>bosses are immune to them
>by halfway through the game your party is immune to them
>not worth wasting a turn to cast them on random encounter trash over just attacking
devs just never figured out how to make them work without trivializing the game

>>10881530
Any game that lets you apply them to bosses I love, and any game where you can't apply them to bosses I hate.
I get they are mostly used for managing large crowds of enemies, but not being able to use them on bosses just feels...limiting and unintuitive.

>>10881530
>What do you think about them?
they are usually effective against your party, but most rpgs i played they are not that effective to use on enemies outside of some niche scenarios. usually boss battles of course, because in normal random battles of turn based games, theres no reason to waste a turn inflicting a status effect when the monsters pretty much all die in 1-3 hits anyway. ff tactics comes to mind as a game where they can actually be quite beneficial.

>>10881548
FFV too

>>10881545
>not worth wasting a turn to cast them on random encounter trash over just attacking
There's been games where the most efficient way to deal with trash is to sleep/paralyze/whatever the entire enemy group on the first turn.

You also have stuff like the old D&D games where status effects were op but you could only cast them so many times so you couldn't spam them every encounter. Well, except you actually could since most of those games just let you sleep with no real restrictions.

>>10881545
>>bosses are immune to them
thats not always true, but it is the case so often that you stop even bothering to try them, or even worse theres a boss in FF10 that you fight on the airship that is able to be slowed but counters it with haste

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i will now make a poison build that will take 15 turns to kill a standard jrpg wolf

It just feels useless, especially in games where the effects persist outside of battle. It's not like if you use them on the enemy it will stay next encounter since it's technically a different enemy, but that makes them feel very useless and pointless to use on any standard random encounter. But then...

>>10881545
>>bosses are immune to them

As this anon mentioned, bosses, the ones who would make sense to use them on, tend to be immune. I guess they wanted the boss to be more challenging or were worried it would trivialize the fight, but the fact that they don't work on bosses makes them feel just useless to bother with.

The whole thing feels like just a mechanic that's mostly against you, and useless when you wield it.
Don't even get me started on instant-death spells

The exceptions are when there is either a random encounter or boss that is super-overpowered UNLESS you use a specific ailment against them, which also feels cheap and like a ham-fisted way to force usage of it since otherwise the player would never use it, which just makes the whole thing worse IMO.

if debuffs work on bosses then every fight turns into mandatory debuff spam

if debuffs dont work on bosses then why debuffs at all

if debuffs work on some bosses then every fight turns into a repetitive game of try every debuff and see what sticks

>>10881585
sleep/heal/etc. in games is ridiculous. Like in Lands of Lore, you can have the enemy invading a town, you fight two battles, then sneak off into a building and sleep for several hours, then come back out and nothing has changed. Like what the fuck? This is why I like Kawazu's game design philosophy, he's the only one I know of who recognizes that actively pushing/using game logic in world sims is fucking retarded.

>>10881545
The best example isn't /vr/. On the other hand I found status effects helpful through Romancing SaGa 2. Sure they aren't used on the seven main bosses, but all the other bosses are susceptible to something. Some enemies take more than a couple hits so doing a mass blind to make enemies miss, and disabling threats that can potentially one shot characters with stuns and paralyzations was always helpful in my play throughs.

>>10881545
Status effect spells are very useful in the Dragon Quest series.

Status effects were legit interesting in the 80s, early 90s.

The problem with mid 90s and onwards aren't the status effects per say. It's that RPG gameplay got dubbed down to the point that basically nothing matters. Blaming the status effects is looking at the tree and missing the forest.

status effects turn it into pokemon where everyone just stalls until you debuff your opponent into uselessness or buff yourself into immortality

>>10881801
Is the best example Scarlet Grace? So many encounters went to hell because my shortsworder couldn't pull off that sleep/paralysis proc I needed.

I think in general it's more fun when status effects work, but typical encounters need to be serious threats to make them worth it and most dev teams don't have the guts

>>10881545
in mother 3 they're very helpful on bosses, especially duster's thief tools. well except for brainshock at least.

>>10881545
stuns/sleeps/paralyze are either useless or broken, there's never any in between

I don't think FFXI is retro but that's probably the one time FF status effects 100% are absolutely critical in not getting instantly buttraped, needing players to keep a close eye on making sure they stick and reapplying if needed. in the actual retro FF, half of FF2's status afflictions might as well be insta-death or helping with self-imposed challenge runs if you're stuck with shitty classes in FF5 (also Silence works on a lot of caster bosses too)

>>10881545
>>bosses are immune to them
Play FFV

>>10881545
There is also games with passively inflicted status effects where it's just an equipment choice or something rather than something that specifically involves using a turn.

