Dancing With The Stars is a 'reality' tv show where they pair up celebrities with professional dancers and have them do various dances. There's a panel of judges that assign scores to the dances each week and they get people to call/text/vote online for who they like best. Then they combine the votes with the scores somehow and figure out who came last in a given week. That pair is fired. Repeat until you have a winner.
This is different than other reality shows like American Idol which is entirely vote based, or The Apprentice which is entirely judge based, or Survivor which is determined by the contestants themselves. Now, I actually don't watch any of those shows and for the most part never have. (I watched some of Survivor when it first came out but got annoyed when they wouldn't let Canadians play.) But I understand the scoring systems for all of them despite only seeing most of them while visiting family in New Brunswick...
I actually watch Dancing With The Stars, but had no clue how the loser was actually determined. How is voting combined with judges scores? What does voting actually do? I turned to my good friend Mr Google and he hooked me up with the answer in a really short amount of time. It turns out to be a pretty simple system. They add all of the judges scores together and work out what percentage of that pool each pair received. Then you separately add up all the votes and work out what percentage of those each pair received. Add the two percentages together and see who has the lowest total.
I was thinking I'd crunch some numbers to see what votes actually had to happen for different possible outcomes to happen but it turns out they don't release total vote totals anywhere that I could find. Also, I found a site that already crunches the numbers in terms of votes per million... It's interesting to think about the consequences of such a system...
One other interesting site I stumbled across in my search is Vote For The Worst which apparently watches all voting based reality television, picks someone who is really bad, and then encourages people to vote for them. I can't help but wonder if these people actually accomplish anything. And if they do, how bad is it?
Monday, October 31, 2011
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Final Fantasy Legend II
Next up on the list is another game I've never played before: Final Fantasy Legend II. From what I've been told about the game it's actually very similar to the first Final Fantasy Legend with the addition of a new class: ROBOT!
Now I haven't done very much research at all but I believe the human, mutant, and monsters classes work pretty much the same way as before. Robots scale entirely with the gear they have equipped. I'm torn with regards to how I feel about this. On the one hand it actually seems like a great way to design a game such that the characters are always at a good spot against the enemies. Their power is strictly capped at gear from shops plus what you can loot from dungeons so there's always an upper bound so things don't get out of hand. Assuming you tune the enemies properly they can always be capable of winning fights. Maybe you need to grind a bit for cash to buy the new gear from the shops but that's quite reasonable.
On the other hand I have no faith at all that the game is actually balanced in such a way. After my experience with monsters in the original game I really worry that a full robot party will either be trivial or a real pain. I'd like to play a game with that system which I was confident was designed with just that system in mind but this game has four leveling systems and I fear the robot one was just tacked on at the end.
That said, what should my party be? With four leveling systems and four character slots it seems like one of each type would make a lot of sense. Unfortunately I really soured on monsters with my four monster party last time and really don't want to write another leveling program to work out how to optimize one character. Even worse, if I did optimize a monster in the same way it would mean some mindless searching for meat at the start and then trivial random encounters the rest of the way up until eventually the monster became bad and I'd just have to hope the other characters have caught up.
I do want one of the other three though and I think I will make the fourth a robot because robots are awesome. I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up being worse characters in general but I hope they should at least be competitive most of the time. Time will tell!
Now I haven't done very much research at all but I believe the human, mutant, and monsters classes work pretty much the same way as before. Robots scale entirely with the gear they have equipped. I'm torn with regards to how I feel about this. On the one hand it actually seems like a great way to design a game such that the characters are always at a good spot against the enemies. Their power is strictly capped at gear from shops plus what you can loot from dungeons so there's always an upper bound so things don't get out of hand. Assuming you tune the enemies properly they can always be capable of winning fights. Maybe you need to grind a bit for cash to buy the new gear from the shops but that's quite reasonable.
On the other hand I have no faith at all that the game is actually balanced in such a way. After my experience with monsters in the original game I really worry that a full robot party will either be trivial or a real pain. I'd like to play a game with that system which I was confident was designed with just that system in mind but this game has four leveling systems and I fear the robot one was just tacked on at the end.
That said, what should my party be? With four leveling systems and four character slots it seems like one of each type would make a lot of sense. Unfortunately I really soured on monsters with my four monster party last time and really don't want to write another leveling program to work out how to optimize one character. Even worse, if I did optimize a monster in the same way it would mean some mindless searching for meat at the start and then trivial random encounters the rest of the way up until eventually the monster became bad and I'd just have to hope the other characters have caught up.
I do want one of the other three though and I think I will make the fourth a robot because robots are awesome. I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up being worse characters in general but I hope they should at least be competitive most of the time. Time will tell!
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Second Time's A Charm!
I plowed my way through the final dungeon to the final boss who behaved differently than every other boss fight in the game in ways that made my initial plan bad. Unfortunately it took me a few rounds to figure out what was going on and by that point it was almost too late. It turns out the final boss has two tentacles which take actions as well and aren't taunted along with the main boss by my viking. They still follow the rule of one spell per monster no matter how many actions they take in a round but there are 3 monsters so they can cast three spells. One of the tentacles always seemed to cast a spell which did about 80% of my black belt's maximum health. The main boss sometimes cast a spell which did about that much as well. Eventually I realized the tentacles existed, just let my black belt stay dead, put a shield on the ninja, and just threw shuriken at the tentacle casting lightning. I managed to kill it but then timing worked out poorly and the boss got two turns in a row, used the massive AE both times, and managed to kill everyone.
