CYBERDAGGER'S PROFILE

author=monkeynohito
BTW, This was all done digitally in GIMP. :D

Bullshit! That's colored pencils! Then again, I see no paper grain in the empty areas...

author=Craze
eo1 was "let's make a pretty dungeon crawler that's nothing like wizardry in order to grab money from wizardry fans"

eo2 was "let's make a good game that expands on eo1 and makes it into its own full-bodied series"

eo3 was "let's make a terrific game with the old dungeon concept, but tie it in to a really cool ship exploration side-mission that helps you dungeon delve, as well as switch up the class system to our best set yet"

eo4 was "let's make it a bit simpler again, returning to eo2, but with the system changes and exploration side-missions of eo3, and give an already-pretty series a graphical update on the new hardware to make it surprisingly even better-looking"

That's a lot better. I see now what you mean, and yeah, if that's how it is, EO1 is entirely skippable. Thanks for the input.

Thinking about whether tagging out should end the turn or the character that tags in should still be able to attack.

Also thinking about how to make a boss that's interesting to fight with a party of a warrior type character and a rogue type character.

author=Nightowl
Some are skyscrapers that have weird puzzles installed in the higher levels.

Well, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense for you to install a bunch of teleporters with no indication of where they lead in your company's offices. That way a crime syndicate won't be able to take over the offices, and just in case they defy all expectations and do so, they won't be able to use the network of teleporters against the kid that's coming to save you.

Silph Co. was a retarded dungeon.

In games like these, your characters basically just do three possible things. They either kill stuff, help their team mates kill stuff faster, or keep their team mates from getting killed. Everything they do is one of these three things, sometimes more than one at the same time. The question is less about what they do, and more about how they do it. If you have two classes that focus on the same goal, like damage, but achieve their goals through different means.

Let's say that you have some damage dealing classes. There are the attackers, the ones that deal their damage by constant use of the attack command, low cost abilities and counters.

In contrast to that, there are the nukers. They are not your main damage dealers most of the time because their damage dealing abilities, while extremely powerful, are very resource intensive. So, once in a while, they can deal massive ammounts of damage, even clearing the whole field some times.

Then there's the critters. If you think they're simply a subset of the attackers with purely aesthetic differences, you're doing crits wrong. A critical hit can be a great damage boost, but it's reliant on a dice roll. While the maximum damage in a turn for these is greater than that of those that rely simply on a massive attack stat, they deal less damage on average, and as such, in a vacuum, simply stacking damage is more beneficial. So give a twist to crits! Have crits ignore defense buffs, or even ignore defense altogether! Give the class abilities that activate on a crit. Whatever you do, make crits more than just a random element on the damage formula.

Then there's the odd ones out. You know the type, those that deal their damage through conditions like poison, burn and bleed. These are special because they circumvent the damage calculations entirely. No randomness, no defense stats mitigating damage, no crits. Just subtracting directly from HP each turn. For this reason, they are excellent against heavily armored enemies, as they ignore this advantage. Them relying on conditions also means that they have some free turns to do other things, while others would have to keep attacking, so making these hybrid classes and giving them something useful to do on those dead turns is nice. Or you can make condition removal prevalent and make it an epic struggle to keep those conditions up, if you wish.

After all that attacking stuff, there's support. As I said before, there are two kinds of support. Offensive support, making your allies kill faster, and defensive support, keeping your allies from getting killed.

With offensive support, you can be a saboteur or a buffer. Buffers raise the party's killing capabilities, by directly influencing damage, or sometthing like a haste spell that makes an ally attack more times. Saboteurs make the enemies more vulnerable to whatever attacks you want to use.

Defensive supporters can also be buffers or saboteurs. Defensive sabotueurs impede the enemies' damage dealing capabilities, either by reducing damage or preventing the attacks from happening at all. Defensive buffers can be either proactive or reactive. Proactive defensive buffers work by improving the party's capacity to take damage. Reactive defensive buffers are what you know as healers. They return the health to its previous value after the damage is dealt.

Now, what do you want to do to make interesting classes? Mix and match! Maybe there's a class that has attacks that heal the party after striking. Maybe there's one that make the rest of the party's attacks against a single enemy more powerful, as long as it keeps attacking it. Hell, mix two damage dealing methods! Perhaps a class that has a skill that deals more damage if the target already has a certain damage dealing condition? A class that inflicts bleed on crit? And how about this one, a class that's a defensive saboteur most of the time, but has a spell that deals damage that scales with the number of conditions the target has, allowing it to work as a nuker once it has already nerfed the opposition as best as it can.

The skills define the class much more than the stats. Make the skills interact in interesting ways among themselves or with other elements of the game, and the classes will be interesting.

If you want examples of class builds I'll post a couple of them later. It's late, and this wall of text has tired me a bit.