Introducing the PSO Rebalance Project: PSOBB REBORN

prophets of motav fomar gg

But seriously, I just looked at the weapon stats and I'm wondering how this will balance out.
Damage difference for most weapons seems so low compared to base stats that multi-hitting/sacrificial specials will become the number one choice when playing using this balance.
The standard will most likely revolve around racasts with charge vulcans/arms.
Not that it's much different than the current meta lol

Let's see how this balance fares :
- Use racast
- Up atp on mag as high as possible
- Up atp using units as high as possible
- Up atp using materials as high as possible
- Use charge vulcans/arms.
- Profit

Note: You probably don't even need much ata boost since accuracy is so much higher than hunters and these non-rangers still need to hit something otherwise they are pointless to use. Based on that list, attack FOs seems more worthwhile to play than hunters anyway since they have more accuracy and they have all the buffs, etc. Best team is something along the lines of Fomar along with 3 racasts. Don't need anything else, and fomar should attack using ranged weapons such as handguns/prophets of motav/etc. Not to mention you'll have very high survivability with above average hp counts on every character.
 
Mylandra said:
prophets of motav fomar gg

But seriously, I just looked at the weapon stats and I'm wondering how this will balance out.
Damage difference for most weapons seems so low compared to base stats that multi-hitting/sacrificial specials will become the number one choice when playing using this balance.
The standard will most likely revolve around racasts with charge vulcans/arms.
Not that it's much different than the current meta lol

Let's see how this balance fares :
- Use racast
- Up atp on mag as high as possible
- Up atp using units as high as possible
- Up atp using materials as high as possible
- Use charge vulcans/arms.
- Profit

Note: You probably don't even need much ata boost since accuracy is so much higher than hunters and these non-rangers still need to hit something otherwise they are pointless to use. Based on that list, attack FOs seems more worthwhile to play than hunters anyway since they have more accuracy and they have all the buffs, etc. Best team is something along the lines of Fomar along with 3 racasts. Don't need anything else, and fomar should attack using ranged weapons such as handguns/prophets of motav/etc. Not to mention you'll have very high survivability with above average hp counts on every character.
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Interesting analysis, though you are assuming monster stats will be anything like the original. Boss and tougher enemy DFP values later in the game will be high enough that multi-hit weapons are not that much better than single hit ones, and are constantly at risk of doing no damage at all.

Enemies also will do damage tuned to the new HP totals, the changes were simply to better define tankier classes from squishier ones.

Later rare weapons with much higher ATP also generally do not have strong sacrificial specials, with the ones that do being end game extremely low drop rate chase items with extremely stringent requirements.

DFP will be a serious wall for any physical character in any case and generally every last scrap of ATP you will need to succeed in ultimate mode.

There are other things I am considering as well. For one I am seriously considering removing Charge from the game entirely as i did for the elemental specials as it is extremely problematic from a balance standpoint. At any rate all good endgame weapons (apart from Vjaya, which isn't really endgame) do not have Charge as a special.

Materials also have been removed from the game as their only real purpose is to either trick newer players into using the wrong amounts and never reaching max stats or to hoard and make a new character incredibly powerful. Mags still do this ofc, but without materials this helps atleast. You can still reach max stats without them with the new units and stat totals from leveling.

Oh and Prophets of Motav is a very different weapon now. It is also a 13* endgame chase item with massive single target tech boosts.

Point being, I am hoping to avoid a lot of the balance problems of original PSO, so it is probably best to assume that everything will be useful at-least until you get your hands on it and prove me wrong somehow, which is probably inevitable ;3
 
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Well, considering zalure drops enemy def by almost 50%, I'm curious just how high defense is going to be.
If only single target weapons can do damage, then all the swords and everything else becomes useless.
Even if you make it « impossible » to solo, you'll still see racasts with gimmick builds using many pb creates and such just like in v2 which allows for perma mylla and youlla level 21 (Unless you also remove those items). Otherwise they would deal 0 damage even at level 200 with endgame weapons.
They also have access to srank zalure which gives a similar level def down. In v2, these weapons still did a pretty hefty sum of damage while using the buffs/debuffs. It will be hard to drop the impact of these weapons without rendering most items useless. Remember, the impact of weapons is minimal since shifta formula works only on base atp and not the full atp. If most weapons are rendered useless, the meta will turn around and people will use 4 forces (with boosted attack techs) to destroy everything. That is, unless you're planning to make everyone weak lol

Removing charge special means it's going to revolve around berserk and/or spirit special.
I guess at least there's a drawback to using the specials.
If charge had a base cost of something like 2k per hit, people would think twice before spamming the trigger lol

One question though, did you change the buffs/debuffs formulas?
 