I did learn that the protect spell is actually also the shell spell in this game. (It wore off of my viking in the middle of the fight and he started taking a much larger amount of damage from the AE spells.)
Ok, 3.5 hours gone... What to do? I decided I probably wanted to get my job level high enough on the viking to get into the 90% chance to land taunt bracket. So I spent a couple hours yesterday watching a Criminal Minds marathon on A&E while grinding on random idiots that couldn't possibly kill me. Then I started killing them off before my viking even got to take an action so I just decided to put him in tanking mode and taunt all the time. (Vikings are very slow so they go last but taunt is rigged to always go first so it isn't useless.)
I also knew in advance that my ninja was going to take a beating if he wasn't wearing a shield so I put the shield on and put him in the back row from the start. I also used protect casting consumables in the first round to try to cut down on the number of insta-gibs on the black belt. (Probably I should have changed to a different job entirely but I thought I could win as is.)
I get into the fight and it turns out the boss only starts casting his AE spell after he's taken a bunch of damage. Since I started the fight this time by killing the tentacles that never happened so they never actually cast enough spells in a single round to kill anyone. I had one scary turn where taunt missed and the boss almost killed my ninja (good thing he was in the back row) but other than that the fight was actually really easy.
There were a bunch of cutscenes after the final boss where we learned what all of the NPCs we met along the way were going to do with their lives. Nothing was learned about the four actual player characters. As far as I know they're just brutally powerful killing machines with no lives to return to. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them took over the world at some point. (Probably Bung...)
In all, a really great game. Part of me actually wants to start over again with a different party setup (all casters the whole way) instead of moving on to a different game. Also there's apparently a challenge dungeon that gets unlocked via the Mognet thing I didn't do so I kinda want to do that too. This is going to move to the top of the list of games played so far but I wonder how much of that is because of the changes made on the DS compared to the original game...
I did learn that the protect spell is actually also the shell spell in this game. (It wore off of my viking in the middle of the fight and he started taking a much larger amount of damage from the AE spells.)
Ok, 3.5 hours gone... What to do? I decided I probably wanted to get my job level high enough on the viking to get into the 90% chance to land taunt bracket. So I spent a couple hours yesterday watching a Criminal Minds marathon on A&E while grinding on random idiots that couldn't possibly kill me. Then I started killing them off before my viking even got to take an action so I just decided to put him in tanking mode and taunt all the time. (Vikings are very slow so they go last but taunt is rigged to always go first so it isn't useless.)
I also knew in advance that my ninja was going to take a beating if he wasn't wearing a shield so I put the shield on and put him in the back row from the start. I also used protect casting consumables in the first round to try to cut down on the number of insta-gibs on the black belt. (Probably I should have changed to a different job entirely but I thought I could win as is.)
I get into the fight and it turns out the boss only starts casting his AE spell after he's taken a bunch of damage. Since I started the fight this time by killing the tentacles that never happened so they never actually cast enough spells in a single round to kill anyone. I had one scary turn where taunt missed and the boss almost killed my ninja (good thing he was in the back row) but other than that the fight was actually really easy.
There were a bunch of cutscenes after the final boss where we learned what all of the NPCs we met along the way were going to do with their lives. Nothing was learned about the four actual player characters. As far as I know they're just brutally powerful killing machines with no lives to return to. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them took over the world at some point. (Probably Bung...)
In all, a really great game. Part of me actually wants to start over again with a different party setup (all casters the whole way) instead of moving on to a different game. Also there's apparently a challenge dungeon that gets unlocked via the Mognet thing I didn't do so I kinda want to do that too. This is going to move to the top of the list of games played so far but I wonder how much of that is because of the changes made on the DS compared to the original game...
Friday, October 28, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Final Dungeon
Last night I made it into what I believe to be the final dungeon in Final Fantasy III and I have some issues with the design. The first issue is one with the game in general which is that you simply cannot save anywhere except on the world map. This is annoying in the sense that you can clear out a dungeon, find all the treasure, and then lose to the boss of the dungeon and have all the previous progress thrown out. I want the bosses in dungeons to be a challenge but it's frustrating to find one that actually is a challenge if you lose an hour of progress because of it. I've dealt with this so far by leaving a couple dungeons after clearing out most of the loot and then saving so I'm risking less when I fight the boss. (This has also meant doing more fights than I normally would which makes the challenging fights less of a challenge. I don't know if this is a good thing or not.)
The second problem, which links into the first one, is I can't leave the final dungeon. There is no exit and the teleport spell is greyed out. This makes sense from a story point of view as my party has been transported to another world where I'm supposed to team up with the warriors of dark to vanquish the big bad. But from a gameplay point of view it really sucks. From the last point I can save until when I expect to meet the final boss will be around 3 hours of gameplay, a dozen or so treasure chests, and at least 9 mid-boss fights. The random encounters have a chance to get a sneak attack and possibly wipe me out and the bosses can certainly get lucky and kill me as well. (Action order in the round is based on agility and job level but has a random component as well. It is very possible the boss will get 2 turns between actions from my healer which could be very bad news.)
I'm not opposed to the final dungeon being long, or to it being hard. I want the final boss to be tricky and to require building a good party for the task or leveling a bunch. I feel like I should die while I get the hang of the fight. But when I'm probably going to lose 5+ hours in the process? That's not cool. (If I die then I lose the 3 hours it will take me to get back to that point and probably I'll want to grind out a couple hours worth of levels before I do if I died for power level reasons.)
