Taunt saved me numerous times. I will only sing praises for the use of taunt.


Actually you can have large dungeons with lots of encounters in them, but it generally means that the game is built on being a dungeon crawl in the first place.

If I'm playing Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3, I do not want to spend every single battle casting Tarunda (reduced attack), Sukunda (reduced hit/evasion), and Rakunda (reduced defense) on every enemy in every battle. It would be repetitive to the point of being just as boring and not fun as when every encounter is too easy. If someone is going to go there and say "highest difficulty is like that," my response is that you brought the repetitiveness on yourself if you pick that difficulty plus repetitive pattern battles are not hard once you know the pattern to follow. I'm talking about the default normal setting.

I expect to do all that debuffing on boss encounters.

I'll conceed that it's fine if I'm debuffing because there's five enemies that cast wind attacks, and I decided to bring Junpei (who is weak to wind damage) with me so I'm probably going to be down a person all battle plus need to waste a healer keeping him alive. It's also fine if I'm debuffing because I ran into something that has a lot of hit points or high evasion to begin with. I just do not want to be pulling out all the debuffs every single encounter.

Perhaps it might be reasonable if you have to use those spells on *some* random battles.

But, to make things interesting, the game doesn't give you enough MP to use those spells in *every* battle.

Or perhaps there's some enemies that hit so hard that you don't have time to use those spells; if you try to do it, you'll have a dead or MP drained character because you didn't focus on taking that one particularly nasty low-HP enemy out first.

(Worth noting that high-attrition games can handle the existence of spells that are capable of trivializing random encounters early; just make the spell expensive enough that you can't use it in every random encounter without running out of MP.)

(Or, if the game has Metal Slime like enemies, and you decide to spend time casting spells like those, the enemy will run away before you have a chance to actually attack, depriving you of the XP you'd get if you had killed the enemy before it ran away.)

This brings up the issue of enemy variety. When *every* enemy in the dungeon has high HP/evasion, things can get repetitive.

Mix those enemies with other enemies that aren't like that. Maybe they die easily (or are weak against instant death), but will give you trouble if you don't take them out aggressively.

Now that that's done, with each encounter the player needs to look at what enemies they're fighting, and decide on how they want to tackle the fight, rather than just doing the same thing every single battle.

(Making random encounters varied, interesting, and fun is something many RPGs fail at doing.)

By the way, my favorite example of hard interesting random encounters is near the end of Dragon Quest 2. While I'd still prefer a bit more enemy variety, you still have the folowing:
* An enemy with high HP that can occasionally critical you to death.
* An enemy with high HP and resistance that casts Explodet (Kaboom in modern translations); this enemy is almost like a boss fight.
* A more fragile enemy, one that is susceptible to instant death and (in remakes) is within range of being one hit killed by Exploded, but it can cast Defense (Kasap) or Defeat (Thwack) on you. Defense isn't a problem (do you care about defense when the enemies don't physically attack you?), but Defeat is, and is enough to make these fights quite scary.
* One enemy that, if it's low on HP, may cast Sacrifice (Kamikaze). If this happens, it's an automatic party wipe (100% instant death that there's no way to defend against). However, they're susceptible to Stopspell (Fizzle), which will prevent the spell from going off, and the spell is only used when they're at low HP.

Well, perhaps, if the game allows them, some options might be:
* Cast a protective spell on the vulnerable character whenever you see that sort of encounter.
* Let the character die, and wait until after the battle to revive him.
* Focus on the problem enemies first.
* Try to use status ailments to prevent the enemies from getting a turn in the first place.
* Or, just run away when you see an encounter that looks particularly painful. (Thinking of Dragon Quest 2's 4 Green Dragons encounter, which is painful if you can't use Defeat yourself.)

Depends on whether it makes sense. Hiding should require certain conditions, and then staying hidden, not continuing to fight. If it can just be used mid battle, it should be a magical or technical ability, invisibility or cloaking, and there should still be ways for enemies to hit, either by countering with other abilities or by using other senses, or from seeing/feeling where that character strikes from.
Depends on the actual threat from the character. Other things being equal, yes, because that character becomes harder to kill, so it makes sense to concentrate on one that is similarly threatening but can be killed or incapacitated faster. When enemies keep whacking a character that's protected from their attacks when others would be available, it's a sign of poor AI.

Or specific to the game that I mentioned, you can exploit the enemy's weakness (if you know it) depending on who is in your party. Enemies that cast wind (Garu) tend to be weak to electricity (Zio.) This means that if Akihiko is in the party, he can zap the first enemy with Zio, get a free turn, zap the second, get another free turn and so on. The main character can do the same provided that he has a persona that can use Zio. If all enemies get a down status, then the party can usually finish them off with an All Out Attack.

It isn't a game where you should be just hitting things with weapons every battle, and never using magic, but sometimes you want to do that if you have enemies that have a weakness to a party member's weapon. Likewise you shouldn't be pulling out all the debuffs every random encounter because not everything is that hard.

The tendency of high-attrition games to devolve into this sort of strategy is the result of a couple factors:
* Usually, magic has a cost, but weapon attacks do not.
* Sometimes, the interface favors physical attacks. For example, in some games a character will use a regular attack if you don't give them a command, but to cast a spell you need to take explicit action. (Wizardry 8 is an example of this, but then again since the game lets you rest anywhere I wouldn't call it high-attrition.)

One approach, one that some SaGa games take, for example, is to give physical attacks costs. SaGa 1 and 2, for example, don't have any free attacks for most of the game. Also worth noting that these two games have no notion of a "regular" attack; you *have* to choose some item or skill in the character's ability list every round, as there's no default. Hence, you don't just "make a regular attack"; rather, you might use your Long Sword (which has 50 uses before it disappears). Casting a spell, then, is just selecting a magic skill or spellbook instead of a weapon. (Fire Emblem games, excluding Gaiden/Echoes, do something similar.)

On interesting case is Sword of Hope 2:
* In random battles, you are constantly using stat changing spells and status ailments, as otherwise combat becomes unmanageable later on.
* Bosses are immune to all those things, so aside from Fortify (or Empower for the second to last boss), those spells are useless there.

Worth noting that the original Sword of Hope is better balanced than its sequel.

Yeah, GOG's curation policy is a mystery.

Thankfully, Winter Wolves games are available on itch.io.