Re: [DMM] Taimanin Asagi
Actually, I've now discovered something that feels like an even worse punch to the gut: having your skills fail to activate repeatedly, then inevitably all activate at once when the boss only has 0.5% health remaining. Yeah, piss in my cornflakes too, why don't you.
Don't worry, you're not the only one who have experienced this. I have experienced this COUNTLESS of times, especially against SR Oboro and now SR Asagi. I had one where after using 6BP dealing with SR Oboro and she has a SLIVER of health left and then 7th one, BAM! Everything procs and I ended up facing her with 98000+ HP. What a waste of good BP!
There are so many unfun things about this game, it's hard to know where to start. I'm just going to talk about game design and balance issues, instead of merely interface issues (ie having to rebuild your deck manually every time you want to change your team). For one, they probably should consider rebalancing the cards to make them all useful in some way or another instead of having 80% of them just be plain garbage or objectively worse versions of other cards.
Definitely agreed with that. Most of the time, you just end up using a select few cards. As of this time, the most useful cards, IMO, are definitely the LRs (barring the newly added LR Taimanin), UR Saya and HR Anemone, chiefly because their skills are so universal and useful which I guess ties to your second point.
Next, the skills are seriously lacking in variety and overwhelmingly encourage the player to build single-faction teams, which seems contrary to the narrative arc about gathering and recruiting girls from all factions. I think it may be interesting to have, for instance, a Taimanin card with very high stats for its rarity bracket, but a skill reducing attack power for all other allied Taimanin. Or for instance, another card with weak stats, but which steals life as a percentage of your team's attack power on every hit. Possibly even a card which increases in power as your team takes damage? Regardless, there's a lot of potential for creativity here.
As a former Valkyrie Crusade player, I have to say that the skills in this game is really lacking. As of right now, skills can broadly fall into these categories:
- Boost Attack of all specific types.
- Boost Defense of all specify type.
- Debuff enemy's attack.
- Debuff enemy's defense.
I'm not sure about that attack reducing skill on how it would work with the current setup. Speaking of which, I do think they need to overhaul how the skills work and/or activate and to add to that, maybe a different proc chance for the skills.
The game has two resources that only have a single function: gold and medals (rare medals and gacha tickets too, but you get my point), eliminating the need for player resource management or allocation. Giving players additional options with both of these would make the game more interesting and engaging. The variety of items in the game is seriously lacking. I'd like to add some gold-purchasable items in the shop (for example consumable attack power +20% boosts for use during boss fights). Also, since the 50% skill activation mechanic is some serious bullshit, I'd probably add an option in boss fights, allowing players to increase skill activation rates in exchange for medals. Something like +5% for every 200 medals invested or something.
Aye, the resource management in this game is quite frankly non-existent. I have over 222,000+ Silver Medals and 910,000+ Gold and I have no use for them outside of Gacha and Training purposes. There really should be some more uses for these to really spice things up.
The arena is seriously lacking in terms of player risk and reward. In conjunction with the above changes to gold and medals, I'd probably make the winner in arena battles take some gold and medals from the loser. Not only would this encourage players to actually participate in PvP, but it would hopefully make the 2 and 3BP options actually useful for once (with the card balance and skill changes mentioned above). Evidently, I'd also implement some rudimentary matchmaking so only players of similar levels could face each other.
Another thing perhaps is to make some changes to the ranking rewards for the arena as well, just for that extra boost of motivation. I still can't make head or tails of how the rewards are handed out, even after reading the FAQs.
Speaking of BP, 6 BP is way too small a cap, making players feel like they need to check on the fucking game way too often. Extending the cap to 20 or so would suit me fine.
THIS. Definitely this. To add to that, the Weak BP potions should be augmented to recover half the BP of the cap, instead of the weak +1 BP per use. That was annoying as hell when you have +50% Endurance Recovery and +1 BP Recovery. To add even more to it, there should be a timer to show how long it'll take for HP and BP to recover to full.
The leveling system is generally fucked and not very satisfying. It isn't uncommon to max a new card mere seconds after finding it, reducing the excitement of finding a new girl and unlocking a new scene to a mere few clicks. I'd extend the exp system to include cards, so cards could only level up by being used in missions. Players would have more incentive to use even weaker cards to level them and hopefully grow some attachment to them in the process. In addition, it would actually build some anticipation towards unlocking an h-scene, which in itself would be more rewarding.
Or perhaps, here are my 2 cents on it, there should be an Affection Meter that only goes up as you use the cards, slowly culminating in unlocking of H-scenes and/or boost the card's stats slightly. That will really make it so that players form an emotional attachment to that. As a corollary to that, maybe make it so that you can still level in missions as well as training but perhaps weaken the amount of EXP gained from training.
Finally, and probably the worst part of the game: the mindless clicking associated with quest mode needs to go. I'd probably change the whole mechanics here, giving mooks health and damage, and having a boss at the end of each stage. Your team would be chosen at the beginning of the stage, and be unchangeable until you ran out of health (potential here for a new health pot type of item to be added) or completed it. In order to be cleared, stages would have to be cleared by a team in a single run. Any drops found during a failed run are still kept by the player, though. IMO, this might give the player a better sense of progression (coupled with the new card leveling system) and having given bosses waiting at the end of stages to drop rewards would be a better mechanic than forcing players to endlessly revisit Stage 1-1 or 2-5 to fish for raid bosses.
Well, there's still more I'd like to talk about, like the terrible friends component and the complete lack of originality in the way-too-frequent events, but I think I'll just leave it at that.
I wouldn't go as far as that but certainly mooks with health and damage will be a nice addition. Really, this game does lacks a certain strategic depth here, making it so that the raid bosses are a game of chance whether you defeat them or not thanks to the skill system.
Another thing I will say: They really should boost the odds of those HR and SR drops for the raid bosses. As it were, you have a better chance of getting a LR from a Gacha than you are of getting a SR from the raid bosses, which kinda defeats the point.
In regards to your very last point, I'd have to say that the frequent events are getting tiresome. It's one of the reason I ended up quitting Valkyrie Crusade but hey, I'm a sucker for Kagami-sensei's art. So yeah, despite the amount of un-fun there is on this game, we (or maybe just me) sure have invested quite a lot to it. Or perhaps because of it, we wish for the game to be better.