The last time I played Final Fantasy III, after buying it for the DS a few years ago, I actually didn't finish the game. I died in the final dungeon, lost a couple hours, and got fed up. I don't remember if I just took a break to play something else or what but I never did go back and finish up. Andrew bought the game on DS at the same time I did and I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to him. It's just so demoralizing to lose a couple hours worth of progress because the game simply doesn't let you prevent it from happening in any way except by being perfect and lucky in every single fight in the final dungeon.
I don't have a clue what the final boss is going to be like but I think my current party set-up is going to be pretty good for winning no matter what it ends up being. Viking, black belt, devout, ninja is working out pretty well. The black belt and ninja take way too much damage from melee hits and from spells but I've leveled enough that it should take three hits to kill them. The devout casts a full heal spell on the whole party every round and the viking taunts 80% of the time. Bosses so far have only ever cast one spell per round so the only way I can lose someone is if the taunt fails AND the timing works out poorly such that the boss goes twice between devout rounds AND he actually casts two spells AND he targets one of the squishies with his attack. Then I have to spend an arise spell on them which prevents the party from getting healed so things do get dangerous but I can probably survive. I'll probably get to find out tonight if I'm going to have won the game or if I'm going to be very bitter...
The second problem, which links into the first one, is I can't leave the final dungeon. There is no exit and the teleport spell is greyed out. This makes sense from a story point of view as my party has been transported to another world where I'm supposed to team up with the warriors of dark to vanquish the big bad. But from a gameplay point of view it really sucks. From the last point I can save until when I expect to meet the final boss will be around 3 hours of gameplay, a dozen or so treasure chests, and at least 9 mid-boss fights. The random encounters have a chance to get a sneak attack and possibly wipe me out and the bosses can certainly get lucky and kill me as well. (Action order in the round is based on agility and job level but has a random component as well. It is very possible the boss will get 2 turns between actions from my healer which could be very bad news.)
I'm not opposed to the final dungeon being long, or to it being hard. I want the final boss to be tricky and to require building a good party for the task or leveling a bunch. I feel like I should die while I get the hang of the fight. But when I'm probably going to lose 5+ hours in the process? That's not cool. (If I die then I lose the 3 hours it will take me to get back to that point and probably I'll want to grind out a couple hours worth of levels before I do if I died for power level reasons.)
The last time I played Final Fantasy III, after buying it for the DS a few years ago, I actually didn't finish the game. I died in the final dungeon, lost a couple hours, and got fed up. I don't remember if I just took a break to play something else or what but I never did go back and finish up. Andrew bought the game on DS at the same time I did and I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to him. It's just so demoralizing to lose a couple hours worth of progress because the game simply doesn't let you prevent it from happening in any way except by being perfect and lucky in every single fight in the final dungeon.
I don't have a clue what the final boss is going to be like but I think my current party set-up is going to be pretty good for winning no matter what it ends up being. Viking, black belt, devout, ninja is working out pretty well. The black belt and ninja take way too much damage from melee hits and from spells but I've leveled enough that it should take three hits to kill them. The devout casts a full heal spell on the whole party every round and the viking taunts 80% of the time. Bosses so far have only ever cast one spell per round so the only way I can lose someone is if the taunt fails AND the timing works out poorly such that the boss goes twice between devout rounds AND he actually casts two spells AND he targets one of the squishies with his attack. Then I have to spend an arise spell on them which prevents the party from getting healed so things do get dangerous but I can probably survive. I'll probably get to find out tonight if I'm going to have won the game or if I'm going to be very bitter...
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Galaxy Legion: Xecti Signal Repeater
It's time for the next temporary mission in Galaxy Legion: The Broodmind Hunt. This mission returns to the old standard where each button press is worth 55 xp and costs 25 energy. You have to do the mission 75 times to get a reward and you can get the reward 15 times total. The reward, for a mere 1875 energy, is a planetary building of size 1 which increases research produced by 10%.
At first glance this seemed pretty good. My top plasma planet makes 390 research per hour so adding 10% onto that would be 39 research which seems awesome. But then you need to consider that it takes up a space so that number goes down a little. You need to actually consider how good it is not so much in terms of raw production but in terms of how space efficient it is. (That plasma, for example, has 52 base production. Assuming I have to replace a 2 research for 1 space building then this new building is worth 5 research for 1 space.) Ok, in that light it's simply amazing. But that's on my best research specific planet. How does it fare elsewhere? I jiggered my spreadsheet a little to work it out...
I could put it on my artifact specialized dyson planet for a gain of 68.35 research points but it would only be worth a little over 3 research per space. My 15th best gain in terms of actual production is 18 points per hour and is worth around 3.6 research per space.
I'm pretty sure the right answer is going to be just putting them where they make the most actual stuff but it doesn't really matter. If I put it where the building is most efficient or where it makes the most stuff it's still an excellent building and really worth getting.
This mission chain has rarely given me something I really wanted all the copies of but this one has managed to do it.
At first glance this seemed pretty good. My top plasma planet makes 390 research per hour so adding 10% onto that would be 39 research which seems awesome. But then you need to consider that it takes up a space so that number goes down a little. You need to actually consider how good it is not so much in terms of raw production but in terms of how space efficient it is. (That plasma, for example, has 52 base production. Assuming I have to replace a 2 research for 1 space building then this new building is worth 5 research for 1 space.) Ok, in that light it's simply amazing. But that's on my best research specific planet. How does it fare elsewhere? I jiggered my spreadsheet a little to work it out...
