Character Revamps

Conash here to once again ramble on about mechanical design stuff as I  understand it. For those of you who haven’t been keeping a close eye in  the BKG discord, the 0.42 release includes a revamp to a lot of  Gargan’s skills, and I’m hoping to give Yamamaya a revamp for 0.43, so I  thought that I’d take the time to try to dissect the mindset that’s  gone into all of this, maybe it’ll be useful for some of you!

So let’s start with Gargan, the intention behind Gargan’s moveset is  to mimic that of the Arkham games, aim for trying to manage and  switching between enemies but getting in big damage in-between. If you  examine Gargan’s original move set you can really see this in play,  cape-stun to setup an enemy for a lot of damage, the ability to counter  incoming physical attacks, and an ability that has a chance to stun two  enemies at once. The problem with these skills however comes down to  cost vs pay-off, consider for a moment using cape-stun followed by  Stun-break which should be Gargan’s bread and butter at lower levels,  originally you had to spend 5 momentum to use cape-stun and then 10  momentum to use stun-break which removes the stun status and does about  twice as much damage as a regular attack. This means that you first have  to build up 15 momentum with 3 attacks first, then you spend 2 turns to  do the same damage as two attacks? From a damage point of view it’s not  worth it, now stunning the enemy could be worth it on it’s own but then  you have to consider that stun-break ends it at least one turn, if not  two, earlier than it would otherwise be so if you just want to stun the  enemy you’re better off just using cape-stun. Later on though Gargan  gets ‘Throw’ which has a smaller chance of stun but hits two enemies and  does 2 attacks worth of damage in one action, even if you don’t get the  stuns you it’s worth it to use two attacks instead of one, the 20  momentum cost makes it not that great but as long as you don’t use  momentum for 4 cape-stuns you’ll get there. Coup De Grace on the other  hand cost 30 momentum, did about as much damage as 2 attacks if  the target was knocked over, oh and it also removed stun, when you  compare these skills side by side and consider how players can typically  rely on 5 momentum per turn and you win battles by doing damage, it’s  no wonder that Throw was Gargan’s only offensive move that got used  consistently. Cape-stun was nice for stuns but when players could bring  Raina to use her knockdowns instead while still doing good damage even  if a lower chance of knockdown it’s easy to see why Gargan wasn’t  considered as stun king/queen in parties. Counter wasn’t a ton better,  as it cost 15 momentum (so 3 turns work to build up to it) and only  lasted until Gargan’s next action, which meant that if you didn’t have a  good way to guarantee an attack by Gargan’s next action you could  easily feel you wasted that momentum, and in many cases you may only get  1 free counter attack from Gargan meaning you spent 15 momentum to  negate damage from 1 attack. Back to Back, the unity force skill, was  very useful with it’s 5 momentum cost and 3 turn duration on top of  hitting both Gargan and Hero, but it required Unity Force so it’s not  something players could rely on in battle. You may have noticed that I  was trying to compare things to using a regular attack, and that’s  important because that’s your bread and butter, if the skills aren’t  more valuable than a regular attack or aren’t worth the time it takes to  get enough momentum to use them, then there’s no reason for players to  think about the skill rather than use an attack, whether players  actively think about it or not they notice how these numbers turn out  and it impacts their decision making.

