MATHEMANCY
Sept 29, 2012 12:52:12 GMT -6
Post by Nayru Al-Saiduq on Sept 29, 2012 12:52:12 GMT -6
Preface: Shop pricing schemes have always seemed unnecessarily convoluted to me; I get that they're (mostly) based off of the games, but there doesn't seem to be much internal consistency, and this just gets worse when you get into the stuff that you couldn't (generally) purchase ingame, that I feel like the RP would be a bit better off altering. Granted, WotW is not a heavily mechanics-based, Starcraft-level-balance-focused roleplay, but I do feel like simplifying things and balancing them a little would serve to improve the site without a dramatic amount of ongoing or initial work.
Weapons!
To illustrate my point, I'm going to bring up some of the pricing points that jumped out at me initially while skimming stuff looking for Elesia/Karyn weaponry.
Examples: Slim/Iron/Steel/Killer/Silver weapons: these are the easiest to compare (in-category) due to their extremely similar functionality (in-category); all Killer weapons add 30 crit, Slim 5, Steel is always stronger than but less accurate than Iron, etc. However, the pricing is nowhere near consistent; Slim swords/lances are nearly identical in cost, while Iron Swords are 1.3x the cost of Iron Lances. Why? They have identical functionality within their weapon group - why don't they at least have the same cost ratio, even if they MUST have different base costs? Why are Killer and Silver lances the same price while Killing Edges are 200g less than Silver Swords? Why are Longswords more than 1.5x the cost of Halberds when they have the exact same effect, while axes have to pay 150-300g more to reverse the weapon triangle, compared to any other weapon type, when axes are almost universally cheaper otherwise, sometimes dramatically so? Why is there no Slim Axe at all when every other weapon-using class is stuck with a Slim weapon? It's not like all axes are giant, and what the heck kind of Knight starts with a -slim- lance? For that matter, why are Slim weapons - universally worse in-game than even Iron stuff - more expensive than Iron weapons?
Solution: I would like to propose that gold-buyable weapon pricing is simplified into a base price per tier. There is no actual mechanical advantage to having an Iron Sword rather than an Iron Axe in-RP, as compared to the games where Axes were generally the best weapon type endgame - why can't we reflect this in RP by setting them both to the same price? While we're at it, why not just make it a simple price?
Averaging Iron weapon prices together (did you know what every single one of them costs off the top of your head? What about Steel? Killer?), we get (460+360+270)/3=363.3333 repeating, so let's say we want to stay in that general price range - maybe 300 or 400, depending on how you want to round and what you feel a better baseline would be to keep the economy going at the rate you want. Why not just add X to that price for Steel weapons, rather than reinventing the wheel? Steel weapon prices average out to 480 exactly - maybe 500 sounds fair? 600 works too, if you want to keep them reasonably more expensive. And hey, that's not hard to remember; 100-300 gold more expensive, depending on which option you go for with each tier.
Heck, why not just continue that? Just keep on tiering up by 200-300gold each level - something like 400/700/1000/1300/1600, or 500/750/1000/1250/1500, or... whatever? Alternately, come up with a couple price points, say 500/800/1100/1500, and group the weapons into those, ex. all weaponreaver/silver weaponry is 1500, all class-killers/killer weapons are 1100, etc? I'd certainly love to be able to say "oh, I know an Iron weapon is 400, and a Steel weapon is 700, so I'll need 1100 gold to get some basic stuff for Karyn..." rather than having to check the shop page to determine that a Steel Sword is 60 and an Iron Sword is 460 and added together that's 1060 and that's not really a number nicely divisible by 100. T_T
MAGIC!
