[Nostalgia]

I thought about this in the shower for some reason. So now Im gonna list some of my reasons and thoughts.

1: The math doesn't add up.
Your first hasted action per turn comes at a -5 to hit. I dont quite remember, but I think a -1 to hit is worth either 2-3%. If it's 3, that means the move came at a -15% disadvantage. Since moves scale around 18% by default, always using a hasted action is more damage points than you'd normally be allowed in a turn. This is of course pretty minor though.

2: There is no risk.
Even if you increase the penalty, there is an issue of what is actually lost. Why not use a hasted action? You lose no health, shields, or resources beyond what the action would normally take away. Even if the penalty is bumped up to -10 to hit, there is still no reason not to take the hasted action since there is no real downside.

3: Who wants to win more.
Keeping the above in mind, where hasted actions give a benefit with no real downside, unless one character is vastly stronger than the other hasted actions will probably make someone win. Action economy is a huge thing in DND, if you get more actions on your side, you'll probably win. With that in mind, if you really want to win, you can just take every hasted action you can and there you go, you'll probably win. Sure they could also take every hasted action they could, but that just shows my point, if you really want to win, just use the hasted actions since there's no reason not to.

Suggestions:
I'm sure you'll be able to come up with plenty of ways to work on the system, but I had two thoughts come to mind. The first is, of course, removing the mechanic entirely. It is unnecessary to the overall feel of the system and combat. The second is changing the kind of cost that comes with hasted actions. Maybe recoil, or locking the move, or losing an action next turn instead.

I'm happy to discuss, I dont know why this is what I thought about in the shower.

[Nostalgia]

You could also say for the "Who wants to win most thing" that it will be covered by the no minmaxing or power gaming rule, but the whole purpose of the mechanic is to get an edge up in the fight. If using a game mechanic too many times is against the rules, it feels kind of weird to have the mechanic in the first place.

[Jade Callisto]

Given that Ray 01 uses the action system for the Air Dash mechanic that would be pretty bad if he couldn't use those. I vote against removing Haste Actions. If they were removed this ability for Air Dash would reduce his actions to a total of 2 during the cooldown along with disadvantage. So fixing the system would be more ideal instead of removing it.

Here's what Air Dash does for example:

~Air Dash: Ray 01 activates his jet thrusters which temporally increases his movement and thus makes him faster. For 2 turns Ray 01 gains an additional action and has advantage in all of his attacks.

However due to using the thrusters, the engines will stall for a bit afterward. This means that he is restricted to only 2 actions for the cooldown's duration and has disadvantage as well, using a 3rd action during this period of time is treated as a Haste action. For Discord Threads after this ability is used it skips Ray 01's turn except dodge and block actions for 2 turns instead. Cooldown is 2 turns.

[Nostalgia]

You could just change the wording of the move to what hasted actions would have been. The last action per turn is taken at a -5 to hit, etc.

[Jade Callisto]

Sept 27, 2021 18:08:55 GMT -8 Nostalgia said:

You could just change the wording of the move to what hasted actions would have been. The last action per turn is taken at a -5 to hit, etc.

I can't make big changes like that unless I have staff permission to rework the app.

[Mari]

Alright let's take a crack at this...

The haste penalty is based on the iterative attack penalty from the golden age of dungeons and dragons, wherein classes of sufficiently high levels got extra attacks, but at a cumulative -5 accuracy penalty. Obviously they work very differently in D&D, because they're based on your class/level and you only get so many of them, and they're in fact an expected part of balance instead of an exception. So it's not really the same, but that's where it comes from.

As for the math. -5 was chosen simply because it felt like sufficiently crippling penalty to discourage hasting. It wasn't balanced against the normal move balancing standards. I believe in the original system all your attacks took a -5 ...or was it a lesser penalty back then? But yeah all your attacks took the penalty and not just the extra ones. But that didn't get done and eventually the rules got adjusted.

As for the risk... There are counters. A move that is low accuracy due to haste is typically easy bait for counters. So instead of a low accuracy attack, you get attacked back at full accuracy. Consider the following expiremental counter move, which we've been doing a little bit of testing with.

Neo Counter:
As a free action, make a non-previewable attack roll against an incoming attack. If your roll beats the target's, the counter is successful and the counter roll becomes the attack roll your opponent must dodge. Else, if it fails, you take double damage from the incoming attack. (Medium Yes Attack; Does 18 Damage)

This is a move that is "theoretically" balanced. Note that not all things which are balanced on paper are necessarily good ideas. Raffina's fever mode is proof of that. But barring some minor tweaking to balance it further, the concept is there. Double damage taken is a fairly high risk to take, and without previewable rolls you often can't KNOW it will be succesful before you use it. In a normal fight, it would be used to prey upon low rolls for a free attack. Pretty good! ...Until you fail and take like 40+ damage which may not even outweigh the bonus attacks you got if you're unlucky, considering those can miss.

If you have an attack like that, you basically have a hard counter to haste. The more attacks they haste, the more free attacks you get. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a counter-"attack" either. You could have a move that buffs you based on the amount of attacks that missed last turn, or one based on the amount of damage you took last turn. I think that there are ways to punish haste really hard if you're willing to step forward the meta. That neo counter above is actually a test subject we've been pondering as a possible balance patch replacement for current counters, which have the really big balancing oversight of "You already know whether it will fail or not due to previewable rolls, completely negating the risk."

