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While buffs and/or debuffs are important, there's actually a lot of factors in this game when it comes to "is my team being effective". Just to list a few:
Which three monsters you use / Skills / Equipment / Food / Properly utilizing the combo system / etc.
Pure damage builds are good and totally a thing in this game, but you have to "power them up" somehow, whether that be through buffs (and/or debuffs), charge stacks, age stacks, causing a lot of combo with your first two monsters, etc. So, if your team isn't being as effective as you'd like, there could be many answers as to why that is.
Similarly, if your monsters are getting defeated easily, it means you might not have as much defenses / health as you might want. For a "rule of thumb", I generally recommend having around 40-50% damage reduction on all monsters.
For assistance on this, I would recommend talking with people on the Discord server found here where others are happy to help: https://discord.gg/vDg6jwR
Similarly, if you like reading, the Steam guides section has some good stuff, such as these and more:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1851743162
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2271439553
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2583426233
A lesser secondary reason is mana costs: Buff/Debuff spells don't generally suffer much from being cast at a lower level due to them being percentage based effects, whereas if you run out of mana on your attacker you suffer far more (Less base damage, less hits for building combo, etc). This could be solved by reducing the mana cost for abilities that don't have a "rider" effect, IE don't apply Burn, Weak, Chill, etc. That way you're less likely to run yourself out of mana using your attackers. Either that, or make it so that riderless attacks have some amount of damage reduction penetration. Biggest factor is that while your mana recovery increments at a fixed pace, ability costs have a slight exponent to them. Thus you may have to sacrifice a damage boosting effect to make sure you don't lose your mana upkeep.
I noticed that Attack scales at about 2/3rds the speed that defense does, not counting HP. So outside massive crit attack simply scales too poorly. Linear scaling damage versus exponential defenses. Even on monsters with poor defense it's rare to see a build up monster with lower than 35%, and that number means you are losing 1/3rd your attack stat, which already trails behind HP growths.
For example:
A single pip of Attack/Magic gives 25 points.
A single pip of Defense gives 35 points.
A single pip of HP gives 315 or so points.
So you're already falling behind as is, not to mention how defense scales means that the more you have of it the better having more defense is. However, even flat HP scales faster than attack even with the large multipliers on attacks.
For example, your end game big single-target nuke has a 530% multiplier on damage. That means for each pip of attack you get roughly 132 points of damage. Notice that number is about 42% of what you get out of raw HP without accounting for defense. That means assuming you have the same Attack and HP Pips it'll take roughly three attacks assuming no critical hits with a maxed out damaging skill.
Now let's be conservative and include the basic 35% damage reduction pretty much any monster can manage with little effort. That turns a single pip of health into roughly 484 HP, which means your attack only does about 27% damage, or a four hit kill. That's a super long time for your main DPS to do their job.
Combo sort of fixes this issue..... but, you can only rely on combo for your last monster, as the other two can only initiate combos not capitalize. But let's assume a baseline combo of 200%. That's 54% up from 27%, or narrowly in a 2 hit kill range. However, this is assuming that the opponent has no shielding or healing options, which if they do it's now a 3 hit kill at minimum.
This is also assuming that a given monster is not a dedicated tank with 50% -> 66% damage reduction, which makes the numbers even more unfavorable for offensive monsters.
This isn't even touching on the fact that while there's foods to increase HP or Defense, there's nothing for Attack or Magic (outside Cookie Mushroom, which isn't even a dedicated attack boosting food). An attack focused monster not only has to overcome it's own poor scaling, but also the fact that any monster can be running an additional 750 HP or 75 Defense.
This is further compounded by the fact a lot of monsters focused on doing damage have little to no synergy outside of those designed for crits. A lot of them have riderless attacks, meaning there's no secondary benefits to be gleaned from having them attack besides raw damage (which in this game can be easily stone walled). These abilities are generally just dead weight, they cannot debuff, ignore dodge, do higher critical damage, remove buffs, give buffs to oneself, etc. That's a lot of possible utility you're losing by running most dedicated hitting monsters.
There's also the issue of "why run straight DPS when you can run a support/debuffer that once setup does a better job than the DPS anyway".
The only thing that does scale well is critical hits in conjunction with a high combo multiplier (turns out, doing 2000% of your attack stat hits a bit harder than 500%), which means you're only able to realistically run a single offensive monster, and if the target is sufficiently bulky enough they can soak it and heal it all off within a single turn. So what do you run in your other two slots? Probably a Defense focused monster, and a debuff focused monster, and that becomes basically every team in the game.
