The reason I suggested making freeze a debuff + %stun is to free up the guaranteed stun to a potential sleep status, assuming you want/plan to have it. The auto status resist buff is a fine idea either way, though please make it populate the foes' status bar so I don't have to manually remember when can I freeze them again.
(somewhat related, a number on the status icons to show when they will expire would be an appreciated QoL improvement)
I don't mind losing spars since XP and trust gets rewarded either way, but it's more to do with Metatron not being the definitively strongest sparring partner, even accounting for the fractured core, that upsets the narratives. Though I suppose ultimately which companion is the most difficult depends on each player's build. I can't break through Aspasia because I ran MAG/AGI Water/Wind/Dagger to maximize glancing hit proc (very funny when I'm basically parrying divine judgement, less so when Aspasia's dummy thicc HP bar asserts dominance).
Ay my bad I just assumed it's all or nothing since some of the stats' tooltips doesn't mention scaling (e.g. AGI's glancing hit and VIT's damage mitigation gives an impression that they have to = Astaroth's level). Might want to put that in the tooltip so dum-dums like me don't make a bigger fool of ourselves.
An option to respec / "switch off" learned attunements (say, longsword initiate) would be appreciated.
I requested the flavor text to differentiate them from regular damage spells (and to check whether Wind Lance's 4th hit procs with Tailwind alpha's initiative buff. my instinct is that it procs, but since Tailwind isn't an initiative buff at base form I can't be 100% sure).
Some of the wind spells (e.g. Aerial Edge) list FCS as a damage modifier. I'm very blind and I don't know what FCS correlates to.
It's more "variations of this situation/scene concept are playing again" kind of broad-stroke overlap rather than "these exact words are repeating again" overlap, but the stand-out in this case are Sam and Ashley, and the resulting banter thereof. The two are both antics-prone idiots, so they naturally draw a lot of (well-deserved) snark from everyone (Astaroth, Celica, and Sarah in particular). Glares get thrown at them very regularly, for example. It's the "slice of life" approach of building characters, which isn't terrible (they are popular for a reason), but not ground-breaking either, and I expected more since I know for sure you have the writing chops to make it so.
I suspect there's also an intentional mirroring of similarities between Sam/Astaroth and Ashley/Sarah (huh, the initials match, clever), but it does threaten to make them (the succs in this case, since Astaroth is the player character) somewhat less memorable. Of course, not every character can get the Metatron treatment, especially considering the rate of which we get new companions.
Frankly, I have no business, nor intention, to impose on your writing style. I guess I was so impressed with your dramatic flair that I kinda raised the expectation for the "day to day" mundane banter accordingly, which, in hindsight, is an unfair comparison (and with so many characters, some recurrences have to be expected).
Yeah, it'll be a 'resist' status bar type thing. If you mouse over a status it shows a description and duration. I'm not sure if I can add a constant visual number, will see.
Lorewise, Metatron isn't trying her hardest, and is generally terrible at sparring - her entire combat style and martial art is basically 'maximum force.' She excels in real battles but struggles to hold back and remain effective in sparring. Gamewise, keeping everyone at around the same level just makes it easier to swap partners when you want and experiment, and some people already bitch about the archangel being a mary sue.
If I was going full lore-friendly, Metatron would be essentially immune to damage/statuses, Aspasia would be immune to most statuses and take like 1% damage, and the succubi would be immune to most statuses, making the human characters objectively garbage in comparison. I figure that having fun, and being able to use Celica instead of Sarah if you like her better, is more important.
I'll look into the vit/agi stuff. I can add it to the progress menu, and revamp the tooltips a bit!
Weapon stuff doesn't take attunement, only magic. The weapon traits will actually get removed next update since the weapon swapping system no longer requires them and seems to have been received positively.
FCS = Focus. I usually use three-letter abbreviations (MAG, INS, FCS, AGI) since the actual stat names vary in length and the descriptions can get pretty bloated. If that's confusing, I can reconsider it.
Ashley starts off sounding like a goof, but her camp scenes are pretty different from Sam's imo, especially when she starts opening up. Did you feel they were too similar there too, or is it more the early vibe of the progress of forest/temple, where you go from banter with Sam -> banter with Ashley? Cuz the latter is definitely something I want to improve, but I didn't think the former was an issue.
