glorerik benson holder
Gwenda Gronert
Break is a Time Magick spell both in the Zodiac versions of Final Fantasy XII as well as in the original PlayStation 2 version. It is a single-target status ailment spell that places a countdown on the target; when the timer expires, the afflicted turns to stone and is defeated.
Break's license costs 70 License Points in the Zodiac versions, where the spell is available from shops for 1000 gil from Eruyt Village onward. Break is also a treasure in Stage 59 of Trial Mode with the Diamond Armlet equipped.
Break inflicts the Petrify status onto a target places a countdown (4.5 seconds per tick) starting from 10 on them. Doom and Petrify cannot co-exist: whichever status is in effect first will render the target immune to the other. Petrify can be cured via Stona and Esuna, and the items Gold Needle and Remedy (with Remedy Lore 2).
The hit rate is improved by further 50% with the caster having Faith status, or doubled with Serenity license/Magick Gloves when on full health, or Spellbreaker license/Leather Gorget when in critical health. Target's Shell halves the accuracy of the spell. If the caster is wearing the Indigo Pendant, Break will succeed unless the enemy is immune to the status.
The accuracy underflow bug is a glitch in some versions of Final Fantasy XII where a low level character with extremely low Magick Power stat attempts to use a status move on a target with very high Vitality, and the accuracy of the spell becomes less than zero. In this case the accuracy will underflow to 100%, allowing certain status spells to always succeed.
The Petrify status can be exploited to trigger the dead character glitch. Enemies that turn to Stone do not increase or break the battle chain, but can still drop loot and EXP, and in some cases will respawn the enemies endlessly.
Because enemies who die by Stone do not break the chain, the player can use it to kill aberrant enemies while trying to preserve their chain. Break's downside is that the toughest of foes are immune to Petrify.
The player can set up an infinite level grinding spot in the Henne Mines with Break. In Pithead Junction B, after touching the gate switch in the room, a limited number of Jellies fall from above, and if they die from Stone, they will respawn endlessly. If player programs their gambits correctly, it is possible to sustain an auto-leveling without touching the controller. Besides the Break spell, it is recommended to have another ally to cast Sleepga on the Jellies (late game) or wear the Mirror Mail, or simply an armor piece sturdy enough to take no damage from the Jellies. If not using the Mirror Mail, a character can prepare curative spells to sustain the party, or use the curative spells only with the Opal Ring equipped. The player can unequip the party's weapons for in case they get confused.
Break can help in spawning the extremely elusive Lv.99 Red Chocobo. To spawn this chocobo, the player must kill at least six chocobos in the Haulo Green area of the Ozmone Plain, then move two areas away, and return. Odds are 1/256 that the Lv.99 Red Chocobo will spawn among one of the six chocobos. To cut down on walking time, the player can kill, leave and return once, and then petrify the chocobos with Break, which will respawn continuously. Two of the six chocobos are placeholders for the Lv.99 Red Chocobo; the ones at the bottom of the attack menu. The player can thus kill the two top-most chocobos from the list and only leave the last one to petrify. There are two groups of three black/red chocobos in Haulo Green, and the player can go back and forth between them, petrifying the chocobo. If the two "top" chocobos from the groups are killed, more will initially spawn. The player can kill those as well, until only one remains, making the petrifying process faster. Even with the fast-forward function in the Zodiac versions, it can take hours for the Lv.99 Red Chocobo to appear using this method.
Another trick the player can do is to use Break on their ally and then use Stop on them right as the timer is about to expire, so the frozen-in-place ally will be nigh invulnerable to physical damage. This ally cannot be made a bait to enemies with Lure, but many physical enemies simply target whoever is closest to them.
I think my favorite solution is to just have really good money sinks in the game. Allow the player to acquire lots of money, but then allow them to spend that money on upgrades with exponentially increasing costs. I realize that this runs into the jerk shopkeeper problem I mentioned earlier, but I think players can tolerate this if the goods in question are portrayed as being rare and exotic. What pisses people off is when a merchant tries to screw them over the prices of common goods they find by the armload during gameplay.
Companions are an unconsidered money sink option. Shadowrun series did this well, too. You had the added security and ease of a larger party, but you had to pay, either through running costs as described or per-dungeon recruitment costs for alternate NPCs.
