Seiken Densetsu 3 Sin of Mana - Discussion

Roadmap until v1.0

Potential ideas towards v2.0

I have to ask, what difficulty would you recommend for a person that hasn't played this game in ages and would eventually like to play it again? Obviously "Psychotic chaos mode of doom" doesn't seem like the right one, but "easier than Vanilla" seems... Not very fun. 

I'd say go with normal.

Easy is roughly where vanilla would sit, imo, and that is where I'd send a real beginner.
Well, vanilla minus some crap with the vanilla Lv3 tech formula that had a chance to give you a gameover when two random endgame enemies decide to give their FST; you know the 500+ damage to the whole team, just because, even against maxed defense.
In this hack, you should be able to survive two of those FSTs even on hard, at least if you've given defense some thought.

On normal I already expect you to make use of buffs and/or debuffs. On hard they are the bare minimum later.
If you find yourself needing to use a buff even for random fights come Lv50+, that is par for the course.

Of course this isn't a free win. Dolan will probably win at least once even on the easiest setting.

And to avoid the average "expert traps":

• black market no longer replaces party building, too expensive for 24/7
• Lv1 techs aren't strictly safer to use, neither are Lv2/3 techs always superior, you may want to change those for some situations.
• the one or other boss "randomly" hitting for 999 is not a bug
• (de)buffs are not only for bosses

Have fun.

I'm a fan of the Rogue final weapon added some updates ago so I'm looking forward to what you have in store for the dark classes.

It'll be a surprise to myself, too. I've currently no idea what to do with any of the missing class weapons.

Or rather, no idea that I can code (RAM likes to be a limitation), is useful and not OP at the same time.

Hi

Can magic animation durations be highly shortened and/or while they are on, having the game to continue playing? (As in Secret of mana)

This would give unbeliveable gameplay

*sigh*

I get this idea so often... the answer remains the same, no because:

• the game is already dieing when spells are used; just go 10h without save/load, just with savestates, the game will hard crash every other spell cast. I once read an article that this also happened on console. this would make it 10 times worse
• horribly unbalanced: if it works like in SOM1, target being completely frozen and everyone else can still act/attack, well, easy mode would be understatement of the year; also boring.

Oh okay, thanks for the reply

So we just got to Mispolm on our three-way playthrough (Rogue/Vanadis/Archmage), and we don't know what the HELL is going on.

This is awesome.

Fiegmund was pretty crazy too, nice one. Really looking forward to the AI changes on Bigieu/Jagan/Dark Prince.

EDIT: HOLY FUCK CAN'T BELIEVE WE KILLED IT

On 23/05/2017 at 11:16 PM, praetarius5018 said:

  Reveal hidden contents

Did you use Lv2/3 techs against Mispolm and see it deal regular+999 damage?

 

Shit, still playing this awesome hack regularly with friends. Really impressive what you've done since I first stumbled upon it back in 2015, super excited for what's to come! Particularly Angela's remaining weapons since I have an inclination towards playing her, hah.

I apologize if it's been asked already, but would you be willing to do anything with the 3-player hack to disable automatic character takeovers? Figuring out controller shenanigans over netplay mid-fight is the only legitimately frustrating thing about multiplayer, but I know you generally want nothing to do with that madness - just figured I may as well ask and see where you stand on this issue specifically, and whether removing the death heirarchy is simple or not.

In any case, thank you for the weeks of entertainment and nostalgia you've provided! You clearly have a talent for game design.

Anybody got any tips on Dolan?

I can't figure out what causes Spiral Moon to do 999 damage. At first I thought it was dependent on how much damage I deal and that I need to slow roll the fight, but it seems that no matter what eventually he casts a 999 damage version that I can't deal with at all.

10 hours ago, Riddle said:

I apologize if it's been asked already, but would you be willing to do anything with the 3-player hack to disable automatic character takeovers? Figuring out controller shenanigans over netplay mid-fight is the only legitimately frustrating thing about multiplayer, but I know you generally want nothing to do with that madness - just figured I may as well ask and see where you stand on this issue specifically, and whether removing the death heirarchy is simple or not.

