I'd imagine getting that damage boost on your builders would be totally worth it, from a mechanical perspective. I assume 1-3 build up mana, since 4+ spend it?
If there are no builders, then I'd have to rethink my assumptions, but I basically look at attack flags which punish a specific sort of target as the sort of thing I'd almost always want to put on an attack against that target if I had no special ideas I wanted to perform.
And since Dude of Darkness is not a monster, but a player, that makes the combat minigame less fun for him, because literally everyone can use attacks specifically meant to rip him a new one, at any time, even if that's not their schtick. If being Dude of Darkness doesn't offer mechanical benefits enough to counterbalance everyone having your weakness, well...being Dude of Darkness isn't gonna be very fun in combat.
Indirectly they might. 1-3 just don't cost any, but I guess you get the Mana regen for that round.
There is a bit of counterbalance, though. We haven't decided all of them, but we have considered Darkness characters getting slight resistance to everything else.
Well, the issue with that is that it just incentivizes throwing the weakness at them constantly, since anything else you do will be even less effective. Basically, once a guy becomes known as Darkness, your setup makes it the best mechanical idea to just hammer the weakness as much as possible, which kind of sucks to be on the receiving end.
If you're tossing Free attacks that do a bit more damage, then you're not using higher level Specials that do even more damage, or anything that has a debuff, or a Psych, or any other Flag. I don't think spamming Banish is going to be worth it to do constantly.
Okay, after talking it over with some others, I'm going to go back on what I said earlier. Banish and Purify are not usable for Free attacks unless you have an Ability that lets you do so, and that Ability will be pretty rare. I think Dune is going to clarify.
Unrelated, an edit at the bottom of the first post, since I left something off. I only note since you've been commenting.
Okay, that sounds better to me, since my thought is, basically, that Free attacks are most of what's going to be thrown. At least in my experience, tossing around your special named stuff tends to be treated as 'use this attack once per fight, tops' etiquette-wise. If this is not the case here, I can see where you're coming from!
But I feel a lot better knowing that most people cannot hammer on the weakness button with free attacks, because...well, I'd imagine free attacks are most of what's getting used.
It depends. Some characters have a lot of Specials (I'm looking at you, Nanoha cast) and will probably have a bunch even with lower levels. There's nothing wrong with tossing out a level 5 Special as often as you want.
I just speak from my experience on M3, where throwing around repeated attacks is frowned on. I tend to end up using mechanically identical but renamed free attacks a lot!
Which I enjoy being able to do, as a side note, because it lets me make up attacks and attack names on the fly, which is always great and something that should be encouraged.
I just speak from my experience on M3, where throwing around repeated attacks is frowned on. I tend to end up using mechanically identical but renamed free attacks a lot!
Which I enjoy being able to do, as a side note, because it lets me make up attacks and attack names on the fly, which is always great and something that should be encouraged.
I just gotta agree with this last bit, I love making up attacks on the fly for all sorts of things various frees will likely be a great deal of my time spent in combat.
On further thought, I have a question: will just spamming your level 5 Special generally be mechanically superior to using varied Free attacks?
I really hope the answer is no, because the point of having a Free Attack system should be to encourage creative use of it and not seeing the same damn attack all the time.
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Free attacks let you flesh out someone's fighting style and are really useful for characters who have lots of varied attacks.
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I assume there is some common sense-based etiquette here, since that seems, at first glance, kind of gamable.
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If there are no builders, then I'd have to rethink my assumptions, but I basically look at attack flags which punish a specific sort of target as the sort of thing I'd almost always want to put on an attack against that target if I had no special ideas I wanted to perform.
And since Dude of Darkness is not a monster, but a player, that makes the combat minigame less fun for him, because literally everyone can use attacks specifically meant to rip him a new one, at any time, even if that's not their schtick. If being Dude of Darkness doesn't offer mechanical benefits enough to counterbalance everyone having your weakness, well...being Dude of Darkness isn't gonna be very fun in combat.
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There is a bit of counterbalance, though. We haven't decided all of them, but we have considered Darkness characters getting slight resistance to everything else.
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Unrelated, an edit at the bottom of the first post, since I left something off. I only note since you've been commenting.
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But I feel a lot better knowing that most people cannot hammer on the weakness button with free attacks, because...well, I'd imagine free attacks are most of what's getting used.
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I just speak from my experience on M3, where throwing around repeated attacks is frowned on. I tend to end up using mechanically identical but renamed free attacks a lot!
Which I enjoy being able to do, as a side note, because it lets me make up attacks and attack names on the fly, which is always great and something that should be encouraged.
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Which I enjoy being able to do, as a side note, because it lets me make up attacks and attack names on the fly, which is always great and something that should be encouraged.
I just gotta agree with this last bit, I love making up attacks on the fly for all sorts of things various frees will likely be a great deal of my time spent in combat.
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I really hope the answer is no, because the point of having a Free Attack system should be to encourage creative use of it and not seeing the same damn attack all the time.
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