Issue: You thought you would escape YOU WERE WRONG. Why does Anima have four buyable weapon tiers while Light only has three? Across the various games there have been PLENTY of light and anima magic tomes to pick from - would it be heresy to jack one might light tome? Why can Monks get their best buyable weapon for a Red Gem while Mages have to buy their best buyable spell? While we're on the subject, why do most of the melee weapons get identical uses (all Iron weapons get 45 uses) while identical-tier spells get such varied uses? The games? The games also had Mt, Wt, and Crit ratings balancing out the equation - here, we really just have price and uses and a VERY rough understanding that the lowest tier of magic stuff is roughly similar though not identical, so why does that poor Monk only get 35 uses of his Lightning to Elesia's 40 on Fire, when Lightning was already pretty much the worst spell in FE7/8 outside of use by Bishops with Slayer for Lagdou Ruins grinding?*
(*honorable mention to Flux for actually being worse in FE8 until you could buy Body Rings to fix it, but for most of the game a reasonably leveled Knoll could 1round pretty much anything whereas the Monks consistently struggled)
Solution: Same thing as with normal weapons - equalize the prices and uses. Not doing too bad on the price equalizing, though do we really need the 1200/1400/1500/1700 price points when we could just use say one or two of those, say 1200 and 1600? Hey, if you want to go the REALLY simple route - 400-800-1200-1600! Starts off about the same price as melee weapons (which might be a bad thing, depending on your perspective - might be better if Iron weapons started off at 300 so spells stayed a bit more expensive) and increases at a simple, linear, easily-memorized rate.
Staves don't look too ridiculously difficult to do something similar with; 500/1000/2000/3500 if you want to keep current prices, or something like 500/1000/1500/2000 if you want to actually see any one of the long-term clerics (because there are SO MANY OF THOSE active right now rite?) ever be able to afford a Physic. Might not hurt to mash a couple of the similar-price staves together (and why can we buy half of the blue gem staff rewards, but not recover? Berserk I can understand, but why is Recover gem-only when Mend is pretty much functionally identical (outside of having more uses and only coming very close to full-healing maxed HP units... which are a tiny subset...) to keep things simple too; does there really need to be an arbitrary price differential between Barrier and Restore when both are utility staffs that are already in the same general price point?
Repairs!
This ties in heavily to the previous points - can we just make repairs sensible for us mortals? Why can't we just make it (say) 30% of buying price so it's really easy to headmath rather than refusing to even give cost tiers for magic repairs because they "vary too much" or whatever the exact phrase was? 30% is just "ok what's 1/10 oft he cost... ok, what's 3x that?" if you don't want to pull out Windows Calculator or are not particularly good at doing math in your head (and while I'm perfectly capable of it, frankly I don't want to dip into ROCKET CALCULUS to figure out what 27% of the base price of Longinus is in base 3, carry the 42). Could take this a step further and just figure out what X% of each tier prices are and collapse Repair and Purchase lists into one, ex. Iron weapons are 400 purchase, 100 repair?
oh yeah MAGIC REPAIRS we are completely ok with player blacksmiths with absolutely no hard rules on the matter, so why can't we do the same thing with magic, even if we have to make it a little more limited due to the esoteric subject matter? Maybe something where so long as the mage (sage?) pays most/all of the normal repair costs to acquire the necessary reagents they can effectively act as a magic blacksmith? If it's a really big deal you can always make it sage-only or require the repair magician have their own copy of the tome to be repaired, explain it in-setting as knowing the proper way to INFUSE MAGIC into books or whatever, and just kinda leave it at that? This could add an avenue for a bit more of a player-run economy if you wanted to go that route.
Gem Shop!
yadda yadda use# equalizing - why don't Rienfleche, Rex Hasta, and Basilikos all have the same number of uses when they are functionally identical as White Gem rewards with no other mechanical difference outside of the very obvious of axe/bow/lance... but even then, why don't Rex Hasta and Basilikos have the same uses, considering they're both melee weapons that cost the same?
Cost vs benefit - I honestly can't even tell if I feel pretty bad for bow users, or mad jelly of them; where melee users get 800-1200 gold worth stuff from Red Gems, and mages get 1200-1700 gold-worth stuff, archers get short bows (which were, like, the worst bow in the game...) but cost almost 1800g here. Why not just have Red Gem rewards let you pick any weapon from a given pricing tier or below (ex. red gem is 1500 or below), based off of the pricing tiers I suggested earlier, so it's easy to keep track of? Like, let's say for ezmode argument that staves have a 1500 tier, magic has a 1500, melee weapons have a 1500... just say "red gem: tier 4 or below weapon" and let people pick which they want below that number; if they want a 1200 who cares?
