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Just so that I can totally understand, what makes it extreme? Is it the frequency of fights, having to dedicate a turn to it, or because you'd prefer to use other kinds of party setups for normal encounters? Or something else entirely?
Couple that with the fact that some bosses clear their threat table constantly and that DPS tend to accumulate way more aggro than a single taunt, it simply isn't viable to run one.
This cascades into the problem that, if tanks are useless, you end up running 4 dps. And if you are running 4 dps, the aforementioned AoE and cleaves wipe your party even more, and it becomes that weird balance of "One shot them before they one shot you."
I think something that I regret, although it wasn't intended, is that a lot of the ultimate team setups tend to favour damage over tanking. I do wish that there were more clever set ups that resulted in overpowered tanks like there are for overpowered DPS.
But in the context of average team comps (such as the one in the clips above), I would have thought that tanks are needed to prevent the problem of getting one-shot, aren't they? Especially for instances where you need to soak up the single-target hits.
I think it comes down to their abilities more than their actual capacity to absorb raw damage without setting up. It's similar to using the Magic Down or Power Down status effects. Cover is especially useful to tank while ignoring threat. Then when it's down, you can Armor Boost or Resist Boost the same party member - these mitigations make a huge difference and even very squishy DPS should be able to survive big hits when they're applied.
I did not build my team with any specific strategy in mind, I mostly went on the fun aspect of classes I wanted to play and have specific characters be strong in what they specificaly do instead of working as a synergistic team.
I did not have any frustrating experience with the difficulty of the game, and I didnt feel I was doing anything specific to work around difficulty.
I will say that I did find it difficult that towards the later stages in the game ive had to use consumable items more and more frequently to heal and get mana. At the start I would use some of the items maybe once every 4-6 fights. And later it felt like almost 1-3 fights. And if I did not have a dedicated healer, it would be worse.
Because of this after that 3rd fight I would find myself getting annoyed by encounters and actively trying to avoid them and sometimes leading to annoying moments where I felt discouraged to explore.
I was ok with the difficulty of certain bosses and if I got wiped by some aoe or specific mechanic (that happened alot), I completely took responsibility of it attributing it on my complete disregard of team synergy and lack debuffs for the enemy. And most of the time when I adjusted my team for that fight, it went better, there were only a couple of fights that felt like hey had one specific answer to them, but I enjoyed them as a puzzle of sort.
A fix for me would be for certain classes to have passives that allowed them to heal or get mana back after fights. The warlock for example, if his mana regen was changed to give more mana but instead of every turn it was at the end of an encounter. Same can be applied to other classes with Health Regen.
Initially, when I started the game, I thought the Counter passive on a tank would be so good, I would be able to out-dps my mages just by tanking and countering. Turns out my tank dies in 2 hits just like my mages would.
Its easier to run a Warlock/Weave double casting / spreading Shell on the party or a Shaman that gives the same damage down debuff while still maintaining a higher dps setup than running a Warrior/Aegis.
The only "worthy" tanks are the ones that debuff enemies with damage down.
Also, most of the utility skills of tanks are magic. You can put them on a true healer, like a Weaver/Aegis or a Cleric/Valkyrie and have the same effect with much more utility and damage than a true tank because of Star Flare / Haste / Buff Manipulation. Magic doesn't miss, unlike a tanks poor melee attack.
Single target hits were always a free turn for me, at least on my case.
Periculum fire blast? Reflected back. Devourer chomp? Everyone has 2 charges of dodge thanks to Tira.
Its easier to dodge single-target hits with smokecreen / reflect than to waste 2 turns taking the damage and healing the tank.
Case in point, its easier, and more efficient, to never take damage in the first place with Sleep / Blind / Thunder Summon / Reflect / Smokescreen than to dedicated 2 turns to debuff and heal with a tank and healer.
A average party like that (1 tank, 1 healer, 2 dps) is not, in any way, optimal and makes every trash fight look like a boss fight.
I agree with and understand with the choice to make buffing your party important. It however feels punishing at times with how the turn system works. Lets say that we are fighting a boss and all my units go before the boss does a big AOE attack. So I use an AOE buff for all my units that makes them take 35% less physical damage, this lasts for 2 turns. However "turns" make it so that that my buff only lasts for 1 boss attack. This is because All my units go before the boss which means the counter ticks down once before the boss even hits my units. Then after the boss attacks then all my units go and the buff counter ticks down once more and at that point it is gone. This may be intended but it feels wrong that I buffed for 2 "turns" but in reality I buffed for what feels like 1. This changes if my unit who buffed goes last. In this case the buff feels like it lasts 2 "turns" not one. As the first tick is not "wasted". This could be fixed by making buffs like this last per hit and not per "turn". There are buffs currently like this in the game like the shadow summon buff for the party.
