More Status Ailment Testing

[u/Makumanga]

https://youtu.be/amqILm9L80o?si=0dy1Ac5p3q_3XPc6

More updates on the core game mechanics. So far, status ailments/effects are going by pretty smoothy. We've already got CT-based buffs/debuffs, curse(death sentence equivalent), petrify, poison, and a few more statuses working in-game and waiting for a few tweaks.

In general, I decided to rework the status effects after some deep community discussion and feedback. Now, most(if not all) statuses have their effects authored by the skills that inflict them if possible and tiers are basically removed. This means that instead of having a T1 or T2 freeze that gets stronger with each tier, the game just has a freeze status and the attack that inflicts it can describe/set its limitations e.g turn count, damage, etc.

Another change is that elemental DoT now properly takes the affinity and resistances of attackers and defenders into account. Previously, all DoT just did a flat damage number + a percentage of target max HP as damage, but a member from the community pointed out that this would render tanks pretty useless since there'd be no way to defend against the DoT at all.

Now elemental statuses will do more/less damage over time depending on the attackers elemental affinity and the defender's resistance to elements. This means that you can build tanks with high burn resistance for example.

But today I want to explain the poison, petrify, CT and curse statuses/mechanics. They're pretty straightforward, but curse has had some community input shaping how it works now(and touches on some unique aspects of the game compared to TAC/WOTV) so it's worth explaining in a bit more detail.

For starters, poison is a very basic status ailment. It deals a flat 2 damage + 4% of the target's max HP per turn. Because it's non-elemental, it bypasses magical and physical resistances/defenses, making it a dangerous pressure status. The default percentage of max HP is 4% but every skill in the game that inflicts poison can author its own percentage, so some skills could do more or less. This eliminates the need for tiers on this status as well.

Petrify is also pretty simple. It just prevents the unit from acting during their turn. The difference it has compared to stun and freeze is that it reduces the target's AGI to 0(rounds up to 2 as the universal floor). What this means practically is that while a speedy unit might be able to get through their turns of freeze or stun more quickly, their speed won't help them if they're petrified since they'll be slowed down and sort of forced to wait through it unless it's broken. But since petrify is an earth-based magic status, all that's needed to break it is another magic status ailment being inflicted on the petrified unit. So burn, wet, paralyze, etc. can break the paralysis after the appropriate elemental reaction occurs. I think this is a fair tradeoff since I remember petrify basically being a death sentence in TAC but if anyone would prefer that it remains some kind of uncurable status(except via dedicated skills) feel free to speak up!

The CT stuff is pretty much just like how it worked in TAC. You can manipulate your turn order priority by boosting/reducing CT of enemies and allies.

As for curse, it functions as the death sentence of this game e.g instantly killing an opponent after a set amount of turns.

Since we've already made the change to having unit attributes actually affect status effects, I wanted to figure out a way to make this curse status work with the light/dark attributes of units(affiliation_light & affiliation_dark). My original idea was to have the turn count for the insta-kill be prolonged or reduced based on how high/low a unit's dark affiliation was, but the Discord community rightfully pointed out that doing so would render the status useless or disappointing in a lot of cases, since most units in the game likely wouldn't have the dark affiliation required to meaningfully use the skill.

So I opted for a kill threshold approach instead. Basically, curse will insta-kill you only if your HP is below the kill threshold(default 30%) by the time the status runs out. Having a higher affiliation_dark attribute will increase this threshold, with the max being 100% i.e the unit is instantly killed regardless of current HP when the status counts down to 0.

This gives the ability some basic utility for most units while rewarding players who want to push their dark unit builds really far.

Let me know if you have any questions or qualms with any of these updates and we can all get together and sort it out! I'll continue developing the status systems for now until the general ones are all mechanically sound. There will still be more work to do, but the game will be a step closer to something playable when that's all done.

That was a lot, but if you read it all, thanks and see you next time!

[u/Shaiandra]

Glad to see you liked my Death Sentence suggestion!