[Rock Eastwood]

Instead of just star atmomizers I'd rather have it so that you could heal team mates with your normal items. Kind of like final fantasy and traditional RPG's.

*toss item into the air*

*party member heals*

I think it would be useful during emergencies... especially when you have no force, and all 5 of your star atomizers would be gone quick in dire situations/boss fights.

Cause yanno I like being able to heal my buddies without being a pseudo paladin, or a support slave.

[Akaimizu]

It's different in a turn-based RPG. When you decide to make a different class heal another, you severely have to take a hit in damage since you sacrificed a whole round of that class doing their job to do the heal. Made even worse since you can only do it to 1 single party member. And healing items where you can heal as good as a true healer were not common at all. True healers had the exclusive ability to do party-wide heals, in those games, as well. Most of the time.

It never really applied that much in Phantasy Star Online. Using items are instantaneous, and using manual dexterity, you sacrificed very little to use such items and keep on attacking away. Taking a none healer, to do a healer role, in a turn-based RPG, was something you really regret on doing because forfeiting damage for an entire round is a game changer. It was a necessary evil at times, but always painful when you had to do it.

[Hotobu]

Originally Posted by Akaimizu

Well, Shifta boosts are nice, potentially. It really comes down to the system itself and how well it supports that. If the time to cast Shifta only gives everybody a damage boost that doesn't give them any more benefit than if you simply casted attack techs, it does very little. It's made even worse in a system when people seem just as happy to pop in an item that'll give them full boosts in a small fraction of the time for you to cast all the buffs.

See this is exactly what I'm talking about. In every game in the series thus far casting a spell that gives the parties' non forces +20% to their damage is better than casting a spell 100% of the time. Not only because of the spell casting rate, but because hunters and rangers can do lots of hits in succession, and killing things faster means the party takes less damage. The party damage output increase, and other intangible benefits from high level shifta trumps the damage output from a single spell caster 100% of the time. It's sad that people don't understand this.

...and it's not like active shifta negates a force's ability to cast spells as well.

[RemiusTA]

It's different in a turn-based RPG. When you decide to make a different class heal another, you severely have to take a hit in damage since you sacrificed a whole round of that class doing their job to do the heal. Made even worse since you can only do it to 1 single party member. And healing items where you can heal as good as a true healer were not common at all. True healers had the exclusive ability to do party-wide heals, in those games, as well. Most of the time.

Healers in most games are also simultaneously among the highest damage dealers. Lets see...In FF7, if you were using healing materia then your magic automatically goes up. FF9, the healing characters (Garnet, Eiko) were also the Summoning characters. FFX, Yuna was the healer, and once again the summoner (which made her one of the most OP characters in the game once you got Anima). Breath of Fire III, Ryu (the main character) gains nothing but defensive and healing abilities as you level up, but has the exclusive ability to use dragon transform (strongest in the game.) Final Fantasy XII, Ashe and Penelo were probably the best magic users. Their healing was absolutely amazing, but if you turned them around and made them attack with magic they'd outdamage your entire party.


The difference between healing in PSO and in most good RPGs is the time difference, i believe. In PSO, your HP decreases extremely fast, and thus the ability to quickly heal is pretty important. Also, healing items usually restore most of your HP, and are not very difficult to obtain. The reason RPGs require healing characters is because if the non-healing characters were left to heal on their own, they would recover damage slower than they received it. And most importantly, while the damage dealer is being focused on staying alive, he isn't doing any damage.

And if by chance one of the damage dealers DIE, well....you have a big problem, because now 1) your enemy has 1 less person to attack, meaning alot more damage is going to the other characters, and 2) he's going to be MUCH harder to keep alive than when he was just low on HP, because once you revive him you still have to bring him out of critical health. The Healing character isn't the only one that's losing damage, it's the entire party.


In PSO, when the damage dealer starts to die, he immediately pops a mate and keeps fighting, probably without interrupting his combo. The only thing Resta does in PSO/PSU is save the other players money/resources and stop them from having to run away, and save them time from having to do it themselves. So, if they want to make classes more relied upon, all they really have to do is balance the amount of time the actions on this game take to carry out. If a Hunter has to flee battle to be able to safely pop a monomate, then the ranger giving him cover fire or the other hunter on his team is going to be very, very useful. But if there is a force nearby, he can get back to health far quicker. And while the force is maintaining the party, inbetween safe periods it can choose to dish out some serious damage.