Speaking of turns, putting weaknesses on enemies has the same issue. If there is a case where one of my units starts to cast flare on a boss, then a different unit puts a weakness on that boss, then the boss goes before the flare goes off then the weakness is wasted as the boss took its "turn". This makes the weakness turn taking really difficult when CT is involved. A weakness tick down per hit would be nice for a case like this.
The next point I would like to talk on is magic vs physical defense. Currently there are no ways of AOE shelling your party. You can mass protect everyone however. This feels weird and makes magic bosses way harder to deal with then physical mostly bosses. This is not the only issue with magic bosses. There are not too many way to deal with magic bosses that I can think of. Reflect is good but cant be used on AOE. You can silence bosses but as far as i am aware there are only two ways to silence, a summon and a wand, So that's not too available. You could use magic attack down on the boss but unless your unit is also shelled then it will most likely mean death for them. All this together makes magic AOE very hard to deal with and they feel cheap when a boss unfortunately decides to do one.
I hope that I conveyed my points well and I really do love this game so I am looking forward to whatever changes the you will make.
1. Having a tank character greatly reduces your party's damage. It provides some protection, through dodge and cover, but due to their lower damage, that prolongs fights.
2. Enemy HP scales too quickly. The fights that drag on are the ones where you get three enemies in the midgame with 1800 HP. That is hard to cut through with physical characters, especially because...
3. Enemy and player AOE spells do far too much damage. They spike the difficulty in the middle of the fight when an enemy drops a random Harvester or Whirlwind that kills a person and rips the other three into the red.
Additionally, player AOEs are the only way to reliably cut through 3 1800 HP midgame enemies.
In general, having a 4th DPS burning down the enemies with AOEs or focusing a single target to eliminate it before it gets a turn is better than the capabilities provided by a tank character.
Therefore, to fix this, I'd recommend:
1. Give tank characters a powerful percentage damage reduction passive, that they distribute a portion of to their party. For example, an Aegis would take 30% less damage and reduce all damage dealt to their party by 15%. These would stack with a very heavy diminishing returns, like -75% effectiveness for each additional tank in the party.
2. Reduce enemy HP scaling, starting around the desert area, aiming for a 25-30% reduction in HP, adjusting accordingly for other known power spikes.
3. Reduce the damage of AOE damage abilities by 15-20% for both players and enemies.
4. Increase single target physical damage by 10-15% for both players and enemies, to increase the value of having a tank, and increase the output of physical DPS.
I personally didn't mind the difficulty all that much, although I will say the times that I enjoyed the game the *least* came from the AoE team-wiping abilities. I usually solved that issue by using a power/magic down and a warlock to give shell or protect to the two that need it most, but this didn't work for everything. In particular, enemies that were significantly faster than the party or enemies that did pure damage (e.g. owlbear) caused massive issues.
The biggest enemy power spikes from my experience came from Okinawa (but in hindsight this is probably because I missed the Jail dungeon), the Undercity (enemies shouldn't be engaged but sometimes their patterns mandated it), Owlbear, the Jungle,
the Quintar Mausoleum, and Slip Slide Ride. I have a feeling a decent number of these spikes were from being underleveled, though.
I'll also parrot the issue I've heard that the defense/resistance stats themselves don't seem to matter too much. I never really did any experimentation to confirm it, but I didn't mind a drop to either stat as long as it was still at a decent level (since I assume it's some kind of multiplicative reduction that has diminishing returns e.g. League of Legends).
Something I will say I noticed during the early-mid game is that it felt like too much of my damage was coming from the 3 DoT debuffs. This is maybe due to me going in an unintended order of places, or it could be due to the team I was using, but in either case I felt like I was doing almost no direct damage and just relying on those. This issue eventually ironed itself out, but it made early battles pretty repetitive using Fencers/Shamans for that.
