Spell Balance

[KDR_11k]

I'd only make one or two shots from the boss's volley be piercing so there's significantly less ordinance coming for you if you're in cover but you can't just sit completely still either.

[zebramatt]

Do we have\can we have cast times?

We also do have a charge-up mechanic that Keith developed out for the crests system that enchants replaced, and that allows for more of a Secret-Of-Mana-style (or Crystalis-style, if you prefer) multi-charge where you can keep holding the button and charge up to level 1, level 2, level 3, etc, and release at a varying power range depending on when you release.  It also locks your facing and makes you move slower while you're charging, to my recollection.  How many bugs would be introduced by dusting this one off, I'm not sure, but it strikes me as more interesting than a linear cast time because a) you can stop anytime you want; b) if you don't get to level 1 charge, no spell is cast, but you're also not locked into place and can dodge an enemy attack if you need; c) you're rewarded, but not forced, for taking the charge time higher and higher.

These can be tricky to balance, though, because of the existence of cover, which complicates everything in AVWW.  In a lot of action-RPGs, there is no cover to speak of.  So if you are doing a large charge-up/cast-time, you're still having to dodge enemy shots or whatever.  In AVWW, it's far too easy to just find a perfectly safe spot, hide there, charge to full, come out, release hell, and repeat.  That can make it so that boss battles become a joke with any charge weapon, or if we fix that problem, that they become murderously too long without a charge weapon.

I've been playing my way through the Metroid Prime Trilogy (which all have charge attacks, cover and boss battles) and several things strike me.

• Rate of fire. Although you might be able to fry enemies with a charge beam or two, it's always borderline whether taking the time to charge up that shot or two actually saves you any time (and therefore potential health from taking fire to the face). In the time you launch a charge attack, you could just as easily shoot three normal shots that might just as quickly do the trick.
• Accuracy. If you shoot something four or five times to kill it with non-charge shots, you might be able to miss (or miss the critical weak spots) with a couple of those shots - whereas you have to make the requisite charge shots count or waste time charging up again.
• Alternatives. Sure, as you progress charge shots of different kinds of weapon are often your most powerful attacks. But just as often, if not more so, you have more powerful alternatives. Missiles are as good, if not better, than charge beams for many enemies. And power bombs are almost always the most powerful option but (a) they're the closest range of all your weapons; and (b) they have extremely limited ammo.
• Ammunition usage. In Metriod, obviously, missiles are a finite resource with a fixed rate of ammo consumption. Beam weapons are infinite and time is the limiting factor. That means that on the whole, where beam weapons are balanced through their shot- and charge-times (as above); missiles and charge missiles are balanced through their ammo consumption rates. Although a super missile (charge) shot is often the most powerful attack, it requires five times as much ammo. Combined with its time-to-charge and time-to-fire, it's a real trade-off.
• Time to fire. Super missiles are a good example of this. You have to charge up with one button, then hit another button to fire. Upon doing so, there's a half-second animation which has to take place before the shot is actually unleashed. During that time, you can still be behind cover but given that when you are you've no idea how far the enemy might have moved, really you have to have come out from behind cover and stay there for the duration of the time it takes between unleashing the shot and it actually firing.
• Enemy resistances. Throughout the game, you only have charge capabilities for some of your weapons - unlocking more as you go. A charge shot from your power beam might be the most powerful weapon for a while but against enemies highly resistant to power shots, it will do less-to-no damage.
• Boss tactics. Bosses on the whole are never about how much damage you can lay down, rather specific tactics requiring a variety of weapons. Charge shots sometimes never even work against certain boss types. Or they do, but only after you've employed some other weapon type to weaken them temporarily.
• Destructible cover, and the abundance thereof. Most cover is destructible. That which isn't, is mostly not in boss rooms. Which means ducking and charging behind cover only works to an extent, and temporarily. And less so in boss situations.
• Enemy response. And finally (finally!) enemies also employ a variety of counter-measures. Some of them also have charge attacks, which you can only prevent by keeping up your fire against them. Some will take any gap in your offensive to rush you. Some are attracted to your charge and smash into you. Many simply rush about like maniacs so you're never sure where they might be when you come out from cover.

Now, obviously, much of that doesn't translate so well to a side-on platformer. And much of it is tricky in a procedural environment. But I thought I'd lay it all out there because a charging option really does offer a lot of tactical choice when implemented well. And although I'm still the sort of player who will always charge a shot in anticipation of entering any new area, in Prime I'm genuinely not convinced that it makes a whole lot of difference to my success rate in the following battles.

Of all the options suggested for Valley, the one semi-implemented by Keith, quoted from Chris above, sounds really interesting to me. Whether it's something which is important enough to go through the hassle of putting out there so close to go live, I'm not convinced of - to me, it sounds like an awesome DLC post-v1.0. 

[KDR_11k]

I don't think there's any game except shmups where the charge beam works well. In something like Megaman X (and the MM series past that) players tend to keep a charge at all times as their first resort attack and are reluctant to use any special weapons because the charge beam is there. In Super Metroid the missiles have been relegated to boss fights because the charge beam is a good enough replacement for normal fights that doesn't cost ammo (in boss fights it's a last resort measure though, with the charge time the CB has crappy DPS compared to the rapid fire missiles and regular beams cannot harm bosses). R-Type's charge beam worked but R-Type scrolls automatically and it takes a lot of time to get a full charge (even more time for the screen-clearing double charge) which you don't always have in a shmup.

Sometimes charge beams are used in combination with short vulnerability windows on bosses but I'm not sure if that's really a good idea.

Also charge beams tend to ruin the audio because players will keep charging the damn things all the time just in case an enemy surprises them.

[zebramatt]

I'm telling you, in Metroid Prime they work really well!

[x4000]

I'll agree that in Metroid Prime they worked really well, and in Super Metroid less so -- I also agree that this is complex enough that, to handle it properly, needs to be post-1.0.  There's lots of other ways to explore variety in the meantime (much lower hanging fruit), and we ought to pursue a large number of those rather than focusing a lot of time and energy on a small number of complex-to-balance features.  In general for the next three weeks, possibly a bit longer than that even, that's going to be my philosophy.

Once we have all the low hanging fruit out of the way, things change, and we can settle into some more complex single features that really mess with the game.  See AI War as an example of this general development strategy, both with its base game and the progression of each expansion's development.

[KDR_11k]

I'm telling you, in Metroid Prime they work really well!

Been a while since I played that but I think a part of the balance there was that your regular beams tended to be fairly strong (well, except for the power beam) so charging wasn't always necessary. Missiles are still underutilized though, I only ever used them as super missiles (since they deal so much damage) and in Prime 3 I was getting fed up with all the missile containers because the missiles were so damn useless.

[BobTheJanitor]

Another thing that I think might need some attention is the mana bar. It's a very binary thing right now. Either you have mana, and you can fire spells at a fast rate, or you have no mana, and you can fire them much slower as you wait for it to regen. As far as I can tell, there is nothing to make mana regenerate faster, so a character with 1000 mana and a character with 200 mana are effectively equivalent after holding down the attack button for a few seconds. (except for some rare spells that low mana characters can't fire at all, but that's not the point here and almost never applies to attack spells)

I hadn't really thought about this before, but I fought a few lieutenants and overlords last night, and it made the problem pretty blindingly obvious to me. When you're trying to kill something with 1 million plus HP, you have a long long time to consider your mana bar.

So it kind of made me wonder what the point of the mana bar is at all. Is it just a leftover from when this was a different game and 10 ball lightning shots didn't take your whole mana bar, and there were mana potions? What purpose is it intended to serve now? Because in practice the real effect is that your shots have a high rate of fire against trash enemies which you come across when you have plenty of mana, and your shots have a much lower rate of fire against bosses, since you will spend the majority of a boss fight either holding down an attack button and hearing the error noise and seeing 'not enough mana to cast...' or just sitting in a corner waiting for a blue bar to fill back up so you can jump back out and attack a few times again. Neither of these options are very interesting for gameplay.

