Ok, before people start to complain I have to say that INT and magical damage is really strong on some characters, INT is still the worst stat of all to invest, since you get nothing besides magic attack from it.
No skill besides Transpose of Thaumaturge and Ogouveve of Bokor really makes investing into INT worth it.
I think it was kinda nice to increase the mdef of mobs, even though it made the lower rank skills suffer a lot, because it made INT a little more valuable, however, it makes very little sense to have INT do nothing else.
I mean intelligent people have lots of advantages over dumb people when it comes to use magic, but also to train more efficiently, to fight more efficiently (i.e. targeting the weak points of enemies) and to evade damage more efficiently.
Yet, in TOS, it’s better to be stupid, because most other stats provide better possibilities to survive actual combat.
Enough pretext, now about INT-efficiency:
Although INT scales well later on, it provides very much nothing when the game starts. It’s very sad to see that you get more damage out of the skills, however, your SP run out so fast that it becomes hard to run an INT build, making you investing into SPR which helps with SP-recovery or forcing you to buy SP pots when you party, because most non-magic classes use way less SP per skill.
This is so contradictory, because if something spiritual is used by a rather spiritually disabled person, shouldn’t he be actually using up more power because he can’t handle it as well as the more intelligent person?
So, suggestion, based on logic:
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Make INT stat give you a discount on SP costs. In many MMORPGs, the INT stat also governs SP amount and SP recovery, but, since we already have SPR and don’t want to make it useless, I suggest INT gives you 1/50 SP useage discount per point of INT. This would make SPR even more useful, because you’ll use up way less potions and need less resting, and it would scale the lower rank skills better since they use less SP and have greater percentages of their costs shaved away.
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Another idea: Give INT a magic nullification chance. Something like 1/50 or 1/30 % per point in INT, practically making you dodge the damage a skill deals (turning it into 1 dmg so that you can still get affected by status effects). The current way magic damage works, it’s way too overpowered , especially if you think logically again. Sure, if an enemy uses a certain spell for the first time, you’d be surprised, but if he spams it, you would have to be an autist to not become able to counter that if your Intelligence is high.
So, it would be not intelligent if you’re not able to counter some magic if you’re a magic freak by investing into INT(basically a versatile scholar).
This would allow you to dodge some magic, the same way as DEX helps with blocking by avoiding, while the Mage dissolves the magic thrown at him. Solid alternative to the weak mdef scaling and pure logic applied to TOS.
About Magic Amplification:
The stat is basically useless in its current state. I don’t know why it’s even called amplification, because amplificare means “amplus facere” = making something large.
This is exactly what is not happening.
It’s already a very bad stat at the start of your journey, and falls off very much to uselessness later on, which discourages you to wear cloth armor and to upgrade the cloth gloves.
- Best solution would be to make Magic Amplification a kind of additional damage that is added at the end of each hit as additional flat damage, not affected by mdef, the same as the additional damage of Blessing. This would help with countering the current mdef scaling while actually not having to touch the mdef of mobs. However, it should still add random damage from within the pool as it does now, so that multihit skills won’t totally obliterate the enemy just by having a high amount of magic amplification, which would again counter the idea of adding points to INT.