This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
Fromsoft: "We will have exactly 2 enemies in the entire game that are weak to this status effect. Everything else will resist the fuck out of it. You can only aquire this status effect by finding a secret hidden boss named "Joseph the Weakling" and defeating him without getting hit. He is the hardest boss in the game."
"It's a consumable and you only get 1 shot at this. Enemy is absurdly hard without it. Unfair, even."
I see this in other games too, and I call it the 'speedrunner tool'.
Normal players (me) get stomped by a boss a few times until they figure it out and can beat it without the buff (fire paper, lightning grease, etc); Maybe they use them, but then they run out and are never used again...
Some players might use the buff and get an easier win; but if they don't, then they are wasted and are hard or impossible to replace, so players learn to not rely on them.
Speedrunners use lightning grease to kill the boss in 3 hits and are already halfway to the next boss before the buff runs out and already picked up the right buff item for that next boss. When your victory is all but guaranteed, the item makes it faster - otherwise it's not really useful.
I think Ethers in FF games as a trope kind of fit here too. Too valuable to waste, but if you can do it without them, then you didn't need it unless you absolutely needed to kill that boss without using a tent or resting, etc, to save time.
Almost accurate, except the boss is randomly weak to one of the 20 status effects. Also, said boss fight is nearly impossible without exploiting that one status weakness because fuck you.
It's worse if it's a status effect only attainable by learning it from a random enemy somewhere in act 2
Status condition recovery items are even worse, because you have to stock them, just in case there's ever a fight that you really need them in, but then finish the game without ever having needed even a single one.
In related news I found out much later than I should have the freeze in Pokemon can wear off on it's own.
There's fire moves that thaw you when you use them as well
Similarly: Skyrim has other potions than health, mana, and fortify restoriation potions. But no one will be able to tell you what they do.
Game designers, and I'm including tabletop rpgs, love having status effects that freeze, paralyzed, or do a percentage of health of damage; but they always neglect the fact that they're ineffective against hordes of weak enemies and are overpowered against strong solo enemies.
Really wish they would have more foresight than to just make it have zero effect on bosses. I'd be satisfied with it applying a weakened effect instead of being outright immune.
As a sometimes-DM who enjoys making interesting encounters, the answer is to either avoid solo bosses, or have multi-phase bosses where their tactics/immunities change. Steal liberally from JRPGs, they were absurdly popular for a reason!
Play Warframe.
Have a frame with armour stripping.
Armour stripping is a number based on current armour, not base armour, so it doesn't scale with level.
Low lto mid evel enemies die too easily from conventional attacks to even bother casting armour strip.
High level enemies have way too much armour, requiring to spend more time and casting energy to strip their armour than just using a conventional weapon with the correct element.
That's not really up to date information, now is it? Most armor strips in Warframe are percentage-based, with only a few remaining that aren't.
Hate to agree with an anon but that was always my exact experience playing any RPG outside of Pokémon. Between that and not having any indication how much stat-boosting moves actually boosted my stats, it trained me to never use anything other than offensive skills.
Outside of Pokémon???
The game where you can spam 1 move on one Pokémon to finish the entire game?
In competitive Pokemon, buffs and debuffs are absolutely critical.
In a single player run, they're useless.
It's a game where it's useful to use status moves on wild Pokemon (mostly to catch) and also all status moves work the same against bosses as regular enemies.
I think that's a (very slight) exaggeration but I recognize Pokémon is babby's first RPG which is why I generally don't count the series when discussing RPGs.
In the case of the topic at hand, tho, all the Pokémon games I've played have encouraged the use of status ailments against bosses and has hard caps on stat boosts that are easy to wrap your head around.
ffxi, we gave Bard a song that deals damage over time. Everything is immune to it.
To be fair to them, they EXPLODED ffxi because it was so shit.
Persona 4, where the first 5 or 6 first bosses are weak to an element, but if you use it they get a shield against it.
I've always felt this about Pokemon, there's so many moves that affect stats, cause status effects, or do something interesting, but I always just go for whatever deals damage. Even on my current run, I'll keep a move around because it sounds fun, but won't use it.
Literally if you arent one-shotting youre just playing the game wrong or bad on purpose.
Im a known pokemon hater. Its just a "very complicated but less complicated than you think" game of rock-paper-scissors.
Yeah, I can't believe that there is actual "competitive" scene of Pokémon. At the end just wins the one with the bigger rock, paper or scissors.
People are downvotung but I love this hot take hahaha
Play Etrian Odyssey where status effects are an integral part of every encounter.
I've yet to play a game in which poison damage was at all relevant. Mostly they require to be poinsoned so you can do more damage with a different attack, if that.
STS & STS2 (slay the spire)
When I played Ass Creed: Odyssey I used a poison build, it was very effective in that game.
Almost worse to me is when you're railroaded to only using the latest acquired buff and everything else is useless once you progress. Like beating the boss is just hoping you land the special attack enough times to beat dps before it runs out. Mostly in TBS games I suppose.
Cast confuse, end up being punched in the face anyway.
The games where status effects basically have healthbars that apply the effect when they break and get bigger when they recover so you can't keep applying the same one easily figured it out. Lets you do things like blind the boss and take no damage for a bit without trivializing by blinding the whole fight
Haste and slow, bb!
eh, depends. I use them quite a bit in some games. Persona and the FF, but you have to know what you are doing, and they are mostly useful on stronger basic enemies or minibosses particularly.
But yeah, pragmatically, the learning/experimentation curve for status effects is too high/annoying for most players/playing. They require a lot of experimentation and remembering weaknesses or how to stack them.
The secondary effects they have in persona is pretty cool, a lot of them up the crit rate substantially, but also they can transfer to your characters if you 'touch' them with a normal attack.