I could put it on my artifact specialized dyson planet for a gain of 68.35 research points but it would only be worth a little over 3 research per space. My 15th best gain in terms of actual production is 18 points per hour and is worth around 3.6 research per space.
I'm pretty sure the right answer is going to be just putting them where they make the most actual stuff but it doesn't really matter. If I put it where the building is most efficient or where it makes the most stuff it's still an excellent building and really worth getting.
This mission chain has rarely given me something I really wanted all the copies of but this one has managed to do it.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Dungeons & Dragons: Vampire Hit Value
My D&D group finished off our second module last week and decided to shake things up a little for the next one. Sky seemed to be getting bored with his overpowered but very straightforward tanking character and built a sorcerer instead. This caused a bit of a chain reaction and I think we're all building brand new characters for this weekend. On the one hand this is a little overwhelming since we're making 11 levels worth of decisions at once with no real idea of party composition or what any of our new abilities actually do. On the other hand building characters is a lot of fun and trying them out will be too. I have tons of ideas but who knows if they're actually as awesome as they seem or if they'll just never come up.
At any rate, I wanted to pick a new class and role. I've been the healer for the last two modules and have spent a lot of that time letting other people attack and tracking all the hit point totals. That was fun but I want something different. I figured I'd take a look at the DPS classes and try to make something fun. I looked at the list of classes and one immediately jumped out as being different and cool... Vampire! Now, I'd assume vampire would be a race and not a class but I gather they recently released a 'Heroes of Shadow' book which has both a vampire type race and a vampire class. It doesn't matter if vampires are good or not they're definitely cool so I was pretty much sold without even looking at what they do.
It turns out they're a mostly melee attacker pretty similar to a rogue but with an interesting resource mechanic and fewer abilities. (Most of my 'choices' were fixed as there is only one vampire class power at most levels.) It turns out they use healing surges as a resource to power up a few abilities. They also drain healing surges when they use at-will powers which seems interesting. They definitely have a lot of flavour.
As an added bonus they use two stats: dexterity and charisma. What's a race with both of those stats? Hobbit! (Ok, Halfling, please don't sue me estate of JRR Tolkein.) I've looked at some of the other races but none of them quite have the coolness factor of being a hobbit vampire. One of the hobbit racial bonuses is to get +2 to AC against opportunity attacks and I found a pair of boots that lets me walk through enemy occupied squares. I was thinking that would be a great way to set up flanking... Stack AC so they couldn't hit me and just walk through the enemies even if they're blocking a hallway or something. So I tried building a character with all the AC stacking I could find and ended up getting up to 37 AC against opportunity attacks. Considering my shaman had 22 AC... That's huge!
And then Sky pointed out I can't actually buy those boots since they're not common and that whole plan went out the window. There's actually a hobbit feat which provides a similar effect but only lets you walk through spaces of enemies 2 sizes larger. We've been tipped off that there are lots of large monsters in this coming module so this could still work... But the feat prevents opportunity attacks from the monster you're walking through so the whole point of super AC is kinda moot.
We get one magic item of level 12 and it's the first level of item with +3s that can have a bonus. They need room for better +3 items all the way up to 15 so the bonuses at level 12 tend to be weak or unexciting. One really stood out for me in the super AC build which was an extra +1 to hit while at full health. Hobbits get a racial power which forces a re-roll of an attack which hits you and vampires put up 7 temporary health with their main at-will attack so this actually seems like it'll stay up for a reasonable amount of time. And I could really go out of my way to try to keep it up all the time if I tried. So the question is, how good is that +1 to hit and is it worth trying to keep it up?
My basic at-will attack (the one that puts up the 7 health) hits for 25.5 damage at +18 vs fort assuming I have combat advantage. That won't be hitting on a 2 so +1 to hit should be worth 5% of that damage, or 1.275 damage. Better than +1 to damage for sure but not super exciting. The first 3 times it hits I get to tack on an extra d10 damage which boosts the gain up to 1.55 damage. Seems pretty good and gives me a baseline for evaluating how important it is to take 0 damage over the fight.
As I said vampires have very few power decisions to make so pretty much my only choices are which feats to take. I could try to find a bunch of pure damage feats or I could try to take some damage prevention feats and roll some of that extra 1.55 damage per round into those.
One of the feats I took in the super-AC build was a multi-class rogue feat which let me add my charisma bonus to my AC after being hit by an opportunity attack. That's obviously terrible now that I'm not planning on taking a ton of opportunity attacks but there was a hobbit feat that unlocked when I took it which turned my free re-roll of a hit into a free re-roll with -5 that can't crit which seemed reasonable. I wanted to pick that up so I needed another multi-class feat from a martial class. My first thought was the rogue feat which lets me backstab once per fight. An extra 3d6 seems pretty great. (In fact, 10.5 damage is better than +1 to hit if the fight lasts 6 or fewer attacks so I probably want this even if I'm not trying to keep my +1 to hit up.) Of course I eventually noticed that you need to be using a light blade to backstab and I use a holy symbol so that got thrown out. Then I found a ranger multi-class feat which takes a minor action but gives 2d6 damage twice. (This requires attacks to land in specific rounds instead of just one ever so this isn't actually 14 damage but it's still pretty sweet.) This seems worth taking.
