Board Thread:Pokemon Arena X - Discussion/@comment-5398529-20131105063323/@comment-5537612-20131215192857

PaxFanHelper - M wrote: "only slightly" still that don't make much sense... btw what do cooldown times and speed itself have to do with each other...

i understand since its gotta be translated into roblox type stuff but still... Not roblox type stuff, but game balance.

You see, it's quite difficult to balance rangedVSmelee attacks. Ranged attacks tend to have the clear advantage, as you can damage enemies from everywhere within the projectile range. Melee attacks cannot do this.

Now, there are several ways to balance this. For example, some melee moves can close the distance between the user and the target very quickly. However, this would make these kind of moves almost mandatory on slow pokemon, and that is only to get to the target. Which by then already has backpedaled far enough to dodge the attack.

You can also alter them stat wise, i.e. ranged attacks are inherently weaker/have a longer cooldown than melee attacks. However, this doesn't really fix the problem either; the slow melee pokemon still can't get near the target, it just takes slightly less damage. Not only that, but it also slows the combat down, and might result in stupid long firefights between two fast ranged pokemon. Add to the fact that you have a party of 6 pokemon, and it starts to border 'boring'. And if the game becomes boring, you are doing it wrong. Games must be fun.

So, instead of the speed stat influencing the movement speed, it could also simply influence a different mechanic. There were several options for this.

It could affect the hit/miss rate. Higher speed means a higher chance to dodge an attack that connects. This, however, introduces a very nasty kind of Hax to the game that isn't exactly fun, not to mention there already is a stat for this.

It could affect the Dodge mechanic, which has the pokemon jump in a certain direction to avoid an attack. This could either mean a faster or a longer dodge. The former is invalidated by ROBLOX's shitty physics system as you can clip through walls with it, and the latter might actually make the dodge a maneuver that hinders the user, making fast pokemon bump into things it wasn't meant to bump into. Not just that, but the speed stat would have less of an overall impact than the rest of the stats.

So we chose for a combination of cooldown and a bit of walkspeed. You could see the cooldown time as the speed at which a pokemon can fire its attacks. Fast pokemon can spit balls of hurt more quickly than a poke that is slow as molasses. It does, in a way, make sense. The little bit of movement speed increase is to ensure the player's suspense of disbelief isn't completely wrecked and have a, say, Avalugg move at the same speed as Ninjask.

tl;dr its for game balance

also if you didnt completely read it you are a phallus