RPG has consumables (potions, scrolls, grenades...)
Don't spend on normal enemies, because there will be bosses
Don't spend on bosses, because there will be final boss
Final boss: dies in a minute without you spending any
Here we go again
Don't spend on bosses because I dont want to have wasted a consumable in case I die and have to retry the boss.
I wish crafting an item made it a refillable instead of a consumable. I feel like the cracked pots in Elden Ring were going in the right direction as "refillable containers" at least
By the time you get to the bosses, the shitty potions don't heal enough anyway.
I appreciate the RPG's that let you craft better potions from the shit ones, but I still never use them.
Played Alan wake a couple days ago and for the first few level it was the same. But then I noticed that I lose all my stuff at the start of a new chapter. So I might as well use it.
So maybe there is something to be said about taking away players stuff in intervals to force them to use it.
That is indeed a curious mechanic
Maybe also having more consumables in the world and less fitting in your inventory would be a good thing? So that the player feels they'll just waste it if they don't use it, and it's not that rare anyway.
I like that. Anti-hoarding mechanics, I guess. I can't remember which game it was, but one I played recently recharged your mana/energy/mojo or whatever between fights, so you were encouraged to actually use the abilities instead of tediously avoiding it for most of the game. "How do I best use the total available mana for each battle" is a bit more fun than "Better pretend I don't have these abilities most of the time."
This is similar to why I actually came to like the rapidly breaking weapons in the Switch Zelda games. Once my mindset became "don't bother hoarding good weapons, just use whatever you want because you'll just find new ones all the time" it stopped being annoying and instead kept things fresh.
The consumables are for plebs that need the help. No, thanks. I'll just explore every corner of the world collecting all of the consumables in chests and pots and whatever(never using them, mind you), fighting every random encounter, and hitting the level cap before the third act. Who needs tchotchkes when I can transform into/summon a glorious esper and cast Ultima?
Shattered pixel dungeon has an interesting approach: everything is unidentified, including potions. If you want to identify them, there are scrolls of identification (once you figure out which ones they are, though I believe most classes auto id them) but most of the time it's experimentation. Drink it and see what happens. Took me a bunch of runs to even realise that was something I should do (because you don't need to identify potions for them to just sit in your bag for future use, but I figured "fuck it" and tried one, which made me float, and I realized what I needed to do to get to chests in rooms full of traps without using all my hp and waiting to heal).
If you don't know it you should try nethack if you like SPD. Stuff being unidentified was the norm in DnD and rogue was an early attempt at making a computer game of that, with nethack being the pinnacle of that era's evolution
I broke this habit once growing when I decided to finish Mario and Luigi Partners in Time after a break. I had just reached the final dungeon, but before diving in I realized I had more money than I knew what to do with.
I went to the store, got like 99 of all the cool looking items, entered the dungeon, and went to town. Every turn was a question of whether to use a power flower, hammer, or what have you. I mowed through all those end game enemies and the final boss didn’t know what hit em. It was glorious.
One thing that is easing me into using items is watching speedruns, of all things. Hell, I used to be an ammo hoarder for side-scrolling games that had them (Jazz Jackrabbit, Mega Man), nowadays I prefer to blast the powerful stuff
Almost accurate, except the boss is randomly weak to one of the 20 status effects. Also, said boss fight is nearly impossible without exploiting that one status weakness because fuck you.
FFX was so annoying about this, was doing the dark aeons recently and all you can do in those fights is buff yourself and attack, felt pointless unlocking debuff skills at the end of some characters pathways only to never use them.
Looking at you Triple Foul.
The dark aeons are very special end bosses though. I remember just paying Yojimbo 10,000,000 cash and then he would just split them in half...
It felt like the Devs overcompensating for making the actual final boss the easiest one in the series.
Especially when you can get locked out of ultimate weapons if you don't back track early enough. I replayed recently and was waiting to get the airship before back tracking for missed chests and jecht spheres, and by that point I kept running into Dark Aeon bullshit randomly.
Fromsoft: "We will have exactly 2 enemies in the entire game that are weak to this status effect. Everything else will resist the fuck out of it. You can only aquire this status effect by finding a secret hidden boss named "Joseph the Weakling" and defeating him without getting hit. He is the hardest boss in the game."
"It's a consumable and you only get 1 shot at this. Enemy is absurdly hard without it. Unfair, even."