I didn't really find much else in the straight damage category worth taking. I took straight +1 to hit, of course, and decided to try the weird feat which gives +1 to hit, damage, and ac when beside a wall. I don't know how often it'll come up but it seems great for all kinds of reasons when it does. Making sure I have combat advantage is worth +2 to hit on its own so I'm giving the cunning stalker feat a try (it gives combat advantage on any enemy who is standing alone). Then a flat +2 to AC seems like it'll help keep my weapon buff up especially with my re-roll ability.
My last feat had some interesting options. I could take a boring but useful +2 to reflex, fortitude, and will defenses. I could take +2 to ac if I'm beside two larger enemies. I could take the feat that lets me walk through large enemies. But I found something really cool that is probably terrible but might be a lot of fun... If I'm standing beside an enemy, and have combat advantage on them, and they shift... I get to shift too. So all I need to do is get beside an enemy caster and then they need to either stop casting brutal spells or let me get free attacks. +1 to hit is like 5% of an attack so if this gives a free attack every other fight it's probably better than +1 to hit. If it shuts down brutal spells it won't do any damage but might help us win. Probably it won't do anything at all and I'll wish I had +2 to ac when I get ganked.
I'll probably end up making lots of changes after getting a week actually playing the class instead of just thinking about playing the class but I'm pretty happy with what I have. Though after I read the rules about stealth I'm really thinking a shade vampire could be intriguing...
At any rate, I wanted to pick a new class and role. I've been the healer for the last two modules and have spent a lot of that time letting other people attack and tracking all the hit point totals. That was fun but I want something different. I figured I'd take a look at the DPS classes and try to make something fun. I looked at the list of classes and one immediately jumped out as being different and cool... Vampire! Now, I'd assume vampire would be a race and not a class but I gather they recently released a 'Heroes of Shadow' book which has both a vampire type race and a vampire class. It doesn't matter if vampires are good or not they're definitely cool so I was pretty much sold without even looking at what they do.
It turns out they're a mostly melee attacker pretty similar to a rogue but with an interesting resource mechanic and fewer abilities. (Most of my 'choices' were fixed as there is only one vampire class power at most levels.) It turns out they use healing surges as a resource to power up a few abilities. They also drain healing surges when they use at-will powers which seems interesting. They definitely have a lot of flavour.
As an added bonus they use two stats: dexterity and charisma. What's a race with both of those stats? Hobbit! (Ok, Halfling, please don't sue me estate of JRR Tolkein.) I've looked at some of the other races but none of them quite have the coolness factor of being a hobbit vampire. One of the hobbit racial bonuses is to get +2 to AC against opportunity attacks and I found a pair of boots that lets me walk through enemy occupied squares. I was thinking that would be a great way to set up flanking... Stack AC so they couldn't hit me and just walk through the enemies even if they're blocking a hallway or something. So I tried building a character with all the AC stacking I could find and ended up getting up to 37 AC against opportunity attacks. Considering my shaman had 22 AC... That's huge!
And then Sky pointed out I can't actually buy those boots since they're not common and that whole plan went out the window. There's actually a hobbit feat which provides a similar effect but only lets you walk through spaces of enemies 2 sizes larger. We've been tipped off that there are lots of large monsters in this coming module so this could still work... But the feat prevents opportunity attacks from the monster you're walking through so the whole point of super AC is kinda moot.
We get one magic item of level 12 and it's the first level of item with +3s that can have a bonus. They need room for better +3 items all the way up to 15 so the bonuses at level 12 tend to be weak or unexciting. One really stood out for me in the super AC build which was an extra +1 to hit while at full health. Hobbits get a racial power which forces a re-roll of an attack which hits you and vampires put up 7 temporary health with their main at-will attack so this actually seems like it'll stay up for a reasonable amount of time. And I could really go out of my way to try to keep it up all the time if I tried. So the question is, how good is that +1 to hit and is it worth trying to keep it up?
My basic at-will attack (the one that puts up the 7 health) hits for 25.5 damage at +18 vs fort assuming I have combat advantage. That won't be hitting on a 2 so +1 to hit should be worth 5% of that damage, or 1.275 damage. Better than +1 to damage for sure but not super exciting. The first 3 times it hits I get to tack on an extra d10 damage which boosts the gain up to 1.55 damage. Seems pretty good and gives me a baseline for evaluating how important it is to take 0 damage over the fight.
As I said vampires have very few power decisions to make so pretty much my only choices are which feats to take. I could try to find a bunch of pure damage feats or I could try to take some damage prevention feats and roll some of that extra 1.55 damage per round into those.
One of the feats I took in the super-AC build was a multi-class rogue feat which let me add my charisma bonus to my AC after being hit by an opportunity attack. That's obviously terrible now that I'm not planning on taking a ton of opportunity attacks but there was a hobbit feat that unlocked when I took it which turned my free re-roll of a hit into a free re-roll with -5 that can't crit which seemed reasonable. I wanted to pick that up so I needed another multi-class feat from a martial class. My first thought was the rogue feat which lets me backstab once per fight. An extra 3d6 seems pretty great. (In fact, 10.5 damage is better than +1 to hit if the fight lasts 6 or fewer attacks so I probably want this even if I'm not trying to keep my +1 to hit up.) Of course I eventually noticed that you need to be using a light blade to backstab and I use a holy symbol so that got thrown out. Then I found a ranger multi-class feat which takes a minor action but gives 2d6 damage twice. (This requires attacks to land in specific rounds instead of just one ever so this isn't actually 14 damage but it's still pretty sweet.) This seems worth taking.
