What (in your opinion) are some low-hanging fruits for making FFT 1.3 better?

I really love the concept of FFT 1.3, but it can be quite frustrating and I just don't have the time or patience for that. I only got part way into Chapter 3 before I stopped playing (due to personal life things) and then I never felt like picking it up again because of how horrible I heard Chapter 4 is (and Chapter 3 was plenty tough enough).

But after seeing some of the great things in FFT 1.3, I just can't imagine playing Vanilla again. With shitty Archers, uninteresting Wizards, enemies that never unlock interesting classes, etc.

So my main motivation here is to change FFT 1.3 to be easier (like the "Content" version). Probably significantly so. But I want to do that by primarily taking away "cheap" shit, like having enemies be 10 levels higher than you, while also outnumbering you and starting with better field position. I feel like that isn't so much to ask.

I only want to make really simple modifications to FFT 1.3.

But there's another aspect to what I want to do. I also want to remove all speed growth from the game. @Emmy has discussed the issues with speed in FFT and has argued for several interesting solutions/mitigations. I'm going for simple and easy here, so I think I'll just take away speed growth altogether. This should keep mage classes useful and interesting for the whole game. I'll obviously need to tweak a lot of things to find a sweet spot for balance.

This is all really just being done for myself. I want a game that I will enjoy playing. But I'm willing to hear what you guys think would be good changes to make things more fair/fun/easy. I'll be happy to post the results here if anyone is interested. So far the only things on my list are these:

• Enemy levels = Party level for all battles (except some bosses/assassinations can stay higher)
• Fewer enemies in some battles, especially randoms- I want randoms to be mostly not hard
• No speed growth
• Far fewer enemies with immortal flags - this shit's annoying when they're so good at reviving
• Maybe some innate Gained JP-Up or just a general JP price lowering? Opinions?

I plan on only using the FFT Patcher Tools, etc, because I don't know anything about hacking PSX games. Unless someone can point me to some "Learn to hack FFT" guide(s).

If you're just looking for a vanilla-ish but relatively easy patch, these patches are popular:

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=11789.0 

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=7182.0

IMO the "1.3 content" changes are the exact opposite type of approach to making 1.3 less difficult than the kinds of changes that should be made.  Some things that could be done that you haven't mentioned:

1. Fix the game's scaling and make status effects an important part of the game.  The game needs to not punish playstyles other than hyper offense and needs to not invalidate 3/4 of the game's skillsets; especially since status effects are one of the major ways to make the game have more depth than "punch shit" that doesn't require asm to change. If enemies are doing less damage to you but are now capable of don't acting your whole team, for example, suddenly they become more dangerous in a more interesting way.  This should go both ways - the player needs meaningful enemies that are vulnerable to status, and shouldn't be able to just null everything with a ribbon either.

2.  XP/JP by battle, not by action.  This is a change I made to MT that I can't go back to not having after making that change.  No more beating yourself over the head for 4 hours to just be able to do something other than punch shit.  No more worrying about taking too many actions to beat a battle, and thus overleveling.  Of course if you make this change, you absolutely need to fix the game's scaling to not punish you for more levels, since your game will now have a minimum level for every battle.  The way I did it was to guarantee that no ability costs more than one battle's worth of JP to get, and action abilities are mostly cheaper than r/s/m including a few free abilities.  That way your character is never helpless and trying new strategies is not particularly costly.

3.  100% transparency.  Why have an ability that can cancel charging/performing, that doesn't work on units flagged by class, with no intuitive reason for the unit to be immune to it?  It's one thing to have an ability that is immortal immune, that the player knows is immortal immune.  It's another thing to randomly flag things as immune to useful sounding skills.  Why even *have* a skill like that, if you don't want the player to use it?

4.  Make bosses other than Velius, Queklain, and Adramelk interesting.  Assassinations are generally garbage compared to a well thought out ??? boss, and the other ??? bosses aren't as well thought out here.  Zalera is a joke, Zalbag is a punching bag, and Altima is a slot machine.  Some of the issues with assassinations can be fixed with scaling/status effects, while those ???'s (and others) need to just be rewritten to have something interesting about them (status effects, nice abilities, etc).  Be creative!

Thanks for replying, Emmy!

1 hour ago, Emmy said:

If you're just looking for a vanilla-ish but relatively easy patch, these patches are popular:

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=11789.0 

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=7182.0

These are too vanilla for me. In particular, I hate the vanilla Archer, Lancer, and Wizard skill sets, and these preserve those, making those classes still very uninteresting.

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IMO the "1.3 content" changes are the exact opposite type of approach to making 1.3 less difficult than the kinds of changes that should be made.  Some things that could be done that you haven't mentioned:

Could you elaborate on the content changes that you think are the most egregious? I think the fixed story battle levels is a mistake, but what else?

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1. Fix the game's scaling and make status effects an important part of the game.  The game needs to not punish playstyles other than hyper offense and needs to not invalidate 3/4 of the game's skillsets; especially since status effects are one of the major ways to make the game have more depth than "punch shit" that doesn't require asm to change. If enemies are doing less damage to you but are now capable of don't acting your whole team, for example, suddenly they become more dangerous in a more interesting way.  This should go both ways - the player needs meaningful enemies that are vulnerable to status, and shouldn't be able to just null everything with a ribbon either.

I agree 100%. Can you give an example of how you might achieve this? Do you just nerf damage output from almost everything? Do you make statuses hit rate higher and/or make damage attacks miss more often?

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2.  XP/JP by battle, not by action.  This is a change I made to MT that I can't go back to not having after making that change.  No more beating yourself over the head for 4 hours to just be able to do something other than punch shit.  No more worrying about taking too many actions to beat a battle, and thus overleveling.  Of course if you make this change, you absolutely need to fix the game's scaling to not punish you for more levels, since your game will now have a minimum level for every battle.  The way I did it was to guarantee that no ability costs more than one battle's worth of JP to get, and action abilities are mostly cheaper than r/s/m including a few free abilities.  That way your character is never helpless and trying new strategies is not particularly costly.

If the enemy levels are always fixed to your party's, then the only concern for overleveling is from them having equipment that you can't get. That's not _that_ bad, but I do like this idea. The only thing I worry about with having abilities being too cheap is that you might have everything (you care about) unlocked long before the end of the game. The shitty thing in Vanilla is that I always know what is good, so I just get that stuff and by mid chapter 2, I basically have my end-game build.

How hard is it to implement this change?

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3.  100% transparency.  Why have an ability that can cancel charging/performing, that doesn't work on units flagged by class, with no intuitive reason for the unit to be immune to it?  It's one thing to have an ability that is immortal immune, that the player knows is immortal immune.  It's another thing to randomly flag things as immune to useful sounding skills.  Why even *have* a skill like that, if you don't want the player to use it?

Agreed. That's bullshit. What are some examples of this? Is this easy to fix in the patcher tools?

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4.  Make bosses other than Velius, Queklain, and Adramelk interesting.  Assassinations are generally garbage compared to a well thought out ??? boss, and the other ??? bosses aren't as well thought out here.  Zalera is a joke, Zalbag is a punching bag, and Altima is a slot machine.  Some of the issues with assassinations can be fixed with scaling/status effects, while those ???'s (and others) need to just be rewritten to have something interesting about them (status effects, nice abilities, etc).  Be creative!

Truth.

1.  It's more that the only reason Content is easier is because you can grind to overcome battles with sheer numbers (when you can't in standard 1.3).  This is the type of behavior that should be discouraged in patches, when you should be rewriting battles to allow for multiple types of strategies and not just a small handful.  That will make it easier in a more enjoyable way, instead of easier in a way that allows you to combat tedium with more tedium.

2.  The biggest thing wrong with 1.3's scaling is nicely illustrated by the way it handles MP Switch.  Because MP switch is nerfed in a way that leftover damage from what hurt MP will roll over into HP, and enemies frequently do enough damage where they can kill someone through MP switch (unless you set up specifically to use it, but any setups made specifically to use it are better spent towards specifically using Damage Split or Meatbone Slash for the better turn economy), it's not very useful for the player to have.  However, when the enemy has it, they have far more HP and MP than any player class, and the ability to heal BOTH to full at any given moment.  This turns MP switch into effectively a second HP bar for the enemy.  What you need to do is change the scaling of the game such that enemies don't have every single advantage.  Enemy is tanky with MP Switch and lots of HP/MP to use it? Don't give it the ability to heal to full or deal much damage in one turn.  Enemy has a OHKO move? It should have low speed or the defenses of a wet paper bag.  Stuff like this will increase variety in the game and thus make it more interesting.

Another thing you mention is to make status effects have higher probability to hit.  No one's going to go for a Petrify that has a 30% chance to hit when the enemy can just throw a Soft on it.  Remove evasion from status effects and make it just a faith based check.  That will give the player a way to increase probability of their own statuses, while at the same time being more vulnerable to enemy status (Faith status).  And, since you mentioned evasion, lower the evasion given by shields/mantles and don't give so many enemies Concentrate.  Nothing should have nearly 100% dodge rates without needing to spend an ability slot (abandon) on it, and you shouldn't need to have Concentrate in so many battles either.

3.  Fixing items to not strictly be better than one another can solve this problem.  This can be done by spreading out bonuses given by things.  That way someone can make a meaningful choice between, say +200 HP, +100 HP and immune Frog, or 0 HP and +1 speed.  Also there shouldn't only be 5 abilities you care about.  Abilities should all have their uses so that the player doesn't just immediately buy Phoenix Down and ignore the rest of the Chemist set.  The change to make xp/jp by battle instead of by action was hard to make, but easy for you to implement (you can find it in my asm pack).

4.  Some examples of this are the bad tooltips in the game.  Lots of abilities don't tell you what they actually do in their descriptions, lots of abilities are things that affect some units but not others, etc.  You can fix this by fixing the text of the game.  Tell the player when you make a unit innately immune to something.  

The reason I stopped playing FFT 1.3 was due to reaching the point where poaching became available. The impression I got was that I HAD to get all of this important gear but actually doing so without overleveling was a huge time waster. In the forums people were talking with a straight face (straight...text? what to you call that sort of thing on a forum?) about how it's find to just edit your file and add those things to your inventory to conserve your sanity.

I will admit that my motivation was not helped by the stories of absurd things that would happen from that point onward.

As for the question of how to make anything other than hyper-offense valuable, I do think increasing the effectiveness of status is good but just removing enemy elixirs is a huge step in the right direction. I don't care if that would make hard mode easier, that item single-handedly makes a large part of the game's skillset non-viable.

12 hours ago, Emmy said:

2.  The biggest thing wrong with 1.3's scaling is nicely illustrated by the way it handles MP Switch.  Because MP switch is nerfed in a way that leftover damage from what hurt MP will roll over into HP, and enemies frequently do enough damage where they can kill someone through MP switch (unless you set up specifically to use it, but any setups made specifically to use it are better spent towards specifically using Damage Split or Meatbone Slash for the better turn economy), it's not very useful for the player to have.  However, when the enemy has it, they have far more HP and MP than any player class, and the ability to heal BOTH to full at any given moment.  This turns MP switch into effectively a second HP bar for the enemy.  What you need to do is change the scaling of the game such that enemies don't have every single advantage.  Enemy is tanky with MP Switch and lots of HP/MP to use it? Don't give it the ability to heal to full or deal much damage in one turn.  Enemy has a OHKO move? It should have low speed or the defenses of a wet paper bag.  Stuff like this will increase variety in the game and thus make it more interesting.

Ah, yes. So, there's two points in there. One is that MP Switch, specifically, isn't good enough. And two is that enemies have access to setups that the user doesn't. Fixing #2 is just a matter of reviewing each battle and making sure that the enemies have trade-offs like you mentioned. I'm not sure I'm able or willing (yet) to do anything about #1.

12 hours ago, Emmy said:

Another thing you mention is to make status effects have higher probability to hit.  No one's going to go for a Petrify that has a 30% chance to hit when the enemy can just throw a Soft on it.  Remove evasion from status effects and make it just a faith based check.  That will give the player a way to increase probability of their own statuses, while at the same time being more vulnerable to enemy status (Faith status).  And, since you mentioned evasion, lower the evasion given by shields/mantles and don't give so many enemies Concentrate.  Nothing should have nearly 100% dodge rates without needing to spend an ability slot (abandon) on it, and you shouldn't need to have Concentrate in so many battles either.

Agreed 100% on evasion and concentrate. The hesitation that I have with making (some) statuses easier to hit is that it will then make Item and/or White Magic basically required for many (most?) battles. Then again, maybe that's already the case anyway, since revival is so important in 1.3 (and even in Vanilla, really).

This would definitely make the game more interesting, but my first priority is making the game easier. So, the status stuff might go into my lower priority pile, but the Concentrate and evasion shenanigans is in high priority.

12 hours ago, Emmy said:

3.  Fixing items to not strictly be better than one another can solve this problem.  This can be done by spreading out bonuses given by things.  That way someone can make a meaningful choice between, say +200 HP, +100 HP and immune Frog, or 0 HP and +1 speed.  Also there shouldn't only be 5 abilities you care about.  Abilities should all have their uses so that the player doesn't just immediately buy Phoenix Down and ignore the rest of the Chemist set.  The change to make xp/jp by battle instead of by action was hard to make, but easy for you to implement (you can find it in my asm pack).

The other nice thing about the xp/jp by battle is that (I assume?) everyone gets the same amount. So your summoner, who only gets off one or two actions wont lag really badly behind your fast melee dudes.

12 hours ago, Emmy said:

4.  Some examples of this are the bad tooltips in the game.  Lots of abilities don't tell you what they actually do in their descriptions, lots of abilities are things that affect some units but not others, etc.  You can fix this by fixing the text of the game.  Tell the player when you make a unit innately immune to something.  

Ah, yes. Fair point.

58 minutes ago, Regdren said:

The reason I stopped playing FFT 1.3 was due to reaching the point where poaching became available. The impression I got was that I HAD to get all of this important gear but actually doing so without overleveling was a huge time waster. In the forums people were talking with a straight face (straight...text? what to you call that sort of thing on a forum?) about how it's find to just edit your file and add those things to your inventory to conserve your sanity.

I feel like it only became "okay" to suggest things like that or to criticize 1.3 in the last year or so. Before that, you just weren't hardcore enough. These days it's finally okay to say that the game isn't perfect and that some of the "challenge" is just bullshit.

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I will admit that my motivation was not helped by the stories of absurd things that would happen from that point onward.

As for the question of how to make anything other than hyper-offense valuable, I do think increasing the effectiveness of status is good but just removing enemy elixirs is a huge step in the right direction. I don't care if that would make hard mode easier, that item single-handedly makes a large part of the game's skillset non-viable.

I ... might just remove Elixir altogether- or rather, just replace it with a more nerfed healing item. That's a super cheap item.

Enemies having setups the player doesn't is fine.   The problem comes when every enemy has every advantage.  Immune to all status, high speed, 999 hp/mp, ability to heal this to full instantly, ability to ohko units, def/mdef up, abilities themselves are ridiculous (such as instant kills with long range, large aoe, no mp cost and/or no ct), ridiculous movement, etc.  This tends to have the opposite effect as what is intended - it actually makes the game easier in some ways because you know exactly what to prepare for, and many of these enemies have stats so high that the ai would never consider using a status effect.  Think of the enemies as playing certain roles in the formation.  These can be stereotypical roles like tank, glass cannon, healer; or you can mix and match.  Let's say for example you want to create an enemy with ridiculous speed/PA/MA.  It should die if you sneeze on it, and have vulnerabilities to a handful of useful statuses like Slow and Don't Act.  Then you can pair it with your tanky elixir user that is slow and has very low damage output.  Stuff like that.  

Removing elixirs is fine, but part of the problem here which makes elixirs annoying is that player access to the same item won't help as much as enemy access (even if the player got them).  If enemies are just ohko'ing you anyway, it doesn't help you to heal your HP to full, and if they have so much HP that you can't kill them easily, that means an enemy throwing an elixir down will reset your progress.  The problem isn't just the elixir itself, but the game's scaling and the distribution of the items.  If instead of being an item, it's a move that is rarely distributed in skillsets and has a CT/MP cost/some other balancing factor to it, it becomes far less annoying.

Poaching is another issue that's leftover from vanilla that is a terrible mechanic.  Easiest fix to it if you want to keep it is to get rid of rare drops.  Best bet is to just eliminate it entirely in favor of additional sidequests or even just putting the items for purchase late into the game.

I get what you're saying about the Elixirs. But, I think that even if it were a rare ability with an MP/CT cost, it would either be too good or useless, depending on the costs. I think the only way to balance that would be to get pretty creative. Something like fully healing HP+MP, but also petrifying them or something (as just an off-the-cuff example).

What's so bad about poaching? Is it just the tedium of getting the rare poaches that offends you?

Most games with rare drops tend to be balanced around the power level of common/fixed (such as storebought) items, with Rare items being a nice bonus you get once in a while from the normal process of playing through the game.

