Introduction

Neutral	Striker	Defender	Controller	Supporter
Base Spells	Burst Spells	Counter Spells	Debuff Spells	Healing Spells
Focused Spells	Lingering Spells	Intercept Spells	Ailment Spells	Buff Spells
Utility Spells	Enchant Spells	Shield Spells	Geomancy Spells	Cleansing Spells
[Cannon Spell Conversion] (https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldenSun/comments/6ncewm/an_adept_is_you_neutral_spells_omake/)	Ailments Primer	Fundaments Primer	The Break Problem	Building a Class

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In Golden Sun, a lot of potential can be seen in having a greater use of Buffs, Debuffs, Ailments, and other indirect forms of combat. However, not only is much of this largely underused, there's one spell that outright decalres war on it.

The Break Problem

Break is a tremendously powerful spell. It targets the entire field, and removes all buffs, no questions asked. There is no way to evade, no way to resist, no matter how high your luck is, Break hits you. Specifically you - because you'll rarely find a good chance to use it yourself. You see, the way GS as built, you're far more likely to throw on buffs than the enemy is, and the use of debuffs is just overall not nearly as common. Rather than design encounters in a way that encourages foes to use buffs and debuffs on their own, fights that are supposed to be though fights just the boss the break spell as a nice and polite way to give the player the middle finger - because it's not like that boss is going to be throwing up buffs of their own.

This poses a problem. Much like with Djinn Storm, the existence of this ability seems entirely one-sided. That being said, the existence of break makes sense. It's a spell designed to dispel enemy buffs - something that could be a vital part of combat. So how do you address this problem? Well, there's a few things that can be done.

• Make Break useful to the player. This one is easy - just have enemies use buffs more so that the player has more chance to and is encouraged to use it themselves.

• Don't make it a guaranteed thing. Treat this like an ailment or debuff - allow the target to have a chance to resist it

• Don't make it all or nothing. Rather than completely negate all buffs, attempt to negate each buff independently. That way, while break is still powerful, it isn't potentially crippling.

So, apart from just changing enemy AI, what can be done? How do you address the other two approaches? Well, that where I came up with the slot system.

Buff, Debuff, and Effect slots

Our first step is to look at some of the reasons why Break is seen as necessary to begin with. And I think easily the most notable one is the fact that players can infinitely stack buffs. A common strategy I personally used revolves around this, buffing each buffable stat for the whole party, and juggling between each buff type to make sure they don't run out. It becomes less about strategy, and more about setting up godlike power then crushing the hopes and dreams of the poor boss that dared stand up against me. Looking at this, you can see why Break was the goto ability for bosses that were supposed to be hard - doesn't matter how little sense it makes for them to throw mercury abilities at me, they do it because buffs were too strong of all things. As such, a good system to solve Break's overwhelming power is to stop the reason for it to need that power in the first place. So I came up with the following:

• Each buffable/debuffable stat has two buff slots and two debuff slots.
• When you cast a buff/debuff, it fills one slot. It also has a countdown timer. When it's over, the buff/debuff wears off, and the slot empties.
• If you cast a buff/debuff again for the same stat, it resets the first countdown timer while the new spell takes the second slot.
• Buff-like effects, such as Regen, Enchantments and Shields, also get their own slots.
• When a Dispel spell such as Break is cast, it has to check each slot separately. The further from the central target the character is, the lower chance the spell has to dispel the buff/positive effect.

So let's look at a simplified expression of this: Imgur

Here, we have health, the five main buff/debuff stats, and a icon representing equipment. This covers Regen, Buffs/Debuffs, Enchantments and Shields. Got it, great. Now go fight this boss.

Oh hey, battle's been going on a while now! Let's look at how things stand: Imgur

So, you've got regen running, a Basic Attack and Casting buff, a Power Casting buff, and Long Speed buff, and a Fire Aspect enchant running. Not bad. Looks like you've got your warding lowered though, so watch out for those spells. Well, the boss sees your buffs, narrows its eyes, and throws out a dispeling attack. We'll call it Spark or something because this boss can't use Mercury spells and there is literally no reason Break should be the only spell that does this.

Now now things look a bit like this: Imgur

You lost your attack buff, your Power buff was actually weak to being dispelled so it makes sense that's gone, your Long buff rolls its eyes at the dispelling effects because that's kind of the point of those spells, and your sword is no longer of fire. But hey, at least you still have that regen going on. Here, the effects of Break and similar Dispel effects are still powerful - you're going to feel that. But it doesn't reset you to zero.

Also notice it didn't touch the debuffs at all. Dispellation and Cleansing spells are now very clearly different effects, so you'll use one or the other depending on if you want to get rid of the enemy's buffs (which they'll use more often now), or if you want to get rid of the party's debuffs (which they'll be hit with more often now).

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Common Q&A:

So... why does this matter, exactly?

It stops break from being a punishment to the player, and opens up the ability for the player to take advantage of it as well.

If Regen can be hit by break, why use it over normal healing?

Frees up the healer to do other things. Not every healer only cares about healing. If they have ongoing passive healing on characters that tend to take more damage (ex: the party's defender), it frees them up to focus on other things. Maybe your healer also doles out debuffs to help keep the damage taken low. Maybe they seal or paralyze the foe to keep them from hurting allies. Maybe they really don't like the way that orc looked at them and just reeeeally want to punch them squarely in the freaking face.

Should also be mentioned that different effects have different chances to be dispelled, and I figure regen is going to be less likely to be affected than buffs would be. Can't say what the exact values would be, and since this series has a narrative focus I think it's safe to say the actual odds wouldn't matter.

If this is a narrative focus, why do slots matter then?

This one's easy to explain - diminishing returns. Let's say you have a mug of coffee, and there's a tiny hole in it. You pick a buff as a specific blend, and it takes up half the mug. You pour in another blend of buff and the mug is full. Leaking, sure, but full. If you try to fill it more, it's just going to spill over.

 

So yeah, sorry about being late on this. Literally slept through Friday. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below~