"New MonBre"

New MonBre

The problem with the battle system:

the only way to have great success vs. a mob is to completely dodge them. If you are hit, it's very punishing. You can heal your monster with its (or others') abilities, but these aren't always available to newbies nor should they have heal after every battle. As you get stronger, with the best example being at Cooridat with the high-HP worms, you cannot kill stuff in one hit unless you absolutely overpower it. As a newbie, coming out of New Orsa is very discouraging and you have to pretty much be in a constant loop of always being stronger than the mobs around you, so you don't get hit.

The solution:

Agility is no longer a literal hit-or-miss stat. Now it's going to factor itself against the mob's, and that will dictate how you will hit them. More agility will give you (or them) a higher chance to hit and dodge. These are already pretty high to begin with, so let's say you have 20 agility and so does the mob. I'm not going to have you both being able to hit each other 50% of the time, it's going to be more like 80% of the time. However, if you have 21 agility vs their 20, it might jump to about 85%. Abilities of both the mob AND monster will ALWAYS hit. I have no plans to change the costs or effectiveness of abilities... but I am considering tying more abilities to the monsters in general. We'll see how that works out. Now the second part of the change will be the "block" stat. This will stop each hit from being absolutely devastating to the HP of the monster and encourage longer time spent in the wild, and less time spent in the hospital. Not entirely sure if block will regenerate quickly, at all, or instantly. I am considering chopping a good piece of HP off the mobs and turning it into block, but I don't want it to just be like "well it's technically HP anyway".

Also, the hit chance % will be known to the player when facing the mob.


The problem with quests and gods:

NO ONE IS TAKING THEM UP! This tells me that, 1. people are stupid, 2. my layout for the main hub, "city", is not acceptable. So I will change it to be more literal. You will go to the city, and there will be blocks similar to those in the employment agency. The first line will say "Hatchery" and have its cute little symbol, and under it will be an explanation of what it does. This will be repeated for all of them, and there will be obvious "QUESTS" and "KILL THIS GOD, PLEASE" blocks. I'm actually already doing things like pushing the god factor on players, by making the "rival story" appear every time they enter a new city for the first time.

Exploring:

One of my worst mistakes, I feel. First off, the world is huge. FUCKING HUGE. This is very discouraging to people who have to travel 50 steps to Silvamed. My solution is to have a "pace" option: normal, or fast. Fast paces will get you there by moving you two tiles at once. There is no "unlock" for this, and coding this will literally take 15 minutes. The second problem with it is that you don't see too much around you. I -really- cannot speculate how much time it would take me to add a tile of vision around you. It could be an hour's work or it could be three. If I added them, it'd be pretty hard on the script and take any thoughts of "maybe one day we will see players around us exploring" to the gutter.

@Dodging/accuracy being combined into just a chance to hit: I'm cool with that. It would also promote builds using agility, because first of all you'll need it to hit, and second of all you can use it to avoid getting hit.

Will there be min/max values for your/the enemy's hit chance?

@Abilities: Maybe level-related abilities? In between evolutions, getting more levels could add more abilities.

@Block: Blocked damage is reduced? If they have block, damage is cut by a certain percentage.

Block for monsters could be slowly recovered as you move around, but like not to the point where it covers itself every battle. Say you have 100 block, if each mob does you 70 damage in a battle, you should be able to heal like 50 block between fights. So it'd be like a gradual death without having to run back to the hospital every two fights.

@Quests/gods: I can't really visualize what you're suggesting, but will the explanations always be there?

@Exploring: Tile of vision? Adding stuff that's just hard on the server doesn't sound good, though.

Well the exploring idea sorta ruins the point of exploring a bit but the other ideas are awesome!
Couldn't trains be cheaper or short cuts be made?

Demi: yes, there will be minimum values. No matter what, the mob will always have 5% chance to hit you, and I'm considering the max hit to be 95%.

Abilities I'm not too sure of. To make a new ability, all I have to do is change things around a bit, and go to skills.php and add it there. Really not too hard.

Block: yeah maybe...

Quests/gods: yeah I think I'll have the ability to turn descriptions off.

Explore: "tile of vision" = all around you there would be one more tile in every direction. That brings it from 25 tiles to... 49 tiles visible.

CJ: there will be little "huts" in exploring for things like mini-hospitals and fishing or something.

As for seeing people around you, most people don't leave themselves out exploring forever. I'm not sure how often you'd even get the chance to see someone else, at least until we gain a very large number of members.

Do you mean seeing them as in a sprite, or just a "Players nearby: 3! Click here to see who!" I'm assuming that the only currently implemented thing we have that would be used there is PvP, but there could be more in the future.

Hmm. Interesting. Alright!
Abilities: No way! being able to dodge a big boulder from a rick elemental can mean the difference between life and death. I think that if you have your agility turned up higher, maybe 1.5 times or 2 times as high as the mob, you can dodge the ability, and the same with const, as the block could absorb the damage if turned up.
Double-tile moves: Yes. I hate how long it takes to travel places, or how much it costs, and make as much use of the happy train and happy sub times as I can get out of it, like for delivering key items or finishing off quests, then come back to the place I'm training my monster out exploring.
Gods: You may be right. I just only realized how weak Gloria was before I defeated Quentin, who was pretty easy to kill off with my pair.
THe things to do scroll at the city is already real good; maybe you should tell the hp of the god which would let a breeder know if their monsters had a good chance of killing said god.
THe shop. We should keep sold equips at their shops for others to buy, and the shop could turn knid of like into the auction house I talked about awhile back. For example, you have the buy/sell equips tabs, you could add an auction tab. However, equips would stay in their own shop, though that may b hard2code, as you'd need to give each town its own shop ... Perhaps city shops could get the items from town shops? Since there are infinitely fewer cities than cities+towns, this could work.