I DO like the idea of gem-exclusive weapons, like the magic weapons for Blue Gems (though it would be cool to eventually be able to get multiple elements - runesword/windblade/lightbrand, say), but it'd be nice if they were actually specified as exclusive - out of the Blue Gem reward staves, Berserk/Barrier/Restore/Recover, why is there no indication that only the middle two are buyable while the bookend two are otherwise unattainable? Even adding asterisks to their names would help, or you could change it to something like "Tier 4 Staves, Berserk, Recover" to make it clear that the named staves are gem-exclusive.
(props on fixing the blue gem magic weapon type stuff, by the way - it's awesome to be able to just pick whatever element would work best for the character!)
Starting Weapons![/u]
Sword and Lance users are stuck with Slim weapons. Axe and Bow users get Iron Weapons. This is silly. Why not just give them all Iron weapons, or make Slim/Iron weapons identical in price (say, both are tier 1 price, ex. 400 gold) and let people pick which is more appropriate for the character? Let's be honest here, slim weapons were completely worthless in games - even pegasus riders did better with iron weapons especially past the first, like, level. Heck, axes/bows don't even HAVE slim weapons, though bow users had Short Bows in the games... which were EXACTLY like slim weapons, all the way down to the 5% crit - why are they fifty million gold here.
Classes!
Yeah this is already way too long so I'm just going to be (relatively) concise (for me) - why are Druids the only Dark/Anima users? Mages and Monks (Acolytes, technically) alike can go Sage to get Anima/Light, so it's not like Light or Anima are that difficult to get for most offensive magic users, and staff users can get Dark (Seer()), Light (Bishop, Valkyrie) and Anima magic (Mage Knight) alike, so it's not like Dark is fundamentally incompatible with healing stuffs... and hey, Druids can get Anima, so it's obviously POSSIBLE to know both of those magic types without spontaneously combusting like you presumably do if you try to roll with both Dark and Light simultaneously. Can we fix that, either by making Sages able to learn all magic types while still limited to mastering two (they ARE basically the world's generalists...) or dropping in a new class to allow anima->anima+dark, say Warlock/Witch or Sorcerer? Partial to Warlock myself, it just sounds BAMF.
...Actually, I VAGUELY remember light/dark being shot down for plot reasons or something, so I'm not going to treat it as a big deal, but man that would be an awesome combination. Twilight magic and shAVING CREAM, yo. Could be fun for yin/yang stuff too, like an Omnyo class COUGH DISGAEA 4 COUGH.
Also hi I love you guys sorry this ended up a bit longer than intended, but I wanted to explain/defend my reasoning for each point rather than just throwing a bunch of random stuff at you and expect you to magically know my thought processes.
Weapons!
To illustrate my point, I'm going to bring up some of the pricing points that jumped out at me initially while skimming stuff looking for Elesia/Karyn weaponry.
Examples: Slim/Iron/Steel/Killer/Silver weapons: these are the easiest to compare (in-category) due to their extremely similar functionality (in-category); all Killer weapons add 30 crit, Slim 5, Steel is always stronger than but less accurate than Iron, etc. However, the pricing is nowhere near consistent; Slim swords/lances are nearly identical in cost, while Iron Swords are 1.3x the cost of Iron Lances. Why? They have identical functionality within their weapon group - why don't they at least have the same cost ratio, even if they MUST have different base costs? Why are Killer and Silver lances the same price while Killing Edges are 200g less than Silver Swords? Why are Longswords more than 1.5x the cost of Halberds when they have the exact same effect, while axes have to pay 150-300g more to reverse the weapon triangle, compared to any other weapon type, when axes are almost universally cheaper otherwise, sometimes dramatically so? Why is there no Slim Axe at all when every other weapon-using class is stuck with a Slim weapon? It's not like all axes are giant, and what the heck kind of Knight starts with a -slim- lance? For that matter, why are Slim weapons - universally worse in-game than even Iron stuff - more expensive than Iron weapons?
Solution: I would like to propose that gold-buyable weapon pricing is simplified into a base price per tier. There is no actual mechanical advantage to having an Iron Sword rather than an Iron Axe in-RP, as compared to the games where Axes were generally the best weapon type endgame - why can't we reflect this in RP by setting them both to the same price? While we're at it, why not just make it a simple price?