1.3 raised the difficulty bar so high you end up feeling like you need Perfumes to compete in late game and thus having to go out of your way since Poaching for rare items is a boring and tedious activity you really must dedicate a couple hours to do if you intend to do it legit unless you're lucky.

(In a bit of irony, Perfumes were the COMMON poach item of their respective monsters in vanilla)

And outside of Perfumes, most poaches were pretty pointless too, giving you cheap storebought items. Tonberry Knives are like the only ones I can think off the top of my head that are useful.

If I recall correctly, poaches are more important in 1.3 if you've been trying to run low level. That was my playthrough style, and I saw a pretty long list of gear that was better than mine. But the sheer time sink smacked me in the face and welp, there were other games I could play. So that's what I did.

If I can reply to the presenting question: FFT 1.3 is one of the greatest video game mods of all time, despite its many flaws, and deserves a 1.4 the same way Philsov's 1.2 deserved Archael's 1.3.  The "low hanging fruit" for 1.4.0.1 would be to simply remove some of the CH 4 immortal flags and make those battles more interesting than "Haha! Power Source!"  Seriously, don't change any classes or abilities or speed-is-the-only-stat or anything big-picture like that, just find some ways to make those last-chapter battles a bit more differentiated one from another. 

Even easier, there are a few quality of life improvements that would go a long way to making the game more enjoyable.  Your first time through the game, it's easy to be unaware that some units are "immortal," and that can be confusing.  Give them unique sprites.  Honestly, just changing all the immortal-flagged or unique-classed or non-player-accessible-ability-having enemies to look different from the classes you can access as a player would be a great improvement.  Start with Germinas Peak.

If you're looking for proper vanilla mod, you can try my mine. It makes the game more challenging a little but it's still genuine vanilla. No more excessive equipment added like knight's sword, crossbow, shield, robe on squire  or 4-5 move increase on some jobs. No more stupid boost that breaks the game balance between you and enemies.

What I disliked the most is making changes that benefits you but not for enemies and make some abilities useless. If you want to increase damage, just add Arcane Strength as innate on black mage instead of increasing MA on weapons. That way enemies will become fearsome force to reckon with too. Some jobs are nerfed with reasons and vanilla re-balance mods often disregard that.

1.3 is good for people who really want challenges but it's not really suitable for vanilla style. Some items and abilities really shouldn't be there in vanilla like Cancel Strike or add oil that makes the game too easy in vanilla. Oh, try to get Female Thief and female healer with best zodiac compatibility, it'll help you a lot.

14 hours ago, Bishop said:

If I can reply to the presenting question: FFT 1.3 is one of the greatest video game mods of all time, despite its many flaws, and deserves a 1.4 the same way Philsov's 1.2 deserved Archael's 1.3. 

I agree. However, I do not have the audacity to label anything I do as "1.4". I simply don't believe I have the skills to make anything that good. Shit- I don't even have the skills to actually play 1.3, let alone make a successor.

Also, my mod will probably not be in the same spirit, just because I don't actually want it to be very hard. Harder than vanilla, of course, but no where near 1.3 hard (even pre-chapter-4).

14 hours ago, Bishop said:

The "low hanging fruit" for 1.4.0.1 would be to simply remove some of the CH 4 immortal flags and make those battles more interesting than "Haha! Power Source!"  Seriously, don't change any classes or abilities or speed-is-the-only-stat or anything big-picture like that, just find some ways to make those last-chapter battles a bit more differentiated one from another. 

Actually, I was planning on removing MOST immortal flags throughout the game. I think they only serve two purposes:

1. Give yet another unfair advantage to the enemy by allowing the enemies to be revived whenever the hell they feel like it, whereas we're stuck to three turns.

2. Making it so that you can face really powerful enemies, but don't get to absorb their crystal, lest you become powerful, too. Well, screw that. Either you can farm insane crystals for defeating insane enemies, or you don't get great crystals and don't face insane enemies.

That's just too lopsided for me. The battles are hard enough: you're usually outnumbered, they often have terrain advantage, they get infinite items, etc. God forbid you have some battles that are close to even.

Also, the more I think about the speed thing, the more I really want to stick to removing all speed growth. I was always frustrated in vanilla (and others agree it's the same in 1.3) that magic just doesn't matter at the end of the game- it's too slow for what it does. If we remove speed growth, we basically get two effects:

1. Magic stays relevant into the late game. You aren't going to get lapped by the enemies while you're charging a hard-hitting spell. Some CTs will likely need to be tweaked, etc.

2. Levels matter even less. I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing. Of course, if all battles scale with your level (instead of level +10 BS), this doesn't matter as much.

I see no downside, from a theoretical POV. There will of course be balance tweaks that need to happen (getting speed + 2 from some piece of equipment would be too good, for example).

14 hours ago, Bishop said:

Even easier, there are a few quality of life improvements that would go a long way to making the game more enjoyable.  Your first time through the game, it's easy to be unaware that some units are "immortal," and that can be confusing.  Give them unique sprites.  Honestly, just changing all the immortal-flagged or unique-classed or non-player-accessible-ability-having enemies to look different from the classes you can access as a player would be a great improvement.  Start with Germinas Peak.

Yup. That will happen by virtue of the above. Pretty much only special characters and guests will be immortal.

11 hours ago, Windows X said:

If you're looking for proper vanilla mod, you can try my mine. It makes the game more challenging a little but it's still genuine vanilla. No more excessive equipment added like knight's sword, crossbow, shield, robe on squire  or 4-5 move increase on some jobs. No more stupid boost that breaks the game balance between you and enemies.

What I disliked the most is making changes that benefits you but not for enemies and make some abilities useless. If you want to increase damage, just add Arcane Strength as innate on black mage instead of increasing MA on weapons. That way enemies will become fearsome force to reckon with too. Some jobs are nerfed with reasons and vanilla re-balance mods often disregard that.

1.3 is good for people who really want challenges but it's not really suitable for vanilla style. Some items and abilities really shouldn't be there in vanilla like Cancel Strike or add oil that makes the game too easy in vanilla. Oh, try to get Female Thief and female healer with best zodiac compatibility, it'll help you a lot.

I'm not looking for a vanilla mod, though. After getting a taste of 1.3, I don't think I can go back to vanilla. The classes in vanilla suck really hard compared to 1.3. The worst offenders being Archer, Calculator, Wizard, Lancer, and almost all of the specials, IMO. They're so bland and repetitive (except Calc- he's just totally broken).

This is precisely why I want to make an easy version of 1.3. I don't want it to be exactly like the Content version, because I don't feel like brute-force grinding is fun, even though Content at least gives you that option. I rather that the game just be balanced in a way that is more "naturally" easy- meaning that enemies are not always so much stronger than you (like Emmy was saying).

Trying to make an easier 1.3 is like a trainwreck version of comprehensive elements. Just play 1.3 original or easy mode. Archer sucks yeah I agree but not far from saving. Faster aim with arm/leg shot makes archer more desirable. Arithmetician is broken yeah I agree and I made him kind of Red Mage variant instead of making OP job with -ja spells like 1.3 (Too crazy for balanced game mod). Dragoon jump is boring I agree but that's how Dragoon works and 1.3 was like that too.

Specials are broken for special reasons and that's optional for people who want to take them on their own accord. I don't see anything wrong with Black Mage though. He has tons of good spells because he's the master of black magic. 3-4 tier spells has been there since early days of FF and it's tradition everyone is accustomed with. Vanilla is far from balanced and proper but it's not too bad to say it's beyond saving in my opinion.

I used to play 1.3 for a while and I gotta say I love many things they did there though the game can be too cruel and unbalanced at times. Those broken suitable for easier mode. Wizard with one level spell like Explosion, Chain Lightning will simply abuse its abilities without AI knowing how to utilize it efficiently. Imagine they cast spell and you use those modded Plunder strikes. You think it's cool and all because it's deadly situation and status ailments affect gameplay a lot. If you make that in easier version, it's just abusing and plain boring. And adding broken spells from enemies to Ramza and Arithmetician makes them broken even more in easier mode.

Please don't get me wrong that I'm against 1.3 mod. It's an excellent mod deserving to be one of the best treasure in history of SRPG gaming. However, it was that good because it's hard and challenging. Trying to make easier version of 1.3 without losing its charm isn't possible. It's captivating because it's hard and that's why you love this. I also tried porting 1.3 abilities and some stuff to make it easier but it'll be just a trainwreck version of mashed up mods by beginners who doesn't understand the game, let alone understanding the purpose of modding.

If you truly want to make an easier version of 1.3, you can do that by trying to optimize each battle, adjust boss abilities and strength to be more acceptable with your standards. Do that for every single battle and every single character and job. If you can put that much time and effort to optimize it for non-hardtype version without breaking game balance and its charm, many of us would like to try that too. Or it would be better if you can try start modding on your own from scratch too.

And for last time, I'd like to tell you that I used to mod 1.3 to make it more easier and friendly for no more people too. I even went as far as porting vanilla fights back and adjust each battle as I believe it shouldn't be that hard with vanilla fights and fix some gears and skills. After trying that for a while, I realized that this isn't 1.3 that it gave me goosebumps and fun factor of risking your life every turn. It's just plain wrong, plain boring and IMO is worse than vanilla gameplay. If you wish to try that again, good luck or get vanilla story battle version of 1.3 to start with from here.

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=3514.0

For me 1.3 isn't 1.3 if it doesn't have difficulty deserving for its changes. You need to understand how battle mechanics work, why they have this ability in this job and why it has something strange like White Mage having very high PA, even higher than Squire. Take hint why Summoner moves slower than others and why White Mage moves faster than average speed. How these affect battle mechanics and sequence of action. If I change abilities to this, will it break other job's abilities? In 1.3, they reworked every part to their liking with different mindset in battle mechanics. Sometimes it's too limited with only one way to win certain battles.

I modded my own game instead of trying to fix 1.3 to the way I like because I realized it's not a proper way to make things right and I did try before coming to this conclusion. I'm no longer a beginner who follow the hype and mash up things I like without giving a second thought to people who created it before anymore and that's why some modders left for their own creation rather than revising legendary 1.3 mod. They do it for their own satisfaction to play the game they feel right for them.

18 hours ago, Windows X said:

Trying to make an easier 1.3 is like a trainwreck version of comprehensive elements. Just play 1.3 original or easy mode. Archer sucks yeah I agree but not far from saving. Faster aim with arm/leg shot makes archer more desirable. Arithmetician is broken yeah I agree and I made him kind of Red Mage variant instead of making OP job with -ja spells like 1.3 (Too crazy for balanced game mod). Dragoon jump is boring I agree but that's how Dragoon works and 1.3 was like that too.

If you suggest playing 1.3 easy mode, then how can it be that trying to make 1.3 easier is a trainwreck?

18 hours ago, Windows X said:

Specials are broken for special reasons and that's optional for people who want to take them on their own accord. I don't see anything wrong with Black Mage though. He has tons of good spells because he's the master of black magic. 3-4 tier spells has been there since early days of FF and it's tradition everyone is accustomed with. Vanilla is far from balanced and proper but it's not too bad to say it's beyond saving in my opinion.

Wizard/Black Mage is very redundant. In vanilla, I usually only get Ice 1, Bolt 2, and that's it. Then I move on to a different, more useful, class (Summoner). Elements almost never matter in vanilla, so there's no reason to get Bolt 1 + Fire 1 + Ice 1- it's a waste of JP. In 1.3, the lower levels spells are all different, which is great because it gives you a reason to want all of them- the elemental part is very secondary. You can, of course, make Wizard better and nerf Summoner so that I want to keep using Wizard, but I still wont buy Fire 3, and Ice 3, and Bolt 3. The only way that will happen is if you tweak many battles to make elemental resistances and weaknesses
much more common.

18 hours ago, Windows X said:

I used to play 1.3 for a while and I gotta say I love many things they did there though the game can be too cruel and unbalanced at times. Those broken suitable for easier mode. Wizard with one level spell like Explosion, Chain Lightning will simply abuse its abilities without AI knowing how to utilize it efficiently. Imagine they cast spell and you use those modded Plunder strikes. You think it's cool and all because it's deadly situation and status ailments affect gameplay a lot. If you make that in easier version, it's just abusing and plain boring. And adding broken spells from enemies to Ramza and Arithmetician makes them broken even more in easier mode.

I think I understand what you're saying. You're saying that the powerful spells are okay when the game is already very hard, but if we try to make it easier, it'll get to be too easy since the AI is dumb. I think that's a fair point, but again- it can't be worse than vanilla. Vanilla has Orlandu and Calculator and Blade Grasp and Auto Potion and Draw Out on Wizard and Two Fist Ninjas and Jumping Ninjas and... All kinds of stuff that the enemies never get to do.

18 hours ago, Windows X said:

Please don't get me wrong that I'm against 1.3 mod. It's an excellent mod deserving to be one of the best treasure in history of SRPG gaming. However, it was that good because it's hard and challenging. Trying to make easier version of 1.3 without losing its charm isn't possible. It's captivating because it's hard and that's why you love this. I also tried porting 1.3 abilities and some stuff to make it easier but it'll be just a trainwreck version of mashed up mods by beginners who doesn't understand the game, let alone understanding the purpose of modding.

If you truly want to make an easier version of 1.3, you can do that by trying to optimize each battle, adjust boss abilities and strength to be more acceptable with your standards. Do that for every single battle and every single character and job. If you can put that much time and effort to optimize it for non-hardtype version without breaking game balance and its charm, many of us would like to try that too. Or it would be better if you can try start modding on your own from scratch too.

The main idea for me is to mostly focus on enemy formations. I want to leave most of the jobs alone (except for the speed thing and maybe a few annoying abilities). The first things are to simply reduce the level gaps, take away (most) immortal enemies, reduce the numbers of enemies, and maybe just put fewer healers in enemy formations, (and do something about Power Source). I don't want the game to be *easy*, I just don't want it to be hair-pulling.

18 hours ago, Windows X said:

And for last time, I'd like to tell you that I used to mod 1.3 to make it more easier and friendly for no more people too. I even went as far as porting vanilla fights back and adjust each battle as I believe it shouldn't be that hard with vanilla fights and fix some gears and skills. After trying that for a while, I realized that this isn't 1.3 that it gave me goosebumps and fun factor of risking your life every turn. It's just plain wrong, plain boring and IMO is worse than vanilla gameplay. If you wish to try that again, good luck or get vanilla story battle version of 1.3 to start with from here.

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=3514.0

I think that's partly because the vanilla battles are so boring- every enemy is Knight/Chemist/Archer for the whole freaking game. I can see how that wouldn't be fun with the cool, improved 1.3 classes.

18 hours ago, Windows X said:

For me 1.3 isn't 1.3 if it doesn't have difficulty deserving for its changes. You need to understand how battle mechanics work, why they have this ability in this job and why it has something strange like White Mage having very high PA, even higher than Squire. Take hint why Summoner moves slower than others and why White Mage moves faster than average speed. How these affect battle mechanics and sequence of action. If I change abilities to this, will it break other job's abilities? In 1.3, they reworked every part to their liking with different mindset in battle mechanics. Sometimes it's too limited with only one way to win certain battles.

I modded my own game instead of trying to fix 1.3 to the way I like because I realized it's not a proper way to make things right and I did try before coming to this conclusion. I'm no longer a beginner who follow the hype and mash up things I like without giving a second thought to people who created it before anymore and that's why some modders left for their own creation rather than revising legendary 1.3 mod. They do it for their own satisfaction to play the game they feel right for them.

Fair points. I will keep those things in mind when I eventually get to this. I've postponed actually working on it since I learned that I need to find another job soon...

2 hours ago, pogeymanz said:

If you suggest playing 1.3 easy mode, then how can it be that trying to make 1.3 easier is a trainwreck?

Because it'll be a trackwreck regardless of either choice so why not trying someone else's work and be done with that? There's also 1.3 with vanilla fights as I suggested before which should be less hassle than content version. I played it, built my own for a while and yeah. It's not really fun like original 1.3 where Archer's strike means your fate of that battle.

2 hours ago, pogeymanz said:

Wizard/Black Mage is very redundant. In vanilla, I usually only get Ice 1, Bolt 2, and that's it. Then I move on to a different, more useful, class (Summoner). Elements almost never matter in vanilla, so there's no reason to get Bolt 1 + Fire 1 + Ice 1- it's a waste of JP. In 1.3, the lower levels spells are all different, which is great because it gives you a reason to want all of them- the elemental part is very secondary. You can, of course, make Wizard better and nerf Summoner so that I want to keep using Wizard, but I still wont buy Fire 3, and Ice 3, and Bolt 3. The only way that will happen is if you tweak many battles to make elemental resistances and weaknesses
much more common.

While I do agree that Fire 1-2-3-4 are pretty redundant. That's the charm of classical Final Fantasy. It'd be nice if skill pops up according to job level but sadly you can skip some of them. In my re-balance, I tried mixing status effects with spells ans I found stable point at giving -ja spells with status infliction. It might mean skipping -ga spells completely for -ja but I'll try to re-balance spells better in next releases. You can improve black mage spells in Vanilla. It's always easier to address issue you have rather than fixing it.

