So here I was at Taco Bell, listening to the Puella Magi OST while plotting the plot for my Suzuko Magica hack, and I had a little idea. You see, in this hack each person has only one weapon, which grows in power with them (Uses stat multipliers rather than added values). However, this wouldn't apply at all to unleash rates. Without the ability to change unleash rates outside of accessories, which I personally didn't like the idea of, I figured I'd just forgo it all together at first.
But then I had an idea... what if we could patch it so that unleash rates could scale with the character?
So I did a bit of thought digging. My end game level would be around 65 or so, right? So if I based their unleash rate off of their level, and had it be, say, 50% or so, then that'd mean that near the end of the game you'd have a 32ish% unleash rate. Not bad... not bad at all. I could even tweak that percentage based on the individual characteristics of the characters in the game so that some have a higher innate unleash rate than others. It'd work well.
So here's the basic gist - for games with low weapon variety, or where a character's weapon improved based on percentile rather than fixed values, this unleash rate style would be ideal. You could make it so that the unleash rate isn't a flat rate, but rather grows alongside the character. If it's a strong unleash, you could have it with a low value, such as 30%. If it's weaker, you could give it a higher value to balance it out, such as 85%. The value would be placed in the unleash rate slot for the weapon, and would range from 0-99, applying that percent of the character's level as the unleash rate.
Now, there's two instances where this is NOT recommended.
1: Games with a low end-game level (ex: GS1 has a end game level of ~28. Base unleash rates are ideal here instead).
2: Games with a lot of weapons, such as GS based games period. It'd be easier just to use Base values.
Another thing to keep in mind while using this system - unless you have a lot of low values, you're going to want to cut down on the amount of critical+ gear. Not because for balance, but because anything above 99 is just plain wasted. So since this scales with the character, plan your crit+ gear around post-game content. Not based on level 99 values, but rather on the target levels for your post game bosses and areas and stuff. Instead of giving boosts to crits above the cutoff value, consider giving the accessory/armor other boosts that the players would find more useful instead.
Now, I'm not proposing this as a way to balance games - how you do that is up to you. Rather, this is simply a different style of unleash to consider. I don't really have any recommended values right now, but I am open to discussion and criticism on the idea to help improve it. I personally plan on using this in my Puella Magi hack, but I figure it'd work with other hacks as well. We'd need someone to code a version of the editor to have a patch for it, though.
Also note that this a one-or-the-other deal. You cannot have percentile based unleash rates alongside base value unleash rates... at least I don't think you can. If someone's willing to make a version of the editor that will prove me wrong on this, I'd be more than welcoming of it, but for now, just plan on one or the other.
And for those of you wondering, no. I don't recommend it for DCrisis. It's a GS-based hack with lots of weapons after all. Stick with what we know for that - base values for unleash rates.
When I saw this thread I was scared you were actually recommending this for the CH. Then I saw what section it was in and breathed a sigh of relief.
This is a pretty nice system. It's slightly reminiscent of FE's crit system. FE uses the skill stat for two purposes - hit and crit rate, where hit is skill + luck/2 and crit is just skill/2, plus whatever bonuses the weapon gives for each. As a result, crit rises as the character levels up, even with the same weapon equipped.
My main critique is that you actually could make this system work for low level games. If your max level is say... 30, then you just divide by 30 instead of 100.
Still, that's pretty much forcing you to use a value of 99 or 100 - you're better off just using base values that scale up with the weapon power. Another alternative, for those with only one weapon per character and a low level, is to have lots of crit+ gear to make up for it. However, games with end levels from 20-35 really don't have much benefit from this type of unleash type, especially if the player decides to grind. In fact, it could actually be pretty harmful to game balance.
For higher level games, you can balance it around post-game content without too much worry about the extra grind. An extra 10 levels isn't going to become a game breaker after all. Plus, if they go out of their way and spend the time to grind up to max level... they probably deserve the extra boost, given the effort that went into it.
Technically, I suppose this could be used for games with lots of weapons too, but... I recommend against it because it sounds like it'd be a headache to balance, given that each one of those weapons likely has a different unleash.
Base*level.current/level.max
You were saying? You could have a base crit rate of say... 50%. With a max level of 30, the crit rate would be 25% at lv15. This is assuming you go through the trouble of editing what the max level in the game is, which should be a fairly trivial process. For a game with a target level in the 60s, you could set the max level to 70 or 75 or something.
Oh, that's not bad. I suppose then that it might be a good idea to use all three unleash styles, since that would work as well.
Do you have an example of an actual level max alteration with the editor's current version? If not, that's probably a good idea for a feature to be added. ...Actually, given your formula, that'd be something we'd have to have, otherwise it'd always use 99 as the max, even if you could trick it into not allowing levels beyond a certain level.
Well, by virtue of the fact that this is a new formula being placed into the game, the constants used for it are completely arbitrary and user-defined.
Current editor cannot adjust stat caps, but sala did find out to lower the HP and PP caps earlier, which can probably be applied to all stats.
The current editor is also Open Source, so we should be able to at least find someone with the know-how of how to get this functionality coded into it.