Post by Frederic Bourgault-Christie on Apr 19, 2011 23:50:27 GMT -5
Practical ITM Optimization:
What do we mean when we say character optimization?
Simply, we mean making the character better.
Okay, maybe not "better". After all, while a character optimized for roleplaying purposes should have a compelling back story, interesting behaviors and quirks, and feel realistic in their portrayal and demeanor, this isn't what optimization is.
Rather, optimization is making a character better within the construct of the game world. It's about managing specialization versus diversification, optimizing numbers, attempting to do some mathematical tricks, considering party roles. It's about making the character better at what they do.
Put this way, it doesn't sound so bad. The problem can come when multiple people on a team either have different levels of skill at optimizing their characters, or when character choices are imbalanced vis-a-vis each other so that different archetypes or character classes or potential races are just not as useful as each other. In D&D, caster classes almost always have an edge. However, character optimization then performs a different function: It exposes mistaken assumptions or balance within the game system itself.
That having been said, a world without optimization would be even worse. A healer could do as much damage as a warrior, or a warrior heal as well as a healer. Bards would take level adjustments, slowing their character growth, to reduce charisma. No character could be effective, nor could any enemy. Everyone would be a random hodgepodge of unrelated, weak and boring abilities, hoping vainly for the dice to win the battle for them.
Optimization is a good thing. It lets players get the rush of defeating difficult enemies, allows a team to work together and create effective combinations, and lets the players write the story.
This article is not only useful for ITM optimization in ITM's present iterations, but its logic applies to dozens of roleplaying games. That having been said, this article is assuming the general system of ITM that has been tinkered with since ITM V, and not so much prior iterations. It is thus current as of 10/19/2010.
Caveats About Optimization
Optimization of characters is a theoretical exercise that has two aims.
1) To improve a character's core roles; to keep up with the power, level and experience growth of a campaign; to decide among competing alternatives, as in how to spend an ability choice, gear choice or trainer choice
2) to create builds that are as utterly powerful as possible, with no regard for game balance (aside from not using abilities that are
banned)
The first is virtually entirely good. In fact, a campaign that didn't
have it would be terrible. Imagine a D&D campaign where everyone chose one level of Fighter, then one level of Wizard, then one level of Druid, then one level of Cleric, then one level of Soulblade, and so on and so forth. The characters would be identical, and identically bad. The GM would have to throw much lower CR encounters at the party and couldn't use established modules that expect that characters have the basic skills they need at their level. There would be no diversity, and the character options would be boring, since the interesting and diverse abilities of each class pays off later on in the build. It would be bland and unexciting, at least as far as combat, skill checks, dungeoneering and exploration went.
The second is an exercise to try to benefit the first. It is not
designed to produce builds that would be fun and playable in a
long-term campaign. It is fun for a few sessions to nuke everything in your way with hundreds of millions of caster levels, or kill entire pantheons, but this will undoubtedly get boring for the optimized character's player because there will be no challenge (the GM might as well not be there since the player knows that they'll win) and will get boring for everyone else. Even if everyone is highly optimized, if encounters can't be difficult enough to provide real challenge, it'll come down to initiative checks to see who wipes the entire enemy party first.
Learning to push the parameters of what is possible to their furthest extremes has two objectives. First: Lesser versions of the broken build can often be made to be very fun, and entirely playable. One doesn't need to push God Hand to the limits where it confers mathematical unkillability: It can be used to make a player into a behemoth, stoppable but requiring some smart maneuvering to kill. And while a Cleric who has made extremely optimized choices for what to do with their turning slots can be boring, picking a few of these Feats makes a Cleric into a much more interesting and very fun holy cannon.
Second: Exposing weaknesses in the underlying game design can be used to plug holes in that design. In fact, the modern shape of ITM is owed in no small part to optimized builds that made it necessary to embrace Archetypes, have a set-down Affinity system, control what trainers could grant, etc.
This guide will be doing both. It does so under the following assumption:
A campaign is a collaborative enterprise. Players and GMs should coordinate and compromise as to desired power levels and levels of optimization in a campaign.
If you are playing any ITM-like game (ITM, MA, FoN, etc.), these principles can guide design, but each of these campaigns has different player expectations and a different culture. Respecting those cultures is essential for everyone getting along and having a good time.
At game creation, have everyone discuss what they'd like to see from the campaign. These discussions should bear in mind different levels of player skill, different objectives, etc. Not all players have the same skill, and they may not want to compete with an optimization arms race, or may want that arms race to be controlled for the benefit of the weaker players. This is fine: It's like playing golf just for fun without a par, or giving a handicap to weaker players. But this should be stated and agreed to by stronger players. Bear in mind who is newer and who is older to the campaign. Campaigns should make sure they are accessible to and fun for new players, but it is also unfair to ask older players to change their playstyle because of relative
newcomers.
In addition, different people want different things out of the game. Some want very high-level combat with incredibly sophisticated fights: A combination of Dragon Ball Z, Star Trek, Rifts and Pun-Pun. Others want mid-level or low-level combat. These expectations need to be laid out with compromise between all parties.
Once the campaign is in mid-swing, if people want changes, they should discuss respectfully with everyone. Joining a campaign means a social compact where people agree to play by the rules and respect everyone else, but the campaign is also about having fun.
The GM is not ancillary to this discussion. In some ideal world,
it might be a good thing to have "blank" GMs capable of running any campaign from Toon to Rifts flawlessly and exactly to the median of players expectations. But real GMs are not like this and cannot try to be. The GM has a skill set and a preferred type of game they can run. They need to be consulted, since, as a practical matter, the GM's ability or inability to run the campaign is the cornerstone and the lynchpin of everyone's fun.
The implications for this guide should be clear. If you're in a game
where the present equilibrium of power is roughly equal and at a
particular level, and most people are enjoying it, it is not okay to unilaterally try to trash that equilibrium without discussing with others, at least the GM. It becomes a surprise attack: Players find that, suddenly, one person has ''forced ''the campaign down a different direction.
Apply the lessons of this guide to keep your character at an
appropriate power level, and no further.
That having been said: There is some degree of competition in
roleplaying games, even when there is also heavy collaboration.
Collaboration is fun, and most builds offered here assume other
players are there to make sure you don't have to do everything, but people will compete. If you're on the losing end of a fair
competition, and haven't broached a discussion of changing the game, you may not be having as much fun, but it is no more fair to demand others change than it is to demand that the bank give losing players interest-free loans in Monopoly in the middle of the game. Express what you need to make the campaign fun. But if you are willing to accept a set of rules, then find that you are being beaten out in those rules, it is unfair to complain.
Glossary:
Glossary
Azerothian Polymorph-like: Any effect that makes the target helpless, usually transforming them into a different shape, and usually uncontrollable, also usually slowing their speed, but cannot be attacked.
Circle: Any effect that removes the target from the battle entirely, as if they were (temporarily) wiped out of existence.
Mesmerize: Any effect that stops the target from acting but has harmful consequences if someone attacks it.
Knockback [or Push]: Any attack or ability that has the effect of knocking back the enemy or pushing them away from the target. The nice thing about knockbacks is that they can be used to position the target, throw them down cliffs and so on, and also have a sort of soft-stun effect since too much knockback disorients and makes it very hard to target abilities.
Remove [or Cyclone[style]: An effect that temporarily makes the target untargetable and
Root: Any effect that stops the target from moving but does not prevent them from acting.
Slow: Any effect that slows the target. This can reduce their number of attacks or their attack rate (slightly different), movement speed, initiative or number of turns they get.
Snare: Slightly non-intuitively, a snare effect is something that reduces the target's movement speed.
Stacking: An effect that is not interfered with by another effect in question, and therefore can be thought of as being on the same pile as it. For example: "Damage reduction stacks with armor class for the purpose of damage mitigation". The reason this is true is obvious. Armor class works based on their strike roll: They miss or they don't. Damage reduction works off the damage done. In total, someone with higher AC and higher damage reduction takes less damage.
Stacking is not a binary, on-off thing, at least in the above
formulation. If someone misses your 60 AC character every time they hit, damage reduction is playing no role. Different effects often work differently and may compete for each other. Always consider: Does raising this preclude the real necessity for the other option?
Not everything stacks. In DotA, orb effects do not stack. If I pick
Mask of Madness for the vampiric and the attack speed increase, I
cannot also choose Stygian Desolator and gets its reduced armor
effect, because it is also an orb effect. Figuring out what effects
stack and what don't, and how well they stack, is core to
optimization.
To stack is to pick effects or upgrades that stack with each
other. For example: In DotA, if I play Leoric, I can buy Mask of
Madness and Vladmir's Offering and use his innate Vampiric Aura, and this is called "stacking lifesteal".
To get stacked, then, is to get enough stacking effects, to
specialize deeply enough into a mechanic, that one is very powerful. "I'm so stacked right now, I have more than 100% evasion" is technically accurate since presumably the character stacked many evasion mechanics to get to that point. "I'm so stacked right now, I can heal, damage and tank" is ''not ''technically accurate because those are different mechanics.
Opportunity Cost
You cannot be an optimizer unless you understand the idea of opportunity cost.
Opportunity cost is defined as "the cost of choosing a particular alternative or making a particular decision, as measured by the benefits of the other alternatives".
Every resource you have, whether it be an ability choice, trainer choice, gear slot, gold coin for gear, Element, Materia, Summon, Jade, or whatever, is (in a game where resources are finite and any of this discussion even matters) a resouce that could be put to any number of ends. You, like Michaelangelo, chisel your unique character out of the infinite possibility space. If you want the statue to look good, you better make careful choices.
