Hello!

So I have been designing the ground work for a video game and these are the damage types & their effects. i been designing the combat system for a couple years now and i think it is pretty balanced, i was jkust curious what anybody/everybody else thanjks!

If there is any problems here let me know so i can iron it out, thanks!

(Blunt)
Staggers movement for a brief second (less than 1 second can stack).

(Piercing)
Reduces damage dealt by 70% for 6 seconds.

(Slashing)
Deals additional 245% per bleed condition of base damage over 6 seconds.

(Cold)
Reduces movement speed, fire rate, and attack speed by 50% for 6 seconds.

(Electricity)
Deals additional 50% base damage to enemies within 5 meters of target, stuns shortly.

(Fire)    
Deals additional 350% base damage over 6 seconds, causes fear on target.

(Poison)
Deals additional 450% base damage over 8 seconds.

(Force)     
Knockdown and stuns target and enemies within 5 meters.

(Acid)
Reduces current Armor by 25%, permanently.

(Poison Cloud)
Target and enemies within 3 meters suffer poison damage and condition.

(Magic)
Reduces maximum spell shields by 75% for 4 seconds and drains 100 mana.

(Chaos)
Confuses enemies and they may target their allies for up to 12 seconds.

(Plague)
Reduces current and maximum health by 50% for 8 seconds.

EDIT - Feel free being as honest/brutal as needed you will be completely Justified owning, knowing I naught  good.

I find it quite impossible to tell whether damage types and their effects on their own are balanced or not. It really depends on your combat (and possibly progression) system. Without any point of reference, it's hard to place a value on the seconds and %'s.

How did you reach the conclusion that this is balanced? Put differently, how did you test it out during design?

On 6/30/2018 at 11:03 PM, modtyrant said:

I have been designing the ground work for a video game and these are the damage types & their effects. i been designing the combat system

I'm afraid this isn't an adequate description of what sort of game you are writing and of your design objectives.

Reading between the lines of the damage types it appears to be a fantasy game ("Magic" and "Chaos" types, unnaturally instantaneous "Plague"); it seems to focus on combat between people (with bleeding, armour etc.); and it is likely to be realtime (there are durations in seconds).

This amount of information is, by far, not enough to put your damage types in context and evaluate them. Examples:

• How are these special damage types used by the monsters, character types etc. that should be balanced against one another? For example, are Plague effects a rarely encountered almost unstoppable ability of very lethal monsters, a common ability everyone cares about being immune to, or something else? More generally, which damage types are supposed to be bad, mediocre, good, very good? Do they have commensurate direct and indirect costs?
• What is the time scale of combat? For instance, how much fails to be done during the 12 seconds of a Chaos attack, and how likely are the opponents to "chain" another Chaos attack during that time? Or, how likely is a character suffering from Plague to be killed in the 8 seconds before hit points come back?
• What are the other rules you refer to? For example, the difference between staggering, beng stunned, and knockdown, or the "spell shields".

In general you should simply test your game: does it have exploitative, boring strategies? Are certain fights easier or harder than they should be? A sufficiently flexible implementation will allow you to modify your damage types (and weapons, spells, characters etc.) easily.

Testing will bring to light actual problems instead of imaginary ones, and if you don't know how to solve them you'll be able to ask for help in meaningful ways (e.g suggesting additional effects of Piercing to make it more immediately lethal, not whether we like Piercing damage).

Oh thanks for replying.

Think like an FPS like Chivalry, so ranged staff might cast a bolt of [insert damage type] at a specified range and that projectile hit some thing and deal base damage and what is specified in my original post.

Melee would work like chivalry.

EDIT = Staffs, melee weapons, throwing things etc. All of those items would have the same template but with slight differences so polearms would be longer and do less damage harder to use up close, just like in chivalry. Crossbow/Staff kind of like the same ranged class but different ammo/mana etc, they literally function the same way, just different animations and damage types.