I already tried to have a look at the controls to enable L/R/select switching off a character that is casting. the results were... weird. and headache inducing.
So, probably not. Sorry.

9 hours ago, WarpedLichen said:

Anybody got any tips on Dolan?

I can't figure out what causes Spiral Moon to do 999 damage. At first I thought it was dependent on how much damage I deal and that I need to slow roll the fight, but it seems that no matter what eventually he casts a 999 damage version that I can't deal with at all.

999 damage is a reaction to something he did and you didn't do.
Try to look closer what happens before the 1st and 2nd spiral moon. And then think of an "answer" to it.
It shouldn't be spoiled too much if I say that any party composition can deliver that "answer".

Yes, and please mark it as spoiler, ty.

So I upgraded to 0.9 and I seem to be getting suddenly steamrolled by enemies - they're doing double damage to me compared to 0.87. Is this a bug or have things changed that drastically diliberately?

Did you use the normal difficulty patch in 0.87 but not with 0.9?

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

Did you use the normal difficulty patch in 0.87 but not with 0.9?

Yeah, I just figured that out. Thank you!

v0.925

• changed AI and stats of Darkshine Knight
• changed AI and stats of Koren
• Lord's final weapon "Sigmund" now strengthens Lv2/3 based on the target's attack power and puts the target into the counterable state
• Duelist's final weapon "Deathbringer" now increases Lv2/3 damage based on proximity to the target(s)
• Grand Divina's final weapon "Ganvantein" now grants saber effects when casting elemental spells on allies
• Archmage's final weapon "Spirit Cane" now allows spells to hit weaknesses for 200% damage instead of 150%
• added a variable bonus to counter attack power based on the target enemy, e.g. knights and crawler take a lot more bonus damage than mages
• increased attack strength of Bulette and Gold Bulette
• added magic damage to a couple status inflicting specials of regular enemies
• changed Grell's Funky Dance from "energy ball" to self heal
• changed Kerberos' and Firedrake's fire breath from inflicting dummy state to poison
• increased Harpy's Talon drain from 10% maxHP to 20%
• increased Carmilla Queen's Bloody Dance from 12.5% maxHP to 33%
• reduced Slime Prince's red glowing attack from 50% HP damage to 25%
• fixed a bug in counterattack timing
• fixed a bug that gave some enemies 0% chance to hit with status ailments in trap rooms

one more boss, just one more boss till 1.0

So close - I was holding off my run at the Dark Shine Knight and now I can continue.

Hoping the new version is much improved compared to ridiculously op enemy that gets stuck on walls.

Nah, he's more of that; the AI is just hopeless around obstacles.
Stats are even more OP than before.

He's build around a proper duel including waiting for an opening and using it, Dark Souls style.

Do you have the bosses with special conditions documented somewhere in a text file? Like at least a hint so people know what to expect? I doubt the game itself gives warnings, like with Ludgar and now that boss. 

Only the cryptic nonsense in the monster_bosses.xls where even I half the time don't know wtf I meant...

What special conditions do you mean exactly? Or could you give me an explicit example of what you'd like to have here?

Beat new Koren, got a few thoughts about the fight if somebody could confirm:

• Spoiler

   

  • You'd need 7, can't be done. For deathspell purposes he should be 105, -1 level (real and otherwise) per horn.
  • Dunno, for my the AI often stops when I'm in his face and have him literally cornered. The AI is absolutely unable to handle certain angles. This can be seen on heath as well.
  • He doesn't counter. The required "hate" for him is beyond the maximum. Instead he deals more damage the more hate he has stored. Same solution as with DkS - throw some counters at him.
  • Also the barrier change is unchanged, so what worked there in vanilla still works here.