Fun fact: in my original plan for the game, MSam would end up with whichever succ you didn't go with, and the canon pairings (if MC didn't pick Ashley) would be MC/Sarah, Sam/Ashley. I ended up dropping that for a variety of reasons.
Regarding the writing in general - it's certainly a challenge to make them all sound different. I think you might be overrating my writing expertise a bit, I'm not equally adept at writing every type of characters, but trying to learn. The best I can say is that I'm trying not to replicate romance arcs or trust progressions between characters.
So, because of Lances, and honestly I thought that my crit rate felt a bit low with Air Cutter, I decided to spend some free time this morning going through all the abilities and checking them over for inconsistency in description/tooltip/effect. I'm not saying everything here is wrong, just that some things don't match. Also, I'm certainly not saying I didn't miss something.
Split into spoilers for space. Also some things are just tooltips on abilities most people wont even see, but I figured I should list them anyway.
So.. yeah. I feel a little bit bad being like, "Hey here's a big list of stuff that might be wrong." but bug fixes and such are a good thing. Just, yeah. Also, since I'm obviously mildly interested in these things, what was the problem with Metatrons Destroyer trait? I looked at it but it looked fine to me. If it's not a huge pain to explain anyway.
Thank you so much for going all those! Yeah, I've had to nerf a fair number of enemies, and some abilities. Also, most are just copy-pastes of another ability, then edited, so there are some dumb errors.
Cooldowns are now displayed in the special tooltip so I'm probably gonna remove them from the description proper.
The negative debuff is from before I changed debuffs to be positive values, fixed.
Target masteries were supposed to be a tradeoff of marking+crippling the target vs marking them while interjecting yourself. Fixed.
Displaying multihits in descriptions has been a problem for a while, and I've gone back and forth on how to display it. Do you have any thoughts on which works better? I'd like to adopt a consistent style.
Good catch on Stomp, damn that was off.
Not sure on Sear... it's not the strongest ability anyways, so 100% burn on all of them is probably fine.
Apathy is unfinished and unbuyable ingame, so it's definitely unpolished haha.
Water/Wind stuff fixed!
Also, don't apologize for any of that, it's incredibly helpful! I've had to tweak ability values enough that there are issues tht are hard to find or notice, it's super nice to get help with that!
To tl;dr the Destroyer thing; for most of the game's lifespan, quipping/unequipping traits that affected vitals, stats, or growths involved editing the character's base stats in some way. Bad coding practice, but I didn't know better, 'cuz making this game was my first experience with Python (and coding much in general).
In... 0.19 I think, I used some newfound knowledge to instead derive values WITHOUT editing the base stuff. Core stat growths from traits are unused in vanilla aside from Metatron, so while I fixed defense/res/hp growths from traits, I missed those.
I have two more things to say.
First good job with Sam. Normally I would not stand dumbasses but Sam made it to be the exception of the rule.
Second I am really curious and gratefull that you made aether and nether magic change yourself. This is something I really wish WoW would goes more into it. Now I am curious, will those two magic lock themselves later out so I have to choose between one of them or could I become an aether-nether hybrid entity?
Sam is a lovable idiot, and not actually THAT dumb, just... doesn't think things through. She's cute tho, so it's okay.
I personally really like the aesthetic of both light and dark magic, but never liked the divide between objectively good/objectively evil. So I've been having a lot of fun with Aether/Nether magic here!
To briefly summarize the corruption plans; low levels of corruption can coexist fine, since your fundamental identity as a human remains. Higher levels are generally exclusive and irreversible, especially once you pass 50% and change from 'fundamentally a human' to 'fundamentally something else,' and your existence starts trying to revert back to its new natural state (aka, ex. 100% nether corruption).
Sarah's existence suggests that there will be a hybrid aether/nether path, but figuring that out will be a bit more involved than the normal aether/nether paths.
Limit breaking your corruption from 20 to 49 will probably be in the game... soon-ish, it was planned as a 10 trust unlock with certain characters, and we're getting to that point with most of the relevant ones. That will unlock various new traits/abilities, and likely be required for higher tier Nether/Aether magic, but not yet be the super irreversible 50%+ final tier of corruption..