2 hours ago, pogeymanz said:

I think I understand what you're saying. You're saying that the powerful spells are okay when the game is already very hard, but if we try to make it easier, it'll get to be too easy since the AI is dumb. I think that's a fair point, but again- it can't be worse than vanilla. Vanilla has Orlandu and Calculator and Blade Grasp and Auto Potion and Draw Out on Wizard and Two Fist Ninjas and Jumping Ninjas and... All kinds of stuff that the enemies never get to do.

It CAN be worse than Vanilla. Trust me. After playing 1.3 abilities and items mod on vanilla fights for a while, I feel like I'm cheating enemies and ended up stopping my 1.3 development. In my mod, enemies will mostly gain benefits with changes I made for most of the time. Enemy archer will use higher level aim on me or hit with no miss chance. Enemy Black Mage can OHKO my Thief. Changes like increasing steal or rend chance will also affect on me too. 1.3 will simply bring new benefits to you and vanilla won't gain much from it.

Orlandu is broken and everyone know this. Just don't use him if you don't feel like using broken characters. There's always generic and other guests available for people who want fair fights. Just stop making excuse like you can't stop using him. And I removed broken Calculator abilities on my mod and make it to be more fair to use job. There might be some tricks to exploit but it's not as bad as how 1.3 works in easier mode IMO.

2 hours ago, pogeymanz said:

The main idea for me is to mostly focus on enemy formations. I want to leave most of the jobs alone (except for the speed thing and maybe a few annoying abilities). The first things are to simply reduce the level gaps, take away (most) immortal enemies, reduce the numbers of enemies, and maybe just put fewer healers in enemy formations, (and do something about Power Source). I don't want the game to be *easy*, I just don't want it to be hair-pulling.

You're actually asking to make the game easy. Just stop pretending that you don't. Remove immortal? Reduce enemies? Reduce healers on enemies? How is that not making the game easy with 1.3? You have tons of broken abilties at your disposal. Why don't you try charming enemies, disabling or immobilize some more so it won't be painful as you are now? 1.3 was designed to abuse status infliction and if you can't do that well, you'd better consider another mod or make ones yourself that you feel good with like what I'm doing now.

2 hours ago, pogeymanz said:

I think that's partly because the vanilla battles are so boring- every enemy is Knight/Chemist/Archer for the whole freaking game. I can see how that wouldn't be fun with the cool, improved 1.3 classes.

Vanilla battle can be boring because developers don't want to make it too hard. Imagine they put Mystic/Orator and spam status infliction on your team. It's a taboo for mass SRPG genre and I don't think it's going to work for public releases. However, you can also make Vanilla fights more interesting like Black Mage can OHKO your Thief, Squire and Chemist can do decent damage, Archer has more effective Aim and some disabilities. It's not going to be so easy as much as before. And I have my share of fun making it my way with balanced mod mindset.

2 hours ago, pogeymanz said:

Fair points. I will keep those things in mind when I eventually get to this. I've postponed actually working on it since I learned that I need to find another job soon...

You know it only took me few days to make the first balanced mod, few days later to improve and fixing stuff. Well, learning curve and expertise takes time so you may need more time to work on it. Before I work on my own mod, I spent a few weeks on working on 1.3, a few months playing other mods and by far Kind of was my favorite. It's the closest to balanced mod to my ideals though he made things a bit to easier for him for some aspects like reducing CT excessively while shorten cast time ability should be used instead for an example.

I'm not telling you to try my mod and enjoy it based on my answers. There're plenty of good mods in communities that'll suit your taste better than 1.3 variant which it will never be casual friendly style. Some mechanics in 1.3 will just break balance in casual play and there're tons of examples to demonstrate that. So you should at least try other mods and open yourself up to possibilities of something outside 1.3. Stop clinging to the hype and enjoy the game in the way you truly want it.

On 12/18/2017 at 0:36 PM, Windows X said:

While I do agree that Fire 1-2-3-4 are pretty redundant. That's the charm of classical Final Fantasy. It'd be nice if skill pops up according to job level but sadly you can skip some of them. In my re-balance, I tried mixing status effects with spells ans I found stable point at giving -ja spells with status infliction. It might mean skipping -ga spells completely for -ja but I'll try to re-balance spells better in next releases. You can improve black mage spells in Vanilla. It's always easier to address issue you have rather than fixing it.

On 12/18/2017 at 9:39 AM, pogeymanz said:

No. It isn't charming. It only made sense in the earlier ones because there was a clear progression. Under normal circumstances, you couldn't have Fire 1 and Fire 3, but not 2. In the world of FFT, you can, so it causes a bit of a problem. Fire 1, 2, 3, and 4 can basically be condensed into 2 spells. "Normal Fire Spell" and "Big AoE Fire Spell." The issue in FFT land is that you can grab Fire 1, and Fire 3 and basically say "Screw off" to Fire 2 and never get it. That means that there isn't a progression here. 1.3 definitely made the right call by mixing up all of the spells. Even in the original games aside from one, this was kinda dumb. Once you get Fire 2, you pretty much never use fire. The Wizard in FFT has an artificially inflated moveset. Compare that to say, Oracle, where it doesn't really have redundant moves and the picture is made perfectly clear what's wrong with the Wizard in Vanilla. 

On 12/18/2017 at 0:36 PM, Windows X said:

It CAN be worse than Vanilla. Trust me. After playing 1.3 abilities and items mod on vanilla fights for a while, I feel like I'm cheating enemies and ended up stopping my 1.3 development. In my mod, enemies will mostly gain benefits with changes I made for most of the time. Enemy archer will use higher level aim on me or hit with no miss chance. Enemy Black Mage can OHKO my Thief. Changes like increasing steal or rend chance will also affect on me too. 1.3 will simply bring new benefits to you and vanilla won't gain much from it.

Orlandu is broken and everyone know this. Just don't use him if you don't feel like using broken characters. There's always generic and other guests available for people who want fair fights. Just stop making excuse like you can't stop using him. And I removed broken Calculator abilities on my mod and make it to be more fair to use job. There might be some tricks to exploit but it's not as bad as how 1.3 works in easier mode IMO.

I'd already stand that 1.3 is worse than Vanilla, as the biggest problem with Vanilla is that it starts out too hard, and the enemies just don't have any real sort of progression with their abilities or jobs and are definitely hurt by the sprite limitation-- not sure if that is a thing in the PSP version, but it's without a doubt, a problem in Vanilla. Especially if you try to mod it, as it's the first annoying problem you'll run into. 1.3 on the other hand, immediately starts the characters with better progression than any sane player could ever possibly have, and around Chapter 4, when you reach the same tier of strength as the enemy, Arch made the AI cheat through obscure tooltips, garbage multipliers (like Knight tier characters that can move as fast or faster than a ninja and have better than thief speed growth), impossible equipment combinations, and impossible faith combinations that you'd never see under normal circumstances. 

Orlandu is overpowered. Broken is the Calculator class. The Calculator class takes a dump on 1) MP 2) Range 3) Charge Times 4) Vertical  5) Move 6) Jump It doesn't give a crap about any of that. Orlandu has nothing on the Calculator class. Fixing Orlandu is a good idea because he's so strong that there's no reason not to use him. In a mod that attempts to fix things, that's absolutely important. 

On 12/18/2017 at 0:36 PM, Windows X said:

You're actually asking to make the game easy. Just stop pretending that you don't. Remove immortal? Reduce enemies? Reduce healers on enemies? How is that not making the game easy with 1.3? You have tons of broken abilties at your disposal. Why don't you try charming enemies, disabling or immobilize some more so it won't be painful as you are now? 1.3 was designed to abuse status infliction and if you can't do that well, you'd better consider another mod or make ones yourself that you feel good with like what I'm doing now.

On 12/18/2017 at 9:39 AM, pogeymanz said:

Removing immortal is a good thing actually. The AI actually behaves better when immortal is removed. It forces the AI to be more aggressive to pursue revivals and the like. And a lot of highlight statuses are removed when you have the immortal flag. And while you could simply remove those status immunity, all people would probably end up doing is hitting them with petrify instead of confuse / sleep and dealing with the annoying person. It also mixes up fights considerably more. 1.3 actually isn't entirely designed with status infliction. The best strategy for 90% of the battles in 1.3 is not actually status effects, but rather 1) Going faster than the enemy 2) Annihilating it before it can do much. In the event that you cannot do both, the response is essentially to slap Damage Split / Hamedo / Meatbone Slash on and survive the initial wave and then mop up afterward. There's a reason that most victory runs on videos are pretty quick.  It's not because the people are just good, it's because the first two turns pretty much determine everything else. 

The biggest issues with 1.3 that need to be done away with is the Power Source fest that is Chapter 4. Chapters 1-3 have some slight problems but aren't where most of the problems even start to crop up. I didn't even notice until I started playing, but Chapter 4 is just a chore, and it's longer than any other chapter in the game. It's literally almost as long as 1, 2, and 3. 

I agree that removing speed growth is one of the best ideas for balancing the game. Aside from not always having to level up characters in classes with good speed, it makes CT balance much easier. You can set CT knowing exactly how fast every character class is, and maybe try some interesting things with it too. Just beware of + speed gear. It's probably best to keep a tight rein on that stuff.

Removing power sources or nerfing them somehow would also be great. Maybe if the game was consistent and made them useable only by Worker robots on both sides of the field instead of just yours, we'd have a better situation. That could make it more of a rare problem to face instead of what we have right now. I have more thought on nerfing that thing but I'm not sure if it would be overkill.

Vanilla calculator needs to go. Maybe use that slot for some weird custom class. I wonder if a blue mage could be made using the game's inbuilt "learn when hit by something" mechanic.

The biggest issue 1.3 has is a clear lack of diverse abilities for the player. For most of its later development, people only focused on long balance discussions without giving any new creative suggestions, nerfing everything which could be considered too "cheap". I agree that Ch4 throws some BS enemy formations at the player, but this wouldn't be so apparent if there were more available options to deal with them, other than maxing speed and focusing damage on important targets, which can be fun, but which shouldn't be the main strategy for every battle. That's why I now enjoy Monster Tactics a lot more than anything which can be done in 1.3.

On the other hand, I completely agree with Bishop. There always used to be players who hated on the mod because they couldn't beat a battle and complained about unfairness and fake difficulty, which is really the motivation behind a lot of the criticism these days. 1.3 is not a perfect mod, but that shouldn't detract from the large amount of enjoyment it brought to many people.

My two cents on this whole deal is.....what if we wait for an actual rehearse of the mod and give out opinions and suggestions?

This feels repetitive when we had a 5 pages long discussion on Insane Difficulty.

If someone wants to make FFT 1.4, just do it and we play it and give out our reviews to enhance the experience, don't you think?

3 hours ago, ronlyn said:

My two cents on this whole deal is.....what if we wait for an actual rehearse of the mod and give out opinions and suggestions?

This feels repetitive when we had a 5 pages long discussion on Insane Difficulty.

If someone wants to make FFT 1.4, just do it and we play it and give out our reviews to enhance the experience, don't you think?

Yeah, that's a fair point. And just to be very clear again, anything I do with a tweaked 1.3 should NOT be considered a 1.4. I don't want that kind of responsibility.

I think these discussions are a testament to how much people enjoyed 1.3 and long for more/similar experiences. Everyone has strong feelings about what was right/wrong about the game because we all love it so much. And it's hard not to want to share your opinion when you care about stuff. That's pretty cool.

On 12/20/2017 at 3:15 AM, Augestein said:

No. It isn't charming. It only made sense in the earlier ones because there was a clear progression. Under normal circumstances, you couldn't have Fire 1 and Fire 3, but not 2. In the world of FFT, you can, so it causes a bit of a problem. Fire 1, 2, 3, and 4 can basically be condensed into 2 spells. "Normal Fire Spell" and "Big AoE Fire Spell." The issue in FFT land is that you can grab Fire 1, and Fire 3 and basically say "Screw off" to Fire 2 and never get it. That means that there isn't a progression here. 1.3 definitely made the right call by mixing up all of the spells. Even in the original games aside from one, this was kinda dumb. Once you get Fire 2, you pretty much never use fire. The Wizard in FFT has an artificially inflated moveset. Compare that to say, Oracle, where it doesn't really have redundant moves and the picture is made perfectly clear what's wrong with the Wizard in Vanilla. 

What you said has answers in itself. You said screw fire 2 and get only 1 and 3. While some get Fire 2 and never use Fire anymore. I believe that calls flexibility and if you have free JP to spends, you'll eventually learn the rest.

However, I do agree that spell tier needs improvements on vanilla. While you appreciate the 'fresh' idea of combined spells with different patterns and stuff, I don't though. That's just the fancy idea from endgame mania who ignores the basics.

The main reason why you should upgrade spell is damage throughput and MP allocation. The reason why you should upgrade spell is to make more damage when caster can provide it. I do agree that -ga -ja spells need some adjustments so people won't skip easily though.

On 12/20/2017 at 3:15 AM, Augestein said:

I'd already stand that 1.3 is worse than Vanilla, as the biggest problem with Vanilla is that it starts out too hard, and the enemies just don't have any real sort of progression with their abilities or jobs and are definitely hurt by the sprite limitation-- not sure if that is a thing in the PSP version, but it's without a doubt, a problem in Vanilla. Especially if you try to mod it, as it's the first annoying problem you'll run into. 1.3 on the other hand, immediately starts the characters with better progression than any sane player could ever possibly have, and around Chapter 4, when you reach the same tier of strength as the enemy, Arch made the AI cheat through obscure tooltips, garbage multipliers (like Knight tier characters that can move as fast or faster than a ninja and have better than thief speed growth), impossible equipment combinations, and impossible faith combinations that you'd never see under normal circumstances. 

Orlandu is overpowered. Broken is the Calculator class. The Calculator class takes a dump on 1) MP 2) Range 3) Charge Times 4) Vertical  5) Move 6) Jump It doesn't give a crap about any of that. Orlandu has nothing on the Calculator class. Fixing Orlandu is a good idea because he's so strong that there's no reason not to use him. In a mod that attempts to fix things, that's absolutely important. 

Vanilla starts out too hard? I mean, seriously? The only fight where I feel it's quite a challenge at first was Dorter Slums and after I realize that we should follow NPCs to take archer on top, it became very easy. The idea is get to the high ground and lure enemies in to finish them off easier.

1.3 has fun aspects but I don't like the idea of enemies having better stuff and throw us a lot to force we play only specific strategy and jobs at times. If Orlandu is broken, don't use him. Think of him as easy mode unit. There's always a unit to help people finishing the game easier if they can't do it without easy mode unit. It's fine to leave Orlandu like that. If calculator skills are broken, change it to something else and I did nerve that job with some good trade offs.

On 12/20/2017 at 3:15 AM, Augestein said:

Removing immortal is a good thing actually. The AI actually behaves better when immortal is removed. It forces the AI to be more aggressive to pursue revivals and the like. And a lot of highlight statuses are removed when you have the immortal flag. And while you could simply remove those status immunity, all people would probably end up doing is hitting them with petrify instead of confuse / sleep and dealing with the annoying person. It also mixes up fights considerably more. 1.3 actually isn't entirely designed with status infliction. The best strategy for 90% of the battles in 1.3 is not actually status effects, but rather 1) Going faster than the enemy 2) Annihilating it before it can do much. In the event that you cannot do both, the response is essentially to slap Damage Split / Hamedo / Meatbone Slash on and survive the initial wave and then mop up afterward. There's a reason that most victory runs on videos are pretty quick.  It's not because the people are just good, it's because the first two turns pretty much determine everything else. 

The biggest issues with 1.3 that need to be done away with is the Power Source fest that is Chapter 4. Chapters 1-3 have some slight problems but aren't where most of the problems even start to crop up. I didn't even notice until I started playing, but Chapter 4 is just a chore, and it's longer than any other chapter in the game. It's literally almost as long as 1, 2, and 3.

Maybe you should consider why they put those on in the first place. But if you want to make your own 1.3 mod without it, fine. Suit yourself. Sometimes mod also suggest me this and that and it's ultimately my decision whether I'll listen to the advice of more experienced modder or not. The only difference is I'm working on my own mod, not on someone else's mod.

To modify someone else's work and share it, you need to understand the reason behind the original and preserve the integrity of originals too. If you like 1.3 elements so much, try to make your own mod based on 1.3 implementation. It's not that hard to do actually.

As for people who complain about spell, I beg you to consider things like Haste/Quick/Swiftness/Tailwind and other speed manipulation attributes. Another possibility is to reduce the factor of speed growth and multiplier, making it less significant like from 95-110 multiplier instead. In my opinion, alternating speed will affect gameplay mechanics at lot and need to be extra careful on doing that.

On 12/20/2017 at 5:13 PM, Windows X said:

What you said has answers in itself. You said screw fire 2 and get only 1 and 3. While some get Fire 2 and never use Fire anymore. I believe that calls flexibility and if you have free JP to spends, you'll eventually learn the rest.

However, I do agree that spell tier needs improvements on vanilla. While you appreciate the 'fresh' idea of combined spells with different patterns and stuff, I don't though. That's just the fancy idea from endgame mania who ignores the basics.

