Talk:Ragnarok and Odyssey

How Ragnarok and similar moves like Titan Blade cause damage

Looking at a gameplay mechanics FAQ recently, I found out that we've been getting our information wrong about how elemental physical attacks like Ragnarok and Unleash effects like Titan Blade calculate their damage ratings. (The two types of elemental assault I just mentioned are considered the same sort of attack as far as the game's concerned, actually.) It is NOT about taking a standard physical attack, adding a bunch of attack points to it, and making the attack of a certain element. Here's what's going on:

A standard physical attack's damage is taken by taking the Attack value of your attack, subtracting the target's Defense value from that, and dividing the result by 2, and finally adding a number from 0 to 3 to that result. So, an attack of 300 against an enemy with a Defense of 50 will do 125-128 damage.

What an elemental physical attack like Ragnarok does is first do the exact normal physical attack above, then apply whatever damage multiplication and addition modifiers to that attack's damage result that are attached to the Ragnarok-like effect (in the order of the multiplication first, then the addition. See Excalibur's unleash). The new result here forms the Physical Portion of the elemental physical attack's damage. Ragnarok adds 35 physical damage points, so Ragnarok's Physical Portion of its assault would come up with a value of 160-163 damage points at this point in time.

Then, assuming that elemental physical attack actually has an element attached to it (some elemental physical attacks such as the Emu Psynergy don't have an element), a second move's worth of damage is calculated: First, take the character's Elemental Power for the element being involved in this assault, subtract the target's elemental resistance rating from that character's power rating, and add 1 to the result, and then divide the result there by 400. Meaning in Ragnarok's case, if the attacker's Venus Power is 50 more than the target's Venus Resistance is, the calculations would yield a number being 0.1275. The Physical Portion of the damage noted above is multiplied by this 0.1275 number to form a new result that is called the Elemental Portion of the damage. This is bonus damage that results from the fact that an element is involved, and it's added to the Physical Portion to form the attack's actual total damage in the game. In the case of Ragnarok, 160-163 times 0.1275 is 20.4-20.7, and that is added to 160-163 to form the actual damage Ragnarok will cause in the game: 180-184.

(Conversely, all this also means that if the Venus Power is lower than the target's Venus Resistance by 25 points, the damage-reduction multiplier would be below zero so it would produce an added number that would ACTUALLY be negative, and the actual damage Ragnarok would cause in the game will be lower, at 151- 153.)

So overall, here's one way how we should actually write the stats for a move like Ragnarok: "Ragnarok is a physical attack that adds 35 damage points to its result, and then adds or subtracts damage from that number based on the combatants' Venus power and resistance levels." Erik Jensen ^{(Appreciate me here!)} 08:40, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Woah. I'm usually pretty good at math, but all those numbers almost lost me. That isn't to say I'm not glad you found this. It's just a little confusing. One thing I'm not clear on: is the majority of the damage physical or elemental? The world's hungriest paperweight 04:01, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, I suppose the "majority of the damage is physical", but it seems to me now that as far as the game is concerned there's no such thing as "physical" and "elemental" damage. There's only damage. You can simply think of all the above like so: An elemental physical attack is a straight physical attack whose resulting damage always has a specific number of damage points added to it by the effect, then the damage is either increased again or decreased depending on the user's elemental power and the target's elemental resistance. Erik Jensen ^{(Appreciate me here!)} 04:40, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Psynergy article revisions

Hey, Erik? I was just wondering why your new Psynergy articles are separated based on game (as opposed to our new weapon articles, for example). I let the Wish Psynergy series slide for now, since we don't know what levels they're learned at in Dark Dawn. But for Ragnarok and Odyssey, the only real change between games is the animation. It would make more sense, to me, to separate the description and the analysis, like we do with the weapons, and then distinguish between games. I'm assuming, however, that you have some reason behind why you did things the way you did, so I'm going to give you a chance to explain. The World's Hungriest Paperweight 11:34, 20 May 2011 (CDT)

I suppose I was just more or less mimicking how the weapon articles were being restructured first - first those were cleaved into separate pages on one article space, and then they were integrated as one page by someone else, namely you. Now, for me, what makes me not do the integrated route right away is not because of different animation descriptions, different collections of characters having access to it through difference classes, more room for images, separate analyses by each game, and more capacity for readers to differentiate GBA and DS content, because the weapon articles have been proven to work really well when all this informaton for the separate games are integrated into single sections. It's that the infoboxes for Psynergy aren't made yet. I'd assume that there would be separate infoboxes for each GBA and Dark Dawn versions Psynergy to accommodate different, full-sized icons and different animation descriptions, but I don't know whether they would end up being made as stacked horizontal infoboxes or infoboxes off to the side. I'm not doing lots of Psynergy articles until this can be explored. Erik the Appreciator 12:06, 20 May 2011 (CDT)

So, basically, they were separated by game as an intermediary step, and you want to wait until we have infoboxes before going much further? Okay, that makes sense. ...You know, they may not be my specialty, but I've tweaked a couple infoboxes enough times that I think I'm going to try making some. I'm sure someone else will have to come along afterwards and clean things up, but at least it will give us something to work with ;) The World's Hungriest Paperweight 12:15, 20 May 2011 (CDT)