Finally making Snowbuddy viable in bossfights?

[Own]

I think I finally figured out what the problem with Snowbuddy is:

He punishes you for letting him die by locking off a massive chunk of your total EP, crippling you for the rest of the fight by reducing the skills and spells you can cast. Which would be great if he had a ton of HP (or perhaps didn't take damage at all, but instead had 5-10 chunks of HP and lost 1 whenever taking any hit... that would actually make him survive decently vs Gundam Hands / Gundam and Phaseman Bullets) and power to go with it, but as it stands he dies all too easily. Especially in the middle of a bossfight.

When he dies not only are you out the investment of EP into him, but you're out every single skillpoint you put into him. You're at a huge disadvantage with your other skills.

So when he dies, could the EP you invested into him be temporarily refunded? Reviving him could require that you have the necessary Max EP to cast him again, to prevent people letting him die and then supercharging their Cloud or Shadowclone.

 

[GarlicJelly]

He just needs to be tanky enough to not die so easily. His scaling with HP/DEF is really poor which is why he becomes useless pretty quickly. I'm still liking the suggestion that the Snow Buddy has the same DEF as the player has. Maybe the Snow Buddy could receive more HP and DEF depending on the player's level so that he stays at the same strength as the player. If the player is getting easily beaten by the Rabbys, then the Snow Buddy should too. If the player is stronger and easily beats the Rabbys then so should Snow Buddy. Snow Buddy is a little bit like the Mage's version of Shadow Clone so there has to be some way to make Snow Buddy scale better into the later stages of the game.

 

[Own]

No, he really... really needs to not punish the player so severely due to him dying. Making him not die so easily is secondary to 'not completely ruining the player for the rest of the fight by half their EP bar being gone' in my opinion.

Snowbuddy will never contribute enough damage in any bossfight outside of Gigaslime to warrant that severe EP drawback.

 

[GarlicJelly]

If you don't buff Snow Buddy's HP/DEF he will die a lot and he will become another Insect Swarm/Summon Plant spell so he'll lose his identity. I think keeping Snow Buddy alive longer is a better option than just letting the players return their EP when he dies so that they can cast the spell again.

 

[Own]

But you can't cast the spell again when he dies, even with the EP back? He's dead until you revive him manually.

Returning the EP while he's dead on the ground would just give you time to ignore him and fight with full force with your other skills until you actually get a window to revive him. When you stop receiving a direct benefit from a spell, it shouldn't tax your EP anymore until it's active again.

 

[GarlicJelly]

Snow Buddy will still be a useless spell even if you return the EP reservation when he dies. He dies by 2-4 attacks from quite early enemies and he doesn't deal that much damage so he will never be a viable spell unless you can keep him in the fights more. Having a Snow Buddy that runs in and hits 3-4 attacks before he dies and then is dead for the rest of the fight means that it's a useless spell. He doesn't soak damage good enough to create space for mages and he doesn't deal enough damage to solo kill many enemies to function as a main spell.

What could work is if he doesn't have HP but has a "5 strikes out" kind of style combined with auto resurrection. So he can take 5 hits of damage and the amount of damage he takes is irrelevant and after being dead for X seconds he would come back again to fight. That would make him more viable and he would be vulnerable to large groups of enemies. If that still feels weak then returning the EP while he is down could be a way to balance him more so that he doesn't become useless EP and skill points spent.

 

[Teddy]

I pretty much agree with both your points. The unique drawback that he can block out ep while passed out is a bit unfair, and doubly so when he isn't even op to begin with!

When we give him the new commands we're going to look at how to improve his overall power as well. We might create a feedback collection topic to get more input as we work with it, too, since you seem to have some good input on the topic!