The main reason why you should upgrade spell is damage throughput and MP allocation. The reason why you should upgrade spell is to make more damage when caster can provide it. I do agree that -ga -ja spells need some adjustments so people won't skip easily though.

It doesn't call for flexibility. That's the issue. Fire 1, 2, and 3 are essentially the same attack. Fire 1 is too weak to use once you have Fire 2 and if you get Fire 2 when Fire 1 still has good damage, Fire 2 probably costs too much MP to be worth using. Instead, it's better to literally have a Fire spell that's always relevant and a big fire spell that hits a larger panel. The spells in this game scale like complete garbage. Both damage wise and speed wise. Without slowing the progression of either the growths, or physical scaling, spells will always have this problem in the game. 

Yes. They do. It's not that I appreciate a "fresh" set of ideas with different patterns, it's that the spells actually *do* different things. Explosion in 1.3 is a low damage fast spell that can proc oil which enables damage spikes. 2 wizards can pack more damage than many things in the early game with it especially if they get lucky with oil procs. Mjonir is a good spell that is fairly strong, and has the ability to proc stops on people if you cannot kill them. Blizzard is a huge sweeping AoE that has a chance of stopping someone. Meltdown is basically explosion and actually gives you a reason to use Black Magic as a secondary if you're a physical user-- as in Vanilla it's just useless. With just these spells I mentioned right now, 1.3 Wizard is already superior to Vanilla Wizard. The biggest problem with 1.3 Wizard is that spells scale poorly in comparison to physical , and that's a problem that was present in Vanilla. 

Which is that they need better scaling. However, fixing the scaling problem is what causes them to not really be necessary to have all of them. Take a look at something like say Knight (Vanilla or 1.3 are fine). Knight only has 8 moves in the game. However, its 8 moves are better than the Wizard's on the account that the Wizard has 16 moves total, but won't be using the other abilities later on in the game, while the Knight's skills are always going to be applicable to use at any given point. Knocking someone's speed down 2 points is always useful. Knocking someone's PA down 2 points or MA down to points may become *less* effective later on, but it's still useful because of the way stats scale in FFT. Compare that to the wizard where there is no real applicable difference between Fire, Ice and Electricity because there generally aren't enough dynamic weaknesses / strengths in gear to make them any different outside of cosmetic differences. Realistically, a person playing this game is better off grabbing for instance, Bolt 1-4 , Flare, and being basically done with the wizard skillset. But we'll be nice and grab Toad and Poison and Death as well. And considering that Bolt 1 and 2 do such lackluster damage, you'll be using Bolt 3 or 4 (haha, no, you won't use 4, it's too slow without Short Charge honestly).  It's not the same as say, Final Fantasy 1, where Spells per day were a thing, so you can realistically run out of "Bolt 3" spells that you can cast, but you're still permitted to bolt 1 and 2. 

On 12/20/2017 at 5:13 PM, Windows X said:

Vanilla starts out too hard? I mean, seriously? The only fight where I feel it's quite a challenge at first was Dorter Slums and after I realize that we should follow NPCs to take archer on top, it became very easy. The idea is get to the high ground and lure enemies in to finish them off easier.

Yes. It does. For a first time player, it most certainly does. Chocobos are incredibly nasty foes to be a basic enemy to fight in randoms-- sporting an AoE heal that doesn't cost MP, more move than any of your characters, Counter, a better reaction ability than any reasonable player would have-- where they probably have NOTHING, and enemies often outnumber you. If a person doesn't immediately gun for Gain JP Up, or a caster class, the game can be fairly difficult. After you beat Dorter, the difficulty just kind of disappears for awhile until you reach Wiegraf, and then disappears again. Chapter 2 is just flat out easier than Chapter 1. Not only are Gafgarion and Agrias able to take care of themselves better than Delita and Algus by being in naturally sturdier classes, but neither of them can miss their attacks, one of them can drain MP of casters should he choose to, and more pressingly, his single target attack that he has heals himself. So yes. Yes FFT Vanilla starts out too hard. By Chapter 3, enemies are still rocking basic gear and the same basic classes they were in Chapter 1. The only difference? You have 2 specials and a bucket load of JP under your belt that if you grabbed Gained JP Up, the difference between you and the enemy progression only continues to widen. By Chapter 4, the game just starts thrusting special weapons and special characters in your arsenal like Beowulf or Reis, and its no wonder people joke about FFT's difficulty. 

On 12/20/2017 at 5:13 PM, Windows X said:

1.3 has fun aspects but I don't like the idea of enemies having better stuff and throw us a lot to force we play only specific strategy and jobs at times. If Orlandu is broken, don't use him. Think of him as easy mode unit. There's always a unit to help people finishing the game easier if they can't do it without easy mode unit. It's fine to leave Orlandu like that. If calculator skills are broken, change it to something else and I did nerve that job with some good trade offs.

Honestly, the enemies generally don't have better stuff than you in terms of equips. Most of the stuff they have, you can get, whether through a sidequest, secret hunt, or simply recruiting a character. However, the issue is that the enemy setups tend to be "sweeping AoEs from fast units" and they have Item as their secondary, and get 4x passives with a 5th one being their natural one. All of these things alone are not a problem. It's the fact that in 1.3, they tend to be the EXACT. SAME. THING. Over and over and over again with the generic enemies being the ones that generally mix things up, but not enough to stop the main problem. Or... You could just change Orlandu and have him be a unit. There's nothing wrong with the decision most people make to make Orlandu fix. If you're doing a rebalance mod, you may as well fix him. And the problem with Orlandu, is why give you an "easy mode" unit at the later half of the game? That's a really lousy idea. Calculator skills are actually broken plain and simple. Orlandu is just a bit too strong. 

On 12/20/2017 at 5:13 PM, Windows X said:

Maybe you should consider why they put those on in the first place. But if you want to make your own 1.3 mod without it, fine. Suit yourself. Sometimes mod also suggest me this and that and it's ultimately my decision whether I'll listen to the advice of more experienced modder or not. The only difference is I'm working on my own mod, not on someone else's mod.

 

The consideration was "it'll be harder to win if enemies don't have counters." We've actually seen Archael say this. People had literally asked this before. We got answers. 

As for the rest of this, I'm not even sure where you're going with this. Who said I was trying to force you to do anything? This topic isn't about you. It's about 1.3 and to a certain extent, the actual creator of the topic. 

On 12/20/2017 at 5:13 PM, Windows X said:

To modify someone else's work and share it, you need to understand the reason behind the original and preserve the integrity of originals too. If you like 1.3 elements so much, try to make your own mod based on 1.3 implementation. It's not that hard to do actually.

Okay? I'm not even sure what you're even prattling on about here. 

On 12/20/2017 at 5:13 PM, Windows X said:

As for people who complain about spell, I beg you to consider things like Haste/Quick/Swiftness/Tailwind and other speed manipulation attributes. Another possibility is to reduce the factor of speed growth and multiplier, making it less significant like from 95-110 multiplier instead. In my opinion, alternating speed will affect gameplay mechanics at lot and need to be extra careful on doing that.

 

Yes. But it's not the speed manipulation abilities that are at fault so much as speed scaling of everything else. Spells in this game-- and largely 1.3 have problems because: 

1) In order to use a spell, you have to deal with mechanics that other things do not: like physical. Like charge times.

2) It ends up doing less damage than a physical attack. 

3) It has a resource that you have to manage that physical does not outside of sword skills. And unlike Samurai, unless it breaks, you can use it infinitely. 

4) Movement makes the advantage that spells would have, a pointless endeavor. 

5) Charge is basically a must for 1.3 by endgame. 

Vanilla has this problem to a certain extent. However, people still liked spells because while their damage was worse, it wasn't so bad that spells because just flat out bad. They just weren't as good. 

13 hours ago, Augestein said:

It doesn't call for flexibility. That's the issue. Fire 1, 2, and 3 are essentially the same attack. Fire 1 is too weak to use once you have Fire 2 and if you get Fire 2 when Fire 1 still has good damage, Fire 2 probably costs too much MP to be worth using. Instead, it's better to literally have a Fire spell that's always relevant and a big fire spell that hits a larger panel. The spells in this game scale like complete garbage. Both damage wise and speed wise. Without slowing the progression of either the growths, or physical scaling, spells will always have this problem in the game. 

Yes. They do. It's not that I appreciate a "fresh" set of ideas with different patterns, it's that the spells actually *do* different things. Explosion in 1.3 is a low damage fast spell that can proc oil which enables damage spikes. 2 wizards can pack more damage than many things in the early game with it especially if they get lucky with oil procs. Mjonir is a good spell that is fairly strong, and has the ability to proc stops on people if you cannot kill them. Blizzard is a huge sweeping AoE that has a chance of stopping someone. Meltdown is basically explosion and actually gives you a reason to use Black Magic as a secondary if you're a physical user-- as in Vanilla it's just useless. With just these spells I mentioned right now, 1.3 Wizard is already superior to Vanilla Wizard. The biggest problem with 1.3 Wizard is that spells scale poorly in comparison to physical , and that's a problem that was present in Vanilla. 

Which is that they need better scaling. However, fixing the scaling problem is what causes them to not really be necessary to have all of them. Take a look at something like say Knight (Vanilla or 1.3 are fine). Knight only has 8 moves in the game. However, its 8 moves are better than the Wizard's on the account that the Wizard has 16 moves total, but won't be using the other abilities later on in the game, while the Knight's skills are always going to be applicable to use at any given point. Knocking someone's speed down 2 points is always useful. Knocking someone's PA down 2 points or MA down to points may become *less* effective later on, but it's still useful because of the way stats scale in FFT. Compare that to the wizard where there is no real applicable difference between Fire, Ice and Electricity because there generally aren't enough dynamic weaknesses / strengths in gear to make them any different outside of cosmetic differences. Realistically, a person playing this game is better off grabbing for instance, Bolt 1-4 , Flare, and being basically done with the wizard skillset. But we'll be nice and grab Toad and Poison and Death as well. And considering that Bolt 1 and 2 do such lackluster damage, you'll be using Bolt 3 or 4 (haha, no, you won't use 4, it's too slow without Short Charge honestly).  It's not the same as say, Final Fantasy 1, where Spells per day were a thing, so you can realistically run out of "Bolt 3" spells that you can cast, but you're still permitted to bolt 1 and 2. 

Yes. It does. For a first time player, it most certainly does. Chocobos are incredibly nasty foes to be a basic enemy to fight in randoms-- sporting an AoE heal that doesn't cost MP, more move than any of your characters, Counter, a better reaction ability than any reasonable player would have-- where they probably have NOTHING, and enemies often outnumber you. If a person doesn't immediately gun for Gain JP Up, or a caster class, the game can be fairly difficult. After you beat Dorter, the difficulty just kind of disappears for awhile until you reach Wiegraf, and then disappears again. Chapter 2 is just flat out easier than Chapter 1. Not only are Gafgarion and Agrias able to take care of themselves better than Delita and Algus by being in naturally sturdier classes, but neither of them can miss their attacks, one of them can drain MP of casters should he choose to, and more pressingly, his single target attack that he has heals himself. So yes. Yes FFT Vanilla starts out too hard. By Chapter 3, enemies are still rocking basic gear and the same basic classes they were in Chapter 1. The only difference? You have 2 specials and a bucket load of JP under your belt that if you grabbed Gained JP Up, the difference between you and the enemy progression only continues to widen. By Chapter 4, the game just starts thrusting special weapons and special characters in your arsenal like Beowulf or Reis, and its no wonder people joke about FFT's difficulty. 

 

Honestly, the enemies generally don't have better stuff than you in terms of equips. Most of the stuff they have, you can get, whether through a sidequest, secret hunt, or simply recruiting a character. However, the issue is that the enemy setups tend to be "sweeping AoEs from fast units" and they have Item as their secondary, and get 4x passives with a 5th one being their natural one. All of these things alone are not a problem. It's the fact that in 1.3, they tend to be the EXACT. SAME. THING. Over and over and over again with the generic enemies being the ones that generally mix things up, but not enough to stop the main problem. Or... You could just change Orlandu and have him be a unit. There's nothing wrong with the decision most people make to make Orlandu fix. If you're doing a rebalance mod, you may as well fix him. And the problem with Orlandu, is why give you an "easy mode" unit at the later half of the game? That's a really lousy idea. Calculator skills are actually broken plain and simple. Orlandu is just a bit too strong. 

 

The consideration was "it'll be harder to win if enemies don't have counters." We've actually seen Archael say this. People had literally asked this before. We got answers. 

As for the rest of this, I'm not even sure where you're going with this. Who said I was trying to force you to do anything? This topic isn't about you. It's about 1.3 and to a certain extent, the actual creator of the topic. 

 

Okay? I'm not even sure what you're even prattling on about here. 

 

Yes. But it's not the speed manipulation abilities that are at fault so much as speed scaling of everything else. Spells in this game-- and largely 1.3 have problems because: 

1) In order to use a spell, you have to deal with mechanics that other things do not: like physical. Like charge times.

2) It ends up doing less damage than a physical attack. 

3) It has a resource that you have to manage that physical does not outside of sword skills. And unlike Samurai, unless it breaks, you can use it infinitely. 

4) Movement makes the advantage that spells would have, a pointless endeavor. 

5) Charge is basically a must for 1.3 by endgame. 

Vanilla has this problem to a certain extent. However, people still liked spells because while their damage was worse, it wasn't so bad that spells because just flat out bad. They just weren't as good. 

On contrary, while Vanilla wizard has poorer scaling, -ja spells does better job with balancing against physical damage than 1.3 did. If you prefer magic being useless during lategame in 1.3, fine.

Your issue about vanilla spells was taken care off in my mod with 2 radius for -ga spells and add status effect on -ja spells. That's how I fixed it and it did work well enough for me right now.

Elemental damage has less role to play in FFT than others which I do agree. However, it's still usable with monsters and some re-balancing can work on it in if you try.

And if you think Vanilla is too hard for early game, it means you need to learn and understand more about tactics. I used to be FFT noob and I felt it was hard before too. But that's not issue about learning how to play properly.

Nerfing Orlandu might sound proper in re-balance but some fights in endgame can be tought and easy mode unit can help such players getting over it. He's a sword saint and probably the strongest knight in FFT. Do give him some credits OK?

As for your excuse to make the game easier and more reasonable for you, asking creators why you put this on and you should remove it is asked before and the answer was there. Accept it.

As for speed manipulation issue, it's an issue with 1.3 where CT on spells isn't balanced. 1.3 favors physical with no CT so you might as well remove CT altogether to fix it. That may work.

You can have better scaled spells without resorting to making fire 1/2/3/4.  The main issues with spell scaling:

1.  Spells are linear, physicals are quadratic; yet magic and physical attack growth scale the same way on characters.  Let's simplify a spell's formula to ma*15 for this example.  A spell like this will outpace ma^2 at ma < 15, and be outpaced by ma^2 at ma > 15.  Spells are frequently broken amounts of damage at lv 1, while barely/not at all worth the action to cast vs. using physical damage by mid level.  Solution = fix all formulas so that they are always linear or always quadratic.

2.  Spells have a charge time, physical attacks do not.  Since charge time is the best balancing factor for skills that isn't properly utilized in 1.3, my proposed solutions:  Give some physical skills a charge time (something like MT's Flare Blitz makes sense to have a charge time, since it's a physical skill that deals more damage than a direct attack, and also has an aoe), fix speed scaling to allow ct to be used (this can either be done by freezing speed growth, capping level much lower, or making spells faster as a character gains speed).

3.  Spells have MP cost, most physical attacks do not.  Why not balance MP costs differently?  MP costs and character MP growth in MT are entirely balanced upon new statuses (mist/rasp); weakness/strength to Ignite and Invert; use of passive abilities such as Amplify, Siphon, Mind Shield, Pressure, Hollow Mind; use of MP milling skills like Mp break, etc.  As such, characters can have thousands of MP at lv 99, yet MP as a mechanic is still important.  What you get in 1.3 is "fuck mp, I'm just going to use physical attacks" or "as long as I have enough MP to cast Meltdown with each character, that's all that matters."

4.  Range and AOE of spells doesn't matter as much when your characters can have 9 move and you only need to kill one target.  Solution = balance movement better, eliminate assassinations.

Elemental stuff can be better balanced with more interesting equipment choices, different procs on different elemental spells, different shaped spells (Fireball/Lightning Bolt/Cone of Cold).

11 hours ago, Windows X said:

And if you think Vanilla is too hard for early game, it means you need to learn and understand more about tactics. I used to be FFT noob and I felt it was hard before too. But that's not issue about learning how to play properly.

I don't think vanilla is too hard for early game, however my main issue with vanilla is that early game is much harder than late game.  Difficulty should scale upwards as the plot progresses, not downwards.  Assuming no excessive grinding, in chapter 1, you're essentially even with the ai.  Ai gets units with few relevant abilities, bad equipment, etc.  You get units with few relevant abilities, bad equipment, etc.  Now what happens in ch 4?  You get ninjas, calculators, Orlandu; and the vast majority of your enemies are still knights and time mages with linen robes and only Haste and Antidote learned.  

