Should bosses be immune to status effects? Currently playing the SNES version of pic related, and when even Thor can be affected by Shock after a Zio spell, then you know your gameplay is shitty. In this case, the gameplay would still be shitty even without the omnipotent Shock, but anyway. What do you think is the correct approach to this issue?
Developers should make the game they want to make. I don't think there should be standard game design to suit my exact tastes at all, that would be mindnumbing.
>>3611407Agree. If they want to make an objectively shitty game, they're free to do it. Pic unrelated.
>>3611410Uniformity is objectively shitty.
>>3611404Adaptive resistance where the boss gains a stacking resistance bonus to ailments.
>>3611404Diversity is our strength in this case. Some should be immune, some resistant, some vulnerable, some should have minions that can cleanse them, some should have minions that render them immune/resistant that the player can take care of. A player character's build should come with enemies that more as well as less challenging and encounter design should give you solutions to challenges that seem insurmountable in straight up combat.
>>3611597This. Have some bosses have some weaknesses, including occasionally ones like silencing/berserking a magic using boss to neuter them completely. Or even instant death sometimes.Just replayed Final Fantasy V, and it did a good job with that. Most bosses have some sort of trick you can do to beat them easily.
>>3611404>NOOO I WANT STATUSES TO WORK ON BOSSES WHY WOULD I EVER CAST BLIND IF IT NEVER WORKS ON ANYTHING>NOOO WHY DO STATUSES WORK ON BOSSES I SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING BUT MASH ATTACK TIL HE DIES AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHwhich is it faggot
>>3611404>explicitly say to the player what ailments will and won't work before the battle startssuddenly, it's a good gameplay element.
>>3611404Zio is broken over basically any of the first mt\smt. thor being weak to shock it's retarded honestly. Also yeah, but with low chance but high reward. Poison is mandatory on the old smt\mt for the biggest or post game bosses.
>>3611601You can completely shut down the second Seymour fight in Final Fantasy X by using Threaten and Reflect.
>>3611688Provoke*, not Threaten
>>3611404No. For starters, the trouble with bosses and SEs is vulnerability makes them feel too similar to regular enemies or makes it so there's one obvious right way to beat them. It's a holistic balance issue and gets even worse in later SMTs because of Press Turn. Solutions could include making a boss weak to both poison and stun, but some circumstance makes it so you can't fight the boss with both, and reaching the boss with one is more difficult than with neither. Weaknesses could also change with phases, so you have to decide which phase you want to be easier. There's also the band-aids of giving bosses higher resistances without immunity or some sort of defensive ability regular enemies don't have access to if you don't mind the implications of RNG or plain tedium.
>>3611404>specialise party member in poison attacks>fight skeletons>immune to poison>fight lizardmen>immune to poison>fight bosses>immune to poison>finally encounter an enemy who is vulnerable>heavy-hitter kills it in one go before poisonman's turnPoison gets no love.
>>3612112Shouldn’t have been a dishonorable knave
I junction Drain to St-ATKand cast Meltdown
>>3611404No, they aren't worth using against regular enemies so if they don't work on bosses they become something that's only ever used against you.
>>3611653Retarded thread, but Thor can also be silenced in addition to Shock/Frozen. If I remember correctly the Imagine MMO also has similar variants for Agi and Zan, I think it was Burn/Blow or something like that.
>>3611404The problem was that you can spam status effects while doing damage and for no MP cost with 95% accuracy rate which reapplied itself every time it procced. SMT simply just cannot design a good status effect system so they always handle it in a poor way.Also, zio sucked dick. All you needed were guns and building *anyone* for magic was a total waste. The second you get bind bullets, it's over so there's really only like 2 fights you'll use zio because it does so little damage.
>>3611404Whether or not a game can get a status system to work is a good indicator of its quality as a whole. Like every other element make them meaningful or remove them
>>3611404Bosses should be susceptible to status effects but only a weaker version of themLike paralysis should reduce 1 action point from the boss instead of immobilize him altogether
Why not have two variants of each status, a strong and weak one.Shitmobs get hit with poison or an eyeball monster gets hit with blind they have the strong version which is crippling, while a strong mob or a boss get hit with poison and blind and they are affected they aren't crippled.Of course immunities and resistances still apply but with a system like that you could make it so most enemies are affected by most status even though a ghost can't be poisoned because it's a ghost.
>>3615755This is actually an elegant solution. I like it.
>>3615755The problem with that is that the action cost of applying status affects should be commensurate with their power and you are tying two effects to the same ability Why bother applying a weak status effect to a boss when you can do something else?
>>3615949Weak is just a moniker to contrast with strong.Question of balance, applying a 50% hit reduction on group of regular mobs with big attack stats that can be dealt with in few turns vs. a multi round boss battle where a 20% hit reduction will very likely result in a few misses saving your party members healing or reviving, leaving them to be able to buff, debuff, and set up.Or maybe a strong Mute spell stops all casting while the weak variant affects spell casting speed, or increases to turn delay, or maybe alters the boss' ai so they're much less likely to cast magic and you can even add flavour on that one by adding text saying something like "The lich broke through your curse of silence!". It's not stopping you from taking those big deeps but it will give you breathing room and opportunities to react. Games, like movies, or books are an experience and those dramatic moments can add a lot to it, especially if you dress it up right with text, and/or animations depending on your budget.pic unrelated, it just looks cool.
>>361595920% hit reduction is strong as fuck but I get what you're saying, they are still powerful just not as. I think that this won't be commonly done, although I think I might've seen it in a game before, because it still doesn't resolve the heart of the issue: developer laziness/incompetene in designing challenging encounters because of all the moving parts in an RPG.
>>3615965Two factors I've noticed that have to do with this are, skill bloat and numerical bloat.If you start doing double digits and end up doing millions at the end there's simply no way to balance that unless you do hard level scaling.Add in that many turn based games give you dozens of skills that are either very similar leaving only damage scaling as the difference or make every character/class a master of everything giving you too many options regardless of situation. In either case you have a game with very little wiggle room for creating a challenging encounter is difficult, limiting players while making new skills an event is more rewarding imo.A decent example of the too many choices is the original FF12 release on PS2. If you don't do side content and just go from plot point to plot point with no incidental leveling with building characters as dedicated roles it's actually a really fun experience until you reach a point where they expect you to have 6 masters of everything characters around the Arcadia arc.The zodiac release fixed some of that but they bloated HP and MP gains to the point where every character becomes an unbeatable tank. The problem of very limited MP without the unlockable multipliers made the original FF12 so much more enthralling, I felt like I was playing an old school RPG crawling those dungeons.
>>3615755Persona 1 did this btw.
>>3611404SMT V and Etrian Odyssey's scaling immunity is good. I really like how you have a method to reset immunity but it requires spending a super move.