Averaging Iron weapon prices together (did you know what every single one of them costs off the top of your head? What about Steel? Killer?), we get (460+360+270)/3=363.3333 repeating, so let's say we want to stay in that general price range - maybe 300 or 400, depending on how you want to round and what you feel a better baseline would be to keep the economy going at the rate you want. Why not just add X to that price for Steel weapons, rather than reinventing the wheel? Steel weapon prices average out to 480 exactly - maybe 500 sounds fair? 600 works too, if you want to keep them reasonably more expensive. And hey, that's not hard to remember; 100-300 gold more expensive, depending on which option you go for with each tier.
Heck, why not just continue that? Just keep on tiering up by 200-300gold each level - something like 400/700/1000/1300/1600, or 500/750/1000/1250/1500, or... whatever? Alternately, come up with a couple price points, say 500/800/1100/1500, and group the weapons into those, ex. all weaponreaver/silver weaponry is 1500, all class-killers/killer weapons are 1100, etc? I'd certainly love to be able to say "oh, I know an Iron weapon is 400, and a Steel weapon is 700, so I'll need 1100 gold to get some basic stuff for Karyn..." rather than having to check the shop page to determine that a Steel Sword is 60 and an Iron Sword is 460 and added together that's 1060 and that's not really a number nicely divisible by 100. T_T
MAGIC!
Issue: You thought you would escape YOU WERE WRONG. Why does Anima have four buyable weapon tiers while Light only has three? Across the various games there have been PLENTY of light and anima magic tomes to pick from - would it be heresy to jack one might light tome? Why can Monks get their best buyable weapon for a Red Gem while Mages have to buy their best buyable spell? While we're on the subject, why do most of the melee weapons get identical uses (all Iron weapons get 45 uses) while identical-tier spells get such varied uses? The games? The games also had Mt, Wt, and Crit ratings balancing out the equation - here, we really just have price and uses and a VERY rough understanding that the lowest tier of magic stuff is roughly similar though not identical, so why does that poor Monk only get 35 uses of his Lightning to Elesia's 40 on Fire, when Lightning was already pretty much the worst spell in FE7/8 outside of use by Bishops with Slayer for Lagdou Ruins grinding?*
(*honorable mention to Flux for actually being worse in FE8 until you could buy Body Rings to fix it, but for most of the game a reasonably leveled Knoll could 1round pretty much anything whereas the Monks consistently struggled)
Solution: Same thing as with normal weapons - equalize the prices and uses. Not doing too bad on the price equalizing, though do we really need the 1200/1400/1500/1700 price points when we could just use say one or two of those, say 1200 and 1600? Hey, if you want to go the REALLY simple route - 400-800-1200-1600! Starts off about the same price as melee weapons (which might be a bad thing, depending on your perspective - might be better if Iron weapons started off at 300 so spells stayed a bit more expensive) and increases at a simple, linear, easily-memorized rate.
Staves don't look too ridiculously difficult to do something similar with; 500/1000/2000/3500 if you want to keep current prices, or something like 500/1000/1500/2000 if you want to actually see any one of the long-term clerics (because there are SO MANY OF THOSE active right now rite?) ever be able to afford a Physic. Might not hurt to mash a couple of the similar-price staves together (and why can we buy half of the blue gem staff rewards, but not recover? Berserk I can understand, but why is Recover gem-only when Mend is pretty much functionally identical (outside of having more uses and only coming very close to full-healing maxed HP units... which are a tiny subset...) to keep things simple too; does there really need to be an arbitrary price differential between Barrier and Restore when both are utility staffs that are already in the same general price point?
Repairs!
This ties in heavily to the previous points - can we just make repairs sensible for us mortals? Why can't we just make it (say) 30% of buying price so it's really easy to headmath rather than refusing to even give cost tiers for magic repairs because they "vary too much" or whatever the exact phrase was? 30% is just "ok what's 1/10 oft he cost... ok, what's 3x that?" if you don't want to pull out Windows Calculator or are not particularly good at doing math in your head (and while I'm perfectly capable of it, frankly I don't want to dip into ROCKET CALCULUS to figure out what 27% of the base price of Longinus is in base 3, carry the 42). Could take this a step further and just figure out what X% of each tier prices are and collapse Repair and Purchase lists into one, ex. Iron weapons are 400 purchase, 100 repair?
oh yeah MAGIC REPAIRS we are completely ok with player blacksmiths with absolutely no hard rules on the matter, so why can't we do the same thing with magic, even if we have to make it a little more limited due to the esoteric subject matter? Maybe something where so long as the mage (sage?) pays most/all of the normal repair costs to acquire the necessary reagents they can effectively act as a magic blacksmith? If it's a really big deal you can always make it sage-only or require the repair magician have their own copy of the tome to be repaired, explain it in-setting as knowing the proper way to INFUSE MAGIC into books or whatever, and just kinda leave it at that? This could add an avenue for a bit more of a player-run economy if you wanted to go that route.