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Mylandra said:
Well, considering zalure drops enemy def by almost 50%, I'm curious just how high defense is going to be.
If only single target weapons can do damage, then all the swords and everything else becomes useless.
Even if you make it « impossible » to solo, you'll still see racasts with gimmick builds using many pb creates and such just like in v2 which allows for perma mylla and youlla level 21 (Unless you also remove those items). Otherwise they would deal 0 damage even at level 200 with endgame weapons.
They also have access to srank zalure which gives a similar level def down. In v2, these weapons still did a pretty hefty sum of damage while using the buffs/debuffs. It will be hard to drop the impact of these weapons without rendering most items useless. Remember, the impact of weapons is minimal since shifta formula works only on base atp and not the full atp. If most weapons are rendered useless, the meta will turn around and people will use 4 forces (with boosted attack techs) to destroy everything.

Removing charge special means it's gonnna revolve around berserk and/or spirit special.
I guess at least there's a drawback to using the specials.
If charge had a base cost of something like 2k per hit, people would think twice before spamming the trigger lol

One question though, did you change the buffs/debuffs formulas?
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These are good points I have considered. The solution I came to was to assume that in multiplayer everyone has some level of shifta & Deband, and all enemies are affected by both Zalure and Jellen, the levels of which depending on difficulty with normal assuming no buffs/debuffs and ultimate assuming all level 30.

First I should note that I have done testing with buffs and weapons and found that Shifta does affect weapon ATP. I can do more testing to double check, but It was fairly conclusive the last few times I messed with it. Other than that I haven't/can't mess with the support tech formulas.

DFP amounts are tuned based on average ATP values for that level taking into account average weapon ATP that would be suitable for that level. This includes bonuses from Shifta, and reduced DFP from Zalure. For example bosses on Ultimate mode have 170% more DFP than the average player ATP, which when reduced by Zalure results in around 90% of average.

The result should be that Single hit weapons will be better for pushing harder content, while multi-hit weapons are better for leveraging your ATP if you manage to get a surplus. Since normal and tougher enemies have wildly different DFP, multi, AoE, and single hit weapons should all have a role in any physical characters arsenal.

It does however mean that a Force, or both HUnewerl and RAmarl, are a requirement for pushing the hardest content. Thats better than forces being useless however so it will have to do.

Sacrificial specials are balanced by the new monster EVP values meaning only lower ATP classes can fully leverage them without heavy investment in ATA either through mags or HIT, and having lower ATP with the new monster DFP values means much lower base damage to multiply. At-least thats the idea, fine tuning may be required that I will probably get round to once I complete the monster changes which could take some time.

Soloing multiplayer shouldn't be impossible, especially not for an over-geared or leveled character, but it would certainly be much slower than with a group.

Truthfully i'm not fully satisfied with this system, as DFP has some serious problems as a balancing tool, namely that its a flat defence that doesn't scale unlike resistances, which makes Techs and physical damage hard to balance against each other. However I am sure that the current system is an improvement over the original, though it will probably need a fair deal of fine tuning even when done.

If Soly can give me control of how much of each stat mags give, I will probably try miniaturing all stats by about 1/10 and removing monster DFP from the game, giving me much greater control over how much damage people can do at any given point while avoiding the hard-coded monster HP cap. But until then this will have to do because unfortunately there is only so much that I can change.

It probably won't avoid people settling on a meta group setup, but hopefully I can make the other options competitive enough that people don't get too angry if you want to play something different ;3
 
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Based on my observations, the formula is as such :
SHIFTA ATP BONUS=([BASE ATP]+[MAX WEAPON ATP]-[MIN WEAPON ATP])*((1.3*[TECHLEVEL]+10)/100)
Note: tech level in game client is always 1 lower than value shown, some values may vary a little due to hidden natural atp

So the weapon atp impact is minimal since it only takes into account the difference between min and max atp. However, do note if you make a weapon with a large variation of damage, it will show up. (Most vanilla weapons have such a low variable damage range.)
Thus, the way you handled machine guns, the 70-270 damage for the strongest one scales better than most other weapons since the variable range is bigger. For instance, katanas have no damage variation and become one of the weakest weapon while psy-amp 40-575 damage benefits from shifta the most out of all the weapons. If you hit 4 way pb, the bonus from shifta should become higher than the difference between the min and max atp. The damage would then become something like 649-1184 for the psy-amp weapon while the best katana would still be at 540-540.

I'm also not sure there's an easy balance fix for the way the game works. Be careful with vol opt though, I think it's the only monster in the game immune to zalure (If I remember right).
 