As for a potential rebalance. What makes the most sense to me logically, is that if you're going really hard on offense and rushing out a bunch of attacks, it should come at the expense of your defense. Would it make you hesitate to haste out two-three attacks if each one gave a cumulative penalty to your dodge rolls? If you've got a 3-6 penalty on your dodges from hasting out several attacks, your opponent may decide to break out the big hitters or grappling punishes and return the favor in response. This would probably require us to re-analyze whether the -5 penalty should be lowered slightly to compensate. Which would in turn probably require us to place a hard limit on how many hasted actions you can take. With a -5 penalty, the max without buffs is basically 3, 4 if you're okay with a roll in the 1-5 range that basically can't hit. And that was already pushing the boundaries of how much haste we wanted to see under normal conditions.

[thetruefinalboss]

My problem with the idea that is balanced is simple.

Desco and soon to be Hansel don't have counter attacks.

So anyone fighting me can take 7 actions a round. Chances are low but the 7th action could still roll a 1 or higher with modifiers. Also could Crit.

At the same time, unless they are NPCs, you know who has counter attacks. So, you know when you are 100% safe because they have a counter and when you aren't safe because they don't have one, at least in PvP.

And this is kinda unfair to those running missions that are repeatable. If one player uses 7 actions a turn but gets countered constantly, and another player does the same mission but only does 3 actions a turn and never gets countered, they didn't actually run the same difficulty mission.

If you had a penalty to 'all' actions that turn for making hasted actions, or a penalty for all attacks next turn if you rolled below a 1, it would at least be able to enforce its own balance.


If every character had a default ability to counter, something like how everyone can Grapple and everyone can Bubble Shield, then it would make more sense to consider this balanced because you would 'always' be at risk.


But Counters don't sound balanced based on this example to begin with. For the same reason I can't have a Defensive Final Smash, because it erases RNG. With a counter move like that since you do get to see the opposing combat roll, and then choose to make the counter.

Say Desco uses her most powerful attack but has so many status effects and penalties that she gets a 2 on her attack roll.

It is fair that because I rolled a 2, I have a 95% chance for my opponent to get a zero action extra 32% damage against me that I have to dodge?

Because you can see the roll you are against, the downside to the Counter would be negligible. For the same reason that Sans actually works as a character because he can roll to dodge low rolls.

[Mari]

Nov 12, 2021 18:28:38 GMT -8 thetruefinalboss said:

My problem with the idea that is balanced is simple.

Desco and soon to be Hansel don't have counter attacks.

The system is of course designed in the hopes that it will be impossible to create a character that simply doesn't have weaknesses. Especially at the start. But the nice thing is. If you really wanted to, you could give them a new move after a couple of missions or PVP battles.

Nov 12, 2021 18:28:38 GMT -8 thetruefinalboss said:

At the same time, unless they are NPCs, you know who has counter attacks. So, you know when you are 100% safe because they have a counter and when you aren't safe because they don't have one, at least in PvP.

If I manage to roll an 16+ even after haste penalties, a counter might not be enough to discourage me from taking the risk. It really depends. I'd have to stop and think about how important that extra damage is. That's strategy and not necessarily a bad thing.

Nov 12, 2021 18:28:38 GMT -8 thetruefinalboss said:

And this is kinda unfair to those running missions that are repeatable. If one player uses 7 actions a turn but gets countered constantly, and another player does the same mission but only does 3 actions a turn and never gets countered, they didn't actually run the same difficulty mission.

I don't mean to be rude when I say this, but uh--You should really get a feel for how missions work before you offer feedback related to them, y'know? The short of it is that every mission is run by an omnipotent GM similar to the dungeon master in D&D who gets to make stuff up and decide how hard they want a mission to be on the fly. So if a stronger or weaker character goes on a mission, they can simply adjust the difficulty if they want. There's also no expectation that a mission needs to reach a certain level of difficulty. Missions challenge people moreso because it's fun. ^^

USUALLY staff only do anything about missions if there are lore problems, rules being broken, or if there's something extremely egregious going on. We try to keep our hands when we can off so that people can have their freedom, y'know?

Nov 12, 2021 18:28:38 GMT -8 thetruefinalboss said:

If you had a penalty to 'all' actions that turn for making hasted actions, or a penalty for all attacks next turn if you rolled below a 1, it would at least be able to enforce its own balance.

Previewable rolls make it so that there's no reason to ever willingly roll below 1 unless you're simply allowing your character to fail. And unfortunately there are pretty humongous issues with using non-previewable rolls instead. As much as I'd love to do that.

Nov 12, 2021 18:28:38 GMT -8 thetruefinalboss said:

If every character had a default ability to counter, something like how everyone can Grapple and everyone can Bubble Shield, then it would make more sense to consider this balanced because you would 'always' be at risk.

We're actually in the process of field testing a new, more balanced counter mechanic. Because there actually is an enormous problem with current counter moves. (See: PREVIEWABLE ROLLS. You know when you'll successfully counter, so the risk of failure is non-existent) I could consider the idea of making it a global default ability. That might actually be something worth considering.

Nov 12, 2021 18:28:38 GMT -8 thetruefinalboss said:

Say Desco uses her most powerful attack but has so many status effects and penalties that she gets a 2 on her attack roll.

It is fair that because I rolled a 2, I have a 95% chance for my opponent to get a zero action extra 32% damage against me that I have to dodge?

Yes. This is a dice system after all. When you roll low, bad things happen. And if you're rolling that extremely low... the correct strategic decision is to really reconsider whether you need/want to make that roll. There are reasons you might have to bite that bullet, but other times you can use strategy to get around it.

Though while that's fair in theory, I might suggest that it might make more logical sense for a counterattack to be a lighter, quicker attack from a flavor perspective. Falcon Punch as a counter is a bit odd feeling. xD