11 hours ago, Windows X said:

As for speed manipulation issue, it's an issue with 1.3 where CT on spells isn't balanced. 1.3 favors physical with no CT so you might as well remove CT altogether to fix it. That may work.

I would advise against removing CT altogether.  CT is the main thing that makes FFT unique when compared with other strategy RPG's, and is one of the best balancing factors to exist.  You're better off finding a way to make it work.

On 12/17/2017 at 2:43 PM, Windows X said:

Trying to make an easier 1.3 is like a trainwreck version of comprehensive elements. Just play 1.3 original or easy mode. Archer sucks yeah I agree but not far from saving. Faster aim with arm/leg shot makes archer more desirable. Arithmetician is broken yeah I agree and I made him kind of Red Mage variant instead of making OP job with -ja spells like 1.3 (Too crazy for balanced game mod). Dragoon jump is boring I agree but that's how Dragoon works and 1.3 was like that too.

Specials are broken for special reasons and that's optional for people who want to take them on their own accord. I don't see anything wrong with Black Mage though. He has tons of good spells because he's the master of black magic. 3-4 tier spells has been there since early days of FF and it's tradition everyone is accustomed with. Vanilla is far from balanced and proper but it's not too bad to say it's beyond saving in my opinion.

I used to play 1.3 for a while and I gotta say I love many things they did there though the game can be too cruel and unbalanced at times. Those broken suitable for easier mode. Wizard with one level spell like Explosion, Chain Lightning will simply abuse its abilities without AI knowing how to utilize it efficiently. Imagine they cast spell and you use those modded Plunder strikes. You think it's cool and all because it's deadly situation and status ailments affect gameplay a lot. If you make that in easier version, it's just abusing and plain boring. And adding broken spells from enemies to Ramza and Arithmetician makes them broken even more in easier mode.

So let me just say that none of these things are actually a problem with 1.3. As a matter of fact, I would argue that the AI uses the new abilities better than players generally will. The amount of times I've seen someone caught off guard and got three of their units wrecked with a Chain Lightning is staggering.

The biggest problems with 1.3 are what Quad and Emmy have mentioned.

Also I'd like to point out something: it seems you're trying to make sport out of Augestein by insinuating he's a bad player.

You're gonna have a bad time with that, bud.

You seem to be getting more aggressive as more and more people disagree with you. I would caution you against this, as this thread is going to end badly for you. Nothing being said here is personal, but it looks like you're taking it that way with how defensive you're getting. Take a step back, my dude. It's nothing to get heated over.

What I'd say 1.3 needs, and what FFT needs, to be honest, is to calm the fuck down with the RNG.

The chance of doing anything going below 50% is just annoying.

A coin flip should be the limit of forced randomness. The use of something like the Blind status would be an exception, of course.

In the case of something like debuffs, where randomness is essentially used as a crutch to balance them, I'd make the ability to heal them much slightly more common, and the ability to inflict them much more spread out.

If you see a group of units with particular jobs and skillsets, you should be able to tell "Okay, they're gonna debuff me like so", and come up with a plan to counteract it. One job focused around debuffs, in the classic, RNG-balanced sense, is dull as hell. Maybe a jobset of less-serious debuffs would still be fine, I guess. Just gotta keep it sane.

Making them unreliable to use isn't the answer.

Well, most of the problem with status effect rng is that in vanilla, debuffs were evadable in addition to the faith based check, and evasion was stupidly high.  When something has a 50% chance to cut through evasion, and another 50% check even if you hit the unit, why bother with status when damage is out of control and you can just kill the guy instead?  Get rid of that evasion check and make it faith based only, and you have something that has reasonable chances of hitting in addition to something that a player could feasibly increase those chances further with use of faith status and/or faith increasing moves.

For status effects, yeah, I think straight-up static evasion amounts are probably for the best. Scrap the both the character evasion and faith evasion checks, altogether.

Protecting from bad statuses any more than that can be the job of status protection items.

Just have to keep the RNG in check. For statuses and otherwise. Nothing below 50%. Anything below a coin flip is pure tedium.

35 minutes ago, AbnormalVoid said:

For status effects, yeah, I think straight-up static evasion amounts are probably for the best. Scrap the both the character evasion and faith evasion checks, altogether.

Protecting from bad statuses any more than that can be the job of status protection items.

Just have to keep the RNG in check. For statuses and otherwise. Nothing below 50%. Anything below a coin flip is pure tedium.

There must be some exceptions however: 50% Charm without any compat is outright ludicrous

And about Windows X rant, I just saw that one coming so that´s why I cut out some chase and put that post before

3 minutes ago, ronlyn said:

There must be some exceptions however: 50% Charm without any compat is outright ludicrous

And about Windows X rant, I just saw that one coming so that´s why I cut out some chase and put that post before

Nah, it's fine. Charm really isn't that OP, you just need to be prepared to counteract it, either with equipment or a quick simple attack.

In any case, whether you agree or not with the above, the trick to balancing more powerful debuffs is to have alternate effects. Say, an ability that causes both Charm and Slow. They're charmed, but their charm has reduced effectiveness, due to them being slowed.

There are better ways. There are ALWAYS better ways than sodomizing players with RNG. That's ludicrous.

39 minutes ago, AbnormalVoid said:

There are better ways. There are ALWAYS better ways than sodomizing players with RNG. That's ludicrous.

*1.3 Altima fight*

*Shivers* 

I'm against making 1.3 easier as it's supposed to be hard to enjoy. That's my point here. I think it'd be better to focus on 1.3 without comparing to vanilla.

Charm + Slow sounds interesting but enemy will also knock charmed unit back to their sense so we'll get enemy unit being hit and slowed instead.

I agree that some physical skills need CT added in 1.3 to balance things out with spells. I don't agree about coin flip limit of RNG though. Some hard to infllict status has its own charm too.

9 hours ago, Windows X said:

I'm against making 1.3 easier as it's supposed to be hard to enjoy. That's my point here. I think it'd be better to focus on 1.3 without comparing to vanilla.

Charm + Slow sounds interesting but enemy will also knock charmed unit back to their sense so we'll get enemy unit being hit and slowed instead.

I agree that some physical skills need CT added in 1.3 to balance things out with spells. I don't agree about coin flip limit of RNG though. Some hard to infllict status has its own charm too.

1.3 isn't even particularly very hard, it's just poorly balanced.

A lot of people will argue that shifting balance against the player is the best, or perhaps only, way to increase difficulty. This is patently wrong. The best way to increase challenge is through the diversity and complexity of the challenge being offered, so that a player will still have the ability to overcome if they use their resources properly. Often, this is done in new ways they hadn't considered, given the change of pace, or subversion of rules, from previous challenges. This way, each new challenge can broaden their strategic understanding of the game, preparing them for further challenges.

Adding boat-loads of RNG into the mix is the worst possible answer to balance. It removes agency from the player, and places it in the hands of chance, which cares nothing for you or your strategy, as good as it may be in every other aspect. While my Charm/Slow analogy was just an example, I'd still say it's balanced, due to the remaining slow effect being the price paid for the opportunity of being able to remove charm from your unit, before they do anything detrimental, and vise-versa for the enemy. Besides that, there's also the availability of status protection for fights. If there's a unit in a fight that constantly uses that particular Charm/Slow ability, but you haven't made the opportunity to guard against it, that's on you. Also, if properly balanced, the player still has the ability to use the same abilities against the enemy. We should let these effects be more commonly used and inflicted. They shake up a battle, turning the tide in interesting ways that make both sides bend to each-other's wills. Making them unreliable to use, or only reliable for the enemy to use, takes away from the whole point of their existence in the game.

Of course, the complete removal of chance from an encounter tends to make it boring, as you don't get those spine-tingling moments of anticipation, where one wonders if their attack is going to hit, or if an attack is going to hit them. This NEEDS to be kept in check, however. Anything less than a 50%, all or nothing, chance removes the point of having the skill at all. If an attack has a greater chance of failing, <50%, and doing nothing at all, then the ability may as well be useless, as it cannot be used in any reliable sense. This point is often obfuscated by the fact that the player can repeat battles ad nauseam, continuing to roll the dice until a favorable outcome presents itself. If you isolate battles into individual instances, then using skills with a statistically unreliable chance is next to pointless, as doing nothing at all and preserving CT, and sometimes MP, will often be the better choice.

Now, the point we can agree on is that 1.3 is absolutely hard to enjoy. Where we disagree is about whether or not subjecting yourself to something that's tedious and irritating is a worthwhile endeavor. If that's what you're up for, go ahead, 1.3 isn't going anywhere.

That's why I tried to make my own re-balance instead of fixing 1.3. It's beyond my skills to make proper balance on 1.3.

In my opinion, some abilities with low RNG means, you shouldn't use it. If it's set to 50% or higher, people can abuse it and game will be broken like dancer's forbidden dance. It really should be forbidden.

Unless steal that I will really need to get no matter what, I won't use low RNG abilities in my gameplay.

25 minutes ago, Windows X said:

That's why I tried to make my own re-balance instead of fixing 1.3. It's beyond my skills to make proper balance on 1.3.

In my opinion, some abilities with low RNG means, you shouldn't use it. If it's set to 50% or higher, people can abuse it and game will be broken like dancer's forbidden dance. It really should be forbidden.

Unless steal that I will really need to get no matter what, I won't use low RNG abilities in my gameplay.

What is the purpose of including abilities that people shouldn't use in a game? Why have that ability at all?

7 hours ago, AbnormalVoid said:

What is the purpose of including abilities that people shouldn't use in a game? Why have that ability at all?

Not much. Hail Mary's are pretty pointless, and bad moves are even worse. And I DO like that Charm + Slow ability. It's interesting. 

On 12/27/2017 at 1:41 AM, AbnormalVoid said:

What is the purpose of including abilities that people shouldn't use in a game? Why have that ability at all?

I said "In my opinion".

2 hours ago, Windows X said:

I said "In my opinion".

On 12/25/2017 at 11:33 AM, AbnormalVoid said:

Adding boat-loads of RNG into the mix is the worst possible answer to balance. It removes agency from the player, and places it in the hands of chance, which cares nothing for you or your strategy, as good as it may be in every other aspect.

I think this is the right frame of mind. RPGs already abstract away the player from skill-based outcomes by having virtual representations of condition -> HP, kinetic force -> STR, knowledge -> INT, and all those other shortcuts D&D originally used to make wargaming appropriate for individual player characters. (Of course then it also gave us 2 dice rolls to get to the result, so...) This is in stark contrast to something like an arena shooter or other realtime game in which human reflexes matter much more than some arbitrary stat.

Adding a % dice roll on top of already-abstracted stats is too much of a gap between the player input and system output IMO. For every dice roll attack there should be some contextual or situational way to make that attack 100% accuracy, whether it's flanking or a passive skill like vanilla's Concentrate. 

I think lower RNG has its room for player to plan their strategy whether they should utilize high risk high return approach in the game play. If it works, you'll gain a bit more favor. If it doesn't, how will you recover from such situation. I for one who doesn't like low RNG ability because I hate it when it fails but I understand the mindset of putting this on.

Removing such elements will make the game more solid but also lose some rewards. If I were to make 1.3 better, I'd tone down the extremeness of overpowering and punishing players down a bit to add more variety with RNG and some certain abilities to be more balanced between players and enemies.

As for Charm + Slow, I disagree as fellow who use Female Thief charming Knights and Wizards. The merit of Charm is you can stall their movement that can be harmful down a bit and enemies aren't stupid so closest unit will knock their friends back to their sense as I did to mine. Adding Slow means you'll also gain favor of slowing down enemy if it is hit before acting in your favor.

If I were to add abilities baesd on my gameplay, I'd rather add something giving benefits enemy unit like Regen so he can gain portion of HP back after being hit from friends and you won't gain benefits from such ability too. Though I'd prefer charm to be as is as it seems fine to make enemies hitting each other instead. Or you can change from Charm to Confuse to reduce the benefits to your side a bit.

4 hours ago, Windows X said:

I think lower RNG has its room for player to plan their strategy whether they should utilize high risk high return approach in the game play. If it works, you'll gain a bit more favor. If it doesn't, how will you recover from such situation. I for one who doesn't like low RNG ability because I hate it when it fails but I understand the mindset of putting this on.

There is no good strategy to low chance RNG in the context of a Total Success/Total Failure situation. The only good strategy is to avoid it entirely. High risk/Reward is exactly how Lotteries take advantage of people who don't understand statistics (to a far greater extent, granted). It doesn't matter how great a successful outcome is, a low chance of seeing that outcome completely removes the strategic benefit of that outcome existing at all.

The low chance means the ability will be used very little, because while you're missing constantly, an enemy will walk over and rip your ass open. The times it will be used is as a last-ditch gambit, where it's your only option of success in an already hopeless situation. You use it, it fails, you fail anyway. You use it, it succeeds, you succeed, but do you really deserve that success? Every poor choice you made led to that hopeless situation. It's only the result of an overpowered ability, locked off with a measure that doesn't actually make it any more balanced, that completely bailed you out.

The player then moves on, learning nothing from their mistakes, and gaining no actual strategic benefit beyond relying on terribly designed abilities. Congratulations, the depth of your game has been subverted entirely.

4 hours ago, Windows X said:

As for Charm + Slow, I disagree as fellow who use Female Thief charming Knights and Wizards. The merit of Charm is you can stall their movement that can be harmful down a bit and enemies aren't stupid so closest unit will knock their friends back to their sense as I did to mine. Adding Slow means you'll also gain favor of slowing down enemy if it is hit before acting in your favor.

If I were to add abilities baesd on my gameplay, I'd rather add something giving benefits enemy unit like Regen so he can gain portion of HP back after being hit from friends and you won't gain benefits from such ability too. Though I'd prefer charm to be as is as it seems fine to make enemies hitting each other instead. Or you can change from Charm to Confuse to reduce the benefits to your side a bit.

Charm was only an example. The point of the example is that abilities should be balanced by what they do, not by the chance that they'll do it.

Giving players the ability to formulate strategies based on weighing the positives and negatives of using abilities in regards to a given situation is infinitely better than constantly rolling the dice on boring, broken abilities. It's one of the few things the original FFT never really grasped, which is a shame, because the potential for it is staggering.

31 minutes ago, AbnormalVoid said:

There is no good strategy to low chance RNG in the context of a Total Success/Total Failure situation. The only good strategy is to avoid it entirely. High risk/Reward is exactly how Lotteries take advantage of people who don't understand statistics (to a far greater extent, granted). It doesn't matter how great a successful outcome is, a low chance of seeing that outcome completely removes the strategic benefit of that outcome existing at all.

The low chance means the ability will be used very little, because while you're missing constantly, an enemy will walk over and rip your ass open. The times it will be used is as a last-ditch gambit, where it's your only option of success in an already hopeless situation. You use it, it fails, you fail anyway. You use it, it succeeds, you succeed, but do you really deserve that success? Every poor choice you made led to that hopeless situation. It's only the result of an overpowered ability, locked off with a measure that doesn't actually make it any more balanced, that completely bailed you out.

The player then moves on, learning nothing from their mistakes, and gaining no actual strategic benefit beyond relying on terribly designed abilities. Congratulations, the depth of your game has been subverted entirely.

Charm was only an example. The point of the example is that abilities should be balanced by what they do, not by the chance that they'll do it.

Giving players the ability to formulate strategies based on weighing the positives and negatives of using abilities in regards to a given situation is infinitely better than constantly rolling the dice on boring, broken abilities. It's one of the few things the original FFT never really grasped, which is a shame, because the potential for it is staggering.

Personally, I'm on the same page with you about not relying on low chance RNG. However, there's also a few players who enjoy that kind of high risk high reward from low RNG abilities. Let's see the case of steal for an example. It has low chance and stealing is hard to do for some fights but many tried to get cool items regardless of risks.

If there's no low RNG abilities, there'll be some abilities being abused like Arithmetician, Dancer+Mimic, Rend/Steal party, etc. And ended up having to remove some abilities to keep the game from being abused. Sometimes seeing enemies using low RNG abilities give us thrill to spice things up. Without such element, it'd make the game less enjoyable to me personally.

As for abilities with advantage/disadvantage has interesting concepts but harder to utilize since most of them are about status ailments, buff/debuff. I think the merits for this should be designer's responsibilities. When modding game, I'll think about benefits and loss between players and enemies. If I add this ability or modify it like this, will it balance benefits between player and enemies better or something like that.

I think it'd be more preferable for more players to have 1.3 with low RNG support and provide flexibility to utilize more strategies without having to resort to sandbagging.

12 minutes ago, Windows X said:

Personally, I'm on the same page with you about not relying on low chance RNG. However, there's also a few players who enjoy that kind of high risk high reward from low RNG abilities. Let's see the case of steal for an example. It has low chance and stealing is hard to do for some fights but many tried to get cool items regardless of risks.

There are people who enjoy doing crack cocaine and voting for the green party. Just because people like to make bad decisions, doesn't mean those choices should be enabled.

