[Zuuljin]

Originally Posted by Cloud9_

That would tie into enemies and their weaknesses as well.. too often you find enemies be weak against X type of spell but not Y spell, so everyone goes for X spell... and the problem stems from the fact that all the enemies that ARE vulnerable to Y spell, no one goes after because there is no compelling reason to.

If you're designing a linear style RPG, obviously which set of spells you go after would make point A in your game harder, but point B easier... would be interesting to see the results though. That would require a lot of playtesting to get the balance right.

In the end though its a wash. So dungeon A is hard, B is easy, and C is medium if you go with fire, but if you go with water, A is easy, B is hard, and C is still medium. At then end of the day it didnt really matter, you just chose which section you wanted to be harder than another.

IMO the skills need to be tied to different types of playstyles or effects, such as fire spells are mainly single target, water spells are AOE, wind spells are fast casting, and earth spells cause status effects. Noone really has a huge advantage, its how you combine all 4 sets that matters.


As a kind of aside, balance in games is one hell of a headache. I've done a few simple games myself, and while the programming is done fairly fast, the vast majority of my time is spent balancing. For instance I made myself one of those TD games. In my head I had a great idea for all the towers and how they would balance, but when I finally got to implimenting them, it was a HUGE pita trying to balance them against each other, and I just gave up lol.