I think another issue regarding the difficulty is that common battles are both an actual threat *and* consumables have a significant price for much of the early-mid game. Not only do you have to use all you've got to effectively deal with enemies, but unless you go heal efficiently at an inn, you're almost certainly going to be using some MP/health restoratives. For me I believe this problem was at its worst around the time of getting the Ibek; I remember running a double Beatsmith specifically so I could have somebody using the MP restore a good portion of the time while another heals or debuffs.
Regarding the more powerful debuffs, I enjoy that most of them are rare, but eye gouge is particularly abusive because of that. Since it has a pretty easily fulfilled condition and renders physical attacks null, physical-based bosses tended to be *much* easier to handle than magical or pure-based bosses. If eye gouge is at its intended strength, I'd provide an alternative for silence in particular, and maybe some of the other ability types. Trick slash is nice but not all abilities can realistically be hit by it, whether that's due to a low CT, the rogue's speed, debuffs, etc.
My final piece of feedback is that I feel like the flame color system could use a small tweak in some way or another. I had that idea when you mentioned in another thread that the cultists left of the capital weren't intended to be engaged for the most part; a blue or even green flame can bait people into fighting enemies that they're definitely not meant to fight. This is also true for the Undercity and its enemies that feel quite overtuned, but on purpose. I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is, but I'd maybe artificially bump up the levels of the enemies that are meant to be avoided just to make it clearer that "hey, that enemy is going to mess you up, you should probably avoid it."
This is fantastic feedback. From what I gather, the frequent difficult fights causes friction between battles due to needing to refill HP and MP. I actually really like the idea of having passives that recover HP or MP when fights are won. It's a very clever solution.
Something else I'm working on is a button in the items menu to auto top up the party's HP and MP using whatever consumables that are owned, trying its best to be efficient and save money. Would this kind of convenience also help, do you think?
This is about 720 damage per turn which is actually really good, I don't think you're doing anything wrong!
I think the main complaints are coming from normal fights, aren't they? Usually starting at the jungle, but sometimes as early as the desert. I do hope that by the time someone reaches the last few bosses, team comps start to get a little weird. Though, if you found tanks not to be useful at this point, that's fair. I'll keep it in mind for rebalancing because I would like them to feel strong here, too.
(I'll continue to read the rest of the replies, thank you for the feedback so far!)
TLDR: I think the main issue is role overlap. Tanks need a unique way to add value to a party.
Hard mode player here. I'm not too far yet. For my adventure, personally, the boss fights feel really well balanced. This is usually the case when dealing with a single opponent. Juggling buffs/debuffs and threat management all seem easily viable, if you pay attention.
However, I hit my first "tedious" wall going left of the capital, into Greenshire Reprise. In Greenshire Reprise I encountered a group of 3 cultists whom have massive single target lighting magic dmg, massive AOE lightning magic dmg (enough to wipe my party in one hit except my tank) and a heal on top of that. The turn order says that Boltena does about 820~ damage, minus mitigation. Even if you managed to debuff 2 of the enemies and sleep another, if those 2 enemies cast AOE spells at the same time, the party is done for. Not far down the road from this area is Salmon river, the enemies here can do multi-target melee attacks but for only about 150~ damage. I am curious as to why is the damage difference between the mobs, in roughly the same area this vast? Party composition and equipment shouldn't account for a difference in numbers like this.
Random encounters in a traditional JRPGs work well because the trash is trash. The party is typically well equipped to deal with the situation, multiple times over. The system is designed to throw many easy fights at you that slowly weaken the party over a long dungeon. In crystal project your philosophy on trash mobs is to, well, not make them trash. I believe this creates a situation in where the player might not be equipped to deal with the trash and faces getting wiped very easily. Avoiding enemies isn't always possible for the average player and not to mention many rpg fans enjoy combat, myself included.
I think your linked fight is a good example of an issue in the game (https://imgur.com/4rvuQNk). You are trying to show an example of how debuffs can save you, but you are also show casing that even with a -35% debuff on the enemy, your entire party is at 50% (or less) hp and you've done 1/8th of the enemy hp.
TLDR; Crystal Project is a great game but I honestly think an adjustment of numbers is needed. Buffs and debuffs lasting a turn longer or per-instance, as someone else suggested, would be a good change. A change like this could help represent the importance of buffing, debuffing and even having some sort of cleanse or dispel ability at the ready. I'd like to read others opinions on this though.
I'll keep slugging it out with the trash but I for one eagerly await a good balance patch, best of luck to you.