The game seems very weighted for stalling tactics. It's bad enough that the developers had to add an in-game timer to ensure battles can actually end with the Infinity system which grants an endlessly stacking damage bonus.
People curios about highly optimized teams can always look into PvP. We actually added a global +20% multiplier to DoT damage for PvP to make it be somewhat relevant and still, teams that purely rely on DoT damage are barely viable there.
The game was much more fun at the beginning, before feeling like all teams were actually the same. 2 defense, 1 offense, relay on infinity buff to actually kill anything.
I'm hoping the situation changes on the end game, but it doesn't look like it will.
It's a shame, because I loved the game and the formula, but it's becoming so boring that I'm having a hard time continuing (at level 20).
You can have direct damage dealing over 10k(my personal record was over 50k), if you utilize combo stacks, charge stacks and various buffs correctly.
I like the games complexity, but I also agree that the infinity buff is something that shouldn't have to exist. It's a crutch to a far larger problem, and that is that there is so much buffing and survivability potential that a wide variety of teams will just bounce off each other for 10 turns. I like the concept. I like the system. But needing a special buff to end matches speaks to a problem with the numbers, Whether those numbers need to be larger, or smaller, I don't know, and I'm sure many would state that they aren't a problem at all. And though other games have similar 'game ending' mechanics, they are there in case they have to be used, not so that they become a part of the overall strategy. It's not a problem with an easy solution, and I would go as far as to say not doing anything is better than doing something bad. But it's still something I think should be looked at, at least so that matches wrap up more naturally, and don't rely on the uber buff to finish things off.
But the fact matches CAN go on forever might be seen as a problem. A badly designed team should just be beaten. It shouldn't have to be kicked down by an ever increasing buff. If it is, that means the team was no better or worse than the opponent's, it just won or lost due to 'time' and the increasing scale of heavy hitters.
Look, I'm just saying that it seems a bit hokey to create a mechanic out of necessity and then turn around say it's the players' fault it has to be used. If it had to be created, and wasn't integral to the design, then it is a problem with the game, and how it's balanced. I like the game, and I know you're trying hard to spread the word and promote it. Balancing to rid it of the need for the infinity buff would no doubt be a daunting and thankless task, so I wouldn't blame you if you never gave it another thought. However, that doesn't change my opinion that I see the buff as a result of a game design flaw. I accept flaws in all things. Nothing is perfect. But don't hand me a chipped vase and tell me the chips there because I planted the wrong flowers.
I understand that, but it seems that the experience for most of the players is to always see the infinity buff. Like the previous post said, teams have so much survival potential, and it's very easy to build a machine of overlapped on proc buffs/debuffs by about level 15. If you don't learn on your own how to do it, the keeper challenges show you how, as all those teams are absolute beasts in regards to proc buff/debuff.
And yes, you can combo and maybe take 3/4, even one shot a mon when all stars align, but that only happens if the enemy is much weaker than you in the first place, and no real strategy is involved. But there is clearly a meta and it's depressingly tight for a game that seems so huge in options at the start.
At least this is how it feels for me. To be fair, this only happens with keeper challenges, that are mostly the only challenging things in the game so far. 90% of the combat is more about getting high rating since the battles are just grinding trash, they are of no consequence and a means to an end, getting new mons, leveling, etc
The counterargument to seeing infinity buff all the time always seems to be "but you can one shot" That's true, but being able to one shot doesn't dismiss the problem. In fact, it makes it worse.
The reason it's worse is because you are requiring specific mons and a specific strategy to avoid a broken mechanic. That's not good for a game like this. Yes, some mons can punch really hard, But what if I want to play a debuff defensive party, or a slow burn stack damage party, or simply want a bunch of mid level hitters with high survivability?
Not saying every party should be viable, quite the opposite really, but the fact that so many party combinations see infinity buff (with the claim they're not supposed to if they're set up well) is to me a big issue with the game. It's basically stating that, out of all the available options, there is only a specific way to do things, and only certain mons can work with other mons. That's not inherently bad, but its very clear that only specific combinations are in mind, and not all that many at that. If a team is truly bad, it should simply lose, period. It shouldn't be kicked down by a buff timer simply because the highest hitting monster on either side had scaling up damage. Never mind that this also partially defeats the purpose of the age buffs
Again, I like this game, but I also think simply dismissing this issue of many players is a big mistake.