Our good friend Brick Bombard

Here is the deal: Brick Bombard is a terrifying attack. It can deal upwards of 250 damage on an average hit. It's also priced to match. It's pretty balanced now, and I'm satisfied with that.

But there's still something amiss with the attack; namely, its requirements. With 125 Str, you can use Sludgehammer Special for roughly 125 damage. If you have 250 Str, you can expect that to go as high as 187, but it stops there. That's fine; it also costs 3/4 as much as Brick Bombard.

The problem is, Brick Bombard can be used at 50 Str, 80 Agi, and 40 Int. This is much, much easier to achieve than Sludgehammer Special's 125 Str. In terms of damage-to-stats, Brick Bombard far outclasses everything else.

There are several options, I think (but feel free to suggest any others):
A - Vastly increase the Agi requirement for Brick Bombard, probably to around 150. (Only James would be able to use it at base stat level with this requirement.)
B - Make Brick Bombard weaker and less expensive.
C - Same as A, but make a weaker version of Brick Bombard for users who can't use it.
D - Same as B, but make another version of Brick Bombard as described in A. This is like C, except users who currently have Brick Bombard would end up with the toned-down version.

Meanwhile, as everyone's stats creep upward (or leap, in some James cases), I'll be working on newer, higher-end attacks. What horrors await?

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

I think the best balance would be a little of both A and B. Instead of vastly increasing the Agi requirement, just moderately increase it, and make it only slightly weaker and slightly cheaper. Slightly.

Oh, one other possibility is that you could make the Crits calculated separately for each strike. That would make a crit with it less devastating, but keep the average damage about the same.

Also, I like the idea of a "baby brother" of this attack, so that the low-level players can get in on the hitting-everybody fun.


EDIT: this talk of balancing got me to thinking about strategies for balancing in a more generalized way, and I came up with a couple ideas.

* Profiling. I don't know how your database is set up, but suppose you maintained a table that counted how often each attack gets used. Right off the bat that would be an easy way to spot underpowered/overpriced attacks, because they would simply barely get used. You could take this a step further, and track how often each attack is used by someone who goes on to eventually win the battle, and how often each attack is used by someone who goes on to lose the battle. This could identify attacks get used often (maybe because they are cool, or maybe because they do high damage) but that have drawbacks which are too severe for their value.

* Simulation. You could make a tool (admin accessible only of course) which pits multiple slimebot Omegas, or maybe Bot-ified copies of regular players against each other at high-speed. This would obviously be more work to implement, and it would only be useful for gathering data to use with a profiling tool as describe above, but it could be very revealing (both for attack balancing and AI balancing)

Yes please.
It's potential is terrifying right now.

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♪♪♪ Du du duuuu ♪♪♪

That's not a bad idea...



*cough*

Currently configured to do 1000 Brick Bombards with all stats = 150 for all players. Gives me ~275 average damage, or roughly 3.35 damage/MP.

The idea you describe wouldn't end up being very helpful -- bots' behavior is much more deterministic than it may seem (except for the buffbots) and is usually based on an attack's expected damage, which I already calculate for every attack when assigning it an MP cost. (MP costs are generally based around the assumption that the user has enough Str to maximize the attack damage. A typical attack does around 3.5 dmg/MP, while some attacks such as Backstab have better efficiency provided you have a decent Agi.)

Besides, I also have debug output for the bots. I can tell ahead of time what OMEGA is charging MP to use, or what the expected damage for each possible attack would be. (You could argue that this gives me an unfair advantage versus OMEGA. I would respond that I wrote his behavior in the first place, so I have an excellent idea of what he should be doing anyway.)

So there is due diligence going into balancing, generally -- which is why attacks rarely become less useful. There's an upward creep on attacks, but only when they don't fit into any niche. I dislike having to rebalance something that people are actively using, like this or Super Shock before it.

I'm currently leaning towards option D.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Woo! 263321 damage! Take that, Mogri! ;)

Sounds like you are a few steps ahead of me on the simulation front :)



Can the new attack be named "Love Brick Apocalypse"?

Yes please. And I'd certainly suggest D over C, though I'd prefer something between A and B, like James suggested.

It is done. The new Brick Bombard is half as strong, but it costs a little less than half as much.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

So, is there some kind of Love Brick Apocalypse then as well?

Yes, but very few players can purchase it currently.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Love Brick Apocalypse (S$2300)
A spell created by a wizard who wanted to cause the end of the world via terrifying brick rain. While it didn't work out the way he'd intended, it is a handy way to deal damage to multiple enemies.
MP: 82 Power: 50 Agi: 150 Int: 100
Target: Random Enemy Crit. Chance: 450 Critical: 26% Multiplier: 1.75x

thats not half bad, now all i have to do is get my stats up higher and i got it

Slimesword would've doubled your damage

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks