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.”
I see this in other games too, and I call it the ‘speedrunner tool’.
Normal players (me) get stomped by a boss a few times until they figure it out and can beat it without the buff (fire paper, lightning grease, etc); Maybe they use them, but then they run out and are never used again…
Some players might use the buff and get an easier win; but if they don’t, then they are wasted and are hard or impossible to replace, so players learn to not rely on them.
Speedrunners use lightning grease to kill the boss in 3 hits and are already halfway to the next boss before the buff runs out and already picked up the right buff item for that next boss. When your victory is all but guaranteed, the item makes it faster - otherwise it’s not really useful.
I think Ethers in FF games as a trope kind of fit here too. Too valuable to waste, but if you can do it without them, then you didn’t need it unless you absolutely needed to kill that boss without using a tent or resting, etc, to save time.
Elden ring was a bit better: Everything is either weak to or completely resistant vs holy, flip a coin
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.
It’s worse if it’s a status effect only attainable by learning it from a random enemy somewhere in act 2
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.
As a sometimes-DM who enjoys making interesting encounters, the answer is to either avoid solo bosses, or have multi-phase bosses where their tactics/immunities change. Steal liberally from JRPGs, they were absurdly popular for a reason!
Crystal Project does exactly that. The DoT effects do health percent damage, and the stronger enemies and bosses have resistance to it rather than full on immunity.
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.
Laughs in Shin Megami Tensei.
A bit like the Elden Ring of jrpgs (well, it’s not that hard)
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.
Yeah, and they’re mostly the older Warframes. Mag feels rather forgotten.
Pretty sure she can 100% armor strip now. She got a tune up a while ago
Mag is insanely strong but lots of people just don’t read her kit. I certainly didn’t for a while until someone said Mag was shit… So then I checked out WarframeFlo’s video on her and realised she melts everything if you play her correctly. Just capture any enemy you want in a magnetic bubble and any other enemy who walks into the bubble, just disappears in a swarm of bullets. The bubbles stay for quite a long time too, and you can make many of them. Another skill just leaves shards of shrapnel or something that also dissolves enemies around the map. Pull is fairly useless if you aren’t host, so switch that out with Nourish or something. And the other skill is a decent emergency offensive skill which restores all your shields instantly. She most likely does more that I didn’t mention, but that’s how I understand her kit and I always have fun playing her.
If your weapon is weak, she might not be so good, so use an incarnon weapon or a weapon with lots of multishot etc.
Probably not as useful with some bosses maybe, but I try to avoid warframes shitty bosses for the most part.
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.
Winning the entry hazards war or getting an Intimidate attack debuff on the opponent’s physical sweeper can make the difference between a win and a loss in competitive. It’s why Gholdengo is so ridiculously overpowered by being immune to status moves and why Pokemon with the Unaware ability are used so much despite having lacklustre stats.
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.
Yeah, dude acting like leer and tail whip were used any more than nil.
Yeah, but swords dance and calm mind are used.
ffxi, we gave Bard a song that deals damage over time. Everything is immune to it.
To be fair to them, they EXPLODED ffxi because it was so shit.
I think you mean ffxiv?
Oh right. For some reason I thought that was Xi but that thing still has servers up. That’s nuts.
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.
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.
Yeah, I can’t believe that there is actual “competitive” scene of Pokémon. At the end just wins the one with the bigger rock, paper or scissors.
Rock paper scissors level 1 rattata
People are downvotung but I love this hot take hahaha
In Pokemon, a lot of stuff exists to throw against you, the single player, which are you not expected to really use yourself. The single-player game is NOT expected to be balanced or fair. Heck, in most of the games there are only 2 NPC’s with a full party: one of which will.be a fisher with 6 Magikarp, the other is the champion and final.boss of the game.
This is why there are a ton of pokemon that suck. They are not intended for you to use and GameFreak just made a mistake: they are intended to allow GameFreak to throw easy encounters at you.
Poison used to tick down your Pokemon’s health with every step outside of battle. Persistent status effects are there to wear down the player’s resources across a routewith several trainer battles and probably wild encounters, nkt to wear down the player over the course of a single battle.
Try pokemon colosseum or XD: gale of darkness (both for gamecube), they both almost exclusively have 2v2-battles which actually have strategic depth as opposed to just matching types and going ham. They also serve a bit of a twist on the normal games, since you capture your pokemon mostly as shadow-pokemon from other trainers.
I did play both of those when they first came out, I don’t remember a whole lot of the gamepkay outside of, no actual travel outside of town, for XD you can only capture dark Pokemon, don’t remember for Colloseum, and they both have the same, rather obvious, twist of who the villain is. That said, I enjoyed them both a lot when I had my GameCube.
The competive strats are diverse use these mechanics. And romhacks that actually focus on harder fights might lead real strategy in a fight and needs good team building
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)
When I played Ass Creed: Odyssey I used a poison build, it was very effective in that game.
In Competitive Pokemon is very useful to handle walls. You specifically want to badly poison them and the amount of HP it removes increases every turn.
Play Etrian Odyssey where status effects are an integral part of every encounter.
Including the ability to cheese curse to do obscene damage if I remember right.
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.
Cast confuse, end up being punched in the face anyway.