I didn't really find much else in the straight damage category worth taking. I took straight +1 to hit, of course, and decided to try the weird feat which gives +1 to hit, damage, and ac when beside a wall. I don't know how often it'll come up but it seems great for all kinds of reasons when it does. Making sure I have combat advantage is worth +2 to hit on its own so I'm giving the cunning stalker feat a try (it gives combat advantage on any enemy who is standing alone). Then a flat +2 to AC seems like it'll help keep my weapon buff up especially with my re-roll ability.
My last feat had some interesting options. I could take a boring but useful +2 to reflex, fortitude, and will defenses. I could take +2 to ac if I'm beside two larger enemies. I could take the feat that lets me walk through large enemies. But I found something really cool that is probably terrible but might be a lot of fun... If I'm standing beside an enemy, and have combat advantage on them, and they shift... I get to shift too. So all I need to do is get beside an enemy caster and then they need to either stop casting brutal spells or let me get free attacks. +1 to hit is like 5% of an attack so if this gives a free attack every other fight it's probably better than +1 to hit. If it shuts down brutal spells it won't do any damage but might help us win. Probably it won't do anything at all and I'll wish I had +2 to ac when I get ganked.
I'll probably end up making lots of changes after getting a week actually playing the class instead of just thinking about playing the class but I'm pretty happy with what I have. Though after I read the rules about stealth I'm really thinking a shade vampire could be intriguing...
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Earth Crystal Jobs
It's go time! Three different airships later and I've finally reached the final crystal and unlocked the remaining jobs. It's time to pick what I expect to be my final party for the rest of the game. The earth crystal has 6 new jobs...
First of all, the black belt. In a sense this is the 'upgraded' monk job. It attacks barehanded like a monk. It has a useless special ability like a monk. (You can spend an entire turn charging up so you can do double damage on the next attack. Or two turns to do triple damage. Maybe useful on enemies that split but pretty much a non-factor for the most part.) On the plus side the black belt has way more strength, agility, and vitality compared to the monk. In fact it has the most vitality of any job in the game and is a must use if you want to max out your health. With a high job level and high melee proficiency I imagine these guys do pretty good damage. Part of me wants to turn my tank into one of these for a while just to build up maximum health.
Next, the magus. This is the ultimate black magic caster. I haven't purchased any black magic spells since the start of the game when I had some red mages. This job might be pretty good but it doesn't really fit in with what I've been doing so far.
Now a real choice: the devout. This is the upgraded white magic caster. The white mage can never cast level 8 spells and gets substantially fewer casts of the higher level spells. On the other hand the white mage gets significantly more casts of low level spells. And is already job level 58. And will gain job levels faster than the devout. If we look at the healing spell formula every 2 mind is worth an additional base healing of the spell and every 4 job levels is worth the same amount. At level 50 the devout will have 12 more mind than the white mage which is nowhere near enough to make up the job level difference. I'm pretty sure in the short term the white mage will actually be significantly better both in terms of total amount healed across all spells and in terms of throughput over a short period of time like a boss fight. On the other hand arise is a level 8 spell and it's awesome and devout only. And if I end up leveling enough that the white mage gets job level capped the devout will eventually pass her.
Next up, the summoner. This is the upgraded evoker and actually gets different affects from each of the summons. The evoker was random, the summoner is fixed. And better. Summoner is tempting to play around with for sure but I don't have any of the summon spells yet so he's going to have to sit on the bench for at least a while.
Sage is an interesting option. Take the magus, the devout, and the evoker and squish them together. You can't learn all the spells but you get to choose which spells you do want to have across all three schools. Their spell progression is pretty bad, unfortunately. The devout gets twice as many level 8 spell casts as the sage. The sage does actually get more level 1 spells though if I want more cure spells...
Last but definitely not least... Ninja! The ninja is simply awesome. He has a very useful special ability: throw. This lets you chuck old weapons for big damage. Eventually you can get shurikens which do even bigger damage. Even when you're not throwing weapons they have high agility and strength so they do a ton of auto-attack damage. They get to use some spicy weapons. They're pretty much guaranteed to go first each round. The only downside is they're rather squishy, especially against spells.
I think next time I play this game I want to try ignoring melee attacks for the most part and just use spells and cool abilities but this time through I've been running tank+healer+melee DPS and I don't see any real reason to stop now. Especially with the way melee proficiency works it really feels like I should keep on beating down at this point. My plan is to use a party of viking, black belt, devout, ninja and see how that treats me. I'm also going to try scumming for health by tracking when my viking is going to level up and switch him to a black belt for the bonus vitality. I'll get punished by the weakened debuff a bit by doing so but viking and black belt are similar enough that the debuff won't last very long. (5 fights total for the 2 switches I think, and it'll only get lower as I gain job levels.) This party will be worse in the short term but once I find a vendor for level 8 spells it should get better.
First of all, the black belt. In a sense this is the 'upgraded' monk job. It attacks barehanded like a monk. It has a useless special ability like a monk. (You can spend an entire turn charging up so you can do double damage on the next attack. Or two turns to do triple damage. Maybe useful on enemies that split but pretty much a non-factor for the most part.) On the plus side the black belt has way more strength, agility, and vitality compared to the monk. In fact it has the most vitality of any job in the game and is a must use if you want to max out your health. With a high job level and high melee proficiency I imagine these guys do pretty good damage. Part of me wants to turn my tank into one of these for a while just to build up maximum health.
Next, the magus. This is the ultimate black magic caster. I haven't purchased any black magic spells since the start of the game when I had some red mages. This job might be pretty good but it doesn't really fit in with what I've been doing so far.