12 minutes ago, Windows X said:

If there's no low RNG abilities, there'll be some abilities being abused like Arithmetician, Dancer+Mimic, Rend/Steal party, etc. And ended up having to remove some abilities to keep the game from being abused. Sometimes seeing enemies using low RNG abilities give us thrill to spice things up. Without such element, it'd make the game less enjoyable to me personally.

Then it's time to get rid of them, or redesign those abilities to function in another manner, with difficult conditions that don't rely on shitty random mechanics.

12 minutes ago, Windows X said:

As for abilities with advantage/disadvantage has interesting concepts but harder to utilize since most of them are about status ailments, buff/debuff. I think the merits for this should be designer's responsibilities. When modding game, I'll think about benefits and loss between players and enemies. If I add this ability or modify it like this, will it balance benefits between player and enemies better or something like that.

There are plenty of ways to balance them besides with other status effects, and many don't even need to be balanced in this manner. They just need to be made easier to inflict for both the player and the enemy. Maybe removed entirely in the case of something like Petrify, unless the properties of it can be changed through assembly.

12 minutes ago, Windows X said:

I think it'd be more preferable for more players to have 1.3 with low RNG support and provide flexibility to utilize more strategies without having to resort to sandbagging.

There are plenty of better ways to deter sandbagging. Low RNG is a BAD MECHANIC. It's lazy, ineffective, and frustrating. Please, for the love of god, stop defending it unless you have a point better than "It's like, my opinion, man."

For better reason, lower RNG gives you more variety sense of adventure. If you want to make your own mod for realist with real world's strategy, it's fine. I'd love to play your finished work too. I'm speaking in topic about making 1.3 better in this regard.

29 minutes ago, Windows X said:

For better reason, lower RNG gives you more variety sense of adventure. If you want to make your own mod for realist with real world's strategy, it's fine. I'd love to play your finished work too. I'm speaking in topic about making 1.3 better in this regard.

RNG doesn't actually provide more meaningful variety. There is enough diversity in the variety of cascading events and decisions that occur within battles to account for a countless variety of outcomes.

Consider the following: http://www.bernmedical.com/blog/how-many-possible-move-combinations-are-there-in-chess

In chess, a game with absolutely no randomness, where each piece can only do one thing, there are literally billions of possible outcomes after only four turns. This is derived purely from the consequences of the strictly intended actions by each player. Adding absurd amounts of randomness on top of an already diverse tapestry of outcomes, and considering it an improvement, is completely ignorant of reality.

Some amounts of RNG is fun.  For example, randomized brave and faith, zodiac signs, and randomized monster stats between male/female variants (the way MT does it, not the way vanilla does it) can make it so that the ai doesn't always choose the same things first.  However, having to rely on accuracies below 50% too frequently shouldn't be a thing in a strategy game.

Low RNG skills are only really a good thing to add if you plan on them being used when you have control over the situation (so a miss doesn't mean that much). Like, invite is a good example -- it's not really to be used in a hectic battle where all your moves matter, but I wouldn't want it removed completely just because it's a low percentage. But that's corner case more than anything, and has little to do with actual battle balance -- High RNG risk elements simply isn't a smart way to go.

I agree with the 50% minimal hit with status effects since I just use steal for REALLY specific fight (riovannes roof for example) or Charm to give myself a little advantage at the beginning of the fight and then toss it aside

Also Windows X, you should avoid speaking from everyone in regards of their tastes: Difficulty comes in all flavors and doing that is kind of offensive for everyone involved here

Yeah, and with best compat, concentrate, and decent speed, steal can get up to 50% as it is, might as well keep it at that constant rate.

Something that might make it more interesting is if it was conditional, and could only be used on enemies who were in critical status, or maybe turned into a "Loot" command, and could only be used to take equipment from KO'd units. Could also make it so it only affected enemies on the same height level, and only from the back, making it so it can be effectively blocked, instead of unreliably dodged.

I regards to something like Invite, it would be interesting if it was made conditional to the effect of only being able to be used on the last remaining enemy, when they're in critical status. This way, it can't be used to cheese fights, and you can fill your roster without it having much effect on the difficulty of battles.

3 minutes ago, AbnormalVoid said:

Yeah, and with best compat, concentrate, and decent speed, steal can get up to 50% as it is, might as well keep it at that constant rate.

Something that might make it more interesting is if it was conditional, and could only be used on enemies who were in critical status, or maybe turned into a "Loot" command, and could only be used to take equipment from KO'd units. Could also make it so it only affected enemies on the same height level, and only from the back, making it so it can be effectively blocked, instead of unreliably dodged.

I regards to something like Invite, it would be interesting if it was made conditional to the effect of only being able to be used on the last remaining enemy, when they're in critical status. This way, it can't be used to cheese fights, and you can fill your roster without it having much effect on the difficulty of battles.

And yeah, I know it is probably impossible without heavy assembly. lol

It's why I started working on a new game instead of modding.

15 hours ago, Emmy said:

Some amounts of RNG is fun.  For example, randomized brave and faith, zodiac signs, and randomized monster stats between male/female variants (the way MT does it, not the way vanilla does it) can make it so that the ai doesn't always choose the same things first.  However, having to rely on accuracies below 50% too frequently shouldn't be a thing in a strategy game.

Yeah, the difference with those is that in a perfect world though, it still balances out and actually does add some strategic depth. IE, is say, 70% is the base for accuracy of spells on a unit with decent faith and the enemy with decent faith, sometimes with compat, this can make it bump up to 90% or go down as low as 50% (just spitballing numbers, don't take that too literally). The difference here is that the 50% itself may be "unreliable," but it's unreliable on that specific enemy, it's not unreliable always, and even then, this still works in at least MT, because you can use buffs like say Faith on you or the enemy to make yourself more accurate despite the compat issues. Combine that with Brave and Faith abilities being decently accurate, and it does become strategic because you can weigh the option if you're in a good enough position to go for a lower accuracy, or take the time to buff you or the enemy with faith or faith raising skills to make it 100%, or at least close enough to be reasonably accurate. 

9 hours ago, Kaffe Myers said:

Low RNG skills are only really a good thing to add if you plan on them being used when you have control over the situation (so a miss doesn't mean that much). Like, invite is a good example -- it's not really to be used in a hectic battle where all your moves matter, but I wouldn't want it removed completely just because it's a low percentage. But that's corner case more than anything, and has little to do with actual battle balance -- High RNG risk elements simply isn't a smart way to go.

Invite is a perfect example to also demonstrate how you can make RNG still work and not necessarily lock it behind low RNG. FFT Invite just sucks tbh. Tactics Ogre has a much better invite system. The invite chance of success is based on the remaining hp of the unit and the loyalty of the unit to the commander, meaning that you can reliably recruit units that are at low health in it. This means that Invite is still reliable while not being the stupidly broken  Hail Mary skill that it is in FFT. You know, the useful-useless move? If you beat everyone else down but that one ninja, what's the point from a design perspective of having the player box the units in for 5+ turns attempting to nab that sweet Invite at 23%? Tactics Ogre does it better, because Invite has idiotically low chances at base (like 4% I believe), but can scoot to as high as 90% at moments. 

On a side note, the GBA version of Tactics Ogre expanded on this by making it to where classes actually mattered as well. Using FFT classes for a moment, it was where classes that were in the same job paths were easier to recruit with one another, and higher tiered units had an easier time Inviting lower tier. IE, a Knight has an easier time with invite on a Squire than a Knight trying to recruit a Chemist. 

It's stuff like this for the reason that Death in FFXIII was actually so good. It was a skill that did damage even if the Death effect missed, and the more status effects you put on the enemy, the more accurate Death was. Stuff like the above are good mechanics with RNG, where the player has some control of it and can fudge the numbers. Otherwise, it ends up falling into a "don't use" or "use this, it's really good." 

I kinda agree with Void on this one. Low RNG moves are really annoying and generally serve almost no purpose outside of either 1) Wasting the player's time 2) Screwing the player over. 

Instead of randomness for Brave and Faith, it would be better served by being a constant amount at its base, a straight 50Br/50Fa, for each character. (Or maybe 55/45 for males, and 45/55 for females, to match the existing delineation of Males as physical units, and Females as Magical Units.)

From this point, the character's Brave and Faith would then reflect:

• Their job class, which makes sense, due to stats changing to suit the qualities of the job already.
• Their equipment, since there's already a tiered system of gear that either leans towards a physical side (Brave/Armor) or a magical side (Faith/Robes) or a middling side (Light Armor/No Preference).
• And, possibly, certain passive abilities and status effects.

(Again, yeah, all wonderful but unrealistic ideas for a scenario in which you could work past FFT's heavily hard-coded bad game design. lol)

Having it randomized gives it an arbitrary feeling, same with Zodiac signs, since it creates such a huge difference in outcome with no control or ability or optimize. In addition to this, most units have random signs/br-fa, therefore you arbitrarily gain either an advantage or a disadvantage that averages itself out over the course of all battles, effectively resulting in no real depth gained.

Zodiac signs feel more like something that would benefit a game where A. You could see the enemy prior to a match, so you could match your stats with theirs, and B. Had a much larger team of simpler units so you could have a large variety of choices when assembling a team to combat your enemy's compatibility.

What? I got told to avoid speaking because I disagree about their ideas about 50% RNG? Are you serious? I already told them I'm on the same boat about their opinion but we should respect for people who have that taste about RNG elements for making 1.3 better.

Fine, I'll leave this 1.3 improvements stuff and wait to see its outcome from the sidelines. I hope it's not all about talking and do something real to make 1.3 better so I can actually play and see.

25 minutes ago, Windows X said:

I hope it's not all about talking and do something real to make 1.3 better so I can actually play and see.

That kinda requires someone taking real action to make something like this.  It won't be 1.3.  I hope whoever does it, does so as their own project and not as some kind of legacy project; because with the insane amount of work required, you don't want to be married to decisions made in 1.3 that you don't agree with or that break decisions that you make.

1 hour ago, Windows X said:

What?

I'd just call it a misunderstanding. 

So I got down voted from expressing my opinions and got warned to stop talking about 1.3 updates due to misunderstandings. Nice. I wish you luck from now on. I'm done.

8 hours ago, Windows X said:

So I got down voted from expressing my opinions and got warned to stop talking about 1.3 updates due to misunderstandings. Nice. I wish you luck from now on. I'm done.

With that attitude, I'm not sure I care.

That was a bit thin skinned.

21 hours ago, Windows X said:

So I got down voted from expressing my opinions and got warned to stop talking about 1.3 updates due to misunderstandings. Nice. I wish you luck from now on. I'm done.

No, you got downvoted because your logic is flawed, your points were silly, and when pressed, you tried to defend yourself by saying it was an "opinion." Who cares if it's an opinion? We know it's an opinion; that does not mean you shouldn't be defending it. It being an opinion and not fact does not save it from being criticized, which you took to poorly. No, you were warned because you were one step away from insulting someone over a simple disagreement in game tactics. And it wasn't even a warning, it was me asking you to take a step back.

Your negative rep came from three posts before this one where you threw your hands up like an infant and stormed out. You're not being bullied. If you don't want to be treated like a child, then stop acting like one.

Agreed wholeheartedly.

43 minutes ago, Kyrios said:

No, you got downvoted because your logic is flawed, your points were silly, and when pressed, you tried to defend yourself by saying it was an "opinion." Who cares if it's an opinion? We know it's an opinion; that does not mean you shouldn't be defending it. It being an opinion and not fact does not save it from being criticized, which you took to poorly. No, you were warned because you were one step away from insulting someone over a simple disagreement in game tactics. And it wasn't even a warning, it was me asking you to take a step back.

Your negative rep came from three posts before this one where you threw your hands up like an infant and stormed out. You're not being bullied. If you don't want to be treated like a child, then stop acting like one.

He asked me

"What is the purpose of including abilities that people shouldn't use in a game? Why have that ability at all?"

That's out of topic question from 1.3 development. It was part of my suggestion mixed with my opinion that I felt that lower RNG isn't something to be used strategically (and everyone in here also agreed from what I read).

It has nothing about defending when I answer his question that it's my opinion. if Administrator think it deserves down voting due to misunderstandings or whatever, fine. I don't care anymore at this point.

11 minutes ago, Windows X said:

He asked me

"What is the purpose of including abilities that people shouldn't use in a game? Why have that ability at all?"

That's out of topic question from 1.3 development. It was part of my suggestion mixed with my opinion that I felt that lower RNG isn't something to be used strategically (and everyone in here also agreed from what I read).

It has nothing about defending when I answer his question that it's my opinion. if Administrator think it deserves down voting due to misunderstandings or whatever, fine. I don't care anymore at this point.

I literally went back and checked the posts. We don't downvote for dissenting opinions, but rather for the content of said posts. That "I said it's my opinion" post deserved to be downvoted into oblivion.

Your posts that were downvoted had poor points, and thus poor content. Stop pitching a fit over it. 5 negative rep is very easily regained. It's not that serious.

Clearly you do care because you keep responding. This is the second time you've said that.

52 minutes ago, Windows X said:

He asked me

"What is the purpose of including abilities that people shouldn't use in a game? Why have that ability at all?"

That's out of topic question from 1.3 development. It was part of my suggestion mixed with my opinion that I felt that lower RNG isn't something to be used strategically (and everyone in here also agreed from what I read).

It has nothing about defending when I answer his question that it's my opinion. if Administrator think it deserves down voting due to misunderstandings or whatever, fine. I don't care anymore at this point.

It's really NOT out of the topic of 1.3 development, as this is actually a bona-fide problem in 1.3. There are several moves that I'd say aren't worth having in 1.3. Jump for instance, still has this problem, there's no reason not to get Horizontal MAX and then the highest vertical Jump you can get. The rest of the moves are useless. Even having the skillset altered to Range +1 and having 6 copies of Range + 1 would be better than what it has now. Squire moves are still general bad, and having Throw Stone now is even more pointless with Squires having the ability to shoot with Crossbows-- which does tie into balance of classes. That said, if you believe the question is outside of the scope of the topic, the response is to send him a PM about it and discuss from there, NOT say "I said in my opinion." If it's a post on a forum, it's clearly understood that everything said is an opinion. So saying that just seems really dickish and dismissive. I'd rather someone just not respond than say "I said in my opinion," because it comes with the assumption that the person you're addressing is too stupid to comprehend that. 

It does though. Because everyone sees it as it is : a flimsy excuse to have a retort, but not actually answering the question. It's a legitimate question that you hand wave away. An ability able to be abused isn't a bad thing-- quite the contrary, that's a good thing. It's only a problem with said ability is the *only* skill worth using because the rest are bad. IE, going with your example with Nameless/Forbidden dance, this is a problem because the only other dance really worth using is Last Dance. Regular dances take too long and without enough potency to really take out a threat quickly enough to allow someone to survive longer. Your response actually brings up a point that many modders / devs actually fall for. "We can't make the move too good." YES. YOU. CAN. Just make sure that everything else is also good or has enough use, and you're golden. Take something like moves that interrupt charges, this move ranges from completely and utterly useless, to being able to save your party's bacon from oblivion. Good move, because it's a godsend when it's useful, and pointless when it's not. Is it worse than Reraise? Maybe, but considering that reraise and an interrupting move aren't on the same turf, there's no problem here. THAT, is why you got downvoted.  

20 hours ago, Augestein said:

It's really NOT out of the topic of 1.3 development, as this is actually a bona-fide problem in 1.3. There are several moves that I'd say aren't worth having in 1.3. Jump for instance, still has this problem, there's no reason not to get Horizontal MAX and then the highest vertical Jump you can get.

I actually had an idea to make Jump a passive command, like Defend or Equip/Change, which is innate on Lancers, in addition to a more varied Dragoon skill-set.

If someone else wants to figure out how to actually implement that idea, they're more than welcome to it. lol

1 hour ago, AbnormalVoid said:

I actually had an idea to make Jump a passive command, like Defend or Equip/Change, which is innate on Lancers, in addition to a more varied Dragoon skill-set.

If someone else wants to figure out how to actually implement that idea, they're more than welcome to it. lol

uhhhhh.......Emmy actually did that with jump, you should ask her

2 minutes ago, ronlyn said:

uhhhhh.......Emmy actually did that with jump, you should ask her

Did she? Huh, good shit. It's honestly the best way to go. Jump is too limited to build an entire class around, in something like FFT.

I see, so jump is applied as long as a character has the Lancer skillset equipped, as Primary or Secondary?

23 hours ago, Windows X said:

He asked me

"What is the purpose of including abilities that people shouldn't use in a game? Why have that ability at all?"

That's out of topic question from 1.3 development. It was part of my suggestion mixed with my opinion that I felt that lower RNG isn't something to be used strategically (and everyone in here also agreed from what I read).

It has nothing about defending when I answer his question that it's my opinion. if Administrator think it deserves down voting due to misunderstandings or whatever, fine. I don't care anymore at this point.

