Stamina Redux Redux

Stamina Redux Redux

With 1.10 on the horizon, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I would change about BNW if I had the hacking expertise (I’d like to make my own patch, someday). Above all else, I would try to streamline stamina to make it simpler and more intuitive. The change I am proposing runs the risk of making stamina useless again, and invalidating some character builds. I realize I am opening a very large can of worms here, but I am very curious to hear thoughts about how I could mitigate this impact.

Basic Concept
Rename “Stamina” to “Heart”, conceived as a hybrid of a character’s endurance and bravery. Remove all stamina implementations that are inconsistent with this description.

No More Stamina Attacks/Heals
Revert damage/healing calculation to use either vigor or magic (possible exceptions: Interceptor, desperation attacks, atma weapon, ???).
* Make magic esper bonuses more available to previous stamina builds
* Adjust base power of previously-stamina-based attacks
* Switch Regen/Remedy to fractional healing to keep them viable on low-magic builds?

Use Stamina for Magical *and* Physical Damage Reduction/Variance
This would hopefully help with stamina’s usefulness, and would mitigate the change to cover mechanics below.

Never Evade while Covering
The in-game cover animation suggests that you are using yourself as a physical shield, so you should always take the hit.

Preserving Stamina's Usefulness
* With stamina more of a dedicated "tanking" stat, perhaps enemies need to hit even harder?
* Could other uses be made stronger? (morph damage reduce, dance success, sap/regen ticks, counter/cover rate, status evade)

I really appreciate any thoughts you all have!

Seems like a neat idea, even if only just as something of an alternate take on the current Stamina usage, especially since for once it's a suggestion wanting to push Stamina more toward a concise defensive stat instead of asking for more Stamina based magic attacks in the game.

One problem I see though is doing it right would require a big esper rebalance and redistribution so more characters have access to at least a +1Mag boost of some kind. (Though I gotta admit the idea of a magic based Sabin amuses me, he would finally have a reason to use Quake! lol)

If the stat name was to be changed though, I would probably rename it something other than Heart as that sounds like something straight out of Captain Planet.
Maybe Vitality? That seems to be what other modern FF games go with nowadays, though I'm admittedly not that good at coming up with names for things myself.

The whole point is that stamina is useful. If it’s only now a defensive variance stat (on top of regen ticks/sap/etc), that’s a lot less useful than before. 

You also lose all the customization of stamina builds and weapons, vigor characters get a substantial nerf from the loss of physical variance mitigation and pure stamina builds are way less interesting or relevant.

There is a huge evasion penalty when covering btw.  I always take the animations with a grain of salt and wouldn’t worry a ton about their realism when balancing how things work.

So my question ultimately is: why would you do this?  Sure it makes it simpler to understand what Stamina does - but is that really that important?  Is it that complex as it is now?  It affects a line of heals, it affects regen ticks/sap/morph, status mitigation, and is a damage stat for some abilities/weapons.  That’s not that hard to figure out.  

1 hour ago, Mishrak said:

So my question ultimately is: why would you do this?

To better answer the question why, allow me to pose a hypothetical:

What if we re-purposed the “Speed” stat by equalizing everyone’s ATB rate and changing several attacks/heals to use “Speed” in their damage calculation? It would definitely create several new character builds, but I think, despite its added complexity, it would hurt the *depth* of character building.

Vigor/Magic as opposing damage sources makes characters 2D, but adding Speed as a third damage source doesn’t make them 3D -- it makes the existing 2D plane larger. On the other hand, adding Speed (in its current implementation) makes characters 3D.

My goal would be to make characters fully 4D with an implementation of Stamina that provides a unique dimension to character building. BNW already does this to a large extent (particularly via Tank n Spank, status mitigation, damage reduction) -- but I am curious to see if I could make the stat stand completely on its own.

I imagine this problem was debated extensively during development of the Stamina Redux patch, and I would not be surprised if there truly is no alternate approach that would satisfy the requirements I’m setting forth. But still, I think it’s an interesting puzzle to try to sort out, even if just for my own enjoyment.

I don't see your point, if abilities that use Stamina in their Damage calculation are given to some character that make their Stamina Build a unique aspect, that neither Vig or Mag build could get (not to their full potential). So consequentially if you remove said abilities and replace Stam EL option by Mag EL option you just hurt the game depth by a lot.

While I agree that giving Stamina attack/heal to all character that can use Stamina Build is not a good idea (especially for characters like Relm and Strago for instance where Stamina is a Defensive option that their fully magic oriented Build can't exploit, making it basically a choice between getting maximum power or sacrificing Power for Defense), your ideas just don't appeal to me.

