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Post by WitchRolina on Nov 20, 2018 1:35:03 GMT
Yeah, that's not something we're gonna want to do. The system's supposed to be much simpler than that. As proposed: In combat, you have two rows - the enemy row, and the party row. Talia | Jupiter Guy | Mars Girl | Venus Dude |
Like that, right? The summon system implies that each has a back row: Talia | Jupiter Guy | Mars Girl | Venus Dude |
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When a character summons, they use the djinn cost for the summon and it appears behind them. In this case, we'll have Talia summon Nereid. Talia | Jupiter Guy | Mars Girl | Venus Dude | Nereid[4] |
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Summoning was Talia's turn, but the summon acts right as it's called. Nereid does her thing - smacking the enemy upside the face with water. Turn continues as normal, with the other three adepts defending so they don't kill the weak mobs and end the tutorial early. :P Talia | Jupiter Guy | Mars Girl | Venus Dude | Nereid[3] |
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Here, we're on our next turn. Talia is able to act however she needs, based on what's available to her class and is in her inventory. Punch Ant see summoner as a threat - is smarter than the average ant. It knows that if Talia goes down, the summon immediately poofs. It attacks Talia. Jupiter Guy is the tank, and tanks gonna tank, so he uses a cover spell to protect Talia, the summoner. So Talia, our controller, has chosen to paralyze the wolf. Oh, and Nereid drowns the vermin. Talia | Jupiter Guy | Mars Girl | Venus Dude | Nereid[2] |
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Now, here we are, in the next turn. The Punch Ant, having somehow survived being punched in the face with a spear (he's tougher than the average ant), knows an unfortunate truth. Summons cannot be targeted themselves. They have no HP stat, no Defense Stat, no Warding stat, or Resistance stats - all they have are stats relating to offense, and share their level with the summoner. This summon happens to have low speed, which is why it went last in the previous turn. He has to take out Talia, but the tank will protect her. Punch Ant, being smarter than the average ant, runs the hell away. The party defends, Nereid does her best waifu impression. Talia | Jupiter Guy | Mars Girl | Venus Dude | Nereid[1] |
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Oh look, it's the last turn. The wolf, being an a stunned doggo, awaits the inevitable. Neirid, being a summon on her last turn, uses her signature ability. Doggo is geyser'd into the sky by our turtle-surfing maiden. She poofs away, and Talia gets a bonus to Mercury Power. The djinn that were used are now in Recovery mode. Doggo lands. Doggo dies. End of tutorial. That's basically how summons work, from a simple standpoint. At least going by method 2. It also has a few other rules: 1: If a summon is already on the field, it cannot be summoned by something else. If Nereid's already out, you must pick another waifu. 2: Summons should not be player-exclusive. We'll want to face people both as common and boss enemies, and I imagine some monsters can summon as well (fairies come to mind). 3: If the summon poofs because of KO, there is now elemental power increase. Does it make more sense now?
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Post by Taz on Nov 20, 2018 1:51:37 GMT
Hmmm. I hadn't considered the implications that the enemy AI can react to an on-field summon (though the rest of the system was already understood). This way if you try summon-rushing a boss, they can react to a mass of signature abilities going off at once with some kind of damage-reduction ability, dramatically decreasing payoff in relation to investment. At the same time, however . . . you will seldom not want to have a full army of summons on your side at least contributing to the fight, if nothing else, and infinitely moreso if the ENEMY can summon--you are basically always going to want Jupiter Guy to pull their attempted summon out from under their feet first.
At any rate, I'm liking this idea a little more now.
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Post by firedjinn on Nov 20, 2018 3:45:32 GMT
That idea sounds cool. I'm not sure what more to add, but I like it a lot (especially the enemy AI targeting summoners or trying to compensate for summon-rush strategies.)
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Post by WitchRolina on Nov 20, 2018 12:31:15 GMT
It also shuts down the summon rush strategy as being viable, encouraging more interesting and nuanced summon strategies. For instance, have another adept provide the djinn, and have the healer summon the summon spirit. Have the tank focus on tanking hits for the healer, while the healer focuses on keeping the tank alive. Smarter enemies should have AI that targets healers and summoners more often (it makes sense, after all), so exploiting this becomes a great strategy. If you try to have the whole team summon, you're basically nerfing your whole team, and the enemy knows it. What's more, you don't recover from it as fast as you would in classic GS. Having faster, harder hitting enemies would put a kibosh on bad strats.
It's certainly better than using all your djinn to summon in the first turn and praying that it does enough damage to win. I always want to promote clever strategies over reckless ones.
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Post by Taz on Nov 20, 2018 17:59:26 GMT
I thought Djinn recovery speed was plenty slow in classic Golden Sun, and that the issue with summon-rushing was the sheer overwhelming amount of burst damage rather than being something that was necessarily "spammable"?
At any rate, if we implement method 2, I definitely foresee a syncopated summoning strategy becoming dominant by end-game, where a different party member initiates a summon each turn while the rest of the party does their thing for more of a slow-burn kind of result.
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Post by WitchRolina on Nov 20, 2018 20:06:54 GMT
With 36 Djinn, you had a guaranteed damage of 108% of the enemy's HP as damage, and can be fully unloaded across three turns. This is also not taking into effect the base damage, nor the elemental bonuses. All frontloaded in the first few rounds of battle. The burst damage was quite absurd.
Another common strategy was to have players use djinn every turn until you had 3/4 on standby, then have the whole team summon. Nothing survives two cycles of this method without notable amounts of healing. So yeah, the burst damage of the old summon system was nuts. You could wipe out a full-power Serpent even with its absurd PP recovery using these summon methods, effectively bypassing the overwhelming regen values it has.
I think this is probably why the fandom's been coming up with ways to try and balance summons since release.
Either way, I think that summon strategy would be prominent with mono- and dual-element teams, but less so with setups that use tri- and tetra- element classes. I imagine that Tri- element will likely be more psynergy centric, while tetra-elemental strats might be more unleash/item centric.
We could be totally wrong, though. If we pull this off, I'll love watching to see how various metas develop.
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Post by WitchRolina on Dec 16, 2018 20:15:07 GMT
Using discussions from the discord meeting today, we've got a structure figured out. There will be 28 summons - 7 of each element. They are:
| Venus | Mars | Jupiter | Mercury | 1 Cost | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 Cost | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2s Cost | 2-1 | 2-1 | 2-1 | 2-1 | 2a Cost | 2-1 | 2-1 | 2-1 | 2-1 | 3 Cost | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3o Cost | 3-1 | 3-1 | 3-1 | 3-1 | 4 Cost | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
If we discuss the duration, I'll add it here.
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Post by Taz on Dec 16, 2018 21:10:00 GMT
With regards to duration, something we need to decide relatively early so we can properly playtest and attempt to balance to new summoning system is whether all summons have the same static duration, or whether duration is variable in relation to summon cost.
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