So should some shots just not take mana at all? Megaman, Samus, Simon Belmont, et al all have at least some basic attacks they can use that take no special fuel to use. Or should mana potions go back in and just be something that you save up for boss fights? Or should there be some sort of mana regen mechanic that kicks in to increase your regen when you're not taking damage, or not moving, or not shooting? Or an extra bonus for not doing any of those? Should enemies drop mana orbs along with health orbs? Maybe just enemies in boss rooms? Maybe some kind of super regen item you can find to use on boss fights? I don't know if any of this sounds reasonable, but I do know that being constantly out of mana against bosses and being unable to do anything about it is not really fun gameplay. 

[zebramatt]

@KDR:

Indeed so. The Ice Beam is particularly potent but has a pretty low number of shots per second, for instance.

I must admit, missiles are pretty niche for most of the game. But they are my first recourse for doing an amount of splash damage quickly - charge shots just take too damn long and require slightly too good an aim whilst dodging for that purpose. With so many missile expansions, they fit that role relatively well. Plus you can't beat ice beam charge to missile for instant kills.

[x4000]

@Bob: In general these affect your ROF more than anything else.  However, having more mana also means that you will be able to use mega-spells that lower-mana characters will not be able to.  In other words, having a small difference in mana might not make much difference, sure, as you say.  But if a spell costs 800 mana to use, and you have only 300, you're not going to be able to use it without major upgrades to yourself.  Think Tellah from FF4.

But in seriousness, this gives a choice: use higher-powered/higher-health characters that can only use the smaller spells?  Or use a lower-health/lower-base-attack character that can cast the mega-spells that deal more damage inherently.  Think Raistlin from Dragonlance.

We just haven't gotten there yet.

In terms of things to adjust your rate of mana recharge, there will be enchants that do that, we just haven't done them yet.  So if it's important you to recharge faster, you'll be able to prioritize that in your enchants.

Last point: when it comes to most basic spells, like fireball and such, those essentially ARE mana-free.  Anything that costs in the sub-38 mana range is basically "costs no/almost-no" mana range because when you look at your mana recharge rate, by the time you can cast that spell again (1 second later or whatever), the amount of mana you spent from the first casting has already been recharged.  So in other words it makes it a spell where you can just hold down the fire button and spam that spell as fast as your cooldown allows, "for free" in terms of mana.  Or at worst with the ones in the 36-40 mana range, it takes like half a minute or more of that kind of spamming to get your mana substantially lower.  I think it's 34-35 mana range spells that are literally free.

Mana is very much not a holdover from a past system, and goodness knows we're not in reinvention territory on something like this at this time -- that's what the beta phase 3 tag means, to some extent.  We're figured out how these subsystems should work, and it's just a matter of implementing the rest of the features and getting them balanced.  I think that the above should address all of your complaints, once we've had a chance to actually get it all in (hopefully well prior to 1.0).

[KDR_11k]

That's assuming a ROF of 1/sec. I'm not quite sure how the cooldown works but it seems to be the largest of the cooldown numbers listed for a spell. That puts fireball (38 mana) and plasma bolt (35 mana) at 0.8 seconds per shot which makes them exceed the 37/sec regeneration. There's also fire touch but you shouldn't use that for combat, it has exactly the same ROF and mana consumption as the fireball but less damage and no range. The only damage dealing spell I can find that has a cooldown that puts it below 37/sec consumption is splashback. I suppose if you use a -20% cost enchant and no ROF boosters you could get fireball and plasma bolt to be below the break even point. But plasma bolt has crap for DPS.

