this game (resonance of fate) has an interesting mechanic where there are two types of damage--some weapons do large amounts of "scratch damage", which can't kill enemies and is easier to heal (and heals on its own over time), while other weapons do small amounts of "direct damage", which requires different (rarer) items to heal and is capable of killing enemies.
not a mechanic we've seen before, but an interesting one
-F
re: game violence //
@lioness we haven't encountered enemies that heal much beyond the fact that scratch damage naturally heals over time, but the tutorials implied that would happen at some point
and yes, the idea is that scratch damage is ideal for lowering HP and then direct damage to finish them off. it's been more "have the character with a direct damage weapon do the final hit" than changing weapons though
i also neglected to mention that any scratch damage an enemy has is converted to direct damage as soon as they take direct damage at all
also most of this doesn't apply to player characters most of the time because that's just how this game works i dunno
for the players, all damage is scratch damage as long as you have at least one point in what the game calls the "hero gauge"; you start each battle with three points, you can spend points to do special attacks, regain points by killing enemies, and lose a point whenever a character's hp gets to zero, which then refills their hp
losing a point in that last manner also causes the container for the point to shatter and you can't regain that point until you pick up the four pieces that got scattered around the battlefield
-F/R
@Felthry oh that's neat, yeah! I like stacking lots of "potential" damage and then locking it in, that's always cool
re: game violence //
@lioness the "direct damage weapons do very little damage" rule is also broken by thrown weapons; throwing a grenade does a ton of direct damage but of course consumes a consumable
-F
re: game violence //
@lioness also slightly interesting: the game incentivizes diversity, because you have three separate experience pools for each character, one for each type of weapon (handguns (direct), machine guns (scratch), and thrown items (direct)) and every time any one of them levels up you get parameter boosts, so it'd be a waste to keep using machine guns on this character when they need 5000 xp to level up in those but only 100 xp to level up in handguns, or something
this game has a number of unusual traits, though past experience says they're likely not that unusual and just unusual in the types of games we play
-F
game violence //
@Felthry that is interesting! is the strategy then to weaken with scratch weapons & swap to a direct damage weapon for the finisher? (also do the enemies heal themselves frequently? usually that's more of a player power, so that's also interesting)