Seems like there is a bunch of talk about Reflect going down over the JP forums and gained enough momentum to where the development team is going to look into whether or not they can get this classic FINAL FANTASY spell into the game.
Things that can be potentially taken care of:
• 1 on 1 reflection
This is basically the same system as Counter, so it seems like it is a possibility.
In the case that both have Reflect up, we can deal with this by adding a rule that “You cannot counter with counter.”
• Reflected damage calculation
• Log display of reflected effect
“→Reflect! ○○ takes ×× damage.”
Difficulties:
• Reflecting spells you cast on yourself
• Random reflection
In the case that the target is not decided, the system will search the area for monsters and decide. If this happens every time Reflect is activated, there is a high chance that it would cause a lot of lag and in the worst case scenario crash the servers.
• AoE Spell reflection
If we made Reflect function like Counter, this would be quite difficult.
• Effect animation
In the whole flow of the spell taking action: spell activates → reflect animation is displayed → reflected spell animation is displayed on yourself, this final part is impossible to do, and the best we can do is cut this animation and only display it in the log. Additionally, the animation needs to be in the memory, but there is a pending concern that the size would be pretty rough.
Stats
Besides the system itself, stats of the spell will need to be adjusted very carefully. Since you would be invincible against single-target spells as well as deal damage by reflecting them, this is an extremely powerful effect, so we would not be doing exactly this. We would need a good amount of time to test and balance this just right.
While nothing is for certain yet, please understand that this is still a ways off, but we would like to look into this more.