Gungnir is the only game I’ve ever played where it makes sense. Status effects work most of the time even against bosses, but only for a short time. There’s a bar that shows how long it will last. Later in the game these effects last barely a turn but in a game that hard it might be long enough to get the job done

Never understood this meme about status effects being useless.
I can think of heaps of games where they're useful, both in jrpgs and wrpgs.
I beat DQIV recently and using snooze on a dangerous enemy group before they could do much damage was useful throughout the game. In baldurs and other dnd games you can shut down entire fights with one confusion or sleep spell. In smt 1 and 2 you can shut down everything with stun bullets.
Really the only rpg I can think of where I never use status is final fantasy.

>>10882913
Being OP is no different than being useless after all.

>>10881747
Virus in FF4 is remarkably strong against some enemy types.

>>10881597
>or even worse

I have no problem with that, at least that is consistent.
Other than "Sorry, this debuff simply does not work against this guy because.... reasons!" /takes you right out of it) he CAN be affected but simply still has half a brain in his skull and counters it with the best counter spell.
Of course it becomes difficult when getting to the disabling effects. How could he counter paralysis if he's already paralyzed?
If they want their bosses to be immune against such shots they should at least make it consistent. Like, make them cast a shield that protects them from sleep and paralysis, but it costs them a turn or sth like this.

>>10882913
>Really the only rpg I can think of where I never use status is final fantasy.
not even true for all Final Fantasy entries

>>10882224
Yeah, Scarlet Grace.
>>10882756
That's the nature of turn based games. If you can get more actions then why aren't you doing that? Then if you can deprive the opponent of actions why aren't you doing that? Hence why something like haste in ATB Final Fantasy games is so good and if a status effect that makes foes unable to act so powerful.

>>10881801
>Romancing SaGa 2
Biggest thing SaGa games have going with that is random encounters are actually threatening. I think it's pulled off a lot better where status effects may not be useful on most bosses but random encounters pose enough of a threat you can't just spam basic attacks for most of the game.

I want to make a game where your only moves are status ailments.

The opportunity cost of not just hitting the enemy has to be low. In most RPGs, a 5% chance of maybe not letting the enemy get an attack (that was going to do 1/20th your health) is beyond not worth it.
There's plenty of games where select statuses are good though.

>>10883903
Virus is probably the 3rd best black magic spell after Nuke and Quake because it has a negligible cast time and solid damage even before the sap effect (which also adds a useful amount of damage over time). If you're talking about Venom, that one is pretty useless. It takes forever to do a small fraction of damage. Even if bosses weren't immune it wouldn't be worth using.

Ohterwise debuffs are generally rather effective in FF4 you just have to know which ones to use and not be overpowered. Sleep can come in handy early on. Mute on warlocks and various other spellcasters. Shrink on Ogres and MadOgres, various enemies are vulnerable to being frogged. Most normal enemies can be stopped and slow is effective on bosses (including Zeromus).

>>10881797
You need to understand that RPG devs and players don't think like this. The genre has always had things work in a certain way, people don't complain about that and keep buying games, and so status effects just work the ways they always have and don't experiment with anything that would genuinely* mix things up and get people to think about them in a new way.

*JRPGs tend to come up with tons and tons of progression gimmicks that change all the time, but very little that alters the core gameplay from their basic conventions. Like, I can barely think of anything that actually severely restricts healing/curing so that consequences 'stick' and can't be erased in one turn.

I like it when games give a special weapons that do status effects. That way I get to see some interesting things happen in battle without losing a turn for fighting. Whenever I find a cool weapon like that in a game I find myself wishing that they would do that more often. What I hate is when the weapon has some awesome effect (like Drain health) but then they drop the hit rate so the weapon is basically useless.

>>10885549
Is "instant death" really a status though? That's the only one that's sometimes good in some FF games.

>>10881530
Just caught a couple frogs in that swamp.
FF9 is a gem.

>>10886101
They can always have skills tied to certain weapon types apply different effects. This allows the player to deal some damage while applying things like debuffs or status effects without making it feel like a wasted turn if the status effect doesn't get applied.

>>10886107
its a status because usually you can get items to become immune to it

>>10881545
>>bosses are immune to them
This is mostly a Final Fantasy problem, Megami Tensei, Wizardry, and SaGa do not have this problem.

>>10882008
But everyone knows that you're just supposed to use your strongest offensive moves in Pokemon.

>>10885667
Very clever.

>>10886107
Mute, size, stop and slow are all worth using in ff4. Toad is frequently a good option also.