But even then that's only two out of six damage types covered. The rest are:
Air: Ball Lightning. Huge mana consumption, the only reason to keep using it is the extra damage against machines.
Ground: Forest Rage: Terrible efficiency and damage output, you pay dearly for the ability to slide along walls. Launch Rock: Really expensive but at least there's an exploit to pierce enemies on battlegrounds*.
Water: You COULD try throwing tidal pulse at enemies but you're better off not even bothering, huge mana consumption for little gain and water resistance seems to be the most common resistance. Good luck going into close combat.
Entropy: No matter what you do it's crazy expensive. Miasma whip is probably the most feasible option but even that is pretty expensive and short ranged.

Mind you, I haven't unlocked all spells but I've got the vast majority and I think the remaining ones are fairly niche.

*= Oh right, forgot to report that... If the rock hits the ground before it hits an enemy it keeps sliding just like normal and can pierce enemies for a few meters.

[BobTheJanitor]

Edit: ^^^ Yeah that's basically what I was typing, but now that I've typed it out, I'm leaving it here. You'd think a short paragraph like this wouldn't take 10 minutes to type out, but I was scouring the in game encyclopedia for spell costs.

Most spells have a less than 1 second refire rate, though, even without enchants. After poking around, I can't find anything in game right now that qualifies as a 'free' spell. Fireball appears to be the cheapest, but it is still 38 mana per shot with a base 0.8 refire rate. So that's still, what 45ish mana used per second against the 37 mana regenerated per second? So with just fireballs on a character with 500 or so mana, you'll still run dry on mana in roughly a minute. No problem in normal use (assuming you don't use ride the lightning too much, like I do) but against a lieutenant or overlord, you'll be slow firing shots and waiting on regen most of the battle.

I removed all my enchants just to verify, and I can't find anything that would come out to less than 37 mana used per second.

[x4000]

Yeah, I did tweak it recently so that none of them are "completely free" now that I think of it.  Because I wanted to emphasize aiming over just spray and pray.  With classic Metroid you were limited to your angles of fire, here with a mouse that is not so, making spray and pray wildly more effective here.  So I wanted to limit the amount of time someone could just hold down the button and perfect their aim by using early shots as tracers.

But even so, what I said still basically holds -- with fireball it takes more than a bit of time before you need to recharge in most cases.  And with enchants coming to adjust mana recharge rates if that's your thing, you'll be hitting that point where some of those spells below a higher threshold (40, maybe; it depends on the recharge boost rate of the particular enchant) will actually be in the free-to-fire category.

With launch rock, the slamming through multiple enemies as it hits the ground or whatever else is intended, thanks.

[KDR_11k]

Is it intended on battlefields? The rock disappears if it hits an enemy first but if it hits the ground and THEN the enemy it pierces.

The rate of fire in AVWW is already fairly low compared to other action games, I wouldn't call two fireballs per second "spray and pray". Spraying is what I do with a minishark or crystal storm in Terraria, flinging 15 bullets per second and carrying enough ammo to flatten the Benelux states. When you can only shoot 1-2 shots per second you're automatically required to aim more accurately, especially at range and with the enemy sizes being what they are in AVWW.

On the other hand I noticed that I found it much more enjoyable to fight with tab targeting on and worrying about dodging instead of aiming my attacks and I was wondering for a moment if 8 way aiming might not be more fun than full mouse aim. Enemies are bullet sponges anyway so shooting isn't terribly satisfying and most bullet hell shmups require next to no aiming so you can focus on dodging. That would also open the way for spells that cover uncommon angles (like Contra's spread gun).

[x4000]

I haven't tested it on battlefields, to be honest.

My recommendation on the mana recharge is to wait for the enchants related to those and see how those change things.  If things still seem out of balance, you know we won't leave something unaddressed once it's clear something needs to be done.

I'll confess I never did play contra, but the spread gun sounds interesting.

[KDR_11k]

I already have a -20% mana cost enchant in my inventory. It takes the same slot as my +40% fire damage enchant so I'm not wearing it.