Advice wanted for my RPG
Problem: Mages still level up extremely quickly, and it's mostly because once they have access to spells that can hit multiple enemies at once, they gain all of that EXP from the damage they deal very fast.
I've already increased the EXP curve for how fast they level, making it a little slower. I've already reduced the amount of damage that those all-enemy spells do. It's seemingly not enough, though, because Mages still start off on the weaker side and then absolutely shoot up around level 20.
So, I'm considering several options at the moment:
1) Further increase the EXP curve for mages. This will fix their progression in the early-mid game, but might make them much weaker in the end game and would require a lot of tuning that I don't fully have resources for (not enough people testing, nobody doing rigorous testing).
2) Level gate spells. Currently, all spells in the game (including all weapons and armors) do not have level gates and can be obtained at any point. This kind of goes with the philosophy of the openness of the game, but if it is breaking balance perhaps it is a good thing to put a bit of a clamp on it.
3) Increase the price of spells. Currently, the general layout from the single target spells is like this: 19/61/122/379. The all-enemy spell is 513. If I increase the price of all spells universally by a certain percentage, and/or increase the all-enemy spell by a larger amount, it could help prevent players from obtaining these massive spells too early.
4) Increase the SP needed for spells. I have noticed that Mages, once they hit a certain point, will very rarely run out of SP (due to some recovery upon level up) unless they're using something like Restore to recover the SP of other party members. Increasing the amount of SP needed for spells could help since they would have to be more considerate about using the all-target spells.
Advice wanted for my RPG
I think what I'm going to end up doing is a mix of all of these, but in small amounts. I've increased the SP cost of spells, decreased it for skills, and increased the price to buy all skills and spells. I've reduced the SP gain per level for mages, and also slightly increased their EXP curve.
All of this was done to relatively minor degrees, so I'm hoping that it eases things a little bit. Mages have been a thorn in my side ever since the beginning of the project. They have always gone between being too weak and way too strong and it's been really hard to balance them. I'm hoping that this won't put them back into being too weak again but it's hard to say when I can't have a whole QA department testing this kind of shit. The game has been not only a monumental task to create, but also proven quite difficult to test. I mean, I'm on my 4th playthrough and I've got the biggest patch list so far. There will certainly be bugs still by the time it releases and it is really unfortunate that I won't be able to catch all of them, especially big ones like soft locks. I guess it sort of hearkens back to the NES days where you had like 5 people working on an entire JRPG and they forgot to test walking up stairs a bunch of times which just like warps you to the credits or some shit like that.
Every game I make from here on out is going to be much, much smaller. Or, at the very least, much more focused. It'd be easier to test a 50 hour long, linear, story-based game than a 25 hour long open world one.
