Malcanthet 24 Apr 2011 21:17
It's come under my observation that normal attacks are a bit… 'blah' in comparison to say, using a level 1 Power attack and blowing them out of the water on all accounts. Sure, spending MP should give you a bigger, better effect, but normals shouldn't leave you never wanting to use them in place of your techs.
Mainly, it seems that their damage suffers the most. Sure you can critically hit, but then you're wildly inaccurate. Your techs almost always hit (unless you pick inaccurate to conserve MP) and even if they crit, most normals leave one with a sour taste in their mouths. Not enough bam-k'pow! No chunky damage to pop up and hell-yeah at when you see the screen flash and a monster dies from your meaty triple-quadruple digit number. Woo! Critical! 300 damage! — Woo, level 1 Power Attack, 500 damage. Uhhhhh.
Boogey and I devised a simple increase to BASE attacks, AP wise as you level. Simply put, based on your equipment your Attack Power will increase by a specific percent.
My initial idea
Level 1-4 is AP x1.0, 5-6 is AP x1.1, 7-8 is APx 1.2, 9 is APx 1.3, and artifact weapons are x1.5.
Boogey's idea
1-3 * 1, 4-6, * 1.25, 7-9 * 1.33, 10 * 1.5
Boogey's is a bit more solid and less math involved, and crunching some numbers it doesn't exactly overpower normals, but it doesn't make them slouchy either. A good character with say, Jump and Concentrate will be quite the contender, and Attack Up becomes a slightly better choice.
The other idea I had for normals (or merely attack power and magic power in general) is to treat their additions to be +STR and +MAG instead, thusly increasing the amount of dice rolled for attacks (for a larger, random integer).
For instance, if I have 40 str and a +60 AP weapon, I will have 100 STR, and thusly roll 2dX*10+AP for damage. AP will still be STR+Weapon of course, so for a mid level weapon it would be 2d8*10+100 (120-260 damage range). The same would be true of magic attacks and power attacks, but the formula would lessen the dice by 1. (Formula: Magic dice (base 0(minimum 1), + amount tech increases it by (between 1 and 3) + MAP(x multiplier). A level 1 Magic attack with a 100 MAP would be 2dX*10+100. The same magic attack with a 200 MAP would be 3d8*10+200, and so on and so forth. A normal attack with 100 AP would be 2dX*10+100, while a level 1 power attack would also be 2dX*10+100. A normal attack with 200 AP would be 3d8*10+200, and a Power attack level 1 would be 3d8*10+200..)
As you can see, eventually level 1 power attacks will become obsolete.. compared to normals but by the time you have 300 STR/AP/MAP you probably should have been thinking about increasing them to level 2 or higher, where the AP gets multiplied, or you get additional dice. Level 1 Power/Magic attacks would mostly be for status effects and the like.. considering their MP cost is relatively paltry. Or they'd be for that elemental affinity you'd want to throw out there.