Gem Shop!
yadda yadda use# equalizing - why don't Rienfleche, Rex Hasta, and Basilikos all have the same number of uses when they are functionally identical as White Gem rewards with no other mechanical difference outside of the very obvious of axe/bow/lance... but even then, why don't Rex Hasta and Basilikos have the same uses, considering they're both melee weapons that cost the same?
Cost vs benefit - I honestly can't even tell if I feel pretty bad for bow users, or mad jelly of them; where melee users get 800-1200 gold worth stuff from Red Gems, and mages get 1200-1700 gold-worth stuff, archers get short bows (which were, like, the worst bow in the game...) but cost almost 1800g here. Why not just have Red Gem rewards let you pick any weapon from a given pricing tier or below (ex. red gem is 1500 or below), based off of the pricing tiers I suggested earlier, so it's easy to keep track of? Like, let's say for ezmode argument that staves have a 1500 tier, magic has a 1500, melee weapons have a 1500... just say "red gem: tier 4 or below weapon" and let people pick which they want below that number; if they want a 1200 who cares?
I DO like the idea of gem-exclusive weapons, like the magic weapons for Blue Gems (though it would be cool to eventually be able to get multiple elements - runesword/windblade/lightbrand, say), but it'd be nice if they were actually specified as exclusive - out of the Blue Gem reward staves, Berserk/Barrier/Restore/Recover, why is there no indication that only the middle two are buyable while the bookend two are otherwise unattainable? Even adding asterisks to their names would help, or you could change it to something like "Tier 4 Staves, Berserk, Recover" to make it clear that the named staves are gem-exclusive.
(props on fixing the blue gem magic weapon type stuff, by the way - it's awesome to be able to just pick whatever element would work best for the character!)
Starting Weapons![/u]
Sword and Lance users are stuck with Slim weapons. Axe and Bow users get Iron Weapons. This is silly. Why not just give them all Iron weapons, or make Slim/Iron weapons identical in price (say, both are tier 1 price, ex. 400 gold) and let people pick which is more appropriate for the character? Let's be honest here, slim weapons were completely worthless in games - even pegasus riders did better with iron weapons especially past the first, like, level. Heck, axes/bows don't even HAVE slim weapons, though bow users had Short Bows in the games... which were EXACTLY like slim weapons, all the way down to the 5% crit - why are they fifty million gold here.
Classes!
Yeah this is already way too long so I'm just going to be (relatively) concise (for me) - why are Druids the only Dark/Anima users? Mages and Monks (Acolytes, technically) alike can go Sage to get Anima/Light, so it's not like Light or Anima are that difficult to get for most offensive magic users, and staff users can get Dark (Seer()), Light (Bishop, Valkyrie) and Anima magic (Mage Knight) alike, so it's not like Dark is fundamentally incompatible with healing stuffs... and hey, Druids can get Anima, so it's obviously POSSIBLE to know both of those magic types without spontaneously combusting like you presumably do if you try to roll with both Dark and Light simultaneously. Can we fix that, either by making Sages able to learn all magic types while still limited to mastering two (they ARE basically the world's generalists...) or dropping in a new class to allow anima->anima+dark, say Warlock/Witch or Sorcerer? Partial to Warlock myself, it just sounds BAMF.
...Actually, I VAGUELY remember light/dark being shot down for plot reasons or something, so I'm not going to treat it as a big deal, but man that would be an awesome combination. Twilight magic and shAVING CREAM, yo. Could be fun for yin/yang stuff too, like an Omnyo class COUGH DISGAEA 4 COUGH.
Also hi I love you guys sorry this ended up a bit longer than intended, but I wanted to explain/defend my reasoning for each point rather than just throwing a bunch of random stuff at you and expect you to magically know my thought processes.