So then the question becomes how do you fix these issues if most of  Gargan’s skills aren’t worth the time it takes to attack? Well, since  it’s important to make sure that you stay creatively in line with what’s  intended you want to take your time and examine how to approach things.  For Cape Stun, the problem is largely that it’s the first move in one  of Gargan’s two combos but it makes the total combo more expensive while  not doing damage, not to mention it runs the traditional risks of hit  rage, evasion chance, or even enemy counters. To combat the problem of  it making combos more expensive I took some inspiration from Raina,  players who use her a lot never have a problem with using Phalanx  because even though it doesn’t do damage and only lasts one turn, it  gives Raina momentum just like if she used guard allowing players to  feel comfortable using it as a bread and butter instead of regular  attacks, as the utility it brings (not to mention increases damage on  some of her skills) outweighs the marginal damage you’d get from a  regular attack, so if Cape-stun was set to generate more momentum than  it required it would help further set players up for a combo by making  it easier to continue the combo afterwards instead of having to  work have the entire combo ready up front. On top of that, I remembered  that common enemies were basically unable to do anything about your  cape stun in the Arkham games, so in addition I gave it some utility  that would allow it to be competitive with ‘Throw’ by making it so that  enemy evasion, taunts, counters, or reduced player accuracy wouldn’t  impact it by turning it instead into a certain hit instead of a physical  hit, allowing it to always have a place in the player’s arsenal even if  they are able to inflict stun through other means. Stun-break got some  changes to the damage formula to make it more rewarding, but the biggest  problem it had was that it removed stun, making it so that a lot of  times players would rather not use it to keep the enemy  stunned, this however was fixed by giving it a base 100% knockdown  chance if the enemy you hit was stunned, now you’re just trading Stun  for Knockdown while doing better than 2 attacks worth of damage, it  still has the 10 momentum cost to it but when combined with Cape Stun  giving you more momentum this combo is very easy to pull off, making it  worth the net loss of momentum (which prevents you from using other  skills). For Coup De Grace I could have done the same thing as Stun  Break, but I instead thought to handle one thing that felt kinda funny  with Gargan, see Gargan is based largely on inflicting stuns then doing  big damage off of stunned enemy, but every other character with similar  abilities use knockdown, and well it just feels odd that Gargan  can benefit from stunned enemies but not enemies on the ground, this  left Gargan feeling like Gargan’s core loop existed on another planet  and couldn’t synergize with other party members, so for this I took more  inspiration from DnD and Pathfinder, instead making Coup De Grace be  based off of ‘helpless’ enemies in the sense that they had the  ‘knockdown’ status and gave it a 60% crit chance on top of Gargan’s base  crit chance, along with some tweaking of the numbers here and there and  now Gargan has a fantastic 1-2-3 combo, it’s hard to maintain the full  combo but if you wanted to jump around from enemy to enemy with a 1-2  combo or just cape-stun everyone, well, that bit is very easy. Counter  was also retouched to last 2 actions instead of 1, so it’s still not as  good as ‘Back to Back’ but many players are reporting that it still  lasts long enough to more than justify it especially as it allows Gargan  to do some pseudo-tanking.

Well, I probably got a bit ahead of myself there going into the  specifics, but general point is that when you want to give players  abilities you should try to keep in mind first what is their bread and  butter, what does it give them, how does it contribute to the ‘win’  condition, and then any special ability needs to be able to have a  reason to use it instead of that bread and butter. If an enemy is  knocked down and Gargan has 60 momentum, sure you could use a regular  attack, but Coup De Grace will probably do 6-10x the damage so unless  you’re saving up momentum to use throw 4 times in a row when some more  enemies show up, there’s no reason not to. Sure players could  just leave an enemy stunned and go for a regular attack that gives them 5  more momentum, but Stun-break will probably do 2-4x as much damage and  set them up for Coup De Grace, that 5 momentum won’t help me win the  battle unless I use it to do more damage but that’s exactly what  Stun-break is for. Players may not be aware of the the details or heck  they may even come to wrong conclusions, but when they’re looking at 400  damage for a regular attack and 800 damage for stun-break, they know  which one will win the fight faster.

Yamamaya’s issues however are a bit different, see many players  already know how to get damage out of Yamamaya to keep her competitive,  and while some of her skills also need to be made worth the cost (like  Shockwave) I strongly believe that her biggest problem is that her  skills are competing with each other to be the ‘best’ skill instead of  working together to give her a good ‘arsenal’. Now, not everyone should  be based around setting up a 1-2-3 combo or anything, but with Yamamaya  you’re looking at using Strong Attack, Mountain Lion Rage, or  Polar Bear rage, not all three. The nature of the rages are going to  make them be competing with one another as she won’t ever be able to use  more than one at a time just like Diadira with her songs, but well,  we’ve got some plans to help her Techniques stand out as a lot more  valuable than they currently are so that they don’t need to be better  than Yamamaya’s best rage. We’ve also talked with fans some and liked  some of the ideas that we got, so do expect to see Yamamaya’s rages  changing up once her revamp is done. I can’t promise that Mountain Lion  rage is going to be as good as it currently is, but my main intention is  to try to make her other rages feel a lot more useful and like there is  the right place and time for them, even if it doesn’t come up too  often. It may get a bit tricky at times since ‘Mountain Lion Rage’ makes  Yama do a lot more damage which contributes directly to  winning a fight so other rages like ‘Polar Bear Rage’ may struggle to  find as much usage, but we’ve got idea and I trust in the tester’s we  have to give me effective feedback on how well we hit things like this!  So you have that to look forward to!

I hope that my talk this time was useful to some of you! My intention here was to try to explain the process of how  you figure out what to do, identify problems and try to solve them,  though looking back I think that’s going to be a bit hard for me since  my process is largely finding new ideas and connecting them together,  but you never know when talking about your own problems and solutions  may end up giving someone else the idea they needed to solve their own!  Feel free to ask any questions or share your comments wherever you find  me!