Opportunity cost is why you have specialization. If you're a DPR character and you acquire a single healing move, you have to ask, "When will I ever use this? If the main healer is dead, shouldn't I be focusing on resurrecting him or retreating rather than trying to pick up the slack? Is this clutch move I might need better than the additional DPR utility I will always use?" Specialization occurs because, more often than not, the answer to those kind of questions is "I better just get the ability within my present role".
I'll get more into specialization versus diversification in a moment, and mention the idea of building your character outwards from a solid foundation, but the biggest truth of opportunity cost is something many players fail to realize:
An ounce of ability acceleration is worth a pound of ability.
Any new ability you choose is essentially "competing" against every other ability you've acquired.
In Tower ITM, there were dozens of moves I used rarely if ever. As a wizard and caster type, that's less of a problem than in most cases, but it is still a serious issue. Every ability choice I made in Tower ITM that wasn't being used was, potentially, a wasted slot compared to something that could be used.
It is important to have multiple options, as I will get into. Some damage or healing combos require several moves to work, and you probably want more than one. Casters should take damage or effects from as many elements or types as possible to be able to deal with multiple opponents.
But if you can get a summon which can do part of your job for you, or a chainspell to get more abilities off, or a clone ability to do more, that is far, far more useful than any new ability.
Always think: Can I increase the amount of things I am effectively doing per turn? If you get an ability that heals while damages, you're performing two roles. If you have a pet, you are getting two turns to do something. If you summon something, you lose one turn at first but immediately get your action refunded if the fight continues one more round, and your investment continues to pay off afterwards. If you summon something out of battle, your reward on investment is immediate.
It's not just turns or pets or chainspelling that's going to be a problem, either. If you're getting stunned, you're losing out on every ability you have. Picking one ability to prevent you from being stunned is then worth the twenty abilities you're not able to use. If you run out of energy, then getting a mana regeneration, energy restore, or energy drain is worth every ability that you're able to cast thanks to those effects.
Anyone who has played Magic: the Gathering or any other reasonably-good CCG knows what I'm talking about. There are many cards that look great that really don't have much utility because they crowd out another card that's good. Think about your ITM character like a deck: All cruft, all fat, should be cut.
Archetype Selection:
Possibly the most important part of modern ITM, archetype selection determines what your character is. We will get into exact tricks, but in essence, between trainers, gear, etc., any build can be tolerable. What is important is to carefully select what you want to do for the party or in the game, how you want to approach the game.
There are roughly two ways to pick archetypes.
The first is to come at it from the role perspective: What do I want to do for the party? However, there is the rub here: Unless your role for the party is incredibly specific, you will find there are dozens of ways to approach fulfilling a role. "I want to do damage" is not specific. "I want to do damage with fire" isn't even that specific. "I want to focus on DoTs and stuns with fire" is a little more so, though there still are dozens of builds with that. "I want to be a healer with fire" is getting better.
Thus, if you want to approach the matter from the perspective of a role design, you have to play Twenty Questions, whittling down the size of the archetypes that fill the role until you find one that suits you. Some questions you can ask:
Answer enough questions in this vein and you'll determine what you want for a party. Roles that a party can use include:
And numerous others.
The other way is to pick your archetype or archetypes and then decide how to build them. Most archetypes have multiple elements. High Magus has casting and Automaton piloting/construction, and even among casting they can be oriented like any caster can to be more illusionist/more stun-oriented/more buffing/more healing/etc. Shamans have melee DPS, tanking, healing, and spell DPS; they have animal and plant, elemental and holy elements; etc. Unless you plan on getting all the possible abilities within your class, any one element you choose to maximize is another you choose not to explore.
Races Suck:
I will often use hyperbole to expand the mind. Races do not suck.
But they're not what they're cracked up to be.
Specifically:
The value of a Race choice must have the value of any other Class subtracted from it.
See where opportunity cost comes in?
A Race can be replaced by a Class if the Race is filled in as human. Two Class combinations are obviously eminently powerful. Druid Monks who focus on wildshaping can do gamebreaking damage. Monk Adepts are natural choices to become Benders and get access to tremendous magic, great HP and mitigation that is amazing because it was designed for low HP (more than that later), stat shifting and ability changes in the midst of battle, and so on. So a Race has to be measured against that possibility.
Some Classes just don't really pair well with other Classes. I can't think of one as of writing this article, but it's certainly
hypothetically true. But many of these Classes are sub-optimal choices anyways, for precisely the same reason.
Where a Race can come in handy is when the race amplifies the archetype while expanding it.
A Kryptonian Barbarian is a good example. Barbarians are tough. Kryptonians are tough. The two have different, stacking kinds of mitigation. Complementary synergy. Kryptonians are very endurant but tend to suck at aggro management. Barbarians fill that in. Kryptonian Super Strength multiplied by Barbarian weapon skill means immense damage. Barbarians often have bad ranged choices. Heat vision and flight solves that problem.
But even this combination has clear problems. Kryptonite weakens a Kryptonian, effectively eliminating one half of the Archetype. A Barbarian has some utilities against this, but it is rare to find a class with such a severe weakness. While it is all Valor-focused, it has the disadvantage that its variety of attack types is fairly limited.
Buu Magi, meanwhile, had the benefit that the two similar archetypes synergized incredibly well. Both specialized in flight, absorption, energy attacks, ability stealing and growth, regeneration, hand to hand combat, and magic, with additional healing utility. Each had different mechanisms and styles for all of the above. Both used Magic to accomplish their primary mechanics, and could leverage Magic to almost any part of the build.
But Buu Magi was not perfect either. The high overlap meant that any weaknesses of one would be replicated by the other. The reason Arek became so unstoppable in ITM VII was primarily due to trainer choices to branch out the archetype and power absorption.
In general, a Race's utility is directly proportional to, and largely determined by, how many abilities it has.
Seeing why is easy. Any good Class has a wide variety of ability choices. A Race that has a similar number of ability choices, or similar quality of abilities, is an excellent choice. A Race that doesn't must have better abilities pound for pound or sufficient attribute bonuses to offset, and since attributes often cap or can be accelerated by abilities...
Buu had a huge variety of skills built into the archetype.
Similarly, Demon is an excellent choice since it is the demon-ness of many demons that gives them their abilities.
General Principles
Redundancy is bad. If you already have a powerful initiating attack move, why get a second? You won't use both.
Redundancy can be good. Don't get identical mechanics, but get stacking mechanics. If you have one ability that reduces damage by 20%, then another that reduces it by a flat sum afterwards, the two are greater than their whole.
Effects are better than numbers. I'd rather be able to hit for 80 damage with a chance to stun than 120 damage that performs no other role. Look for abilities that perform multiple roles so you can save on ability choices and time in fights.
Ideally, every ability you have should synergize with every other ability you have flawlessly. You shouldn't be able to heal AND DPR: The one should complement the other.
Research Your Archetype and Think About It Broadly
Generally, we choose an archetype because we think of one or two sources we like for it. We like Shaman King, so we roll Shaman. We like Cyber-Knights, so we roll Knight. We like No More Heroes, so we roll Assassin.
But once you do that, and establish the core of the character you want, Google up all the things that archetype is in and talk to people about things they know about.
A Shaman King shaman can have a powerful Overspirit and synergy with it. But a Shaman is a far broader archetype. Shamans have been elements of mythology just as they've been elements of culture and tradition for millenia. Shamans can do long-distance hexes, communion with the spirits to discover information, and direct healing. Rifts Shamans can transform into totem spirits to become frontline combatants, summon animals and plants, control and heal animals and plants, use powerful healing rituals, learn unbelievably powerful Warlock magic and summon elemental spirits and True Elementals, create gear in the form of fetishes and masks, and even use time, space and gravity magic! WoW Shamans can wear mail, buff allies, summon wolves, see far distances, are powerful healers, enchant their blades with elemental power, and control elementals. Fire Emblem Shamans have had two distinct iterations, one light magic and stave oriented and the other dark magic oriented, with three different promotion paths!
Someone who just approached the concept from one or the other of the above approaches would have been locked into a far less versatile idea. But the same mechanisms let Shaman do almost any role. They can massively increase their power with Overspirits, have their own power type (furyoku), summon, do elemental damage, do physical damage, get good gear, wield almost anything...
Similarly, the idea of a Knight is core to both Japanese and English cultures. While Samurai are not Knights for the purposes of ITM, a Knight is still tremendously versatile. We have the treatment of Arthur and Lancelot from FSN, Cyber-Knights with their psychic powers and cybernetics, Mystic Knights with their magic and psychic development and control over raw magical energy, Cosmo-Knights with their archetypal yet purely "technological" power source, the Knights of Wormwood with multiple approaches including the use of high technology and motorcycles for mounts...
And in Maple Story, Knights have development paths that emphasize spirit summoning, archery, flame magic, stealth and ninjutsu, and berserker skills! Between these choices, Knights can be Magic, Tech, Ki, Psi or Valor. They can be mounted combatants or unmounted. They can wield modern or ancient weapons, swords or maces, dual-wield or go sword and board (or even sword and board for every "hand" slot!)
Now, of course, we're all here to have fun. If you like to maximize a particular sub-section of your Archetype, go ahead. But if you intend to do that, it may be best to specialize in that sub-section to get faster access.
This optimization is key because it can compensate for weaknesses that might be apparent in one version of the archetype. Monks in D&D have middle-of-the-road HP: They need high Con to get HP, high Wis to get armor, and good armor and defense gear and optimization to survive. Monks in Final Fantasy get great HP growth, HP +30%, counters that are not available to D&D Monks due to a different system, self-healing and powerful healing of others, greater range... Since the D&D Monk has mechanisms to keep alive even without low HP, and the FF Monk has great HP growth, their combination is devastating.