The force will need both faster (but weaker) and slower (but more powerful) techniques to use in case he is not maintaining the party. A staple of healing characters is that their defense is terrible, which is usually because they have a lower chance of being targeted because you can put them BEHIND other characters. Therefore, they usually are able to end the battle in a single attack if left to themselves. So yeah, the issue really is timing. Healing items and Magic don't need COOLDOWN times, but they most definitely need Warmup periods. This not only makes them risky to use, but it makes you respect the fact that others can do it better/faster than you. Shifta/Deband/Zalure/Jellen should definitely be Force specific gimmicks, too.




Aaaannnddd finally, the biggest mistake that MMORPG developers make is that they base the ENTIRE game around the stats of the characters. You are COMPLETELY allowed to let a Force character nuke an entire field of enemies, but only if it doesn't work throughout the entire game. Perhaps their magic defense is a bit higher, and it would be a waste of TP to use powerhouse techniques, forcing you to debuff them and use faster ones. They need to make sure the ENEMIES are unique enough so that you have to switch up your strategy. PSO was able to achieve this by making the different elemental abilities actually function differently, so you are forced to fight different element enemies in different ways. But there are many ways they could do it.

[Rock Eastwood]

Originally Posted by Akaimizu

It's different in a turn-based RPG. When you decide to make a different class heal another, you severely have to take a hit in damage since you sacrificed a whole round of that class doing their job to do the heal. Made even worse since you can only do it to 1 single party member. And healing items where you can heal as good as a true healer were not common at all. True healers had the exclusive ability to do party-wide heals, in those games, as well. Most of the time.

It never really applied that much in Phantasy Star Online. Using items are instantaneous, and using manual dexterity, you sacrificed very little to use such items and keep on attacking away. Taking a none healer, to do a healer role, in a turn-based RPG, was something you really regret on doing because forfeiting damage for an entire round is a game changer. It was a necessary evil at times, but always painful when you had to do it.

Looking at fast paced this game is, assuming your have to go through your menu to reach the item and hoping you'd heal your team mate in time.

I assume there's enough risks to make up for the traditional Rpg game "Turn" ESPECIALLY if they made so that you had to be within range of your heal target.

I'm not seeing this as a truly horrible or flawed gameplay element if it's just there as option.


Of course doing something like giving monomates resta aoe(which would make no since anyway because I assume it's a food ration) would be ridiculous.

[Akaimizu]

Mates as super easy to access and pop off, they really don't take much time. Everybody can work in the finger dex to pop off the item instantaneously, if they need it. Especially in both PSU or PSO. Especially if the player typically arranges the (insta heal) stuff to the quicker to reach place (like a ready-to-hit default button), and with fast finger dex, not even break their stride. And items are always allowable to be set in quick-action buttons.

Blue burst also being a major culprit due to its PC nature and access keys, you always have instant access to any commonly used item, even if you decided to set all non-items on the default controller buttons. Now take into consideration that we're talking about straight rangers and hunters, not something as amazingly diverse as Force or techer hybrids. They have a lot less to have to configure to the main slots. So there's no real excuse not to have nigh instant item access for your main important items for those classes.

Heck, as a Guntecher alone, I typically run through a mission with fingers flying 3 times the rate a hunter, regular ranger, or hunter/ranger hybrid class needs to do, just to handle the multi-role aspect of the class. And I can get to quick items, most of the time. It's a doddle for the non-techers.

[Akaimizu]

Originally Posted by Hotobu

See this is exactly what I'm talking about. In every game in the series thus far casting a spell that gives the parties' non forces +20% to their damage is better than casting a spell 100% of the time. Not only because of the spell casting rate, but because hunters and rangers can do lots of hits in succession, and killing things faster means the party takes less damage. The party damage output increase, and other intangible benefits from high level shifta trumps the damage output from a single spell caster 100% of the time. It's sad that people don't understand this.

...and it's not like active shifta negates a force's ability to cast spells as well.

I totally agree with what this is for. However, it doesn't quite get rid of my issue with a particular all-stat boost item. I'm always big on Buffing, regardless. That's what I do as a techer or a techer hybrid, who is there for that job. On the other hand, the buff items have definitely made folks lower the idea for buffs quite a bit. Not to mention, the way powerful (even ranged-based) attacks of hunters being so powerful, they accomplish maybe a bit too much unbuffed or partially buffed. But this goes back to typical issues discussed way too many times, on these forums already. Also why people, in PSU, were clamoring for tougher and more resilient beasts. Anything to increase the benefit of support tech and percentage-based DoT attacks (so that rangers don't have to be balanced in as direct-hit DPS machines like the hunters were)

Edit: And because of recent news showing Forces, I'll finish this now dead topic with a song. The official topic theme song.

https://files.me.com/akaimizu/jio7k3.mp3