Now a real choice: the devout. This is the upgraded white magic caster. The white mage can never cast level 8 spells and gets substantially fewer casts of the higher level spells. On the other hand the white mage gets significantly more casts of low level spells. And is already job level 58. And will gain job levels faster than the devout. If we look at the healing spell formula every 2 mind is worth an additional base healing of the spell and every 4 job levels is worth the same amount. At level 50 the devout will have 12 more mind than the white mage which is nowhere near enough to make up the job level difference. I'm pretty sure in the short term the white mage will actually be significantly better both in terms of total amount healed across all spells and in terms of throughput over a short period of time like a boss fight. On the other hand arise is a level 8 spell and it's awesome and devout only. And if I end up leveling enough that the white mage gets job level capped the devout will eventually pass her.
Next up, the summoner. This is the upgraded evoker and actually gets different affects from each of the summons. The evoker was random, the summoner is fixed. And better. Summoner is tempting to play around with for sure but I don't have any of the summon spells yet so he's going to have to sit on the bench for at least a while.
Sage is an interesting option. Take the magus, the devout, and the evoker and squish them together. You can't learn all the spells but you get to choose which spells you do want to have across all three schools. Their spell progression is pretty bad, unfortunately. The devout gets twice as many level 8 spell casts as the sage. The sage does actually get more level 1 spells though if I want more cure spells...
Last but definitely not least... Ninja! The ninja is simply awesome. He has a very useful special ability: throw. This lets you chuck old weapons for big damage. Eventually you can get shurikens which do even bigger damage. Even when you're not throwing weapons they have high agility and strength so they do a ton of auto-attack damage. They get to use some spicy weapons. They're pretty much guaranteed to go first each round. The only downside is they're rather squishy, especially against spells.
I think next time I play this game I want to try ignoring melee attacks for the most part and just use spells and cool abilities but this time through I've been running tank+healer+melee DPS and I don't see any real reason to stop now. Especially with the way melee proficiency works it really feels like I should keep on beating down at this point. My plan is to use a party of viking, black belt, devout, ninja and see how that treats me. I'm also going to try scumming for health by tracking when my viking is going to level up and switch him to a black belt for the bonus vitality. I'll get punished by the weakened debuff a bit by doing so but viking and black belt are similar enough that the debuff won't last very long. (5 fights total for the 2 switches I think, and it'll only get lower as I gain job levels.) This party will be worse in the short term but once I find a vendor for level 8 spells it should get better.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Water Crystal Jobs
The party of knight, knight, white mage, knight ended up being better and worse than expected. I definitely didn't have 6 quality swords to use and really only had 3 which meant one of my knights was awesome, one was ok, and one was pretty weak. In random encounters they were all fine but on bosses if they didn't have top swords they hardly did any damage to the boss. On the plus side just standing around and casting cure every round meant I simply couldn't lose either. Boss fights took forever but I wasn't in any real danger of losing. I did decide to job level grind before tackling the water crystal boss to get my guys from 6 swings a round to 8 swings per round. It turned out doing so also leveled up melee proficiency in one hand so they were swinging 9 times. (I bet they'd start swinging 10 times after just a couple more fights.) One thing I did notice is that having lower agility meant they went after the white mage pretty much always. And she still does more damage with her lightning staff than they did with auto attacks so often she'd kill the monsters before they could get their job level experience. Sigh.
At any rate the town after the water crystal doesn't sell any gear for knights at all so I really want to swap out at least 2 of my knights for other things. On the plus side I have 5 new options to consider!
First of all there's the viking. He's an interesting job and doesn't at all do what you'd think he does from the name. When I think of vikings I think of crazed killing machines on boats. Maybe my view of vikings are just different than reality though as I remember being extremely disappointed by the board game VIKINGS! since it had a lot of vikings doing non-combat related things. There was no raping or pillaging involved. But I digress... The viking job in this game is the true tank job. His special ability is provoke which forces one enemy to attack him in the next round and also lowers the enemy defense in the process. Unfortunately they decided to scale both of these abilities with job level so you really want to level a viking a whole lot to make his ability useful and it takes max job level to make it a guarantee. But having the ability to make bosses focus their attacks onto one target is insanely powerful. Unfortunately compared to the knights I have now he actually has worse vitality so while he may be a 'tank' he won't have as much health. He does have higher strength so he'd probably do more damage at equal job levels?
Next is the dragoon. Like Kain in Final Fantasy IV he has the jump ability as his special ability which causes the dragoon to disappear from the fight and then come back next turn to do a bunch of damage. Unfortunately the damage done is worse than just attacking twice would have been until you get the dragoon's job level up pretty high. Max it out and it does a ton of damage and it also does double damage to flying monsters. Beyond that he has less strength and vitality than a knight but more agility. And if you recall earlier when discussing the thief I said there was one item in the game that you needed a very high level thief to steal? It's the best weapon for the dragoon. Yeah, I didn't level a thief the whole way which pretty much excludes dragoon from being a top end game option for me this time around.
Then we have the dark knight. Like Cecil in the first part of the harder versions of Final Fantasy IV he has the souleater ability which is a massive AE attack which hurts all the enemies and the dark knight. The damage from this ability scaled pretty crazily with job level, current health, and weapon attack. It seems pretty great at wiping out random fights filled with dudes but I like using those fights to level up my job levels and my melee proficiencies... Like the dragoon he has more agility than my knights but less strength and vitality. I don't know that I want to use a dark knight the whole time so the fact that using his ability costs me melee proficiency in the long run really sucks. Also less max hp than just staying as a knight, so I think I'll be passing.