Game Stage
Any game of ITM, or roleplaying game in general, should have different stages of experience and power. We can think of this as the beginning, middle and end game. Different archetypes often have different power levels at various game points. For example: Fighters usually start out stronger than wizards, but lose out over time.
Unfortunately, this is bad game design. It means that the wizards feel less useful at first and the fighters feel less useful at the end of the game. It gives people perverse incentives: Wizards to accelerate through content to "the good stuff", fighters to keep things back in the low levels.
However, even a perfectly balanced game would see archetypes change over time. Take heroes like Fiddlesticks, Dark Seer or Voodoo Jester. These "early game heroes" excel at the early game but also provide key team support late game. Their role in the party changes as the level of power increases.
Consider how your archetypes change in power over time. Is your design frontloaded, middle-loaded or backloaded?
A frontloaded design might be something like a mecha pilot, dragon rider or supersoldier class. Their core elements are very powerful by definition and by scale, so they have to be achieved early. But, if the game is balanced, they will begin to trail off late game. In Rifts, Glitter Boys are highly dominant at level 1, but a Warlock at level 8 can kill or immobilize a Glitter Boy in one turn!
Middle-loaded designs are hard to define, but certainly do exist. Some superheroic archetypes, for example, don't start out with all their abilities, so they're not frontloaded, but they miss out on high power abilities later on so they are not backloaded either.
A backloaded design will be something like a caster. In the beginning of the game, their stats, ability selection and gear aren't sufficient to make them very useful. But by the end of the game, the raw power they have at their disposal and the sheer complexity of their abilities are immense.
Any archetype build can be made, with GM cooperation, to be useful at the beginning, middle and end. But it requires a little work. Ask yourself these three questions:
1. Are any of the abilities I consider core to what I'm doing too powerful to be meaningfully learned at the beginning? Does this build need a trainer to really take off? Will I need medium gear to pull it off? If so, then you're too frontloaded. Consider what low-level abilities and gear you can use to be of assistance to your party.
Remember that relatively humble abilities can be incredibly useful early on. In D&D, Entangle is a very early spell for Rangers, but it has a lot of utility. Magic Missile can be great in certain situations. Color Spray is very helpful.
2. Once I hit the mid game, do I have a robust set of ideas? Does my build require too many simultaneous specializations to be effective, so much so that I won't be able to sell them with limited abilities? Does my archetype change, and if so, am I being useful to the team?
Generally, problems don't hit too hard here, but I will caution you against overconfidence. Once you have the makings of a full ability set, it's tempting to grab another. Don't. Make sure before you start to leave a particular role that you have all the things necessary to fulfill that role. If you're a healer, make sure you have all of your status effect heals, your resurrections, your chain and AoE heals. Mid-game progression relies on everyone doing their job better than early game, not as well or slightly worse.
3. In the end-game, what is truly powerful about my build? Do I sort of trail off with trainer ideas? Do I undergo another transformation?
At the end game, there is no excuse not to have a complete ability set for your primary function. You should have a complete build that can do immense effects, hopefully qualitative and variable ones.
In particular, make sure that what you think is powerful actually is. Can it smash planets? If not, then make sure it can kill the planet-smashers.
Raw Power Sucks
DBZ is fun. Kamehameha is fun. But remember: Abilities are only as powerful as your sheet can make them. Picking a DBZ archetype won't make you a planet smasher, and even if it did, raw damage, raw speed, raw strength, all are trivially easy to control, limit and punish.
In general, don't think, "How powerful is this move in its continuity?", but rather, "What sort of power do I have to be able to execute this move? Is it highly dominant at this point in the power arc of the game?" Either the move will be reduced in power to an appropriate level or you won't have the ability to cast it.
On Buffs
Buffs are a good thing. You can never have enough of them.
Buffs are useful primarily because you can often set them up out of battle, preserving time within battle. You do enter battle with lower magic, but unless you are sure you are going to exhaust your energy in the fight, it's a non-issue. Further, even if you need every TP you have, it's important to ask: Is a persistent effect that pays off round over round really going to be eclipsed by any individual action I can do in a fight? If I can cast a spell that does 30 damage or buff the main DPR to do 15 more a hit, that buff was worth it if the fight continues on for a mere three rounds.
However, numerical buffs have many problems. They are easy for the GM and the players to forget, as a matter of accounting. They often get eclipsed or fail to scale well. A +5 to Agility is useful if you remember it, but becomes worse per point of Agility you get. A +20% to Agility is more useful and will remain equally so throughout the entire game. A buff that makes it so, when you hit, you have a 20% chance to stun, gives you a new capacity you didn't have before.
Buffs that give qualitative changes tend to be the best. Barriers, for example, don't only add hit points to protect squishy members, they also keep people from being staggered by being hit. Barriers don't feel pain.
Leverage Your Advantages
When diversifying at all, the best and most efficient way is to leverage your existing advantages and turn them to the new arena you want.
Let's say you have a tank. His job is to get hit a lot. He primarily builds mitigation and aggro management, but he finds that he's more than satisfied with his current ability spread. He wants to start doing damage and healing. How could he do so, assuming that the game is set up that he won't be able to equal a specialist without some smart manuevering?
For damage, he could choose abilities that do bonus damage based on max HP, damage taken, the difference between max and current HP, or on his armor. He could design a counter-attack build: Taunt enemies then force them to kill themselves on him. HoN's Legionnaire does this: He Taunts, raising his armor, then uses Counter Helix, a counter-attacking AoE spin, and Blade Mail, an activatable item that returns 100% damage, to whittle enemies down. If he's built right, he has made his opponents pit their DPS against his tankiness, and he will most likely win. Or he could go the direction of Armadon: An attack or effect that does building damage over time. This has the benefit not only of letting him do damage, but also of making him a better tank, as enemies will want to shut him down. He could have flat AoE damage, like Zephyr or Paladins with offensive auras do.
Or let's say you have a DPR character. She does immense melee damage. If she wants to heal, she should get an item like a Cure Rod, Tenseiga, a Cure Blade, Hanataro's shikai, or something that makes her do healing instead of damage. She is now a good healer because she is good DPR, not in spite of it. If she wants to tank, she just needs sufficient vampiric that her already high attack speed and damage will let her survive the enemies' hits.
Notice how the above strategies do not involve building an entire suite of abilities. One or two abilities for each strategy, or one or two pieces of gear, are enough to radically expand the character's role.
This is one of the reasons trainers must be chosen so carefully. With the right choice, they can expand a character's versatility and efficacy tremendously. A tank that can also do immense damage is performing his primary role better and a secondary one well. A DPR that could heal or tank becomes amazingly useful as tanks or healers fall or become neutralized.
One advantage of doing this is psychological. A character who is in fact high DPR can appear to be a good healer. Enemies will then neutralize her healing, only to find that that isn't what she specializes in whatsoever.
Trainer Choices
Don't pick a trainer just because you like them! This might sound like the advice of a "Stop Having Fun Guy" or a srzbzns advocate, but picking a trainer that you happen to like and shoehorning them into your build is not only bad design, but is ultimately less fun than you'd imagine. If you take a trainer that isn't within your skill set, then you'll feel that the abilities you're using aren't effective and you won't get the fun rush of using the character you like to their fullest extent. And picking a trainer you didn't think of immediately can be fun. Try to think really hard about a trainer concept before choosing one.
Trainers, in general, shouldn't be about a laundry list of abilities, but about radically expanding your focus and skills.
For example: Mika Izinsky in ITM VII had the excellent idea of branching out somewhat from merely doing Yu-Gi-Oh summoning to exploiting her skills another way. She specialized by having Pegasus training to create new cards and Yusei Fudo to acquire some more utility, while diversifying with Ivy and Yomiko.
The problem was that her core summoning and control game wasn't complete because her effects relied on instant death. She needed advantages and trainers that would fulfill that role better and give her summons more robustness. Two Yu-Gi-Oh trainers were too specialized, while Ivy and Yomiko as a combination were too similar.
Always think: While this may be a cool idea, can I actually sell it? If you're a summoner, you often do have turns free, but if you do, shouldn't those turns be used leveraging the power of your summons rather than doing something completely different?
DPR
(Meaning "damage per round", also known sometimes as "damage per second", "deeps", "damage dealing", etc. Used to describe characters whose primary role for the team is damage, Striking, etc.)
My number one rule for DPR:
DPR sucks. Dominant DPR rules.
Any hack can build someone with lots of super damaging abilities, yo.
A slightly better hack can optimize choices to get early access to game-breaking damage.
A real DPR player will forsake damage to make sure that damage can't be stopped.
To use an analogy from D&D, what's more useful: 8D6 bonus sneak dice damage to your attacks as long as you have combat advantage which enemies won't give you and which you have no way of getting, and as long as the foe isn't a construct, robot, building, ooze, slime, undead, vampire, wearing fortified armor, has the Shift Internal Organs skill, is Elder Toguro, has no organ systems, has redundant organ systems, and isn't intangible or ethereal....
Or 5D6 bonus sneak dice damage that you always get because you always have opponents flatfooted or surrounded and will hurt virtually any opponent?
Clearly the former, right?
I define "dominant DPR" as "damage per round that cannot be easily shut down, stopped, blocked or impeded in any way".
You do clearly need to get your basic DPR utilities. Sneak attack damage. Critical multipliers. Backstab damage. Good gear. And so on. You need to be able to do enough damage that you fulfill your role. How much this is, and how much dominance you need to add, varies depending on your average encounters, your group makeup, the quality of your tank(s), buffers and healers. Again: Your mage will probably want Fira, Thundara and Blizzara, just so they can make sure they can hurt every opponent.
