Photon Art Levelling

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Photon Art Levelling

Postby Chikinface » Tue Mar 13, 2012 10:36 am

PAs level too slowly in vanilla PSU overall. Some level far more quickly than others without really making much sense (WHY DOES ABSOLUTE DANCE TAKE SO LONG).

But simply speeding them up won't solve anything.

One proposal that's been echoed a lot is to make enemies drop PA disks like in PSP2.

To highlight issues with that:
  • PA disks would fatten up the drop charts potentially, spreading other drops thinner (increasing useless drops as you find more disks!)
  • Many players object to RNG determining skill progression.
  • Implementing it in PSU would be awkward as far as I know

There are of course issues with the practice-makes-perfect system as well. So to get to my proposal:

Photon Art levelling should be treated under a "fast to learn, slower to master" approach. My main objection to a lot of photon-art levelling is that many of them are either completely useless at low levels or are so much less useful than other Photon Arts the character has that they're forced to gimp themselves in order to level them. Therefore, make getting photon arts combat ready (1-21) a much quicker process. Beyond that the levelling speed can drop.

To go along with this, character level should be taken into account when calculating PA exp. It should take longer for lower level characters to raise PAs than higher level characters. Reasons for this are lowbies can get away with underlevelled PAs and higher level characters are hindered more severely by taking on new PAs. The only potential downside to this is that players could use higher level characters to grind PAs to then pass on to lowbie alts, but personally I have no issue with this as it requires a player to have gotten a character to a high level in the first place.

Note that this proposal only covers offensive abilities. I have no idea how to handly support abilities..
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Re: Photon Art Levelling

Postby essen » Tue Mar 13, 2012 10:52 am

There's nothing preventing us from giving the full PA combos from level 1 AFAIK.
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Re: Photon Art Levelling

Postby Chikinface » Tue Mar 13, 2012 11:35 am

There isn't, except that introducing parts of the combo one part at a time isn't really bad game design. What is is the amount of time they take to introduce it at the moment.

This may work for Skills anyway.. Bullets, not necessarily.
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Re: Photon Art Levelling

Postby Qwerty » Tue Mar 13, 2012 5:16 pm

I like the idea of leveling PAs, but I hate how long it takes. I would keep leveling, but at a much, much faster rate (at least until like level 30ish anyway). However, I'd also like to see alternative ways of getting higher level PAs. Here's a few ideas, not sure if some of them are even possible:

- Have high level PA disks be area drops from high level areas. Gets around the issue of them squeezing more interesting drops out of the charts.
- Maybe give a very high level PA disk of your choosing as a reward for completing extremely difficult end-game missions (or something like challenge mode stuff).
- Maybe use PA Fragments and/or some other items in an exchange mission that lets you quickly add experience to PAs that you already know.

Again, not sure if some of these would even be possible. Just throwing out some ideas for options to consider.
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Re: Photon Art Levelling

Postby Chikinface » Sun Mar 18, 2012 7:52 pm

Echoing sentiments from the public thread to not allow photon art disks to be tradeable.
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