Quote Originally Posted by Golgotha View Post
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I agree with most everything you say. However worded differently, your first paragraph just says that players want to have the absolute theoretical max multipliers without having to choose anything, and without having to sacrifice anything. That doesn't make an interesting game.

Regarding your 2nd paragraph about class synergy, my proposal above does that. It does not take into account anything that is class specific. All stances are useful for all classes and they are universal. No stance is tied to any weapon (except SU's pet stance) or even weapon type (strike / range / tech). They are tied to the state of the enemy and the battlefield (and your allies for TE's proposed stances).

Your 3rd paragraph actually highlights the issue. Players don't like to have to make choices; they just want to see big numbers without them wanting to play, just spam whatever and see big numbers. This reminds me the discussion in World of Warcraft many years ago, where Fire Mages had a significant part of their damage tied to dealing critical hits, and players with 70% crit chance would actually create threads complaining that they should have 100% crit chance because "our class does not have 70% crit chance, it has 30% chance of blocking us from dealing proper damage."

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Fluidity is very important to an action game. But there are different types of fluidity. My proposal does not hinder a player from being agile, from being able to dodge attacks, from being able to move around the battlefield quickly or from being able to close/increase gaps to an enemy. The only changes are to damage output, which isn't radically different than selecting a different PA/Tech except on a longer scale.

Clunkiness is when a player has to perform a series of actions before they are even able to perform a task, and they have to repeat that a lot of times over a small period of time. Clunkiness, for example, is having to switch a different weapon, accumulate PP over time, and then spam a specific PA to be able to move swiftly around the battlefield. Clunkiness is highlighted if someone is able to accomplish that without effort, while others have to perform this series of actions. Imagine if instead of that, we just had a skill at our disposal that gave us dashing speed at the expense of PP over time. That's how you remove clunkiness.