But once you have them, stop.
Even the example I gave above is a sign of what I mean. If you
have Fira already, taking Firaga just means you do more damage.
You are just as useless if you are fighting a fire immune foe.
Taking Blizzara doubles your elemental damage choices.
In particular, the elements of dominant DPR are:
1. Uninterruptibility. Your DPR is useless if you are stunned, snared, too far away from the target because of knockback or enemy terrain control, rooted, mesmerized, sleeped, feared, etc. You need basic utilities to make sure these things happen to you less or don't happen at all.
In HoN and DotA, DPS classes almost always take the Shrunken Head or the Black King Bar. These items grant temporary magic immunity. Almost nothing in the game is a physical damage stun or disable. Without being disabled the moment they appear, DPS classes become very dangerous, especially if they have enough vampiric or built-in mitigation to survive through the remaining damage.
2. Survivability. Just like you are useless if you can be stunned, you are useless if you are dead. DPR and healers always get focus fired before tanks. If someone is hitting me for 1000 damage per hit, I'll hit them over the 100 damage guy any day.
This becomes especially true if it takes ten times as long to kill the 100 damage guy. The difference between the two in terms of my desire to hit them is a hundred fold.
Think about some of the classic DPS classes. Sorcerers and wizards not only blast things, but place barriers, make themselves invisible, hide behind walls they create, have summons attack for them and distract enemies, and buff themselves with Protect and Shell. Rogues can stealth. Hunters can feign death. Warriors and heavy hitters usually have heavy armor to go along with their heavy weapons. Almost every classic DPR class has something to keep them alive.
Notice that if you have enough of #1, #2 becomes a lot easier. You only need a little bit of lifesteal to survive if you can escape damage. You can be a lot squishier if you can turn invisible. Passive resistance is hard to come by, active resistance not so much.
3. Initiators and mobility. You need to make sure that you not only can do damage if you do hit, but that you're always hitting them. Melee classes need leaps, blinks, charges, and ranged options. Mages and ranged classes need enough range to hit the targets they need to, positioning, preparation, stealth or telepoertation so they won't be outmanuevered nearby, and so forth.
4. Effects and guaranteed damage. 1000 damage that can be easily blocked, dodged, deflected, mitigated, or reflected is useless. 500 damage that can't be isn't.
Similarly, if you can stunlock a target, it doesn't matter how little damage you can do.
Don't just look for high damage. Look for high damage that establishes dominance. Magic Missile is an amazing spell because it is undodgable and can't be saved against. You want abilities that will penetrate armor, stymie dodging and running, harm the invisible and the intangible, stun and snare so that opponents can't get away to heal, prevent healing and regeneration so you can deal with enemies like Heath or Toguro. Ultima is a better spell than Forsaken despite lower base damage because it is unresistable.
Though it's easy to design a character when you have absorption and power acceleration abilities, and therefore more ability slots (itself a key part of optimization) Buu Arek indicated how effective this strategy could be. Base to the archetypes of Buu and Magi, I had plenty of damage capacity. But aside from regeneration, resistance and barriers, my damage absorption was sub-par. So I sought out abilities in particular that would raise my stealth, my damage reduction, and so forth. I wanted to make sure I was effectively uninterruptable.
Between God Hand, Gravekeeper's Cloak, summons, mitigation, Permanent Invisibility, and stealth, I had what I needed.
Now, this character does indicate the dynamic nature of optimization. Now that my ability set had expanded by tenfold, my formerly substantial spell and ability acceleration was not up to the task. I had to add clones, Shantotto's chainspelling, X-Magic, Multicast and other effects to truly be able to use my abilities to their fullest.
Healer Optimization
Again, any hack can make a healer that heals a lot. Soraka's Wish, Curaja, Tenseiga, Orihime's barriers, Renew, Tranquility, Chain Heal... the list goes on and on.
Generally, the principles of healer optimization are
1. Be as little of a healer as possible. Healing is a crucial part of a team, but in terms of the essentials, they are behind DPR and tanks. A whole team of DPR can win. A whole team of tanks can win slowly. A whole team of healers will struggle even as they remain at full health. A whole team of buffers will struggle even more.
Essentially, once you've gotten the most healing you need, try to make sure you can also do other things, if not as effectively. Shamans, druids and paladins are perfectly capable of damage and tanking, and the former two of summoning and therefore battlefield control. Medics can get Team Fortress II
This is a tip for advanced players. If you find that your healing is falling behind, don't bother. A bad healer who's okay DPR will never be as beloved or essential as a great healer.
2. Make sure you can heal anything. Just like dominant DPS needs to be able to damage anything, you need to be able to heal organics and mechanicals, heal death, heal disease, poison and cures, or have powerful enough HoTs to keep people alive. Trainers can be used to fill in the gaps. If you can't heal it, then buffs, barriers and counterspells should keep it from ever happening.
3. The same principles as for dominant DPS. Healers get shut down just as much as DPS, so make sure that you can't be shut down by stuns and disables, can survive if the tank fails, etc.
Things you'll want to have some contrivance to heal:
[/li][li]Battle death: Like in Final Fantasy, the ability to heal someone knocked out, bleeding to death, etc. but not actually dead.
[/li][li]Curses: Some curses are tenacious and won't be wiped by Esuna.
[/li][li]Level drain: While it's rare, it does happen.
[/li][li]Poison: Antidote sometimes works, but sometimes you need a nice dedicated heal.
[/li][li]True death: True resurrection is nice.
Here are some of the most dominant healer trainers I have found. This, like the rest, is not an exhaustive list. Suggestions are welcome.
[/li][li]Aeris: Mostly for Great Gospel.
[/li][li]Banon: A free, spammable all-party heal? Awesome.
[/li][li]Dr. Faust: From what we can see, Dr. Faust basically uses kung fu acupuncture to heal you mentally and physically in a fight.
[/li][li]Elixir: Biokinesis is immensely amazing. It's not so good against pure HP damage that just sort of happens, but it's very good at keeping organics topped off.
[/li][li]Genkai [or Yusuke]: Spirit Wave is ranged, incredibly dominant healing that can seemingly be done AoE, to the self at will, and is also like distance psychic surgery.
[/li][li]Giorno Giovanna: A creepy healing, Gold Experience Requiem also allows reversal of damage.
[/li][li]Hanada Yamataro: Arguably even better than his boss, Retsu. Retsu's healing is obviously stronger, but so far in Bleach there's not unique healing spells. Hanada heals the same way, and kido healing is amazing because it heals MP then uses their MP to heals their HP, basically. He also has a classic Cure Blade setup, except his builds up to do an amassed attack.
[/li][li]Josuke Joestar: Josuke has a pretty nasty full restoration ability built in.
[/li][li]Kurama: Kurama's in-combat healing is not so good, but he has nasty plants to protect him while he does it. More importantly, his out of combat healing is insanely good.
[/li][li]Leo Wyatt: Leo's a classic heal bitch, a rare example of a male one. Whitelighters have really versatile lay-on-hands healing.
[/li][li]Martyr: He has a heal that brings two people up to the higher of the two HPs. He also teaches you to operate at low HP, which is great if you want to heal by self-harming.
[/li][li]Minwu: He has darn near every White Magic spell, Ultima, and sword magic.
[/li][li]Orihime: This one is obvious. She's able to heal pretty much anything besides bona fide death. While the healing is a little slow (at least in Bleach), it also combines with nasty barrier and attack options.
[/li][li]Recca: Immortal healing flame. 'Nuff said.
[/li][li]Retsu Unohana: Soul Society's best healer. From what we've seen, what distinguishes her is a healing pet, which is pretty savage as a shikai.
[/li][li]Sesshoumaru: Yeah, sadly enough, Tenseiga is ridiculously good at healing. It's a bit like , except it can resurrect from the dead and as anti-demon and ghost properties, but doesn't have the building blast.
[/li][li]Tachibana: Tachibana's Eternity Eight is possibly the best of the Alters for utility purposes. They can be paired into weapons and shields, be used to heal, mind-control, levitate people and move them around and out of the way of harm (while healing them), and almost anything else you can imagine. It's rare, incredibly good healing DIO.
In addition, here are some of the best healing abilities I've found, aside from those connected to the following trainers.
[/li][li]Abolish Poison (Azerothian): This Druid ability not only purges the poisons you have, but repeatedly purges others.
[/li][li]Grow Senzu Beans: Face it, they're basically Elixirs.
[/li][li]HolyHealing: Element, heals statuses and tons of HP.
[/li][li]Iris: Resurrection, healing and damage.
[/li][li]Restoration (Rifts): This spell is mana expensive, but boy is it worth it. It's sad that a full heal is a footnote for this ability, but it also purges almost any status effect, including long-term and otherwise irreversible curses. It also flushes out symbiotes and basically fixes any bad thing happening to a character.
[/li][li]Saints: Resurrection, healing and damage.
What do we mean when we say character optimization?
Simply, we mean making the character better.
Okay, maybe not "better". After all, while a character optimized for roleplaying purposes should have a compelling back story, interesting behaviors and quirks, and feel realistic in their portrayal and demeanor, this isn't what optimization is.
Rather, optimization is making a character better within the construct of the game world. It's about managing specialization versus diversification, optimizing numbers, attempting to do some mathematical tricks, considering party roles. It's about making the character better at what they do.
Put this way, it doesn't sound so bad. The problem can come when multiple people on a team either have different levels of skill at optimizing their characters, or when character choices are imbalanced vis-a-vis each other so that different archetypes or character classes or potential races are just not as useful as each other. In D&D, caster classes almost always have an edge. However, character optimization then performs a different function: It exposes mistaken assumptions or balance within the game system itself.
