It is hard, but I think we can all agree that standing in opposition to John K is always good design.
Edit: In all seriousness, though, the way you walk that tightrope is you aim the tweaks against only John K Minmaxer's bag of bullshit. In FF5's case, for example, there are so many arcane "Oh yeah if you pair this one obscure Mix combination with this other even more obscure equipment and blue magic combination you can just break the game completely in half" combinations that Joe Q Random would never even have heard of and would have no reason to touch, ever.
Like, make it so that while an enemy's level can still be manipulated for the purposes of debuffing/making them weaker (inflicting Old, etc.) Death By Math moves only ever check against their actual (start of the battle) level. In other words, if an enemy isn't naturally a multiple-of-five level, you can't throw weird Morrowind alchemy at them until they are just to L5 Death them. There, with one simple change you just completely atomized the entire Smogon-level metagame in a way that no casual player would even notice.
no subject
Edit: In all seriousness, though, the way you walk that tightrope is you aim the tweaks against only John K Minmaxer's bag of bullshit. In FF5's case, for example, there are so many arcane "Oh yeah if you pair this one obscure Mix combination with this other even more obscure equipment and blue magic combination you can just break the game completely in half" combinations that Joe Q Random would never even have heard of and would have no reason to touch, ever.
Like, make it so that while an enemy's level can still be manipulated for the purposes of debuffing/making them weaker (inflicting Old, etc.) Death By Math moves only ever check against their actual (start of the battle) level. In other words, if an enemy isn't naturally a multiple-of-five level, you can't throw weird Morrowind alchemy at them until they are just to L5 Death them. There, with one simple change you just completely atomized the entire Smogon-level metagame in a way that no casual player would even notice.