-Have lots of in-game money sinks that you apply to everyone as part of normal gameplay. Fast travel can cost money (like a Silt Strider basically) that scales based on distance and location. Gear can lose durability over time and cost money or resources to repair.
Only games that have ever done item degradation well were Far Cry 2, where it fit the theme and Metal Gear Solid 3, with suppressors to leave guns as the last-ditch option. Every other time it has been an annoyance.
Outward takes this one further and basically ties your progression entirely to money. There are no levels at all in that game, but you can pay to learn skills (both active and passive) from various trainers throughout the world.
For reasons of player engagement, I think the better fix for these issues is to guide player attitudes through game mechanics. Obviously, strongly disincentivising looting will upset many gamers with strongly inbuilt habits, but encouraging them to manage resources is a more sly way to replace one impulse with another.
This way, if you take the time to seek out rare or expensive items, you get perks to offset the suboptimal looting style, guiding players away from spending 13 hours harvesting boar pelts for 2 gold each, since it pays the same in the long run.
Third edition mostly fixed it with magic weapons. A longsword is worth something like 5 GP. An enchanted +1 longsword is worth 2005 GP, and a +5 Flaming longsword is worth 72005 GP. The magic boosts are large enough to be a big deal for players, but small enough that mid-level players can still be challenged by mooks with unenchanted gear worth pennies.
Heck, I could even go for to vanishing corpses. I know that this was originally a technical-constraints kind of thing, but I think it works as a sort of genre convention. It signals to the player that this is not a loot-drop focused game and that he should just get on with the things that the game is actually about.
The real problem is the endlessly spawning mooks. KOTOR has a fixed number of enemies in the game. If you kill everything in the game, you will have a set value of credits, which will be enough to buy a few of the highest end armors and weapons at the Yavin station before heading off to the Star Forge.
(Actually, one of the things that always made me laugh was the shops that had specialized gear for your party that made no sense for the region. The town full of wizards selling paladin armor, or the militarized knightly kingdom selling kung-fu shirts.)
That felt like more of a problem in Oblivion, where turning food into crappy potions was effortless. At least Morrowind forced the player to sit through a bunch of failures, so the blame for breaking things sits with said player.
Loot can/should tell a story, either in history or in the future. If you loot a cursed skull of extreme annihilation and sell it to the innkeeper, it could serve a story purpose. Perhaps the patrons of the inn would start hearing whispers and see shadows at the edge of their vision. Then disappearances, screams from the cellar.. Perhaps the local witch hunters would show up and question you about your motives in selling this obviously evil artifact to the innkeeper.
I liked how the Witcher 3 handled it. While it was generally easy to make money if you hit up all the side quests and sold crafting materials. Once you engaged in crafting your money was spent very quickly. I tended to horde my crafting materials and random monster parts as I never knew which I would need and it was expensive to buy them from merchants. But it never felt like I had ungodly levels of wealth. It did inflate a bit in Blood and Wine but so did the prices. To build the grandmaster level armor wiped me out and I was usually forced to sell my excess materials if I wanted enough money to craft the set. I also like the solution CD Project Red did for the cow exploit where if you kill too many cows a Friend is summoned.
Another thing i dont see people mention here (or read over it) is that the hero doesnt eat, doesnt sleep, doesnt need new clothes, doesnt get taxed, works 24/7 (if you assume kililng bandits is his job and loot his payment). Im sure in real life, you have a halfdecent job, sleep in a ditch, work every waking hour, arent taxes, and dont need food/new clothing/anything you will become filthy rich pretty fast.
Now, for comparison. It seems the average UK salary is at 508 / week (made of 48 h ) which means the average UK person working 24/7 and never spending any money would be getting their first million in just over 11 years.
These are the most dangerous manual(ish) jobs i could think of
It seems obvious that manual jobs, whilst they can be incredibly well paid, will not even remotely equate to what the oblivion character can reach!
Of course, that brings up another weird game-only ecosystem: How can there be so many bandits and similar malcontents in the game world for you to kill? Always bizarre to be seeing bandits outnumbering actual populace 10-to-1. Are they all just robbing each other?
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