That having been said, a world without optimization would be even worse. A healer could do as much damage as a warrior, or a warrior heal as well as a healer. Bards would take level adjustments, slowing their character growth, to reduce charisma. No character could be effective, nor could any enemy. Everyone would be a random hodgepodge of unrelated, weak and boring abilities, hoping vainly for the dice to win the battle for them.
Optimization is a good thing. It lets players get the rush of defeating difficult enemies, allows a team to work together and create effective combinations, and lets the players write the story.
This article is not only useful for ITM optimization in ITM's present iterations, but its logic applies to dozens of roleplaying games. That having been said, this article is assuming the general system of ITM that has been tinkered with since ITM V, and not so much prior iterations. It is thus current as of 10/19/2010.
Caveats About Optimization
Optimization of characters is a theoretical exercise that has two aims.
1) To improve a character's core roles; to keep up with the power, level and experience growth of a campaign; to decide among competing alternatives, as in how to spend an ability choice, gear choice or trainer choice
2) to create builds that are as utterly powerful as possible, with no regard for game balance (aside from not using abilities that are
banned)
The first is virtually entirely good. In fact, a campaign that didn't
have it would be terrible. Imagine a D&D campaign where everyone chose one level of Fighter, then one level of Wizard, then one level of Druid, then one level of Cleric, then one level of Soulblade, and so on and so forth. The characters would be identical, and identically bad. The GM would have to throw much lower CR encounters at the party and couldn't use established modules that expect that characters have the basic skills they need at their level. There would be no diversity, and the character options would be boring, since the interesting and diverse abilities of each class pays off later on in the build. It would be bland and unexciting, at least as far as combat, skill checks, dungeoneering and exploration went.
The second is an exercise to try to benefit the first. It is not
designed to produce builds that would be fun and playable in a
long-term campaign. It is fun for a few sessions to nuke everything in your way with hundreds of millions of caster levels, or kill entire pantheons, but this will undoubtedly get boring for the optimized character's player because there will be no challenge (the GM might as well not be there since the player knows that they'll win) and will get boring for everyone else. Even if everyone is highly optimized, if encounters can't be difficult enough to provide real challenge, it'll come down to initiative checks to see who wipes the entire enemy party first.
Learning to push the parameters of what is possible to their furthest extremes has two objectives. First: Lesser versions of the broken build can often be made to be very fun, and entirely playable. One doesn't need to push God Hand to the limits where it confers mathematical unkillability: It can be used to make a player into a behemoth, stoppable but requiring some smart maneuvering to kill. And while a Cleric who has made extremely optimized choices for what to do with their turning slots can be boring, picking a few of these Feats makes a Cleric into a much more interesting and very fun holy cannon.
Second: Exposing weaknesses in the underlying game design can be used to plug holes in that design. In fact, the modern shape of ITM is owed in no small part to optimized builds that made it necessary to embrace Archetypes, have a set-down Affinity system, control what trainers could grant, etc.
This guide will be doing both. It does so under the following assumption:
A campaign is a collaborative enterprise. Players and GMs should coordinate and compromise as to desired power levels and levels of optimization in a campaign.
If you are playing any ITM-like game (ITM, MA, FoN, etc.), these principles can guide design, but each of these campaigns has different player expectations and a different culture. Respecting those cultures is essential for everyone getting along and having a good time.
At game creation, have everyone discuss what they'd like to see from the campaign. These discussions should bear in mind different levels of player skill, different objectives, etc. Not all players have the same skill, and they may not want to compete with an optimization arms race, or may want that arms race to be controlled for the benefit of the weaker players. This is fine: It's like playing golf just for fun without a par, or giving a handicap to weaker players. But this should be stated and agreed to by stronger players. Bear in mind who is newer and who is older to the campaign. Campaigns should make sure they are accessible to and fun for new players, but it is also unfair to ask older players to change their playstyle because of relative
newcomers.
In addition, different people want different things out of the game. Some want very high-level combat with incredibly sophisticated fights: A combination of Dragon Ball Z, Star Trek, Rifts and Pun-Pun. Others want mid-level or low-level combat. These expectations need to be laid out with compromise between all parties.
Once the campaign is in mid-swing, if people want changes, they should discuss respectfully with everyone. Joining a campaign means a social compact where people agree to play by the rules and respect everyone else, but the campaign is also about having fun.
The GM is not ancillary to this discussion. In some ideal world,
it might be a good thing to have "blank" GMs capable of running any campaign from Toon to Rifts flawlessly and exactly to the median of players expectations. But real GMs are not like this and cannot try to be. The GM has a skill set and a preferred type of game they can run. They need to be consulted, since, as a practical matter, the GM's ability or inability to run the campaign is the cornerstone and the lynchpin of everyone's fun.
The implications for this guide should be clear. If you're in a game
where the present equilibrium of power is roughly equal and at a
particular level, and most people are enjoying it, it is not okay to unilaterally try to trash that equilibrium without discussing with others, at least the GM. It becomes a surprise attack: Players find that, suddenly, one person has ''forced ''the campaign down a different direction.
Apply the lessons of this guide to keep your character at an
appropriate power level, and no further.
That having been said: There is some degree of competition in
roleplaying games, even when there is also heavy collaboration.
Collaboration is fun, and most builds offered here assume other
players are there to make sure you don't have to do everything, but people will compete. If you're on the losing end of a fair
competition, and haven't broached a discussion of changing the game, you may not be having as much fun, but it is no more fair to demand others change than it is to demand that the bank give losing players interest-free loans in Monopoly in the middle of the game. Express what you need to make the campaign fun. But if you are willing to accept a set of rules, then find that you are being beaten out in those rules, it is unfair to complain.
Glossary:
Glossary
Azerothian Polymorph-like: Any effect that makes the target helpless, usually transforming them into a different shape, and usually uncontrollable, also usually slowing their speed, but cannot be attacked.
Circle: Any effect that removes the target from the battle entirely, as if they were (temporarily) wiped out of existence.
Mesmerize: Any effect that stops the target from acting but has harmful consequences if someone attacks it.
Knockback [or Push]: Any attack or ability that has the effect of knocking back the enemy or pushing them away from the target. The nice thing about knockbacks is that they can be used to position the target, throw them down cliffs and so on, and also have a sort of soft-stun effect since too much knockback disorients and makes it very hard to target abilities.
Remove [or Cyclone[style]: An effect that temporarily makes the target untargetable and
Root: Any effect that stops the target from moving but does not prevent them from acting.
Slow: Any effect that slows the target. This can reduce their number of attacks or their attack rate (slightly different), movement speed, initiative or number of turns they get.
Snare: Slightly non-intuitively, a snare effect is something that reduces the target's movement speed.
Stacking: An effect that is not interfered with by another effect in question, and therefore can be thought of as being on the same pile as it. For example: "Damage reduction stacks with armor class for the purpose of damage mitigation". The reason this is true is obvious. Armor class works based on their strike roll: They miss or they don't. Damage reduction works off the damage done. In total, someone with higher AC and higher damage reduction takes less damage.
Stacking is not a binary, on-off thing, at least in the above
formulation. If someone misses your 60 AC character every time they hit, damage reduction is playing no role. Different effects often work differently and may compete for each other. Always consider: Does raising this preclude the real necessity for the other option?
Not everything stacks. In DotA, orb effects do not stack. If I pick
Mask of Madness for the vampiric and the attack speed increase, I
cannot also choose Stygian Desolator and gets its reduced armor
effect, because it is also an orb effect. Figuring out what effects
stack and what don't, and how well they stack, is core to
optimization.
To stack is to pick effects or upgrades that stack with each
other. For example: In DotA, if I play Leoric, I can buy Mask of
Madness and Vladmir's Offering and use his innate Vampiric Aura, and this is called "stacking lifesteal".
To get stacked, then, is to get enough stacking effects, to
specialize deeply enough into a mechanic, that one is very powerful. "I'm so stacked right now, I have more than 100% evasion" is technically accurate since presumably the character stacked many evasion mechanics to get to that point. "I'm so stacked right now, I can heal, damage and tank" is ''not ''technically accurate because those are different mechanics.
Opportunity Cost
You cannot be an optimizer unless you understand the idea of opportunity cost.
Opportunity cost is defined as "the cost of choosing a particular alternative or making a particular decision, as measured by the benefits of the other alternatives".
Every resource you have, whether it be an ability choice, trainer choice, gear slot, gold coin for gear, Element, Materia, Summon, Jade, or whatever, is (in a game where resources are finite and any of this discussion even matters) a resouce that could be put to any number of ends. You, like Michaelangelo, chisel your unique character out of the infinite possibility space. If you want the statue to look good, you better make careful choices.
Opportunity cost is why you have specialization. If you're a DPR character and you acquire a single healing move, you have to ask, "When will I ever use this? If the main healer is dead, shouldn't I be focusing on resurrecting him or retreating rather than trying to pick up the slack? Is this clutch move I might need better than the additional DPR utility I will always use?" Specialization occurs because, more often than not, the answer to those kind of questions is "I better just get the ability within my present role".
I'll get more into specialization versus diversification in a moment, and mention the idea of building your character outwards from a solid foundation, but the biggest truth of opportunity cost is something many players fail to realize:
An ounce of ability acceleration is worth a pound of ability.
Any new ability you choose is essentially "competing" against every other ability you've acquired.
In Tower ITM, there were dozens of moves I used rarely if ever. As a wizard and caster type, that's less of a problem than in most cases, but it is still a serious issue. Every ability choice I made in Tower ITM that wasn't being used was, potentially, a wasted slot compared to something that could be used.
