another possible solution to the evasion issue (in General)

i haven't thought this out fully and it may just be sleeplessness talking, but i thought of something else that might balance the issue between usd weapons and evasion.

part 1: lucky shot! if a melee blow is totally evaded in a round, then there is a 10% chance to get a lucky shot for 25% damage (these numbers may need to be tweaked for balance sake or even reversed, 25% chance for a 10% damage shot.) it could only happen once per round and would only effect rounds where blows were totally evaded. this would also help against the robf.

part 2: if after lucky shot is implemented, the mages need any kind of boost, then add spell critical! this could be triggered by opponents amf or mage shield blocking a certain level or based on trained level of dd. instead of adding extra damage though, it just reduces the randomness factor in dd. so instead of 50 percent to 100 percent damage, you get something like 75% to 100% for that round or for all rounds if based on dd level. it could also be randomized.

again, i haven't thought through all of this, but wanted to post the ideas and let everyone either tweak them to improve or shoot it down if it be silly.

I think the evasion problem needs to be addressed for more than when it's completely evaded.

What if the evasion effect reduced pth & cth by a percentage? Of course it would be lessened so that you can't get the effect very high easily like protection.

But it'd be like.

Dex = Defensive dex => 100 Cth
200 pth on the weapon

50 evasion effect

.50*300 = 150 so 1 hit and half a chance for a second

Defensive Dex overwhelms Dex => 0 Cth
100 pth on the weapon.

.50*100 = 50pct

This idea isn't perfect or great by any means, but maybe someone can take it somewhere useful.

i am hijacking my own thread, but oh well! after thinking about this as i was trying to get back to sleep this morning, i realized that with a 6 million cb investment in a mage shield in addition to the randomized damage, mages best hope is 30 to 60 percent of their damage investment before any other damage reduction even comes into play!

i have always known we lost a great deal of our experience investment, but had never really thought of the way these two things interact. the randomized damage was here before the mage shield and i seriously wonder if it was taken into account when the cost curve of the mage shield was created. do we really need both in the game or for so little investment?

dude, don't forget the lesser DD damage done in ranged (not sure what those factors are any more...) That takes your 30/60 and makes it even smaller. And that's just one layer! One item! Sure, the MgS has offsets, but walls are as common as spit now, so finding a spot for at least one MgS on a team isn't really that difficult.

I didn't realize a +40 mage shield only cost 6 million...sheesh! But then, I didn't even have to know that to already want the damn things nerfed or removed from the game... *smile*

I'm not sure about the lucky shot idea... I would rather go with my weapon "materia" slot ideas to give chances for stuff like that -- critical hit, lucky shots, VA, etc...

"so finding a spot for at least one MgS on a team isn't really that difficult."

It's finding a Mage Shield to begin with that's the difficult part.

Without turning this into yet another "but you guys always hit! evasion sucks/Mage Shield rules!" argument, I'll say that I agree that the randomness needs to be drastically reduced, especially for mage damage.

As for Evasion, I've always offered the following solution:
Effect starts at 1.0
Decays by 10% per round

the only problem with that lord bob is that it really doesn't address the usd pumped weapons at all in effect ignoring half of the problem. unless you meant to implement that with a weapons cap of some sort...

It wasn't meant to address USD pumped weapons. It was a fix for Evasion.

As for the weapon cap, I could take it or leave it. I would much rather scrap the constant upgrade curve on weapon damage and replace it with a linear growth curve.

i tend to agree that the change to a constant cost for the damage upgrade may have been a mistake. i wonder if we reverted back to the prior method, how that would affect things.

"dude, don't forget the lesser DD damage done in ranged (not sure what those factors are any more...) That takes your 30/60 and makes it even smaller. And that's just one layer! One item! Sure, the MgS has offsets, but walls are as common as spit now, so finding a spot for at least one MgS on a team isn't really that difficult. "

with the 40 percent ranged damage reduction against a mage shield with the random factors, a mage can at best hope for 18 to 36% of their damage. this is before any armor bonuses or amf reductions.

with that all being said, is amf level based off of these reduced amounts or the original full damage amount?

AMF goes first, as far as I know.

And rarity has never been a good balancing methodology, in my opinion. So I couldn't care less if an MgS is hard to come by. They are here, and they are only getting larger. Items never go away.

Well it is the 25th already and nothing has really been done for evasion.

nor a weapons/item cap for that matter.

i am wondering how the ranged changes have panned out. i really wish i could find the thread where jon announced what percentage of fights ended in ranged...i seem to remember 75% but would feel better having it verified. i also wonder where we are now with the ranged changes.