Elemental damage
Thu, 04/07/2011 - 00:50
meowreka
Legacy Username
Because of the nature of the game and how quickly enemies are killed, the way that elemental damage is handled now is really not all that helpful.
What I suggest:
1. Elemental damage that activates instantly, as soon as the status is inflicted. For example with a fire-based gun, if I shoot an enemy and they get caught on fire, have them IMMEDIATELY take damage, not a few seconds later.
2. Make status effects like this shorter but more powerful, again, because of how short battles tend to be.
3. Make enemies who are already affected by a status effect have a much higher chance to be affected by the same effect. For example, if I use a fire-based gun on an enemy and they catch on fire, then make it 50% more likely for them to get the FIRE status again.
4. Remove elemental damage from normal attacks unless the status effect activates. That means if I use a fire-based gun on an ice-based monster, it won't do bonus damage unless the FIRE effect activates on them, and only does bonus damage for that shot.
This way, elemental weapons would be more on-par with other weapons and would be just as viable.
There's a little ambiguity here: Elemental damage is not always status effect-related, and status effects are not always Elemental related.
Alchemers are also quite in par with other weapons, especially on higher star levels -- Their bullet bounce makes them able to deal plenty of damage per shot, at a fairly quick pace.
Other elemental weapons are very viable, especially in the case of Vaporizers. Fire used to do more damage, but this made Ash of Agni just too incredibly good. Nowadays they're just very good, and definitely on par with (or better than!) other weapons.
Status-effect causing alchemers intentionally cause somewhat weak effects, since they are made to hassle crowds of enemies better. The Prismatech line of alchemers seem to be the guns that are made to be an elemental damage-dealer. Whether or not they're balanced with each other is a separate question, but yeah, they could use a little rebalancing.
Having the status effects be more effective but last shorter and always activate seems like an interesting way to go, although the guns will probably take a lot of work to balance out if they take the place of current alchemers. Would make a neat alternate alchemer line though!
On successive/renewing effects -- The current system is a bit weird. For example, a Cryotech shot can't re-freeze an enemy if a previous Cryotech shot froze it, but a charge shot or a different freeze weapon will re-freeze the enemy. I agree that being able to renew effects easily would make the alchemers more useful, especially in the case of freeze alchemers -- sometimes a shot bounces inside a monster and undoes its own freezing. This deals great damage, but makes it do a poorer job of crowd control.