   

   

Alright so far, this is a fantastic hack, good job on it. I'm playing it on hard, with hawk, riezel and angela (aiming for nightblade. archmage, vanadise) and i just killed the second golems, god darn they were a pain in my ... riezel is pretty tanky but hawk and angela are glass cannons, so i kept getting destroyed in seconds since the ai can't dodge if their life depended on it. so my strategy was solo them with hawk with a life leech ring and a double tech weapon and a whole lot of running around and chocolate. Worked out suprisngly well, ill probably try that against bill and ben too if need be.

again great job, i'm loving it. i hope you release version 1 before I finish so i can get nightblade final weapon

So how is the counter mechanic supposed to work anyway? The readme suggests that its only the lvl 1 tech? How do I counter enemies who use screen freezers? Is it hitting them while they are in their casting pose?

"...Lv1 tech hits an enemy shortly after they start their attack or cast a spell..."

hit them in the 3~4s after the spell animation finishes.
hold direction away from the enemy in case the spell sends you flying to get knocked closer to them.

Darkshine Knight is the best enemy to test regular counters against as he takes at least 200 damage extra from it, so it is easily visible when you get it.

While I'm waiting for 1.0.0 to fight Dragon Emperor, got a few more questions about game mechanics.

Are the increased power while deathless weapons only supposed to work if somebody has never died ever or just death score? It seems pretty much impossible to never die in this game, especially when Zable and Koren are in the mix.

When do the resist increase gear come into place? It seems too situational for what they do. One resist isn't worth worse defenses. I've never fought a boss where I remove weakness or increased magic defense wasn't enough. Am I missing something, especially given how tight money is.

I feel like a lot of the armor and weapons in the second half of the game should be brought up to medium at least to make them worth using. I stuck with a few tried and true sets basically the whole time (medium, pure armor, pure evade, magic + negate weakness). I think undead armor is the poster child of good design because its very useful when you get it because of key status resists with a drawback that gets worse as the game goes on.

Finally, does evade work past 127 on the character sheet? Not sure if I get anything by going over with Max Agi Hawk.

Deathless weapons are your proof if you succeeded a "no death" playstyle; die once (normal or higher) or hit a trap (tough or higher) and it is gone for this playthrough.
Whats the problem with Zable and Koren specifically?

Evade is hard capped at 127; more AGL will give you the other bonuses still: more accuracy (less misses), bons to Lv1 tech damage, etc.
I think the highest accuracy any enemy has is 38, so you're at the effective evasion cap of 90 anyway (127 - 38 = 89, ok you miss 1%, cast speed up asap!!!).

weapons and armor are meant to be usable most of the entire game, some in general, other with more niche use, and all of course depending on playstyle.
theoretically the wendel weapon and armor should last you the whole game, so money shouldn't be much of a problem.

does it even matter much if an armor is light, light-medium or medium? sure the damage number changes, but on higher difficulty does it change the number of hits you can survive?
if the damage gets reduced from 700 to 500 that looks good but you still die in 2 hits.
That's where the resist gear should come in, resistance cuts damage in half; you have a bit lower defense but now the 700 gets down to let's say 400, oh hey that means you can now take to hits at 801 HP instead of almost getting one shot there.
Or for the OCD people that need everyone to take similar damage; you know some classes have natural resistance to a given element, others don't, so they can even it out that way.

Also don't only look at the pure defense; HP factor, evade, crit resistance also play a huge role on how much it lets you survive.
Bazant Mail (93% HP, heavy p.def) vs Dragon's Mail (103% HP, light def) is almost 100 HP difference at Lv90+. Dragon takes more damage per hit, yes, but it still takes 100 more damage before you hit 0.

I'd actually say, undead armor becomes more useful later; you get a few options to recover HP outside of now harmful healing (moon saber/hp steal weapon/ring, HP regen ring, bishop weapon or plain post battle healing) and status effects become more diverse. of course there's only one boss where it is safe to use at all.
someone made use of it in dragon hole even.