Next up is a new spellcaster job: evoker! This job gets to cast summon spells for cool and powerful effects. Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks here... For one, there is no place to buy summon spells that I can access right now! Switching to an evoker immediately is just kicking myself in the junk for fun and that doesn't actually sound like fun at all. Then like the geomancer you don't get to decide what the summon does, it picks from 2 options each time. 2 very different options one of which you probably don't want. It also has pathetically bad vitality. Yeah, there's pretty much no reason to want to switch to one of these guys.
Finally there's a unique job: bard. She has the special ability to sing a song with her equipped harp which does something cool to the party. Small defense buff, or attack buff, or damage, or an ae heal, or a damage taken debuff. All of which sounds kinda cool but they can't all be done right away since you can't get all the harps right away. As far as stats go they have bad strength and vitality so she probably does bad damage and has lower maximum health. I can definitely see bards being good with some setups (the AE heal combined with the dark knight's souleater seems pretty spicy) but that doesn't really fit in with the way I'm playing right now.
So, what am I going to do? Well, none of these jobs can take the place of my white mage yet so I'm keeping her around. I really want to ditch some knights for sword related reasons but dark knights also use swords so that doesn't help. Evokers and bards don't fit my party plan. I do like tanks and vikings use different weapons so I think I'll switch into one of those. I could switch into a dragoon for the short term but since I can't get their best weapon I'm not going to stay with them forever. I think I'm better off keeping the higher vitality knight around. As such I believe my party for now is going to be viking, knight, white mage, knight.
At any rate the town after the water crystal doesn't sell any gear for knights at all so I really want to swap out at least 2 of my knights for other things. On the plus side I have 5 new options to consider!
First of all there's the viking. He's an interesting job and doesn't at all do what you'd think he does from the name. When I think of vikings I think of crazed killing machines on boats. Maybe my view of vikings are just different than reality though as I remember being extremely disappointed by the board game VIKINGS! since it had a lot of vikings doing non-combat related things. There was no raping or pillaging involved. But I digress... The viking job in this game is the true tank job. His special ability is provoke which forces one enemy to attack him in the next round and also lowers the enemy defense in the process. Unfortunately they decided to scale both of these abilities with job level so you really want to level a viking a whole lot to make his ability useful and it takes max job level to make it a guarantee. But having the ability to make bosses focus their attacks onto one target is insanely powerful. Unfortunately compared to the knights I have now he actually has worse vitality so while he may be a 'tank' he won't have as much health. He does have higher strength so he'd probably do more damage at equal job levels?
Next is the dragoon. Like Kain in Final Fantasy IV he has the jump ability as his special ability which causes the dragoon to disappear from the fight and then come back next turn to do a bunch of damage. Unfortunately the damage done is worse than just attacking twice would have been until you get the dragoon's job level up pretty high. Max it out and it does a ton of damage and it also does double damage to flying monsters. Beyond that he has less strength and vitality than a knight but more agility. And if you recall earlier when discussing the thief I said there was one item in the game that you needed a very high level thief to steal? It's the best weapon for the dragoon. Yeah, I didn't level a thief the whole way which pretty much excludes dragoon from being a top end game option for me this time around.
Then we have the dark knight. Like Cecil in the first part of the harder versions of Final Fantasy IV he has the souleater ability which is a massive AE attack which hurts all the enemies and the dark knight. The damage from this ability scaled pretty crazily with job level, current health, and weapon attack. It seems pretty great at wiping out random fights filled with dudes but I like using those fights to level up my job levels and my melee proficiencies... Like the dragoon he has more agility than my knights but less strength and vitality. I don't know that I want to use a dark knight the whole time so the fact that using his ability costs me melee proficiency in the long run really sucks. Also less max hp than just staying as a knight, so I think I'll be passing.
Next up is a new spellcaster job: evoker! This job gets to cast summon spells for cool and powerful effects. Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks here... For one, there is no place to buy summon spells that I can access right now! Switching to an evoker immediately is just kicking myself in the junk for fun and that doesn't actually sound like fun at all. Then like the geomancer you don't get to decide what the summon does, it picks from 2 options each time. 2 very different options one of which you probably don't want. It also has pathetically bad vitality. Yeah, there's pretty much no reason to want to switch to one of these guys.
Finally there's a unique job: bard. She has the special ability to sing a song with her equipped harp which does something cool to the party. Small defense buff, or attack buff, or damage, or an ae heal, or a damage taken debuff. All of which sounds kinda cool but they can't all be done right away since you can't get all the harps right away. As far as stats go they have bad strength and vitality so she probably does bad damage and has lower maximum health. I can definitely see bards being good with some setups (the AE heal combined with the dark knight's souleater seems pretty spicy) but that doesn't really fit in with the way I'm playing right now.
So, what am I going to do? Well, none of these jobs can take the place of my white mage yet so I'm keeping her around. I really want to ditch some knights for sword related reasons but dark knights also use swords so that doesn't help. Evokers and bards don't fit my party plan. I do like tanks and vikings use different weapons so I think I'll switch into one of those. I could switch into a dragoon for the short term but since I can't get their best weapon I'm not going to stay with them forever. I think I'm better off keeping the higher vitality knight around. As such I believe my party for now is going to be viking, knight, white mage, knight.
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