Regarding the No Evasion while Covering : I don't see a reason for that IMO Realism is the very bottom least of my concern in a Turn-Base RPG, there's already a Evasion nerf when Covering and again it reduce the depth of the game, for instance I use Shadow to Cover why ? Because I liked using Shadow this way but this work because of Shadow Evasion without that Shadow suck at Covering, remove that and it cuts me this way of playing Shadow (and probably other characters as well), so again reduce the depth of the gameplay.

So Yeah for me I don't see the point here what you propose is basically cut off a good portion of what make Stamina good by it's own, to makes it less useful and less interesting to invest in for many characters.

Even if we put a single defensive stat for it, variance is probably the wrong target for a purely defensive stat anyway. Variance only makes up for a small part of the damage formula.  The biggest contributors to defense are mdef/pdef, safe/shell for reduction and mev/pev and image/reflect for avoidance.  

At most you only affect 25% of incoming damage (at 90+) when you just target variance. For most of the game it’ll be a lot less than 25%.

Well in a way Stamina is already a Defensive Stat, as it affect Regen Tick and increase the chance of your characters to avoid Statut Effect.

Yep. Correct. It affects a ton of defensive things. 

As a slightly different approach to my suggestion above, you could make "Spirit" (Stamina) the source of all restorative magic and defensive behavior. Severing restorative magic from damaging magic would constitute a new character dimension without distracting from the opposing damage stats Magic/Vigor. This approach would also be intuitive for veteran RPG players. With this approach, the changes are:

* Vigor loses its damage reduction, but gains Counter % bonus
* All restorative espers/magic/tools/bushido/blitz/rage/dance/slots -> Spirit (except drain)
* Rock/Shrapnel/Tentacle rages, GP Toss -> Vigor

Some Implications:
Sabin would need access to Magic boosts, Gau might prefer Vgr+1/Mag+1 instead of Stamina, and Cyan's now-magic-based Bushido might be repurposed as primarily status attacks. Current stamina builds that can output lots of damage (???, Terra Morph, others?) might become too powerful as healers. In general, you would build your mages as either Black or White, and only balanced fighters could capitalize on Cover+Counter. I would expect these changes to encourage more strategic decisions regarding team planning, since fewer characters will be equally effective as healers and damage dealers.
 

Actually that isn't a bad idea, FFIV 3D does that using Magic stat for offensive spells and Spirit stat for Healing Spell, which I think was an interesting approach, but doing that with current BNW would need a Lot of balancing.

I think a lot of people think that it's weird that Stamina is used in damage calculations. I kinda of like the spirit of the suggestion, that "Heart" (why Heart? What's wrong with Stamina?) would be a purely defensive stat, but I think you're going to find that it falls apart in application. Balancing would be a nightmare. It has to be very effective for it to trump a standard Vigor or Magic build, which means enemies have to become a lot stronger, which means the mod will become a lot more punishing to players who don't want or understand how to build a purely defensive Stam-Tank. And every party would essentially require one.

I just don't see it working out.

I also disagree with this: 

On 1/9/2019 at 1:39 PM, Bropedio said:

Never Evade while Covering
The in-game cover animation suggests that you are using yourself as a physical shield, so you should always take the hit.

The animation shows the character throwing themselves in front of another character to defend for them. Why would they not attempt to use their shield or weapon to block said attack? As it is, I don't even like the 50% evade penalty. A lot of times it makes a cover character a detriment for the player, which feels terrible since the cover character required a an investment on the player's part.

I tend to think of the current implementation of Stamina as a sort of "Spirit" stat already, as I feel most of its uses fit such a theme. I see it as embodying the character's measure of willpower, determination, bravery, resilience, etc., moreso than just a measure of durability as the word "Stamina" might suggest.

On the subject of how such a Spirit stat could contribute to healing, I don't think it necessarily would have to be used as the casting stat. Imagine it instead contributing to the amount healed based on the target's score — like an inverse of its current role in magical damage variance mitigation, or an X/256 bonus healing factor, or somesuch. It would go hand in hand with Regen ticks on making high Stamina characters bounce back faster, synergizes with Stamina's tanking role, etc.

I'd say just rename Stamina to Spirit and be done with it, since it fits better with what the stat actually does currently.

Changing a name just to change it is pretty unusual for BNW. There’s almost always a compelling reason for really anything that has been changed.  

It’s also not as simple as just changing it in the game. There’s a ton of documentation that has to be updated as well. 

As far as aesthetics go, there’s nothing to gain except confusion when changing just the name from Stamina to Spirit.