Let's talk about poison

The good thing about the early Dragon Warrior games was the limited inventory space. No one seems to think this is a good thing anymore, but it really affects things like this. It doesn't matter how many antidote herbs you can afford, you can only FIT so many of them, and at the expense of space for other items (this was an excellent way to keep costs for equipment high, while costs for simple items low, without running into the problem of the player being able to obliterate poison via buying 500 antidotes). And the cost of the antidote spell was relevant as well; in this way, poison was a drain on items/MP more than an immediate danger to a character's HP.

Of course, this was meaningless against monsters, and so it is not surprising that the heroes had no poisoning attacks.

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I am Srime

Actually, when I suggested to stock up on Antidotes in FF1, I didn't mean get up to 99. You actually only need around 10 for the Marsh Cave, and 10 or 20 more for the rest of the game.

From what I know of DW games, characters actually learn spells that cure Poison at very little MP cost, so inventory space wouldn't be as much of an issue as it's intended to be. FF1, it costs a lot of money to buy an Antidote spell and it is a high level spell so you don't get many castings of it, making the item variant much more important.

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<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb

Not to mention that for the price of the spell, you can buy enough PUREs to last you the whole game.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

That is true I suppose. Still, the MP drain was, I seem to remember, an issue. The Antidote spell was cheap, but MP was limited enough that it was became an issue if you found yourself poisoned often. Enemies who could poison the whole group were among the worst simply because they could require the use of multiple castings of the spell from only one attack - I remember trying to get rid of these enemies early in a battle if possible, even in the mid-to-late game in DW2 and 4 (I can't remember 3 as well). And that alone meant pairing them with powerful enemies in other areas caused a problem.

I guess the basic gist I'm trying to get through is that poison can be a drain on resources for the heroes, and the avoidance of it can be made important to the player, not for HP's sake, but for MP/item availability. This is, unfortunately, a dimension of battle that cannot (easily) be reversed to consideration of poisoning enemies.

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I am Srime

I can usually afford 4, maybe 5 PUREs by that time... which is like two unlucky combats. I'm not saying it's impossible to deal with - it's just the bane of my runs.

Also, I'm using multiple forms of poison in my game. Before, they reset the register, so if one attack (that caused "bleeding" for example) got in the way of another one ("poison") well, too bad.

But now I've shifted them to non-blocking attacks. Working on balancing the snowball effect is important, but I don't really mind if some players discover that poison effects are pretty powerful in certain situations. It's way better than most people completely ignoring those effects, even when they are good. (Last boss of FF6 for example.)

You can easily fight one more battle for Pure money. Do you just not stop for anything?

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<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb

That's the plan!

The Single-Segment Speedrun on SDA had to rig encounters for money, getting an Undead battle formation whenever he could. If you want to make money for Pures with minimal stopping points, do exactly that.

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<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb