due to the way BP is gained, it is only useful for about half of the duration. After a character uses BP, they don’t gain any for the next turn, and since the max is 5 BP, there can only ever be two turns in a row where you benefit from this, and depending on support skills, the maximum benefit a character can get from this ability is an additional 4 – 6 BP. Now there is a Merchant skill that can give another character 4 BP instantly for the exact same cost. The rest of the skills range from decent but situational to worse versions of other job skills, and remember, Starseer is a secret job, meaning you don’t start with access to it, all the abilities are relatively expensive, and you have to fight a boss to unlock it. Continuing to a decent but situational skill is one that can target either enemies or allies, and prevents all stat buffs from being able to be applied to an enemy or prevents all stat debuffs from being able to be applied to an ally. If you know the enemy is a type to be able to apply either, this can be helpful if you can time it properly. The other skills of the job are mostly more expensive and / or worse versions of skills that other jobs have. From dealing multiple types of damage (worse than just 1 in 95% of cases) to healing over time (enemy’s damage considerably outpaces the healing it provides) to a counter that doesn’t prevent the damage like its counterpart, pretty much every active skill they have is disappointing.

I ran out of steam on that last paragraph, and stopped writing this for about 3 months, so I’ll just get one last point in. There are actually a lot of mechanics in the game that are kind of complicated, but since this game is about oversimplification, much of the most important nuance that the game actually has is hidden from the player. There are a ton of little bits of information that would make decision making in the game so much easier, but because the game refuses to display them, there’s a lot of guesswork. In some cases, this hidden information is obfuscating mechanics that subvert player expectations, so what they thought was an easy decision should actually be harder. The following is a non-comprehensive list of some of the worst offenders of hiding information in my opinion. The stat nuts, which raise character stats permanently, give different amounts of their stat depending on which character eats it. Moves that hit a random amount of times ignore all bonuses and penalties to accuracy and evasion. Items that reduce damage or recover HP/SP don’t say by how much, or whether it is percentage or a flat number. Healing skills scale with the caster’s elemental defense. What makes these and similar mechanics the most annoying is that there are some skills that do list exact numbers or percentages for their effects, so it is inconsistent too.

I will end this now and hopefully I covered everything I meant to. A lot of this was thought up while mowing the lawn or laying in bed trying to get to sleep so if something was lost in the recesses of my mind that’s unfortunate. I hope whoever made it all the way down here enjoyed reading, or at least thought it was interesting, and feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to hear more.