The reason I downvoted the post that I did had nothing to do with disagreeing with it.  There are plenty of things that people say, in this thread and any other FFT balance/theorycrafting thread that I disagree with, some of which I actually upvote due to the person arguing his points in a way that contributes to discussion.  When you said something to the effect of "I said it's my opinion" and nothing else in your post, coincidentally that's the exact kind of thing that makes me not want to read anything else you say.  I know it's your opinion because you're saying it, and very few things in these topics are actually facts.  And since you had nothing else in the post, it didn't contribute to discussion.  

39 minutes ago, AbnormalVoid said:

Did she? Huh, good shit. It's honestly the best way to go. Jump is too limited to build an entire class around, in something like FFT.

Yes.  You still need to turn skillset 0x12 into a regular skillset, and whatever you put into skillset 0x34 is autolearned.  And yes, it will follow equipping the skillset.  Any time you have 0x12 as a primary or secondary, you will have 0x34 for free as well.

On 12/29/2017 at 0:35 PM, Augestein said:

It's stuff like this for the reason that Death in FFXIII was actually so good. It was a skill that did damage even if the Death effect missed, and the more status effects you put on the enemy, the more accurate Death was. Stuff like the above are good mechanics with RNG, where the player has some control of it and can fudge the numbers. Otherwise, it ends up falling into a "don't use" or "use this, it's really good." 

There were good and bad points to Death as implemented, from a balance standpoint. The only things I'd add to your general overview of its effectiveness:

• When Death did miss and dealt damage instead, it dealt quite a lot; this made it worth using Vanille's entire ATB bar on Death as an alternative to Ruin spam as a Commando or something.
• Death could only be cast in SAB which prevented Vanille from gaining damage bonuses from COM (though she could get the passive benefits of the other two party members being COMs, or the debuff boosts from both being SABs as well). That allowed the developers to make it incredibly strong because it was inherently impossible to use in Cerberus.
• Death actually worked on things and could instant kill even powerful marks like Ochus and whatnot.

These are really good things and made Death worthwhile, but they did lead to one small problem that does remind me a bit of 1.3: Because there were no consequences for resetting a battle in FFXIII, there was no downside to fighting something way out of your depth and just starting over if you couldn't get Death to land in time. On the one hand, it's nice that Death actually did something. On the other hand, fishing for a Death proc felt cheesy and not terribly rewarding when you did win with it and you knew there was no way you could've won without it. While the ability to influence its proc rate via debuffing made it feel more like a legitimate strategy than a pure gimmick, it could still prove rather gimmicky against things with a low-but-nonzero chance of being affected by it.

I've always felt that things like random Zodiac and Br/Fa are the same kind of thing in FFT. The difficulty of a battle can be completely up in the air depending on something as simple as the compatibility between the first enemy to move and the nearest ally, and that's not only bad from a strategic standpoint -- I can't predict or plan when enemy behavior changes when I do the same things each time, unless I have encyclopedic knowledge of the game's AI -- but also from a player frustration standpoint. They add depth to the system just as Death does, but in a way that can occasionally encourage scummy reset style gameplay that's tedious when it doesn't work out and unsatisfying when it does. A risky strategy involving a powerful but conditional ability is perfectly fine, but when it's random or it doesn't feel like there's a viable alternative (which there often is in FFT, hence why the randomness isn't a huge gamebreaking problem), it can sometimes feel like the game is suggesting you use something that might work but probably won't for reasons outside your control.

Not that I have any good ideas on how you address that issue or if you even can. If nothing else I don't see how you'd do Zodiacs except either having them be fixed per battle for consistency's sake (which makes them exploitable with foreknowledge and doesn't help with random encounters) or leaving them random and just accepting that they'll alter the AI's behavior in potentially large ways each time you approach a battle.

40 minutes ago, Nakar said:

If nothing else I don't see how you'd do Zodiacs except either having them be fixed per battle for consistency's sake (which makes them exploitable with foreknowledge and doesn't help with random encounters) or leaving them random and just accepting that they'll alter the AI's behavior in potentially large ways each time you approach a battle.

Zodiacs aren't even that important tbh since there are three conclusions to reach with them:

-If you have good compat, just target that unit with status effects and take your distance since things could get messy if said enemy does the same to you (I suggest poison)

-If you have bad compat, the unit (or the whole team if you somehow managed to do that) should abuse the fact that the enemy also does less damage and piledrop on him while buffing yourself to sail the point home

-If you have neutral compat, just have fun and see what works best for you 

Br/Fa are just there so you have an excuse to use abilities to enhance those in hopes to have better hit/damage with magic and better chances of activate something like auto potion/damage split   

2 hours ago, ronlyn said:

Zodiacs aren't even that important tbh since there are three conclusions to reach with them:

-If you have good compat, just target that unit with status effects and take your distance since things could get messy if said enemy does the same to you (I suggest poison)

-If you have bad compat, the unit (or the whole team if you somehow managed to do that) should abuse the fact that the enemy also does less damage and piledrop on him while buffing yourself to sail the point home

-If you have neutral compat, just have fun and see what works best for you 

 

Br/Fa are just there so you have an excuse to use abilities to enhance those in hopes to have better hit/damage with magic and better chances of activate something like auto potion/damage split   

Yeah, they're a redundant factor. They're inherently balanced, but considering the fact that they're an independent system that doesn't rely on any outside input, the entire system balances itself into oblivion.

A system where each Zodiac offered specific benefits and detriments, such as innate status buffs/debuffs, or innate stat bonuses/penalties, etc. would have been far more interesting. It would synergize nicely with existing systems, and create a huge opportunity for character building depth.

Systems in a game should work like an interconnecting web. where everything feeds into the strategic depth of everything else. Not like a pile of blankets, where each system is placed over top of the rest, only tangentially adding depth.

(Not a hard and fast rule, I know, but something to keep in mind.)

1 hour ago, AbnormalVoid said:

A system where each Zodiac offered specific benefits and detriments, such as innate status buffs/debuffs, or innate stat bonuses/penalties, etc. would have been far more interesting. It would synergize nicely with existing systems, and create a huge opportunity for character building depth.

Oh god.......I think I'm in love with that idea

Don't mind me if I steal it for later

Go right ahead, all my ideas for FFT are fair game, since I don't really plan on modding it myself. lol

I just really appreciate discussing the structure and possibility offered by the design of the game, since it's so vastly open to interesting design

11 hours ago, AbnormalVoid said:

Yeah, they're a redundant factor. They're inherently balanced, but considering the fact that they're an independent system that doesn't rely on any outside input, the entire system balances itself into oblivion.

They're balanced over a long period of time or in a scenario where the first turn isn't that impactful. In Tactics Ogre, which has more people on the field and generally longer battles, you usually don't worry too much about potential random factors because what will cause a restart won't be the very first action. However, it can be a problem in FFT, and it's definitely a problem in 1.3, because when done wrong FFT turns into rocket tag with a quickness. Whether an enemy advances or retreats is also a big deal and they consider factors like compatibility in doing so, so you can never be sure if that guy's going to be lured in to get jacked or charge something nasty and wander off out of range each time you restart. If you have to restart a lot, it becomes considerably more frustrating.

So one way to address the issue is just to treat the other problem and ensure that the first turn of any given map does not have a massive and potentially determinative effect on the outcome of the attempt. That's something that is an aspect of 1.3 that could stand to be significantly altered, and doing so largely eliminates problems that random Br/Fa/Sign can cause.

11 hours ago, Nakar said:

They're balanced over a long period of time or in a scenario where the first turn isn't that impactful. In Tactics Ogre, which has more people on the field and generally longer battles, you usually don't worry too much about potential random factors because what will cause a restart won't be the very first action. However, it can be a problem in FFT, and it's definitely a problem in 1.3, because when done wrong FFT turns into rocket tag with a quickness. Whether an enemy advances or retreats is also a big deal and they consider factors like compatibility in doing so, so you can never be sure if that guy's going to be lured in to get jacked or charge something nasty and wander off out of range each time you restart. If you have to restart a lot, it becomes considerably more frustrating.

So one way to address the issue is just to treat the other problem and ensure that the first turn of any given map does not have a massive and potentially determinative effect on the outcome of the attempt. That's something that is an aspect of 1.3 that could stand to be significantly altered, and doing so largely eliminates problems that random Br/Fa/Sign can cause.

My point wasn't that Brave/Faith is a problem because of the unfair odds it may provide. My point was that it's pointless, in the grand scheme.

Adding a factor of forced randomness that does little to affect the outcome of a match (beyond short, concise matches, as you mentioned) does nothing to increase the depth of the experience.

Even in those short, cramped matches, where Brave and Faith do make a difference, one just needs to do a quick reset to roll the odds back and get something that's hopefully more preferable. It's very important to keep in mind that the worth of every engagement can only be judged by the best and worst case scenarios. If those scenarios are wildly different, for no other reason than because of an arbitrarily random, substance-less system, then it's a poor way to add randomness to the game.

It's better to focus on creating a challenging engagement, without the worry that it will fall into the territory of unfairness, or otherwise, trivialize the engagement by becoming too simple. A game like Final Fantasy Tactics thrives around designed engagements. Where random engagements may be fun or interesting in certain situations, they're also, in all likelihood, going to suffer from not having a synergistic approach to their equipment, abilities and teamwork. Not that I don't think they should still be included, but a system that gives them a reliable leg-up is preferable.

The system I detailed previously, in regards to a revamped Zodiac system, supports this concept instead of working against it. Instead of working in a manner that is unpredictable, where one cannot say if they'll have the signs necessary to be compatible with a foe, it's designed around altering the inherent qualities of the unit itself, providing sufficient context to the player in regards to what they're going to be up against. It allows for each unit to be given proper signs to enhance their most important qualities, and allows for units to function quite differently from one another. A Virgo Priest might be entirely different from an Ares Priest, but there could still be depth behind each.

It's a best-case pipe-dream system, as I'm not sure something could even be implemented with FFT's limiting code, but I feel it accurately details the kind of system that would be desirable as opposed to the ill-conceived system in place by default.

 I feel the whole zodiac and Br/Fa deal can be only archive if we erase completely the soldier hiring option in the game and every generic the players has access to has said characteristics. I also got inspired by a fire emblem modder which gave several patches which you can use to change the experience each time you play the game (example: one patch have three male/one female generic at the beginning and other has two male/female units with different signs and stats compared to the last ones)  

Of course, this world of possibilities is tied to the modder's patience to deliver such patches since they aren't hard but tedious to handle without screwing something along the way

2 hours ago, ronlyn said:

 I feel the whole zodiac and Br/Fa deal can be only archive if we erase completely the soldier hiring option in the game and every generic the players has access to has said characteristics. I also got inspired by a fire emblem modder which gave several patches which you can use to change the experience each time you play the game (example: one patch have three male/one female generic at the beginning and other has two male/female units with different signs and stats compared to the last ones)  

Of course, this world of possibilities is tied to the modder's patience to deliver such patches since they aren't hard but tedious to handle without screwing something along the way

I figure another way to make brave-faith better is to make their influence on chance-based abilities less noticeable. Say, reaction abilities chance could be like, 80% base chance and the formula could be ((Brave/5)+80)%. With a similarly lighter effect on spell power. Still a flawed system, but giving it a lighter influence to match its already forced existence in the game would at least be more tolerable.

3 hours ago, AbnormalVoid said:

Even in those short, cramped matches, where Brave and Faith do make a difference, one just needs to do a quick reset to roll the odds back and get something that's hopefully more preferable. It's very important to keep in mind that the worth of every engagement can only be judged by the best and worst case scenarios. If those scenarios are wildly different, for no other reason than because of an arbitrarily random, substance-less system, then it's a poor way to add randomness to the game.

Frequent resets should not be encouraged behavior in a tactical RPG. It's one thing to restart a bunch and tweak your strategy or setup, but having to do it because sometimes the first enemy to move can kill two of your guys (or something unrecoverable, whatever that may be) isn't a good thing. If early misfortunes caused by randomness balance out in the grand scheme of a battle, then no big deal; however, that isn't always the case with 1.3. And rerolling a fight on purpose for more favorable enemy Br/Fa/Zodiac is, in my mind, basically cheating and should not be encouraged. It's fine if it's random but choosing to repeatedly reset until the randomness is in your favor is exploitative. The ideal setup should be to encourage the player to roll with the misfortunes and fortunes alike, assuming they're balanced such that you're likely to experience a bit of both in every battle.

1 hour ago, Nakar said:

Frequent resets should not be encouraged behavior in a tactical RPG. It's one thing to restart a bunch and tweak your strategy or setup, but having to do it because sometimes the first enemy to move can kill two of your guys (or something unrecoverable, whatever that may be) isn't a good thing. If early misfortunes caused by randomness balance out in the grand scheme of a battle, then no big deal; however, that isn't always the case with 1.3. And rerolling a fight on purpose for more favorable enemy Br/Fa/Zodiac is, in my mind, basically cheating and should not be encouraged. It's fine if it's random but choosing to repeatedly reset until the randomness is in your favor is exploitative. The ideal setup should be to encourage the player to roll with the misfortunes and fortunes alike, assuming they're balanced such that you're likely to experience a bit of both in every battle.

It's never encouraged, but people are still going to do it. People are always drawn to the path of least resistance, it's a well known concept. Putting exploitable systems in your game, especially when they provide no real depth, is a terrible idea. You cannot fight human nature, never ever try.

Now, considering the fact that you're going to experience fortunes and misfortunes in regards to randomized elements, one must also consider how much depth is actually being added with this. If in the end, it, more likely than not, averages out, then was there any actual significance to the randomness in the first place? Over and above the actual structured depth of the game, did the randomness provide any real substance?

I'll say it again, I don't think additional randomness adds any depth to tactical RPGs, or for that matter, any game with sufficient strategic depth. The variety of outcomes already available through the vast array of choices and possibilities is staggering. Adding on top of it merely creates an annoying layer of strategic obfuscation.

On 1/1/2018 at 11:32 AM, Nakar said:

There were good and bad points to Death as implemented, from a balance standpoint. The only things I'd add to your general overview of its effectiveness:

• When Death did miss and dealt damage instead, it dealt quite a lot; this made it worth using Vanille's entire ATB bar on Death as an alternative to Ruin spam as a Commando or something.
• Death could only be cast in SAB which prevented Vanille from gaining damage bonuses from COM (though she could get the passive benefits of the other two party members being COMs, or the debuff boosts from both being SABs as well). That allowed the developers to make it incredibly strong because it was inherently impossible to use in Cerberus.
• Death actually worked on things and could instant kill even powerful marks like Ochus and whatnot.

These are really good things and made Death worthwhile, but they did lead to one small problem that does remind me a bit of 1.3: Because there were no consequences for resetting a battle in FFXIII, there was no downside to fighting something way out of your depth and just starting over if you couldn't get Death to land in time. On the one hand, it's nice that Death actually did something. On the other hand, fishing for a Death proc felt cheesy and not terribly rewarding when you did win with it and you knew there was no way you could've won without it. While the ability to influence its proc rate via debuffing made it feel more like a legitimate strategy than a pure gimmick, it could still prove rather gimmicky against things with a low-but-nonzero chance of being affected by it.

I've always felt that things like random Zodiac and Br/Fa are the same kind of thing in FFT. The difficulty of a battle can be completely up in the air depending on something as simple as the compatibility between the first enemy to move and the nearest ally, and that's not only bad from a strategic standpoint -- I can't predict or plan when enemy behavior changes when I do the same things each time, unless I have encyclopedic knowledge of the game's AI -- but also from a player frustration standpoint. They add depth to the system just as Death does, but in a way that can occasionally encourage scummy reset style gameplay that's tedious when it doesn't work out and unsatisfying when it does. A risky strategy involving a powerful but conditional ability is perfectly fine, but when it's random or it doesn't feel like there's a viable alternative (which there often is in FFT, hence why the randomness isn't a huge gamebreaking problem), it can sometimes feel like the game is suggesting you use something that might work but probably won't for reasons outside your control.

Not that I have any good ideas on how you address that issue or if you even can. If nothing else I don't see how you'd do Zodiacs except either having them be fixed per battle for consistency's sake (which makes them exploitable with foreknowledge and doesn't help with random encounters) or leaving them random and just accepting that they'll alter the AI's behavior in potentially large ways each time you approach a battle.

Yeah, I think Death may be a bit too good, but the general idea of Death here is actually really good. It's damage is a little too high I think, but it's certainly not useless-- which in my eyes, is a bigger sin than it being a bit too good. There are still other viable ways of getting around bosses without needing to rely on a death proc. 

Even without Death Procs, you could go with things like SEN/COM/MED or SEN/SEN/COM to do chip damage provided there weren't doom counters on plenty of bosses. And more pressingly, I think that means that they should have put enemy stats as a buffer against Death Procs as well. That would have helped with this notion. 

For FFT, I still don't think Br/Fa are quite the same thing, all the zodiac signs encourage is having a more well rounded team to not have a "weakness." While it can seem kinda unfair, I think the "outside of your control" bit is happening because you can't see the enemies before you deploy your units. If you could see the enemy units before you deployed, I'd say this problem was mostly handled. Especially if units that you didn't use still could get EXP-- IE, FFTA and FFTA2 where you can send them on deployment missions to get JP while they weren't fighting and still get relatively decent AP. 

