Let's talk about... status effects!
(Particularly, buffs and debuffs)
"Magic to strengthen or weaken your party members" is a concept that dates back a
very long time. The online PS series is no stranger to it--every one of them has had at least a couple, one in particular (guess which) may have gone a bit crazy.
PSO has two of them, with associated debuffs:
Shifta: Increases ATP
Jellen: Reduces ATP
Deband: Increases DFP
Zalure: Reduces ATP
(PSO had a weird phobia against letting people actually increase their MST; teching weapons still had ATP as their actual attack stat, so the most MST you could get from a weapon was in the 50-60 range.)
PSU has... well... let's count:
1. Shifta (Agtar): Increases ATP
2. Deband (Defbar): Increases DFP
3. Zodial: Increases ATA and EVP
4. Retier: Increases TP and MST
5. Jellen: Decreases ATP
6. Zalure: Decreases DFP
7. Zoldeel: Decreases ATA and EVP
8. Megistar: Casts Shifta, Deband, Zodial, and Retier solely on yourself, but also drains HP
9. Giresta: Restores HP over time (note: can restore above 100%, leading to effectively increasing max HP, briefly)
10. Rentis: Negates (offline)/reduces the damage of (online) a certain number of tech attacks
11. Dizas: Negates (offline)/reduces the damage of (online) a certain number of physical attacks
11.
11! You can cut out the 3 debuffs and Megistar, and you
still have 7.
Moving right along, though, Infinity has the following:
Shifta: Increases ATP and TP
Deband: Increases DFP, EVP, and MST
Jellen: Decreases ATP and TP
Zalure: Decreases DFP, EVP, and MST
Foverse: User only. Summons flames that follow the caster, inflicting damage to nearby enemies.
Note: Mirage Blasts can provide the following two effects:
Wild Blast: Increased Blast Gauge fill rate
Attack Haste: Increased attack speedGiresta is gone (its revival ability is instead on Regene (Reverser in english PSU, Giresta in english PSP2) when you have the リバーサラー (Reversaller; yes, it's stupid) skill), the main 4 buffs got combined into 2 (with the ATA bonus gone, for... some reason), the main 3 debuffs (and the rare TP/MST down) got combined into 2, Rentis and Dizas are gone...
(Note that Wild Blast was added to PSU as a GAS customization, and the standard mix of HP restore units are still available in Infinity. Also note that, because the firearm damage formula includes ATA, this means that shifta is a little bit less effective on rangers than it is on hunters and forces. The more you know...)
(Fun fact: Foverse is "firedress" internally)
PSO2 actually went an interesting direction:
Shifta: Increases S-ATK/R-ATK/T-ATK
Deband: Increases S-DEF/R-DEF/T-DEF
That's it for "cast and carry" party buffs. Individual characters have more that they can solely use on themselves (e.g Fury Stance, Showtime, Wand Lovers, PP Convert, etc) that I'm... largely going to ignore here because there's way too many of them and they're not strictly relevant. However, there are still other, more global ones:
2 ranger bullets:
Weak Bullet: Increases (>2x) damage inflicted to a certain hitbox
Jellen Shot: Decreases all damage inflicted
2 field techniques:
Megiverse: Casts a field in which all party member attacks gain HP steal
Zanverse: Casts a field in which all party member attacks inflict extra damage as wind
2 Bouncer auras:
Elemental PP Restore Field: An aura that surrounds its owner, increasing the amount of PP party members within range recover from attacking monsters with the proper element.
Critical Field: An aura that surrounds its owner, increasing critical hit rate for party members within range.
PSO2 largely moved towards a more offensively-oriented system. Ranger has all the debuffs, several effects are granted only while standing in the designated area; initially, even Shifta and Deband needed to be reapplied
in combat (each fully charged cast would give 4 pulses of their status, each pulse gave 15 seconds of duration, it was hard capped at 1 minute max duration).
Alright, so, all that in mind: how do I envision these things? Well, taking it from the top...
Zodial and Retier add two stats each. Shifta and Deband are one each. These are two different ways of setting them up, with the end result that you need to cast
4 techs to cover most classes (Shifta and Zodial for attack, Deband/Retier for defense), which is way too many. Shifta can cover all the attack stats, Deband can cover all the defense ones.
This, of course, renders Zodial, Zoldeel, Retier, their respective status effects, and the (generally unused) TP/MST-down status effect worthless. This would be fine (I would love to cut out a few pointless techs), but... Zodial, Zoldeel, and Retier all show up in the wild, and I don't want to have to edit every monster who has them (including things like the Ohtori Encampment version of Ethan). Similarly, PSO has one particular status effect that shows up literally
one place in PSU, and it would be neat to have it show up elsewhere; with that in mind...
Zodial/Zoldeel:
Haste/
Slow. Slow showed up all over the place in PSO, but it showed up
only in the Dark Falz 2 fight in PSU (with no icon or anything); this would effectively promote it to a full status effect. Obviously it wouldn't be a 6-minutes-per-cast thing (PSO slow lasted about 10 seconds, tops); it may not even be a persistent buff at all, I'm halfway thinking maybe they should be area of effect things ("stay within the field to move faster").
Retier/(nonexistent): I struggled to find something for this. The goal is something
unique but
optional; pretty much the best I could come up with is
Thorns and
Life Tap (to borrow the Diablo 2 names). Essentially, the buff would cause enemies to take damage upon attacking you, while the debuff would cause them to heal instead. If the life steal one was put on something akin to online's Sa- techs, you would effectively have a version of PSO2's Megiverse (just where the enemies have to be in it rather than you).
Rentis/Dizas: These two are... problems. On one hand, I could just ignore them (I'll admit a large part of this project is just "let things fall where they may"), on the other, "negate the next 5 attacks" is too good to ignore without either a major penalty or major downtime (neither of which is really doable here). Completely coincidentally, there's a
certain SUV that focuses on support, but provides something generally not that useful. Maybe remove the actual techs, buff the status effect, and put it on Rapia Fluge.
If anyone has any thoughts on any of this, feel free to let me know. I'm still kinda bouncing ideas off the wall on all of it, the only ones that are anywhere near actual implementation are the Shifta/Deband and Zodial/Zoldeel changes (and the latter's primarily from when I was trying to track down what was going on with the attack speed units and/or the "slow" SE that Falz 2 uses).
(Note: techs use the same visual effect format as weapons, SUVs, enemy attacks, units, status effects, etc. In theory, I could steal the toilet from Ascension Gift (or, you know, a non-joke thing) and turn it into Gigrants... except that the light tech list is completely full. Giresta and Rentis may be on borrowed time...)