I can take a look at general attack and defense value of weapons and armors, but for that I need a bit more concrete feedback;
why should weapon/armor X be increased one attack/defense stage and how does it make X not strictly better than similar options.
Resistance gear requires knowing what the enemies use for elements, but at least for the godbeasts that's dead obvious (minus one troll).

Admittedly, I've designed myself into a corner there; the medium power wendel stuff was supposed to be the baseline, the stuff to compare to, and then it doesn't have anything special and only medium power.
And there's only so much hitrate/critrate/evade/whatever that I can reduce otherwise...

Zable and Koren both seem to cast Death spell randomly in their routines and are at too high of a level to negate with a level. Get hit with death spell = no bonus. Not to mention the occasional boulder getting off roulette and the like.

I think you're overestimating HP+ gear. In general by the end game I am close to max HP (700-800+). An average enemy hit does around 120-170, 100 hp is less than one hit. The difference between high def and low is like 50-80 hp per hit.

Early - Mid game - Heal Light casting is too slow, the main criteria in a boss fight is making sure your healing stocks last through an entire fight. Most often the difference between medium and light defense by feel is that a light defense hit takes me down to almost nothing, and I need to blow 3+ round drops to take another hit. Medium defense, I might only need 1 round drop before I die in the next hit. The difference in item and time efficiency is the deciding factor, not how many hits I can take in a vacuum.

The problem with resist gear is that it helps you against one element of damage and increases the damage you take from everything else. Wearing Dark resist gear against Gorza for example is counterproductive, you take maybe 25% less damage from dark spells (due to lower base magic resist), but the trade off is that his physical attacks and ghost road now one shot you. Resist gear is only good against bosses (because regular enemies don't use elements too much, and the ones that do use AI to target your weakness specifically) and only against bosses that don't have non elemental attacks. Admittedly a lot of God Beats are kinda one trick wonders, but there's a quite a few physical attackers in the mix. And it seems like you're probably better off using Remove Weakness or More Magic Defense for those God Beasts anyway.

I didn't like undead armor because end game enemies deal way too much damage to fight comfortably. Even with max defense Duran is taking 100+ damage a hit. Evade stacking feels way better than defense stacking and the lack of evade on the chest piece just makes it not worth it. Knowing that max evade is 90 changes things a lot, though i feel like 1% is wrong because I still got hit a lot at 127 in the Dragon Hole (feels closer to 5% to 10 %?) maybe enemies just attack a ton. It seems like in mid game, wearing undead armor meant that I could just about comfortably tank an entire screen of enemies, get really close to death, but get the free heal after. This is extremely relevant in the snow fields where you can't wear pure physical defense because of mages or in the wind area because enemies inflict status effects like crazy. In the end game, I can't rely on using pure defense to last me through a map with undead armor because I will die before I can even take out one enemy in melee, so I prefer having access to regular healing.

For weapons, I think its quite clear because weapons use the same statline for every character despite being better/worse for each character due to their role. Duran's mp drain weapon is pretty bad for example, because he doesn't use spells very much in any of his classes. That one can probably be bumped to medium-heavy for him because of the relative lack of utility. Hawk can't get any innate healing spells, so his strong Heal Light item should probably be buffed to compensate.

The random chance to inflict poison weapon seems really bad. Random amount of hits it takes to inflict status, you just run away? Even though the AI isn't capable of carrying out that strategy? Same with random chance to inflict silence - there are only a few enemies that I want a random silence on (bees because they buff before the FST and eyes because they don't cast often) - everything I else I want to silence asap or I don't care at all. I feel like those could probably be increased to medium attack but with lower crit chance or something.

Armor wise, I think all of the resist status stuff is too weak, feel like it should be buffed to medium to make it competitive with Wendel armor. I already said my piece about resistance armor. Attack up stuff in general don't feel worth it right now. I wish there were a set of armor that negates enemy elemental resists, a weapon that negates evade, and a weapon that can do knock back consistently.

