In the current system you could just replace all the stats with 3. 'power' 'skill slots' and 'initiative'. Con is useless since its all about MA and PA, and str/fin/int is basically something you just raise with out thinking based on the kind of weapon you are using, there's really no other dynamic to it.

And due to MA and PA it makes mixing up parties to be more punishing. I feel better off going full physical with everyone having magic support skills, or full magic damage party. While 2 and 2 can work both of the 2s need to be damage focused (so the mages both want high aero even if they dont intend to use aero skills much, just to break the armor).

Random idea off the top of my head:

Remove MA, rename PA to just armor, armor now stops all kinds of direct damage, but statuses pass right through it.
Replace MA with a sort of status armor. This doesn't come on equipment, its inherent and based on your CON. Each point of CON gives you +1 status armor. (so everyone starts with 10).

Status armor prevents you from being affected by status effects that are on you, they do not prevent the effect from being applied to you. Damage over time status effects like bleed/poison/burning strip 1 status armor per turn if the target still has status armor up, walking through ground effects remove it as well even if you already have the effect applied. Hard CC things like knockdown and stun can remove more than 1 point. The exact amount that certain skills which are more direct CC skills remove can be a balancing factor of those skills.

The idea here is that attacks do damage, and everyone can focus a target down despite their damage type. Further, status effects always do something useful, because if the target still has status armor, or call it resilience or something, they help strip this from them. You can have an effect heavy skill setup and resilience will get stripped fast. Some enemies might be better to just try and kill outright, others might have lots of health but low resilience. Aoe status appliers might make sense to have a party that tries to aoe strip status and CC, or you might make a party that just ignores statuses and goes for burst damage. Many skills become useful in both situations because status effects and damage are both doing something for you party's strategy. You could even add interesting things like a talent that lowers your damage output but doubles the power of all status effects.

Because these effects are still on the target, just not affecting them as long as they still have resilience, you can do effect combos as well before the resilience is stripped.

Also make it very hard to restore resilience mid battle, so drawn out battles can see people getting more susceptible to CC and dots because they are getting worn down. This means you have to judge the situation and maybe change strategies based on fight. If you are fighting lots of things with a lot of health you may favor just starting to strip resilience as fast as possible because its going to be a protracted CC fight in the end, or alternatively you may identify that the enemy does a lot of dots that will strip your resilience, but only a certain enemy has hard CC, and so you focus on just bursting that enemy down fast before your party starts running low on resilience from all the stripping the status effects are causing. You can then use environmental hazards as part of fight balancing more dynamically. Certain positions or enemies behind considerable obstacles you might be able to just run through at cost of your resilience, the decision to do so must be made early else you end up stunned in the middle of a lava field mid way

Last edited by zelpha; 08/02/17 09:54 PM.