Mylandra said:
Based on my observations, the formula is as such :
SHIFTA ATP BONUS=([BASE ATP]+[MAX WEAPON ATP]-[MIN WEAPON ATP])*((1.3*[TECHLEVEL]+10)/100)
Note: tech level in game client is always 1 lower than value shown, some values may vary a little due to hidden natural atp

So the weapon atp impact is minimal since it only takes into account the difference between min and max atp. However, do note if you make a weapon with a large variation of damage, it will show up. (Most vanilla weapons have such a low variable damage range.)
Thus, the way you handled machine guns, the 70-270 damage for the strongest one scales better than most other weapons since the variable range is bigger. For instance, katanas have no damage variation and become one of the weakest weapon while psy-amp 40-575 damage benefits from shifta the most out of all the weapons. If you hit 4 way pb, the bonus from shifta should become higher than the difference between the min and max atp. The damage would then become something like 649-1184 for the psy-amp weapon while the best katana would still be at 540-540.

I'm also not sure there's an easy balance fix for the way the game works. Be careful with vol opt though, I think it's the only monster in the game immune to zalure (If I remember right).
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Hmm, ill do more testing to see if thats true, cause its super dumb if it is -.-

The work around would be simple though, but pretty boring: Every weapon has no ATP variance, their current ATP would be the average of the numbers they currently have. I'd rather not do that, but if it comes to the Oh-God-Why-SEGA scenario thats what will have to happen.

And yeah, i'm taking debuff immune monsters into account by giving them just the normal 90% DFP of average ATP, or whatever is appropriate.
 
Some things in PSO are so broken that you just have to ignore them and hope that players also ignore them if they want to have a good time. The Shifta bonus on 4P combos is so broken that your only options are to either a) expect that people will willingly refrain from using combos so as to prevent the game from getting too easy and boring, or b) make the enemies so strong that you might as well call your new difficulty "Combo mode", because anything less than Shifta 81 means that you're helpless to kill anything in a reasonable timeframe. Your only other option is to remove Mylla & Youlla from all Mags that learn it, in which case androids are royally screwed for soloing.
 
Aleron Ives said:
Some things in PSO are so broken that you just have to ignore them and hope that players also ignore them if they want to have a good time. The Shifta bonus on 4P combos is so broken that your only options are to either a) expect that people will willingly refrain from using combos so as to prevent the game from getting too easy and boring, or b) make the enemies so strong that you might as well call your new difficulty "Combo mode", because anything less than Shifta 81 means that you're helpless to kill anything in a reasonable timeframe. Your only other option is to remove Mylla & Youlla from all Mags that learn it, in which case androids are royally screwed for soloing.
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Yeah, with things like that I don't think I can make PSO a particularly hard game, but I should be able to make it so that all content is at-least relevant right up to when you hit 200 and get any of the also game breaking 13* weapons...

That said, perhaps if I also had control over Mag IQ levels I could balance photon combos better. Lower it so that a 4 way Mylla & Youla still gave a relevant buff (around level 35-40ish) and compensate by buffing the rate at which PB/Creates give energy so that you can photon blast more often, but for less damage/less impact buffs. I already made higher level regeneration units rarer drops as well.

CAST characters should also be capable of soloing solo mode with the buffed HP steal weapons and the fact Solo monster stats don't assume a HUcast with level 30 shifta.
 
Tested the effects of Shifta on weapons with large damage variances and confirmed Mylandra's theory that Shifta only affects the difference between min and max ATP...

Which is pretty dumb but does mean that weapons provide less ATP overall than i thought they did which gives me a bit more wiggle room as far as the monster HP cap is concerned.

it does however mean I will have to remove all damage variance from weapons which will be both time consuming and ultimately less interesting.

Also did another pass over Player stats and did some major reworks that i've detailed in the main post change-log.
 
About the things you listed before...
I already added multiple files for character data... so you can actually give a full inventory and bank to a single class and leave the others naked (just saying, not that it would happen lol).
 
In original teth, they had different starting equipment too but it was dynamically generated.
In mine, you explicitly assign their equipment in the files. I guess it gives more control to end users.
 
Soly said:
In original teth, they had different starting equipment too but it was dynamically generated.
In mine, you explicitly assign their equipment in the files. I guess it gives more control to end users.
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That sounds like a better setup for me at any rate. Would that also include control over starting techs?
 
Fire AKA Drazn said:
That sounds like a better setup for me at any rate. Would that also include control over starting techs?
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It includes control over all the character data... however there is no application to edit the files so you will have to guide yourself with the character data struct.
 
If you are into linux....
Recently looking into some wine and the tons of fixmes and errors wine/net outputs, decided to check mono....
It seems that with a few Path configurations (hint: look at the file names in nautilus on the background) I can get my C# stuff to run without wine. (ship server would still require it tho)
U40mu6X.jpg
 
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