At tier 4: 100sta corresponds to a skill multiplier of x5, or five extra hits.
It's not airtight. The balance varies depending on context, so:
Bladedance is more powerful than agility if your speed gives you more than 1hit per second, which it probably does. I don't know the conversion rate for speed to hit frequency so just used a 1hit/sec assumption.
Bladedance vs brace looks ridiculous, I know. Head to head they cancel each other out even though brace is half the cost. But then, bladedance over 10secs costs 200sta and doubles your total damage so assuming 1hit/sec and 2000damage/hit, that's 20k extra damage over 10s. Brace for the same duration costs 100sta and saves 10k damage. I don't really know how to reconcile that except by seeing how they both pan out in action.
Dodge and agility are basically similar to ^^^ but again, speed is unaccounted for.
Encircle I did some numbers and estimated that it would fall in a similar bracket depending on how long the fight went on.
The debuffs are straight guesses because their value is so hard to pin down.
My main problem is that there are too many factors for me to account for on paper even though this is the simplest system I can come up with for skills that are actually useful in different ways. Like I said, it can't be done without commitment and I can't see much point in trying to take it any further without coding.
Blunt alternative:
Take evasive skills off thief and give them to ranger, so thief is aggressive with encircle and ranger is evasive with dodge/phase, and then make warrior's brace more potent while blunting cleave to make a similar difference within fighters. That is a viable option I think, making thief and hunter purely aggressive; ranger and warrior purely defensive; gypsy in between. Then spells are still ridiculous but you could take mind electricity/ice off priest and that would halve their damage and leave heal as their primary strength, which is enough; then confiscate high level aggressive spells from priest, give them all to mage and remove the delays, thus granting mages huge damage; then esper would go somewhere in between I guess.
All of that would make a difference but likewise you obviously know that every step there throws something else up in the air and all of it would need so much testing and balancing to actually make it worthwhile that I don't even know if it would be worth it. I think it would more likely wind up just as half-assed and unbalanced as it is now.
The OTHER possible way forward is uncapping str, con, dex, int, wis and cha. tie str firmly to melee damage, con to damage taken, dex to chance of skill success, int & cha to magic damage and wis to magic damage taken. Skill success rate would then depend on dex vs opponent dex or something, and practicing it to increase proficiency could instead reduce cost. in my world it would reduce stamina cost such that a high tier allows you to use skills much more cheaply. AGAIN the factors involved scare the shit out of me but this would allow different players to specialize in damage as opposed to defense, etc.
I really can't see a way to get anything worthwhile out of gameplay one way or another without committing to it as a long-term project and investing hours on end in the balancing, and I can't see that happening. I see half-finished efforts and a bunch of people annoyed with a new set of imbalances that haven't fundamentally changed anything. I honestly think the maps are a better option.
lastly yea, the detector could still be fun. there are about 15 new artifacts sitting on the buildport that are ready whenever the pricing is, bar a couple that i think still need locations. i haven't looked at them in a few weeks.
