The New Damage Model Proposal: Dragon Ball

[Steel_Rook]

On 2019-11-05 at 1:14 PM, George_PPS said:

Rule No 1: Always buffing  and never nerfing anything.

I realise others have pointed out why this is unsistainable, but let me give you a particular example of why. Let's say enemies were seen as too weak, so developers decided to give them damage resistance, let's say 10%. This increases their effective health by a little over 11%. Over time, player damage creeps up by about 11%, so developers decide to do another increase of enemy resistance - up to 20%. This increases their original health by 25%, or by another 12.5% relative to their previous health. Now let's assume we keep doing this in steps of 10%. We're now up to 80% damage resistance. This has increased enemy health by 500% relative to where we started, but that's fine. It's all numbers, right? Player damage has increased to match it, so let's buff enemy resistance again - to 90%. Enemy health has now increased by 1000% relative to where we started and easily DOUBLED relative to 80%. So where do you go from here? Do you bump enemy resistance by another 10% and make them straight-up immune to damage? Do you start fashioning some kind of formula to help you increase enemy resistance by less but still keep encroaching up? Either way, you're still running against the hard cap of 100% damage resistance.

This applies to a lot of systems in the game already. Status Chance and other proc chances only go up to 100%. Inversely, plenty of mods work off of base values. 440% health isn't a lot when your base is 100, but it's rather a lot when you're Inaros and your base health is 550. It's why most Warframes have 500-1000 health while my Inaros now has close to 8000. That's not even getting into the way damage buffs stack. When your weapon is dealing base*(1 + base_mods)*(1 + elemental_mods)*(1 + crit)*(1 + headshot)*(1 + crit_headhist)*a_bunch_more_things, increasing base damage has a massive cascading effect. When your base damage is being boosted by a factor 200 literally, even minor changes to it can have massive effects once all buffs are taken into account.

Hell, Dragon Ball itself ended up having to do "game balance" of its own power levels. For one thing, they stopped counting power levels around a million with the Freeza Saga when the Scouters which measured that began blowing up. For another thing, character power levels in that show fluctuate massively based on narrative convenience. The Cell Saga and especially the Buu Saga showed most of the Super Saiyan forms to be pretty pathetic as every new villain could kick the snot out of them, yet Dragon Ball Super has been trying to show SSJ2 to be some kind of massively overpowered, awe-inspiring form. That's because Akira Toriyama had to stop having new and overpowered villains just show up. Instead, the Saiyans were shown to be the strongest in all the universes... Except every so often they'd push a villain into increasing their own power. Not to mention the introduction of the Universe 6 Sayians whose own SSJ2 forms seemed to trump the new SSJ Blue form, which itself barely seems worth considering since it's entirely too weak. By the time of the Universal Tournament, power levels were being all but entirely disregarded and characters were shown as weak or strong depending on what made sense for the intended dramatic impact of the episode.

Long story short, endless power creep is a fool's errand. It doesn't make for good games or good TV shows. Any long-running franchise has to deal with it eventually, and the longer they wait the more pissed off the audience is when it does inevitably happen.

[BloodRavenCap]

I agree with you, that weapons should be buffed instead of nerfed, I actually talked about it in my other thread

But the way you convey your thoughts is just... strange. Especially when you compare damage system to Dragon Ball.