It is important to have multiple options, as I will get into. Some damage or healing combos require several moves to work, and you probably want more than one. Casters should take damage or effects from as many elements or types as possible to be able to deal with multiple opponents.
But if you can get a summon which can do part of your job for you, or a chainspell to get more abilities off, or a clone ability to do more, that is far, far more useful than any new ability.
Always think: Can I increase the amount of things I am effectively doing per turn? If you get an ability that heals while damages, you're performing two roles. If you have a pet, you are getting two turns to do something. If you summon something, you lose one turn at first but immediately get your action refunded if the fight continues one more round, and your investment continues to pay off afterwards. If you summon something out of battle, your reward on investment is immediate.
It's not just turns or pets or chainspelling that's going to be a problem, either. If you're getting stunned, you're losing out on every ability you have. Picking one ability to prevent you from being stunned is then worth the twenty abilities you're not able to use. If you run out of energy, then getting a mana regeneration, energy restore, or energy drain is worth every ability that you're able to cast thanks to those effects.
Anyone who has played Magic: the Gathering or any other reasonably-good CCG knows what I'm talking about. There are many cards that look great that really don't have much utility because they crowd out another card that's good. Think about your ITM character like a deck: All cruft, all fat, should be cut.
Archetype Selection:
Possibly the most important part of modern ITM, archetype selection determines what your character is. We will get into exact tricks, but in essence, between trainers, gear, etc., any build can be tolerable. What is important is to carefully select what you want to do for the party or in the game, how you want to approach the game.
There are roughly two ways to pick archetypes.
The first is to come at it from the role perspective: What do I want to do for the party? However, there is the rub here: Unless your role for the party is incredibly specific, you will find there are dozens of ways to approach fulfilling a role. "I want to do damage" is not specific. "I want to do damage with fire" isn't even that specific. "I want to focus on DoTs and stuns with fire" is a little more so, though there still are dozens of builds with that. "I want to be a healer with fire" is getting better.
Thus, if you want to approach the matter from the perspective of a role design, you have to play Twenty Questions, whittling down the size of the archetypes that fill the role until you find one that suits you. Some questions you can ask:
- What sort of theme do I want? Do I want a dark, morbid theme, a light theme, a badass theme, a classic superhero feel, etc.? Necromancers, Wizards and Ludicrous Mages can all perform similar roles in the party, but they do so with very different motifs and feels. Wolverine and Superman are both comic book characters, but with incredibly different timbres.
- Do I want to be more useful against individual targets or against multiple ones? This applies to healing, tanking, buffing, and damage.
- Do I want to be better at killing bosses or killing mobs? Both are important, and while the former is more glamorous, the latter is more of the encounters you are likely to have.
- Do I want a technological theme? A psychic one? A valor one? Ki? Magic? A technological healer could be a Team Fortress Medic or a doctor, a Valor healer a combat medic or combat acupuncturist, a Ki healer a Feng Shui or Chi Gung or reiki healer, a magic healer a White Mage and a psychic healer a Earthbound character or Psi-Healer.
- Am I more subtle with my approach or more direct? A ninja or assassin and a fighter may both do physical damage, but with a very different approach.
- Do I want to be in the center of the spotlight or do I prefer to support from the sidelines?
- Do I want to very showy and flashy? Ultima and a mentalic attack can be equally devastating, but the former glows pretty.
Answer enough questions in this vein and you'll determine what you want for a party. Roles that a party can use include:
- Damage over time (DoTs)
- Instant killing
- Mover (someone who moves enemies, pushing or pulling or teleporting them)
- Snarer/rooter (someone who slows enemies or puts them in place but doesn't stop them from attacking
- Single-target clutch healer
- Stunner (someone who stops enemies from attacking)
- Summoner (either smaller, more powerful summons or mob hordes)
- Tank
And numerous others.
The other way is to pick your archetype or archetypes and then decide how to build them. Most archetypes have multiple elements. High Magus has casting and Automaton piloting/construction, and even among casting they can be oriented like any caster can to be more illusionist/more stun-oriented/more buffing/more healing/etc. Shamans have melee DPS, tanking, healing, and spell DPS; they have animal and plant, elemental and holy elements; etc. Unless you plan on getting all the possible abilities within your class, any one element you choose to maximize is another you choose not to explore.
Races Suck:
I will often use hyperbole to expand the mind. Races do not suck.
But they're not what they're cracked up to be.
Specifically:
The value of a Race choice must have the value of any other Class subtracted from it.
See where opportunity cost comes in?
A Race can be replaced by a Class if the Race is filled in as human. Two Class combinations are obviously eminently powerful. Druid Monks who focus on wildshaping can do gamebreaking damage. Monk Adepts are natural choices to become Benders and get access to tremendous magic, great HP and mitigation that is amazing because it was designed for low HP (more than that later), stat shifting and ability changes in the midst of battle, and so on. So a Race has to be measured against that possibility.
Some Classes just don't really pair well with other Classes. I can't think of one as of writing this article, but it's certainly
hypothetically true. But many of these Classes are sub-optimal choices anyways, for precisely the same reason.
Where a Race can come in handy is when the race amplifies the archetype while expanding it.
A Kryptonian Barbarian is a good example. Barbarians are tough. Kryptonians are tough. The two have different, stacking kinds of mitigation. Complementary synergy. Kryptonians are very endurant but tend to suck at aggro management. Barbarians fill that in. Kryptonian Super Strength multiplied by Barbarian weapon skill means immense damage. Barbarians often have bad ranged choices. Heat vision and flight solves that problem.
But even this combination has clear problems. Kryptonite weakens a Kryptonian, effectively eliminating one half of the Archetype. A Barbarian has some utilities against this, but it is rare to find a class with such a severe weakness. While it is all Valor-focused, it has the disadvantage that its variety of attack types is fairly limited.
Buu Magi, meanwhile, had the benefit that the two similar archetypes synergized incredibly well. Both specialized in flight, absorption, energy attacks, ability stealing and growth, regeneration, hand to hand combat, and magic, with additional healing utility. Each had different mechanisms and styles for all of the above. Both used Magic to accomplish their primary mechanics, and could leverage Magic to almost any part of the build.
But Buu Magi was not perfect either. The high overlap meant that any weaknesses of one would be replicated by the other. The reason Arek became so unstoppable in ITM VII was primarily due to trainer choices to branch out the archetype and power absorption.
In general, a Race's utility is directly proportional to, and largely determined by, how many abilities it has.
Seeing why is easy. Any good Class has a wide variety of ability choices. A Race that has a similar number of ability choices, or similar quality of abilities, is an excellent choice. A Race that doesn't must have better abilities pound for pound or sufficient attribute bonuses to offset, and since attributes often cap or can be accelerated by abilities...
Buu had a huge variety of skills built into the archetype.
Similarly, Demon is an excellent choice since it is the demon-ness of many demons that gives them their abilities.
General Principles
Redundancy is bad. If you already have a powerful initiating attack move, why get a second? You won't use both.
Redundancy can be good. Don't get identical mechanics, but get stacking mechanics. If you have one ability that reduces damage by 20%, then another that reduces it by a flat sum afterwards, the two are greater than their whole.
Effects are better than numbers. I'd rather be able to hit for 80 damage with a chance to stun than 120 damage that performs no other role. Look for abilities that perform multiple roles so you can save on ability choices and time in fights.
Ideally, every ability you have should synergize with every other ability you have flawlessly. You shouldn't be able to heal AND DPR: The one should complement the other.
Research Your Archetype and Think About It Broadly
Generally, we choose an archetype because we think of one or two sources we like for it. We like Shaman King, so we roll Shaman. We like Cyber-Knights, so we roll Knight. We like No More Heroes, so we roll Assassin.
But once you do that, and establish the core of the character you want, Google up all the things that archetype is in and talk to people about things they know about.
A Shaman King shaman can have a powerful Overspirit and synergy with it. But a Shaman is a far broader archetype. Shamans have been elements of mythology just as they've been elements of culture and tradition for millenia. Shamans can do long-distance hexes, communion with the spirits to discover information, and direct healing. Rifts Shamans can transform into totem spirits to become frontline combatants, summon animals and plants, control and heal animals and plants, use powerful healing rituals, learn unbelievably powerful Warlock magic and summon elemental spirits and True Elementals, create gear in the form of fetishes and masks, and even use time, space and gravity magic! WoW Shamans can wear mail, buff allies, summon wolves, see far distances, are powerful healers, enchant their blades with elemental power, and control elementals. Fire Emblem Shamans have had two distinct iterations, one light magic and stave oriented and the other dark magic oriented, with three different promotion paths!
Someone who just approached the concept from one or the other of the above approaches would have been locked into a far less versatile idea. But the same mechanisms let Shaman do almost any role. They can massively increase their power with Overspirits, have their own power type (furyoku), summon, do elemental damage, do physical damage, get good gear, wield almost anything...
Similarly, the idea of a Knight is core to both Japanese and English cultures. While Samurai are not Knights for the purposes of ITM, a Knight is still tremendously versatile. We have the treatment of Arthur and Lancelot from FSN, Cyber-Knights with their psychic powers and cybernetics, Mystic Knights with their magic and psychic development and control over raw magical energy, Cosmo-Knights with their archetypal yet purely "technological" power source, the Knights of Wormwood with multiple approaches including the use of high technology and motorcycles for mounts...
And in Maple Story, Knights have development paths that emphasize spirit summoning, archery, flame magic, stealth and ninjutsu, and berserker skills! Between these choices, Knights can be Magic, Tech, Ki, Psi or Valor. They can be mounted combatants or unmounted. They can wield modern or ancient weapons, swords or maces, dual-wield or go sword and board (or even sword and board for every "hand" slot!)
