Victory Barks and Tanking update

So now that my niece and nephew have quieted down after a day of  babysitting that has carried on far longer than anyone anticipated, I  have the time to sit down and ask for some feedback at definitely not  the last minute! While any feedback is appreciated, be warned that I’m  pretty exhausted right now so I may be a bit scattered and hard to  understand until I get some rest and can go through this all again  tomorrow.

There are a few changes in the recent 0.40 release that I’m sure  people have already noticed, the first of which being the one dialogue  box at the end of every battle. That little feature has certainly come  with a few more bugs than it probably should have, but it’s in a  relatively stable state, which now brings up a few issues that I’d much  appreciate some feedback on. See, originally I had intended to work in  something into the options menu so that you could have it display a  message after every battle, as it currently does, after no battles, or  go through a sort of algorithm where it checks how often you’ve ‘seen’ a  quote from x character then randomly checks whether or not to skip that  character, effectively making characters who you’ve seen multiple  quotes from have a lesser chance of coming up, to help you experience  quotes that you haven’t seen before. This ended up not making it into  the 0.40 release for a few reasons, largely to help save on time with  the intention of, well, getting people’s thoughts about which of these  options they prefer now that they’ve had a chance to see the the victory  barks feature at it’s theoretically most obnoxious.If the general  consensus is that the system is fine, or just needs to be turned off  when it gets annoying, it’d probably be best if I took the development  time that I’d put into that third option and instead invest it into  working on bugs or something else.

There is something else that I’d appreciate some feedback on with the  victory barks. All canon party members (aside from Alina) have a  level-up quote associated with them that will take priority over the  standard barks if at least one person levels up. The original intention  is that the one quote you see would come from your active party, though  due to a bug, instead the quote is selected from anyone who levels up,  which does stretch immersion some. I’ve elected to leave the bug as-is  for now, as we’ve gotten some people requesting that the game plays all  level up barks one after another when they happen. To me, that seems  like it’d get rather tedious after awhile since each character only has  one, after 30-40 level ups there’s going to be several that you’re tired  of. To this end, any feedback that can be given on how important it is  that level-up barks apply only to your active party or that you can only  get one at a time would be much appreciated.

Finally, one last thing that I’d appreciate some feedback on! It’s  come to my attention that the addition to tanking that I had mentioned  awhile back has been causing some problems, in that it’s making player  tanks take too many hits, to the point that keeping them alive has  gotten very difficult. Some discussion with a few players has helped me  figure out that what I plan to at some point in the game development  process is make it so that anytime that any character ‘blocks’ an attack  they get a damage reduction bonus, both on the player and enemy side,  to help radically reduce the amount of damage that tanks accumulate by  blocking AoEs for your side as well as helping to encourage more  strategical play on the players end of things by having ‘cover’ and  other similar skills reduce your damage if you don’t properly respond,  but the problem with adding this in now is that it might result in  making enemy tanks harder to kill and just drag out the game a lot more  as the existing fights haven’t been balanced with this in mind but would  be impacted by it, so it might be better to roll out with re-balancing  as a whole. My other options to deal with this core issue is either turn  off the AoE blocking that’s currently in the game or at least adjust  the formulas so that it’ll be noticeably less likely to activate, this  might make it harder to keep characters like Yeon alive as more AoEs  would hit them, but trading deaths on squishy characters with deaths on  your tank typically isn’t the best philosophy.

So yeah… Any thoughts would be appreciated!