This armor is a gamechanger because it gives me a decent elemental resistance boost to some random element, I'm gonna organize my build around it
Statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged
I will only stay in this one area where this specific type of enemy spawns to get the most out of this resistance. I don't want to see the rest of the game.
And you find the plate mail with 80% fire resistance not at the end of the water dungeon, but at the end of the fire dungeon. You will never see another fire elemental after you exit here. Fire damage will be completely irrelevant, even in the final boss fight where Satan himself shows up and only uses dark attacks.
I feel like Square-Enix in particular over-corrected on status effects after FF6 had the Vanish/Doom combo, Fenix Down items used on undead instantly killing them, etc.
Status condition recovery items are even worse, because you have to stock them, just in case there's ever a fight that you really need them in, but then finish the game without ever having needed even a single one.
In related news I found out much later than I should have the freeze in Pokemon can wear off on it's own.
There's fire moves that thaw you when you use them as well
Similarly: Skyrim has other potions than health, mana, and fortify restoriation potions. But no one will be able to tell you what they do.
Game designers, and I'm including tabletop rpgs, love having status effects that freeze, paralyzed, or do a percentage of health of damage; but they always neglect the fact that they're ineffective against hordes of weak enemies and are overpowered against strong solo enemies.
Really wish they would have more foresight than to just make it have zero effect on bosses. I'd be satisfied with it applying a weakened effect instead of being outright immune.
Hate to agree with an anon but that was always my exact experience playing any RPG outside of Pokémon. Between that and not having any indication how much stat-boosting moves actually boosted my stats, it trained me to never use anything other than offensive skills.
Outside of Pokémon???
The game where you can spam 1 move on one Pokémon to finish the entire game?
In competitive Pokemon, buffs and debuffs are absolutely critical.
In a single player run, they're useless.
It's a game where it's useful to use status moves on wild Pokemon (mostly to catch) and also all status moves work the same against bosses as regular enemies.
I think that's a (very slight) exaggeration but I recognize Pokémon is babby's first RPG which is why I generally don't count the series when discussing RPGs.
In the case of the topic at hand, tho, all the Pokémon games I've played have encouraged the use of status ailments against bosses and has hard caps on stat boosts that are easy to wrap your head around.
Play Warframe.
Have a frame with armour stripping.
Armour stripping is a number based on current armour, not base armour, so it doesn't scale with level.
Low lto mid evel enemies die too easily from conventional attacks to even bother casting armour strip.
High level enemies have way too much armour, requiring to spend more time and casting energy to strip their armour than just using a conventional weapon with the correct element.
That's not really up to date information, now is it? Most armor strips in Warframe are percentage-based, with only a few remaining that aren't.
Laughs in Shin Megami Tensei.
Play Etrian Odyssey where status effects are an integral part of every encounter.
I've always felt this about Pokemon, there's so many moves that affect stats, cause status effects, or do something interesting, but I always just go for whatever deals damage. Even on my current run, I'll keep a move around because it sounds fun, but won't use it.
Literally if you arent one-shotting youre just playing the game wrong or bad on purpose.
Im a known pokemon hater. Its just a "very complicated but less complicated than you think" game of rock-paper-scissors.
ffxi, we gave Bard a song that deals damage over time. Everything is immune to it.
Persona 4, where the first 5 or 6 first bosses are weak to an element, but if you use it they get a shield against it.
Almost worse to me is when you're railroaded to only using the latest acquired buff and everything else is useless once you progress. Like beating the boss is just hoping you land the special attack enough times to beat dps before it runs out. Mostly in TBS games I suppose.
I've yet to play a game in which poison damage was at all relevant. Mostly they require to be poinsoned so you can do more damage with a different attack, if that.
STS & STS2 (slay the spire)
eh, depends. I use them quite a bit in some games. Persona and the FF, but you have to know what you are doing, and they are mostly useful on stronger basic enemies or minibosses particularly.
But yeah, pragmatically, the learning/experimentation curve for status effects is too high/annoying for most players/playing. They require a lot of experimentation and remembering weaknesses or how to stack them.
The secondary effects they have in persona is pretty cool, a lot of them up the crit rate substantially, but also they can transfer to your characters if you 'touch' them with a normal attack.
Haste and slow, bb!
A bit like SMT (me playing Nocturne) where not a single one of your demons has the required skill that would make it so much easier.
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