Now, of course, we're all here to have fun. If you like to maximize a particular sub-section of your Archetype, go ahead. But if you intend to do that, it may be best to specialize in that sub-section to get faster access.
This optimization is key because it can compensate for weaknesses that might be apparent in one version of the archetype. Monks in D&D have middle-of-the-road HP: They need high Con to get HP, high Wis to get armor, and good armor and defense gear and optimization to survive. Monks in Final Fantasy get great HP growth, HP +30%, counters that are not available to D&D Monks due to a different system, self-healing and powerful healing of others, greater range... Since the D&D Monk has mechanisms to keep alive even without low HP, and the FF Monk has great HP growth, their combination is devastating.
Game Stage
Any game of ITM, or roleplaying game in general, should have different stages of experience and power. We can think of this as the beginning, middle and end game. Different archetypes often have different power levels at various game points. For example: Fighters usually start out stronger than wizards, but lose out over time.
Unfortunately, this is bad game design. It means that the wizards feel less useful at first and the fighters feel less useful at the end of the game. It gives people perverse incentives: Wizards to accelerate through content to "the good stuff", fighters to keep things back in the low levels.
However, even a perfectly balanced game would see archetypes change over time. Take heroes like Fiddlesticks, Dark Seer or Voodoo Jester. These "early game heroes" excel at the early game but also provide key team support late game. Their role in the party changes as the level of power increases.
Consider how your archetypes change in power over time. Is your design frontloaded, middle-loaded or backloaded?
A frontloaded design might be something like a mecha pilot, dragon rider or supersoldier class. Their core elements are very powerful by definition and by scale, so they have to be achieved early. But, if the game is balanced, they will begin to trail off late game. In Rifts, Glitter Boys are highly dominant at level 1, but a Warlock at level 8 can kill or immobilize a Glitter Boy in one turn!
Middle-loaded designs are hard to define, but certainly do exist. Some superheroic archetypes, for example, don't start out with all their abilities, so they're not frontloaded, but they miss out on high power abilities later on so they are not backloaded either.
A backloaded design will be something like a caster. In the beginning of the game, their stats, ability selection and gear aren't sufficient to make them very useful. But by the end of the game, the raw power they have at their disposal and the sheer complexity of their abilities are immense.
Any archetype build can be made, with GM cooperation, to be useful at the beginning, middle and end. But it requires a little work. Ask yourself these three questions:
1. Are any of the abilities I consider core to what I'm doing too powerful to be meaningfully learned at the beginning? Does this build need a trainer to really take off? Will I need medium gear to pull it off? If so, then you're too frontloaded. Consider what low-level abilities and gear you can use to be of assistance to your party.
Remember that relatively humble abilities can be incredibly useful early on. In D&D, Entangle is a very early spell for Rangers, but it has a lot of utility. Magic Missile can be great in certain situations. Color Spray is very helpful.
2. Once I hit the mid game, do I have a robust set of ideas? Does my build require too many simultaneous specializations to be effective, so much so that I won't be able to sell them with limited abilities? Does my archetype change, and if so, am I being useful to the team?
Generally, problems don't hit too hard here, but I will caution you against overconfidence. Once you have the makings of a full ability set, it's tempting to grab another. Don't. Make sure before you start to leave a particular role that you have all the things necessary to fulfill that role. If you're a healer, make sure you have all of your status effect heals, your resurrections, your chain and AoE heals. Mid-game progression relies on everyone doing their job better than early game, not as well or slightly worse.
3. In the end-game, what is truly powerful about my build? Do I sort of trail off with trainer ideas? Do I undergo another transformation?
At the end game, there is no excuse not to have a complete ability set for your primary function. You should have a complete build that can do immense effects, hopefully qualitative and variable ones.
In particular, make sure that what you think is powerful actually is. Can it smash planets? If not, then make sure it can kill the planet-smashers.
Raw Power Sucks
DBZ is fun. Kamehameha is fun. But remember: Abilities are only as powerful as your sheet can make them. Picking a DBZ archetype won't make you a planet smasher, and even if it did, raw damage, raw speed, raw strength, all are trivially easy to control, limit and punish.
In general, don't think, "How powerful is this move in its continuity?", but rather, "What sort of power do I have to be able to execute this move? Is it highly dominant at this point in the power arc of the game?" Either the move will be reduced in power to an appropriate level or you won't have the ability to cast it.
On Buffs
Buffs are a good thing. You can never have enough of them.
Buffs are useful primarily because you can often set them up out of battle, preserving time within battle. You do enter battle with lower magic, but unless you are sure you are going to exhaust your energy in the fight, it's a non-issue. Further, even if you need every TP you have, it's important to ask: Is a persistent effect that pays off round over round really going to be eclipsed by any individual action I can do in a fight? If I can cast a spell that does 30 damage or buff the main DPR to do 15 more a hit, that buff was worth it if the fight continues on for a mere three rounds.
However, numerical buffs have many problems. They are easy for the GM and the players to forget, as a matter of accounting. They often get eclipsed or fail to scale well. A +5 to Agility is useful if you remember it, but becomes worse per point of Agility you get. A +20% to Agility is more useful and will remain equally so throughout the entire game. A buff that makes it so, when you hit, you have a 20% chance to stun, gives you a new capacity you didn't have before.
Buffs that give qualitative changes tend to be the best. Barriers, for example, don't only add hit points to protect squishy members, they also keep people from being staggered by being hit. Barriers don't feel pain.
Leverage Your Advantages
When diversifying at all, the best and most efficient way is to leverage your existing advantages and turn them to the new arena you want.
Let's say you have a tank. His job is to get hit a lot. He primarily builds mitigation and aggro management, but he finds that he's more than satisfied with his current ability spread. He wants to start doing damage and healing. How could he do so, assuming that the game is set up that he won't be able to equal a specialist without some smart manuevering?
For damage, he could choose abilities that do bonus damage based on max HP, damage taken, the difference between max and current HP, or on his armor. He could design a counter-attack build: Taunt enemies then force them to kill themselves on him. HoN's Legionnaire does this: He Taunts, raising his armor, then uses Counter Helix, a counter-attacking AoE spin, and Blade Mail, an activatable item that returns 100% damage, to whittle enemies down. If he's built right, he has made his opponents pit their DPS against his tankiness, and he will most likely win. Or he could go the direction of Armadon: An attack or effect that does building damage over time. This has the benefit not only of letting him do damage, but also of making him a better tank, as enemies will want to shut him down. He could have flat AoE damage, like Zephyr or Paladins with offensive auras do.
Or let's say you have a DPR character. She does immense melee damage. If she wants to heal, she should get an item like a Cure Rod, Tenseiga, a Cure Blade, Hanataro's shikai, or something that makes her do healing instead of damage. She is now a good healer because she is good DPR, not in spite of it. If she wants to tank, she just needs sufficient vampiric that her already high attack speed and damage will let her survive the enemies' hits.
Notice how the above strategies do not involve building an entire suite of abilities. One or two abilities for each strategy, or one or two pieces of gear, are enough to radically expand the character's role.
This is one of the reasons trainers must be chosen so carefully. With the right choice, they can expand a character's versatility and efficacy tremendously. A tank that can also do immense damage is performing his primary role better and a secondary one well. A DPR that could heal or tank becomes amazingly useful as tanks or healers fall or become neutralized.
One advantage of doing this is psychological. A character who is in fact high DPR can appear to be a good healer. Enemies will then neutralize her healing, only to find that that isn't what she specializes in whatsoever.
Trainer Choices
Don't pick a trainer just because you like them! This might sound like the advice of a "Stop Having Fun Guy" or a srzbzns advocate, but picking a trainer that you happen to like and shoehorning them into your build is not only bad design, but is ultimately less fun than you'd imagine. If you take a trainer that isn't within your skill set, then you'll feel that the abilities you're using aren't effective and you won't get the fun rush of using the character you like to their fullest extent. And picking a trainer you didn't think of immediately can be fun. Try to think really hard about a trainer concept before choosing one.
Trainers, in general, shouldn't be about a laundry list of abilities, but about radically expanding your focus and skills.
For example: Mika Izinsky in ITM VII had the excellent idea of branching out somewhat from merely doing Yu-Gi-Oh summoning to exploiting her skills another way. She specialized by having Pegasus training to create new cards and Yusei Fudo to acquire some more utility, while diversifying with Ivy and Yomiko.
The problem was that her core summoning and control game wasn't complete because her effects relied on instant death. She needed advantages and trainers that would fulfill that role better and give her summons more robustness. Two Yu-Gi-Oh trainers were too specialized, while Ivy and Yomiko as a combination were too similar.
Always think: While this may be a cool idea, can I actually sell it? If you're a summoner, you often do have turns free, but if you do, shouldn't those turns be used leveraging the power of your summons rather than doing something completely different?
DPR
(Meaning "damage per round", also known sometimes as "damage per second", "deeps", "damage dealing", etc. Used to describe characters whose primary role for the team is damage, Striking, etc.)
My number one rule for DPR:
DPR sucks. Dominant DPR rules.
Any hack can build someone with lots of super damaging abilities, yo.
A slightly better hack can optimize choices to get early access to game-breaking damage.
A real DPR player will forsake damage to make sure that damage can't be stopped.
To use an analogy from D&D, what's more useful: 8D6 bonus sneak dice damage to your attacks as long as you have combat advantage which enemies won't give you and which you have no way of getting, and as long as the foe isn't a construct, robot, building, ooze, slime, undead, vampire, wearing fortified armor, has the Shift Internal Organs skill, is Elder Toguro, has no organ systems, has redundant organ systems, and isn't intangible or ethereal....
