Poise

[CHOO CHOO]

Poise being lost on step seems very harsh. Is there any other stackable buff that's lost completely on such a basic action? It's strong, to be sure, but needing to stand still to use it practically marries it to the teleportation skills of the Astral skill branch, or else requires some other ability to reach enemies that do not obligingly come close.

How about instead of losing all stacks on taking a step, you instead lose only a limited number? Say 5 stacks per step. Or 20. Or half of what you have.

Now, I haven't hashed out the balance concerns, but that would fix the problem of Poise often just feeling very disappointing to use.

[The Wise Wolf]

To your first question, Dream gets lost on step *or* attack. So there is that. Though that one is very specific.

In my own experience, I just never cared about losing Poise. When I have a source of it (usually the class that gives it over time when standing next to enemies) I usually just fight in place as long as I can, and then just move to next group of enemies and start stacking it up again. In fact I didn't even think of using Poise with teleportation (and while logically it makes sense you don't lose Poise on teleport, for some reason intuitively I assumed you would).

[Stormlock]

I think maybe it should be changed to lose like, half the stacks on step? Or a flat number of them?

I tried using it with teleport before but you need a massive investment in teleport mastery to get the delay down to 1 turn, and even 1 turn is a long time when enemies have 20+ speed. There's a robe that could fix it if you deal astral damage... but then you probably don't want to be near enemies if you're wearing a robe and doing astral damage.

The fundamental problem with it is that the bonuses it gives are valuable to characters with low armour/block, but if you have low armour/block you're not going to survive long enough to build up the stacks. The other scenario where it helps a lot is terrain with a chokepoint where even ranged enemies will come to you, but that's not something you can reliably find.

[CHOO CHOO]

Yeah, that robe is pretty much mandatory for a melee poise + teleport build.

On a different note: War Chant poise builds and Dream builds can get away without teleport since they don't need to get adjacent to the enemy.

[The Wise Wolf]

I must say, this seems very in-line with other design choices, which in general seem to be against "reliability". Your armor flat-out fails 10% of the time (if I'm reading it correctly?), most enemies have a chance to recover from statuses, and that also seems to remove *all* the stacks (though so does your willpower-based recover, I guess?), dodge and block have capped chances, etc.

I'm not saying it's a good/bad thing, just it seems somewhat consistent with other parts of the game.

[CHOO CHOO]

Well, then I wouldn't mind the dev just saying that it's working quite as intended and no change is to be hoped for :D

[The Wise Wolf]

Originally posted by CHOO CHOO:

Well, then I wouldn't mind the dev just saying that it's working quite as intended and no change is to be hoped for :D

It's clearly working "as intended" in the sense the text clearly states it's removed on step. As in, it's celearly not a bug.
Though whether that's conductive to fun gameplay and in line with the dev's goals is another thing, and I would also be happy to hear from the dev on this.

[Ulfsire]

I've been reading this discussion with interest. Balance wise, the idea is that poise can ramp up extremely quickly --- balanced by total removal. It seems like the idea of total removal creates sort of an unfun feeling, even if poise can be gotten back at a speed that compensates for the removal. I'm definitely open to changing it into some kind of stack reduction but I only hesitate because it's fairly unique in its limitation, and at least when I play games I enjoy stuff that has more absolute downsides rather than incremental penalties, which is a matter of taste of course -- how to create the feeling of things being different. I'm actually thinking of how to distinguish meditate from charge, and meditate in fact seems like a good candidate for getting removed on step, or reduced like poise, in exchange for a damage increase

Really really appreciate the thoughts going into this and again, open to considering the partial removal ( 50% stacks on move seems reasonable, and I might not even decrease the gain either lol ) (I may have already talked myself into it)

*I'm actually messing with another effect-removal situation: how transformations replace each other -- the next update will have the old transformation pass its stacks into the new one, which could create some interesting things involving switching (Sparkform to an immediate +10 Batform for example)

[CHOO CHOO]

Hey, a 50% reduction per step sounds great! Probably wouldn't give any overpowering advantages to Poise, but would allow for some minimal footwork without suddenly feeling entirely naked. Thanks for considering it :)