- Oh my god the Faeries! Any way you can defeat/avoid them? I did manage to kill the plant and quickly run away, but the encounter rate didn't let me do the same with the treasure chest.
I forgot how they are in that particular built. In the original built they were bugged and doing huge damage every turn to all your characters. Is that what's happening? Or are there a ton of them and they whittle your health away little by little while their evasion makes them impossible to hit? If it's the latter Gwen's Starfall is the best weapon against them. It ignores their magic defense altogether so if you're high enough level they'll all die in a couple of turns.
- I think that you should be able to run away from filler encounters. Once you're high-level enough, there's mostly no point to them apart from the stronger ones. Thanks to Rally and Bone Armor (both recover some HP), they don't deplete your HP/MP in any significant way either.
You can run away from trash encounters. Not sure how the game handles that exactly though. Press escape when your turn comes and the option should show up at least.
- Any point to the piercing resistance?
Spiders, hornets, bats and the two mysterious assailants do piercing damage. So does the Master's regular attack. Originally both bats and hornets would show up with large groups of slimes. I removed them because getting constantly poisoned so early in the game wasn't much fun.
- Sylvia has Prey so why give her an ability that improves her evasion? She isn't going to get hit anyway. And isn't Lure useless for her too, for the same reason?
Some enemy skills hit random enemies, and some multiple hit skills can be dodged, so it's still useful. Lure can be cast on any of the other party members, you don't have to (and probably shouldn't) use it on Sylvia. Sometimes Seth gets beaten down and you want to give him some breathing room from tanking. Vlad makes a decent tank, particularly against large groups of enemies since he has high health, can wear heavy armor and can use life steal to heal himself.
- Also I mostly just spammed Needling Array with Sylvia, although I must admit Pinning Shot also came in handy against Spectral Stalkers (who'd consistently evade Needling Array) and the final boss - that's good.
Needling array is good against unarmored enemies, due to the high number of shots (which is most enemes, for now). Spectral Stalkers have huge evasion (i think it's about 95%) so raw needling array is useless against them. Pinning shot damages evasion so it's helpful against high evasion characters (which is quite a few of them) because it lets other party members wail on them too. Leading shot is the best bet if you want to pick out high value targets though. It does a lot of damage per shot, and also does extra damage depending on the enemy's health.
- Is Amber's Fireside Dance (which shows the TP cost of 20 or so) also supposed to use MP? Because that was the impression I had. About 15 MP or so, iirc. It is also VERY strong against undead and spiders alike, to the point of almost being overpowered. Not by much, but maybe a little. Gwen's Meteor Hammer is also very powerful compared to other abilities that cost more or the same amount of TP/MP.
Both Fireside Dance and Meteor Hammer were very strong (I didn't have the time to test the game properly as I rushed to release something playable) so there's a lot of balance tweaks that need to be made. I've toned them both down somewhat. Fireside Dance doesn't do nearly as much damage anymore but it can set enemies on fire (many of amber's skills can now, and often they set her or the party on fire too).
Fireside Dance uses 15 mana too. The game just doesn't display it. I'd add it to the description but there's not much space there either.
- Why does "Mass Vampirism" only seem to target one character?
- If Seth is poisoned and you use Sin Eater, he dies.
Both of them are bugged. Sin Eater is supposed to poison Seth but I fucked up the state so instead of applying poison it applies death.
- I almost exclusively used Seth as a buffer - I'd have him use Rally every turn, with almost no exception. It's just too useful and lets you avoid almost any need for healing over the course of several encounters. Only very rarely (when the party was at almost full health/MP and enough TP) did I have him use Pendulum Strike. Rally helped me a lot in getting through the encounters without any trouble - perhaps too much so.
In the current build rally has a chance to remove his provocation, so every time you use it you risk losing his status as a tank, which can prove deadly for squishier party members. Mind you, you can always walk around looking for 1 slime encounters and use them to heal up your party but part of the nature of rpgmaker is that grinding can help you vault over every obstacle eventually. I might just make rally automatically remove provoke (which was how I originally envisioned it), though that might limit its usefulness to healing yourself on trash mobs.
- Vlad's Bone Armor is also so helpful that he only occasionally had the chance to use his other abilities.
- Constantine's Tactical Arrangement is a must-have no-brainer too.
The 3 starting skills are the only way (other than regular attacks) to build up TP and are meant to be used frequently. I make the earlier game more of a slug fest so the player gets used to the skills and what they do. In the public build there aren't all that many skills or opportunities that require you to use them, something I intend to change in the late game. I'm currently working on getting all the characters their base class skills (eventually they'll each be able to train up one of two subclasses, but I'll worry about that later). Amber's skill set is done and so is most of Seth's. If I feel that any character becomes too much of a one trick pony I'll modify (or replace altogether) some of their skills.
- Constantine's Cautious Assault remains active after the battle is over and may even carry over to the next one - is it supposed to be that way?
No, I'll fix it.
- All enemies, be it spiders or undead, poison you. I wish the status effects were more varied, though I suspect that's probably in the works.
Spiders, hornets, zombies and the two mysterious assailants poison you. Zombies are quite frequent so that's probably what gives the impression of too much poison. I added a ton of poison because poison is the easiest to manage of the health drain statuses. It goes away if you walk around for a bit and doesn't do much damage per turn. Wither is probably more common than poison among undead (and nastier too) but the undead who use it don't show up in random encounters outside of the library (and, I think, final boss). I wanted to get the player used to attrition. It was a lot more annoying back when poison would last indefinitely.
- Sylvia has the best damage AND she can hide in the shadows. That's one pretty overpowered fighter/rogue! Her Pinning Shot and Amber's Flaming Strike (or whatever it's called, I forget) allowed me to bring the final boss down in a few turns.
What level were you? If you grind enough you can probably one-shot the boss. If you spammed pinning shot he probably went down slower than he would have otherwise. 1 pinning shot followed by leading strikes will probably take him down even faster.
- What's the Flying status that Constantine receives when using Dive-By (iirc)?
Same effect as hiding (enemies don't target you often) and boosts evasion considerably. Drive-by will thus double up as a decent "fuck I'm losing" skill, and combo well with constantine's "ultimate" skill (which will be some manner of mass resurrection). Only lasts for 1 turn though.
- The rest point on the 1st floor was kinda pointless for me, since I had my HP almost at the max when I arrived there.
I'll have to make the game harder then. :p
I might just remove random encounters altogether (except for the world map, which isn't accessible). That'll limit the amount of experience you can get and thus make the early game at least easier to balance. Grinding to become a god then steamrolling the game is a time honored blobber tradition though, so I'm not sure I wanna do away with that altogether.
Anyway, thanks for playing and I'll definitely use your comments to make some adjustments.