Confuse/Charm status

[Mogri]

This is a feature people have been requesting for over a decade. There's no way to take control of heroes away from the player, but there's been a way to create confused monsters for a little while now. I'm not aware of anyone using this.

The spell itself is easy enough: create an attack with the "Confuse" element. If you want it to deal damage, too, then you can do that.

The implementation is a bit more involved. Each confusable enemy will need two enemy entries: one for its normal state, and another for its confused state. You'll also need to create self-targeting attacks to transmogrify the enemy both ways. (Note to James/TMC: it'd be great if enemies had their own transmogrify-on-hit menus.) Set up the normal enemy to transform into confused as a counter to "Confuse" element. You can choose which attacks trigger the reverse transformation. The Final Fantasy games only remove Confuse on physical damage or Esuna/Remedy, but this is your game, so do it how you want.


The same technique can be used to create other status effects, too, like Berserk and Sleep. Now, all we need is AI-controlled heroes and hero transmogrification

[Foxley]

I feel bad asking the devs for anything, but. This would be amazing. The only thing I'd want more in the battle system would be hero counterattacks.

[msw188]

I haven't thought about this at all, but the main difference between this and a status effect that comes to mind is, how do you arrange for the effect to run out after some amount of time? Also, can transmogrify be arranged to keep all stats the same (I seem to remember yes for HP and MP, but I don't remember for others)?

We've discussed the more complicated status effects before (confuse and reflect being the two I remember). There always seems to be more involved than meets the eye. I do like the idea of having computer-controlled heroes and handling all 'confusion' via transmogrification so that the author can control what actions are available to confused versions of characters (can confused heroes waste items?). But it seems unwieldy to start relying on transmogrification for lots of status effects. Like, if you want to use this for a 'berserk' effect, what happens if you berserk an already confused character? Could be handled, but the number of versions of each character needed starts to grow exponentially, not to mention the logic-attack chains necessary for adding or subtracting various statuses.

So in short, yeah cpu-controlled heroes and hero-transmog would both be cool (although hero-transmog can lead to other issues we're not addressing here). But at the same time, the best approach would probably be to have a system in place in custom that allowed users enough flexibility to set up their own status effects. Or battlescripting, I guess.