It's honestly not that bad-- it's the same way for Fire Emblem Lunatic+ mode, you always prepare for the worst possible scenario for your units. IE, if you *don't* want the enemy to run away, you prepare for the scenario for when it does. I stand by that the biggest issue here is not the random nature of brave and faith, but rather, the fact that you can't see them before you deploy. 

But I do like Void's idea of having the zodiacs have strengths and weaknesses to elements / statuses based on their sign. 

5 minutes ago, Augestein said:

For FFT, I still don't think Br/Fa are quite the same thing, all the zodiac signs encourage is having a more well rounded team to not have a "weakness." While it can seem kinda unfair, I think the "outside of your control" bit is happening because you can't see the enemies before you deploy your units. If you could see the enemy units before you deployed, I'd say this problem was mostly handled. Especially if units that you didn't use still could get EXP-- IE, FFTA and FFTA2 where you can send them on deployment missions to get JP while they weren't fighting and still get relatively decent AP.

I was considering mentioning this possibility in my last post, but realized it wouldn't really be feasible, since it's more of a system that relies on having a larger selection of selection of units to meet the needs of each individual situation.

Also, in this situation, you always get the upper hand, since the enemy has no ability to counter this advantage. While that's also true for the player's knowledge of static aspects of the opposing team's make-up, I feel like that's more in service to the enemy as a designed challenge, over the random nature of arbitrary strengths and weaknesses.

In regards to Brave and Faith, they're definitely very different in regards to their applications, but I feel they could be valuable assets if only they reflected the actual inherent job and equipment qualities of each character.

Such as how I had explained in this previous post:

On 12/29/2017 at 1:33 PM, AbnormalVoid said:

Instead of randomness for Brave and Faith, it would be better served by being a constant amount at its base, a straight 50Br/50Fa, for each character. (Or maybe 55/45 for males, and 45/55 for females, to match the existing delineation of Males as physical units, and Females as Magical Units.)

From this point, the character's Brave and Faith would then reflect:

• Their job class, which makes sense, due to stats changing to suit the qualities of the job already.
• Their equipment, since there's already a tiered system of gear that either leans towards a physical side (Brave/Armor) or a magical side (Faith/Robes) or a middling side (Light Armor/No Preference).
• And, possibly, certain passive abilities and status effects.

(Again, yeah, all wonderful but unrealistic ideas for a scenario in which you could work past FFT's heavily hard-coded bad game design. lol)

9 minutes ago, Augestein said:

It's honestly not that bad-- it's the same way for Fire Emblem Lunatic+ mode, you always prepare for the worst possible scenario for your units. IE, if you *don't* want the enemy to run away, you prepare for the scenario for when it does. I stand by that the biggest issue here is not the random nature of brave and faith, but rather, the fact that you can't see them before you deploy. 

True, but Fire Emblem for the most part has deterministic AI and fixed enemy stats. An example of where I think it's a problem would be if a certain enemy in Ch1 of Awakening Lunatic+ could random their Strength to either be high enough to damage Frederick or not, and if it couldn't damage Frederick it wouldn't move. Since a huge part of the Ch1 Lunatic+ strategy involves manipulating Frederick to take hits and eliminate problems on a very tight timetable (since Frederick is really the only unit capable of it), an enemy randomly either moving up on him and dying to a counterattack or not moving at all can completely throw off the map balance. This did still happen with Lunatic+ skills which is probably one reason why Fates Lunatic doesn't do random skills even in Conquest, which is the hard route for series veterans.

Being able to see enemy stats on deployment would help, but because there's often still a touch of randomness in gear assignment and Zodiac compatibility, you'd still end up having to know the AI backward and forward to know whether that Ninja is going to come in on you or not. Still, it'd be better than not even knowing what Zodiacs the enemy has until the map starts.

OK, since this whole jungle bumble is really hurting my brain (I blame hours of gaming for that), I would like to simplify things so we can close some points and pass up to other things that needs to be discussed (example: 1.3 awful endgame, that thing needs help ASAP)

- About Br/Fa: I see two strong points out there and I see the wisdom behind them, but I do side with the idea of just put fixed Br/Fa and said stuff can either change via jobs bases or just left the thing like that because let's be honest here: Since I got Auto-Potion, I haven't get off the damn thing because how reliable is to have 72 br and yeah, that's good but it also downgrades Fa since up to this date, I haven't see ANY reaction being activate via Fa and Br buff/debuffing only matters when someone who can turn you into chicken is nearby (And even then that isn't balanced enough since we have MT where when that happens I just petrify/poison/stop/charm/don't move/don't act the first time he does that and push him to hell until it dies or 1.3 where losing even the tiniest of Br means you're death because surviving is now 0% possible)

note: at least MT has you distracted with other threats so you forget about that menace, 1.3 just outright push that boot up your butt without warnings

-About Death: I do feel instant death needs something to be attractive since failing the spell means wasted MP/CP. I do like however how Trails in the Sky make his approach: all attacks that have instant death attached to them have about 60 or 80% of the damage you do with a physical attack, so it doesn't feel like a waste when death doesn't proc but also makes you think if you should use it so it procs or just stick with normal attacks/arts

-About the USELESS jobs (Yes, I call them that if their only function is to reach samurai/ninja): Archer just outright needs to be rehashed from scratch, maybe giving him some tools to keep the enemy at bay OR even better, do something about the bowgun: some skills that works with bowgun (maybe some hard hitting abilities) while the bow does less damage but have nice debuffs/elemental attacks to keep it attractive.

Now, since Emmy did find out a way to make Dragoon less sucking, I........really don't have anything since the possibilities are endless while at the same time, all mods were balance only with jump while MT just patched up the problem. Dragoons are just.....weird and that's all I got

Sorry if this whole post seems pushy but when I see the four pages long threat that only talks about three points while the whole deal feels unsolved I feel waaaay back at ID so I feel this one needs to be more dynamic while picking up some slack from the past

21 minutes ago, ronlyn said:

- About Br/Fa: I see two strong points out there and I see the wisdom behind them, but I do side with the idea of just put fixed Br/Fa and said stuff can either change via jobs bases or just left the thing like that because let's be honest here: Since I got Auto-Potion, I haven't get off the damn thing because how reliable is to have 72 br and yeah, that's good but it also downgrades Fa since up to this date, I haven't see ANY reaction being activate via Fa and Br buff/debuffing only matters when someone who can turn you into chicken is nearby (And even then that isn't balanced enough since we have MT where when that happens I just petrify/poison/stop/charm/don't move/don't act the first time he does that and push him to hell until it dies or 1.3 where losing even the tiniest of Br means you're death because surviving is now 0% possible)

Don't forget also that I had made br/fa changes no longer permanent, and 1.3 did not.  The reason I did this is so that if enemy uses chicken race on you, it's not automatically a reset; while in 1.3 it is because you can't buff it back and too many battles rely on the rng of reactions going off.  

25 minutes ago, ronlyn said:

-About the USELESS jobs (Yes, I call them that if their only function is to reach samurai/ninja): Archer just outright needs to be rehashed from scratch, maybe giving him some tools to keep the enemy at bay OR even better, do something about the bowgun: some skills that works with bowgun (maybe some hard hitting abilities) while the bow does less damage but have nice debuffs/elemental attacks to keep it attractive.

Pretty much all the useless jobs need to be rehashed from scratch.  I like 1.3's approach to Archer, it however both needs the bugfix fix I made for charged shots, and its status effects need to be more accurate and relevant to more fights.  Interrupt (i forgot what 1.3 calls it, but it's what MT calls Interrupt) needs to actually work on bosses or there needs to be a reason intuitive to the player for it to not work on everything.  Tying it to Faith is one approach, or you can give it a charge time so that it has a tricky CT to line up.  Something that'll make it actually worth getting and not confuse the player (past not knowing game mechanics) when it doesn't work.  I also don't care for its roulette like move, when I'd rather have something that is a 100% or nearly so of a minor status that would be useful to use at range.  Poison, Blind, Silence, Oil are good choices here, since they can lead to interesting strategies when combined with party compositions.

Lancer is an easy fix with my fix.  Autolearned jump, and actual skills in the real skillset.  Literally anything else in the real skillset would be an improvement.

26 minutes ago, ronlyn said:

-About the USELESS jobs (Yes, I call them that if their only function is to reach samurai/ninja): Archer just outright needs to be rehashed from scratch, maybe giving him some tools to keep the enemy at bay OR even better, do something about the bowgun: some skills that works with bowgun (maybe some hard hitting abilities) while the bow does less damage but have nice debuffs/elemental attacks to keep it attractive.

Now, since Emmy did find out a way to make Dragoon less sucking, I........really don't have anything since the possibilities are endless while at the same time, all mods were balance only with jump while MT just patched up the problem. Dragoons are just.....weird and that's all I got

 

Sorry if this whole post seems pushy but when I see the four pages long threat that only talks about three points while the whole deal feels unsolved I feel waaaay back at ID so I feel this one needs to be more dynamic while picking up some slack from the past

Yeah, useless jobs are another one. Or more accurately, less useful jobs. It's not that they didn't have their strengths, but compared to other jobs, they were severely outclassed.

I feel in 1.3, too many jobs tried to do too many things, instead of being focused around doing one role really well. Now, there could be some variety within that role, but when designing a class for FFT, there needs to be a through line that ties it all together and subconsciously contextualizes it to the player. This is something I feel vanilla did really well. Some things just weren't as good as others for other reasons, like straight up power output, speed, movement and attack range.

Wanna have the easiest FFT run of your life? Play with 5 Ninjas with item. You win, period.

1 hour ago, Emmy said:

Don't forget also that I had made br/fa changes no longer permanent, and 1.3 did not.  The reason I did this is so that if enemy uses chicken race on you, it's not automatically a reset; while in 1.3 it is because you can't buff it back and too many battles rely on the rng of reactions going off.  

Touche. But doesn't solve the problem of Br having more impact on the long run against Fa since not being able to use Auto Potion can make your tank a corpse while not having spells means you need equipment to inflict those status effects

1 hour ago, AbnormalVoid said:

I feel in 1.3, too many jobs tried to do too many things, instead of being focused around doing one role really

I can accept some experiment: Marksman was interesting and it could be decent if the creator bothered to refined such class. Alas, it's another case of "doing stuff half-way is even worse than don't bother at all" 

4 hours ago, Nakar said:

True, but Fire Emblem for the most part has deterministic AI and fixed enemy stats. An example of where I think it's a problem would be if a certain enemy in Ch1 of Awakening Lunatic+ could random their Strength to either be high enough to damage Frederick or not, and if it couldn't damage Frederick it wouldn't move. Since a huge part of the Ch1 Lunatic+ strategy involves manipulating Frederick to take hits and eliminate problems on a very tight timetable (since Frederick is really the only unit capable of it), an enemy randomly either moving up on him and dying to a counterattack or not moving at all can completely throw off the map balance. This did still happen with Lunatic+ skills which is probably one reason why Fates Lunatic doesn't do random skills even in Conquest, which is the hard route for series veterans.

Being able to see enemy stats on deployment would help, but because there's often still a touch of randomness in gear assignment and Zodiac compatibility, you'd still end up having to know the AI backward and forward to know whether that Ninja is going to come in on you or not. Still, it'd be better than not even knowing what Zodiacs the enemy has until the map starts.

I agree that Lunatic+ had that problem. I'd honestly blame the stat distribution. But even then, enemy stats in Fire Emblem are random. The enemies have growths as well, and sometimes that can be pretty important, IE, 1 point of speed can be the difference between enemies doubling and not, which can be a huge problem at moments. 

Yeah. That's more so where I'm going with that. It's a shame the Tactics Ogre remake fudged this up really badly. 

4 hours ago, AbnormalVoid said:

was considering mentioning this possibility in my last post, but realized it wouldn't really be feasible, since it's more of a system that relies on having a larger selection of selection of units to meet the needs of each individual situation.

Also, in this situation, you always get the upper hand, since the enemy has no ability to counter this advantage. While that's also true for the player's knowledge of static aspects of the opposing team's make-up, I feel like that's more in service to the enemy as a designed challenge, over the random nature of arbitrary strengths and weaknesses.

In regards to Brave and Faith, they're definitely very different in regards to their applications, but I feel they could be valuable assets if only they reflected the actual inherent job and equipment qualities of each character.

Such as how I had explained in this previous post:

I don't know if it's feasible or not for splitting JP after battle though. I do wonder... 

Yeah, but here's a question I've always wondered, does the enemy really need to gain and advantage? I mean, the game is about providing the player different challenges. Not necessarily making the opponent able to kill the player. While I understand that a part of that is providing enemies that can fight back, the question still remains relevant. 

Perhaps. I'd honestly blame the issue of Br/Fa values on the shitty reaction system. As it stands, you never want low brave outside of the equally horrible Move-Find Item. However, if the Brave System had abilities that worked better when you were a coward or brave, there might actually be some strategic use, or value in having middling brave units. IE, say Auto-potion / Defensive reactions work better for cowards, while aggressive ones work better for heroic units. It has its place, it's just not utilized as effectively as possible. Faith works decently as is, because having lower faith has a benefit, and the same goes for high faith. The only problem I really have with it, is that casters tend to be weak to themselves, which is actually strange and kind of dumb. 

2 hours ago, Augestein said:

Yeah, but here's a question I've always wondered, does the enemy really need to gain and advantage? I mean, the game is about providing the player different challenges. Not necessarily making the opponent able to kill the player. While I understand that a part of that is providing enemies that can fight back, the question still remains relevant.

It's less letting enemies gain an advantage, and more trying to keep the field as level as possible. Giving a pointless advantage in any situation only really devalues the inherent quality of the battle.

2 hours ago, Augestein said:

Perhaps. I'd honestly blame the issue of Br/Fa values on the shitty reaction system. As it stands, you never want low brave outside of the equally horrible Move-Find Item. However, if the Brave System had abilities that worked better when you were a coward or brave, there might actually be some strategic use, or value in having middling brave units. IE, say Auto-potion / Defensive reactions work better for cowards, while aggressive ones work better for heroic units. It has its place, it's just not utilized as effectively as possible. Faith works decently as is, because having lower faith has a benefit, and the same goes for high faith. The only problem I really have with it, is that casters tend to be weak to themselves, which is actually strange and kind of dumb. 

Faith works better, I agree, and tying reactions to it made no sense at all. I really like your cowardly attack idea, though. Attacks that do more damage with an inverse brave formula is a fun concept.

To fix Brave and Faith, I'd give the following addition to my previous fix for Br/Fa: Have Brave work the same as Faith, only with Physical damage instead of Magic damage. Consider how the stat is "Brave". Bravery can also be associated with rashness. From that mindset doing more and receiving more Physical damage makes sense, in the same way Faith works from the standpoint that when you believe more fervently in mystic powers, it makes them stronger, both for and against you. Mix that with my (theoretical) system where you can use equipment and job set-ups to determine your Brave and Faith, and you have an interesting system of give and take.

Now, this would obviously require a reworking of the formula, I suggest:

The Faith (and Brave, in this new situation) formula would  work as (CFa/50)*(TFa/50) instead of (CFa/100)*(TFa/100).
This way, 50 Brave or Faith would just be the regular damage of the ability.
The lowest and highest Brave and Faith would be 100 and 25 respectively. Meaning at 25, they'd take and do half damage, and at 100, they'd take and give twice the damage. The ability to get as low or high as 25 and 100 would only be possible under extreme circumstances.

Ugh, I spent way too long mulling over this theoretical situation, I'm like half asleep. In any case, I'd probably add the new formula to FFT vanilla, in place of the current faith formula. It would probably fix a lot of the problems with the accuracy of status effects. Would need to balance...every magic spell's power...but yeah, it's a good idea. rofl

On 1/4/2018 at 10:14 AM, Emmy said:

I like 1.3's approach to Archer, it however both needs the bugfix fix I made for charged shots.

There was a bug with charged shot? What was it?

Interrupt (i forgot what 1.3 calls it, but it's what MT calls Interrupt) needs to actually work on bosses or there needs to be a reason intuitive to the player for it to not work on everything

It actually did use to work on bosses and it was removed for balance issues because you could deprive a Zodiac Boss (that doesn't use Non-Charge) of all its turns if you set it up right.

Of course that kind of made it kinda useless since most enemies which aren't immune to it are usually more likely to be stopped from charging by just killing him, but Marksman is kind of a headache job where it's just more effective in the enemy hands than yours.

Anything with a charge time, if the AI uses it and moves, moving will cancel the charging of that move.  It is something hardcoded to that skillset that I figured out the fix to fairly recently.  I put this fix in the spoiler tag below.

And it's these "balance issues" that I'm challenging here.  Why not be more creative in how you handle bosses?  Having it be faith based can allow you to set it to pathetic/0 accuracy with a low faith enemy, having an enemy using non-charge or having no moves with a charge time means that the enemy will be effectively immune.  Of course, you shouldn't be doing this to every boss and the move needs to have a use against some bosses.  Why punish the player for having access to a useful move by making the enemies immune for a reason that the player won't understand?