Or 5D6 bonus sneak dice damage that you always get because you always have opponents flatfooted or surrounded and will hurt virtually any opponent?
Clearly the former, right?
I define "dominant DPR" as "damage per round that cannot be easily shut down, stopped, blocked or impeded in any way".
You do clearly need to get your basic DPR utilities. Sneak attack damage. Critical multipliers. Backstab damage. Good gear. And so on. You need to be able to do enough damage that you fulfill your role. How much this is, and how much dominance you need to add, varies depending on your average encounters, your group makeup, the quality of your tank(s), buffers and healers. Again: Your mage will probably want Fira, Thundara and Blizzara, just so they can make sure they can hurt every opponent.
But once you have them, stop.
Even the example I gave above is a sign of what I mean. If you
have Fira already, taking Firaga just means you do more damage.
You are just as useless if you are fighting a fire immune foe.
Taking Blizzara doubles your elemental damage choices.
In particular, the elements of dominant DPR are:
1. Uninterruptibility. Your DPR is useless if you are stunned, snared, too far away from the target because of knockback or enemy terrain control, rooted, mesmerized, sleeped, feared, etc. You need basic utilities to make sure these things happen to you less or don't happen at all.
In HoN and DotA, DPS classes almost always take the Shrunken Head or the Black King Bar. These items grant temporary magic immunity. Almost nothing in the game is a physical damage stun or disable. Without being disabled the moment they appear, DPS classes become very dangerous, especially if they have enough vampiric or built-in mitigation to survive through the remaining damage.
2. Survivability. Just like you are useless if you can be stunned, you are useless if you are dead. DPR and healers always get focus fired before tanks. If someone is hitting me for 1000 damage per hit, I'll hit them over the 100 damage guy any day.
This becomes especially true if it takes ten times as long to kill the 100 damage guy. The difference between the two in terms of my desire to hit them is a hundred fold.
Think about some of the classic DPS classes. Sorcerers and wizards not only blast things, but place barriers, make themselves invisible, hide behind walls they create, have summons attack for them and distract enemies, and buff themselves with Protect and Shell. Rogues can stealth. Hunters can feign death. Warriors and heavy hitters usually have heavy armor to go along with their heavy weapons. Almost every classic DPR class has something to keep them alive.
Notice that if you have enough of #1, #2 becomes a lot easier. You only need a little bit of lifesteal to survive if you can escape damage. You can be a lot squishier if you can turn invisible. Passive resistance is hard to come by, active resistance not so much.
3. Initiators and mobility. You need to make sure that you not only can do damage if you do hit, but that you're always hitting them. Melee classes need leaps, blinks, charges, and ranged options. Mages and ranged classes need enough range to hit the targets they need to, positioning, preparation, stealth or telepoertation so they won't be outmanuevered nearby, and so forth.
4. Effects and guaranteed damage. 1000 damage that can be easily blocked, dodged, deflected, mitigated, or reflected is useless. 500 damage that can't be isn't.
Similarly, if you can stunlock a target, it doesn't matter how little damage you can do.
Don't just look for high damage. Look for high damage that establishes dominance. Magic Missile is an amazing spell because it is undodgable and can't be saved against. You want abilities that will penetrate armor, stymie dodging and running, harm the invisible and the intangible, stun and snare so that opponents can't get away to heal, prevent healing and regeneration so you can deal with enemies like Heath or Toguro. Ultima is a better spell than Forsaken despite lower base damage because it is unresistable.
Though it's easy to design a character when you have absorption and power acceleration abilities, and therefore more ability slots (itself a key part of optimization) Buu Arek indicated how effective this strategy could be. Base to the archetypes of Buu and Magi, I had plenty of damage capacity. But aside from regeneration, resistance and barriers, my damage absorption was sub-par. So I sought out abilities in particular that would raise my stealth, my damage reduction, and so forth. I wanted to make sure I was effectively uninterruptable.
Between God Hand, Gravekeeper's Cloak, summons, mitigation, Permanent Invisibility, and stealth, I had what I needed.
Now, this character does indicate the dynamic nature of optimization. Now that my ability set had expanded by tenfold, my formerly substantial spell and ability acceleration was not up to the task. I had to add clones, Shantotto's chainspelling, X-Magic, Multicast and other effects to truly be able to use my abilities to their fullest.
Healer Optimization
Again, any hack can make a healer that heals a lot. Soraka's Wish, Curaja, Tenseiga, Orihime's barriers, Renew, Tranquility, Chain Heal... the list goes on and on.
Generally, the principles of healer optimization are
1. Be as little of a healer as possible. Healing is a crucial part of a team, but in terms of the essentials, they are behind DPR and tanks. A whole team of DPR can win. A whole team of tanks can win slowly. A whole team of healers will struggle even as they remain at full health. A whole team of buffers will struggle even more.
Essentially, once you've gotten the most healing you need, try to make sure you can also do other things, if not as effectively. Shamans, druids and paladins are perfectly capable of damage and tanking, and the former two of summoning and therefore battlefield control. Medics can get Team Fortress II
This is a tip for advanced players. If you find that your healing is falling behind, don't bother. A bad healer who's okay DPR will never be as beloved or essential as a great healer.
2. Make sure you can heal anything. Just like dominant DPS needs to be able to damage anything, you need to be able to heal organics and mechanicals, heal death, heal disease, poison and cures, or have powerful enough HoTs to keep people alive. Trainers can be used to fill in the gaps. If you can't heal it, then buffs, barriers and counterspells should keep it from ever happening.
3. The same principles as for dominant DPS. Healers get shut down just as much as DPS, so make sure that you can't be shut down by stuns and disables, can survive if the tank fails, etc.
Things you'll want to have some contrivance to heal:
[/li][li]Battle death: Like in Final Fantasy, the ability to heal someone knocked out, bleeding to death, etc. but not actually dead.
[/li][li]Curses: Some curses are tenacious and won't be wiped by Esuna.
[/li][li]Level drain: While it's rare, it does happen.
[/li][li]Poison: Antidote sometimes works, but sometimes you need a nice dedicated heal.
[/li][li]True death: True resurrection is nice.
Here are some of the most dominant healer trainers I have found. This, like the rest, is not an exhaustive list. Suggestions are welcome.
[/li][li]Aeris: Mostly for Great Gospel.
[/li][li]Banon: A free, spammable all-party heal? Awesome.
[/li][li]Dr. Faust: From what we can see, Dr. Faust basically uses kung fu acupuncture to heal you mentally and physically in a fight.
[/li][li]Elixir: Biokinesis is immensely amazing. It's not so good against pure HP damage that just sort of happens, but it's very good at keeping organics topped off.
[/li][li]Genkai [or Yusuke]: Spirit Wave is ranged, incredibly dominant healing that can seemingly be done AoE, to the self at will, and is also like distance psychic surgery.
[/li][li]Giorno Giovanna: A creepy healing, Gold Experience Requiem also allows reversal of damage.
[/li][li]Hanada Yamataro: Arguably even better than his boss, Retsu. Retsu's healing is obviously stronger, but so far in Bleach there's not unique healing spells. Hanada heals the same way, and kido healing is amazing because it heals MP then uses their MP to heals their HP, basically. He also has a classic Cure Blade setup, except his builds up to do an amassed attack.
[/li][li]Josuke Joestar: Josuke has a pretty nasty full restoration ability built in.
[/li][li]Kurama: Kurama's in-combat healing is not so good, but he has nasty plants to protect him while he does it. More importantly, his out of combat healing is insanely good.
[/li][li]Leo Wyatt: Leo's a classic heal bitch, a rare example of a male one. Whitelighters have really versatile lay-on-hands healing.
[/li][li]Martyr: He has a heal that brings two people up to the higher of the two HPs. He also teaches you to operate at low HP, which is great if you want to heal by self-harming.
[/li][li]Minwu: He has darn near every White Magic spell, Ultima, and sword magic.
[/li][li]Orihime: This one is obvious. She's able to heal pretty much anything besides bona fide death. While the healing is a little slow (at least in Bleach), it also combines with nasty barrier and attack options.
[/li][li]Recca: Immortal healing flame. 'Nuff said.
[/li][li]Retsu Unohana: Soul Society's best healer. From what we've seen, what distinguishes her is a healing pet, which is pretty savage as a shikai.
[/li][li]Sesshoumaru: Yeah, sadly enough, Tenseiga is ridiculously good at healing. It's a bit like , except it can resurrect from the dead and as anti-demon and ghost properties, but doesn't have the building blast.
[/li][li]Tachibana: Tachibana's Eternity Eight is possibly the best of the Alters for utility purposes. They can be paired into weapons and shields, be used to heal, mind-control, levitate people and move them around and out of the way of harm (while healing them), and almost anything else you can imagine. It's rare, incredibly good healing DIO.
In addition, here are some of the best healing abilities I've found, aside from those connected to the following trainers.
[/li][li]Abolish Poison (Azerothian): This Druid ability not only purges the poisons you have, but repeatedly purges others.
[/li][li]Grow Senzu Beans: Face it, they're basically Elixirs.
[/li][li]HolyHealing: Element, heals statuses and tons of HP.
[/li][li]Iris: Resurrection, healing and damage.
[/li][li]Restoration (Rifts): This spell is mana expensive, but boy is it worth it. It's sad that a full heal is a footnote for this ability, but it also purges almost any status effect, including long-term and otherwise irreversible curses. It also flushes out symbiotes and basically fixes any bad thing happening to a character.
[/li][li]Saints: Resurrection, healing and damage.