What status ailments/debuffs do people like best in games? Which ones are more fun? Which ones don't add so much to the game? What are some unusual ones you've encountered and how did you feel about them?

I'll start by a couple that are quite common: blind/dark (often reduce chances to hit or reduces damage), poison/bleed (often lose health over time), or stun/paralyze (can't do much if anything while you have it). The prevalence of these seems to indicate both that they "make sense" to us as feeling right, that players tend to accept them, and that they are thought to make situations more interesting during play.

One set of unusual one I have in mind right now is Oil (Final Fantasy Tactics/12) or Flash Freeze (Grim Dawn); both of these are "more damage from fire while you have this". In FF, it's an ailment that does nothing on its own, except cause the next time you take fire damage to be increased considerably. Sadly this was bugged (in addition to rare) in FFT to not do anything. Grim Dawn's Flash Freeze skill is a low damage cold spell around you that freezes (short stun) your enemies in a wide burst around you, but also reduces their fire resistance by some amount (making them take more fire damage for that freeze duration).

These effects aren't only common in RPGs anymore. They've creeped into non-RPG action games and open world games), too; eventhose without RPG elements. I've played a few games that have "flashbang blindness", poison effects, and stun ones (as well as slowing), so the above common ones are certainly accounted for. Malaria was a strange one in Far Cry 2 that foes didn't inflict on you, but you had to manage and drove the plot. I can't recall which game, but there was one that had a confusion effect that temporarily inverted your controls away from your normal. Let's hear about more of these!

That was more than one game. Some games took it a step further and rotated your controls every so often. Earthbound had mushroomization, Secret of Mana had Confustion, Terranigma had a control scrambling status...

With this thread, I was reminded of an odd status from Final Fantasy 9. A couple, actually.

Age of Wonders of course, in planetfall for example you can encounter a multitude of ailments all designed around the elements, force and psychic nature. These can be found both by unit skills and abilities. One of the more exotic of these ailments is the ability to infect a living enemy with a sort of virus that turns the enemy after he dies into a ghastly appearance. This appearance will stay with your army provided if you have enough room left and is a decent low tiered combatant. As this appearance gains levels it will also gain the ability to take over another living enemy with mind control basically taking over the enemy and disappearing leaving you with a brand new unit

On second thought, let's not talk about Status Ailments. It is a silly topic.

I've encountered two game where it actually does the reverse, *increasing* chance to hit. (Those two games are SaGa 1 (only for basic strength-based melee attacks) and Morrowind (no code patch or OpenMW).)

There's also Final Fantasy 6, where the only function of the status ailment is to prevent one character from learning new abilities.

I hate paralyze and similar things, where you lose all control of the character for an extended period of time. I am replaying Pillars of Eternity right now and just did the dwarven forge quest where these banshees paralyze people constantly, even through my buffs. Get unlucky with who beat the dice roll and it's a full party wipe. "Fear" can also be a pain, especially in Pathfinder Kingmaker where it was frequently used by spirit enemies with high will stats and made your party members run around like idiots for 10 seconds.

As for ones I enjoy, I do like being "punished" for dying or being knocked out. Things like "exhausted" or "wounded" add stakes to a game, especially when you have limited resting or potions. I have definitely been three levels deep in a dungeon with wounded and limping characters and no more tents, wondering if I can make it to the end, and that's a fun feeling.

In Stranger of Sword City, paralyze only prevents the use of skills; a paralyzed character can still attack, defend, cast spells, or use items.

In Stranger of Sword City Revisited, paralyze only causes the user to take damage when using a skill. The damage is proportional to the level at which the skill is learned, so the clock-up skill (which I think may be overpowered for how easy it is to get) has a low HP cost since it's learned at level 1.

Note that both these games have an entire dungeon where your party is treated as paralyzed.

Of course, there's Final Fantasy 4's more conventional paralysis, and that one dungeon where everybody wearing metallic equipment is always paralyzed; If everybody in your party is wearing such equipment, then you get a game over as soon as combat starts. (Speedrun trick: There's a fight at the end of the dungeon that you're not meant to win, and the game will continue even if you lose. To speed things up, equip everybody with metallic equipment, and the fight will end instantly, allowing the game to instantly continue. (But don't forget to talk to Edward in the castle first!)) Super Mario Bros. 3 has a stun effect; when a giant hammer brother slams down, you will be stunned briefly.

Metroid and Castlevania 3 both have a frozen status ailment that can be applied to enemies. In both these games, you can use a frozen enemy as a platform. While it didn't become a staple of the Castlevania series (Circle of the Moon aside), it *did* become a staple of the Metroid series. (Interestingly enough, a plain Metroid can't be damaged if it's not frozen first.) It exists in Final Fantasy 6 as well; the Air Anchor tool inflicts it.

Edit: Why the low rating?

Level draining is fun. It really puts the OCD of many gamers in a twist. The thought of actually losing XP in un-bear-ab-le.

Poison is always annoying. In many games Cure Poison is one of the first spells I aim for.

As for debuffs, they only hurt if you need prebuffing to be buff. It's amusing when designers go out of their way to make sure your prebuffs are debuffed, and you didn't even prebuff in the first place. Happened to me in the final battle when I played Trials of the Luremaster quite recently.

Reminds me of the Shield of Sorrow in some Dragon Quest games, which is a cursed item that does something similar to the character equipped with it.

SaGa Frontier has the series of mess status ailments, which may cause the character to fail to act or even turn on party members (which is *not* a good thing given the lopsided HP scale; say hello to having your whole party take 1,000+ damage when the HP cap is only 999). Worth noting that, while charm won't work on robots, there are attacks that can cause these mess status ailment on them.

While not an unusual status aliment, in SaGa 3 there's a skill that's easily learnable early on in the game (to the point where you could easily learn it without knowing about its existence) that has an instant kill effect. Reminds me of Final Fantasy 1, being killed by enemies hitting for 1 damage because they kept paralyzing me.

I consider the fear status ailment to be bad game design, as it's frustrating regardless of whether it's a party member or enemy that's under the effect. I disagree, unless there's some mechanic that allows the player to benefit from level draining (like the level down/up trick in Final Fantasy Tactics to boost stats) or it's part of the cost of an extremely powerful spell (HAMAN/MAHAMAN in Wizardry 1-5 (though it's unusable in 4; it will never work unless you hack your save)).

Or if the level drain is temporary.

Stranger of Sword City allows you to take a temporary level loss in order to attempt the lineage slaying challenge when you're past the allowed level.

Yeah, there's a fine line between challenging and annoying.

Except that enemy-targeted fear is quite annoying, but not at all challenging.

In Wizardry 8, there's one part of the game where fear might be useful to give your party a breather and reduce the number of enemies attacking at a time, but most of the time it's more trouble than it's worth. What's even worse is that the Gadgeteer's Omnigun gets a blind effect early on, and that effect behaves like fear when it hits an enemy.

Does "drunk" count? If yes, that's my favourite...

Like in CarlSagan42's new Super Mario World hack?

Also, there's another status condition in that hack that comes later.

Plenty of games do have that. It often is a lesser confusion combined with a lesser slow. :)

Link? His YT channel has a ton of stuff and none was obvious.