Death Spell -> Wishbone

HP/def: I never said that those 100 HP are the be-all-end-all, I just said that you can't ignore those HP. That one was a comparison between an armor that is strictly for physical defense versus an armor that has a non-defensive use, OF COURSE the later will be worse defensively, but it also has some HP more to make it not that bad as you made it out to be.

Evasion: there's a lot of things that outright ignore evasion. techs, criticals, looks-like-a-regular-attack-but-is-actually-a-spell

Duran needs no MP?  - tell that to people that use him as a main healer.

for random status weapon try upping your luck, it gives you up to 40% chance to hit those status ailments.
poison is just a ton of free dps; like dead in 10-15 seconds even if you do nothing to them

Will admit I didn't that counter at all, I assumed Wishbone was the counter to the death penalty.

Also will admit I don't know enough about the game mechanics to know what is what, just that I get hit by random damage quite a bit.

Cleric Duran is probably possible, but I don't really rely on heal light for combat healing because the cast time is too much of a pain for me to bother.

10-15 seconds is a long time even after the proc. I do some of the proc weapons - petrify and chibiko for example. I think the Pedan gear in general are really cool competitive alternatives to each other. I just feel like there's a big gap where you get extremely situational gear options for a long time.

Ok, I'll change "death resistance" to "protection against instant death spells" to make it more clear.

Honestly, I've the same problem; half the time it does the same damage, has the same animation but for square reason it counts as something other than a regular attack so evasion is skipped.

Give him some INT (also strengthens his Lv3 tech so no real loss) and/or the Rising Moon Helm. And avoid Rune Earrings.
I'd be honestly surprised if there's any situation - that isn't absurdly unrealistic - for which exists no useful gear at this point.

Care to elaborate what gap you mean?

That's still 80% of the game where he's not a credible healer because of how slow his cast time is. You're talking end game armor + 3rd class change + sizable int investment before cast time feels good.

The equipment gap I feel starts from the Ghost Ship. You already have your baseline defensive gear and you're starting to get random resist armor of dubious general usefulness. Similarly, you're getting the alt stat weapons for a couple towns. I understand the intent of flat gear progression, but its also kind of lame to get to a new equipment shop and getting no progression.

I feel like resist armor should be removed - you get resist accessories from Cats right around the God Beast fights when they're the most useful.

A set of faster cast time armor/sudden cast accessory should be made available earlier so that 2nd class classes can make better use of their buffs in regular fights.

A lot of it is also due to enemy layout - if enemy layouts could be changed so that you can specialize against an area then the specialized gear becomes a lot better.

Eh, no, totally not; quick cast helm is available at the cats (~lv55), so more or less exactly in the middle of the game.
Levels are more or less parallel to how far you are in the game; last class change is Lv38 so roughly a third into the game.
Either way that is a far cry from 80%.
If I had proposed a "healer Fenrir Knight" THAT would be 80% into as she needs her final/class specific weapon.

I read it as "there's no gap just items you don't feel useful to you" - that's per se ok.
As long as someone finds a good use for it those aren't a waste in my book.

How about you use the resist armors to have your entire team resist one specific element and then cast a saber of that element on all enemies, thought about that option?
On that front, has anyone even tried to make some use out of Y button shenanigans (cast spell on wrong target group)?
My list of those strategies wants some more entries. Currently stuck at 10 entries.

Another thing you feel lacking already exists -> Sage Stone, buffs cast almost instantly, available same time as you get your 2nd class change.

Enemy layouts have been changed and actually change themselves to a degree, specifically so they are not trivialized with a single item.
I wanted this hack to be more about execution/skill than "just get the right equip/stats and gg".
The general idea was more along the lines of "if in area x the most dangerous thing is petrification throw some petrify resist gear on" and not "wear petrify resist gear, max p.def and then hold A".

I'm thinking of playing this mod
Which character combo you'd say is the most complete at this point?
Also, it would be nice to see some in-game indication that the patch worked (some text somewhere around the title is fine)

The ingame indication is simple:
you can run in battle and take more than 2 damage from a hit

As for adding a text somewhere - this would be insanely difficult to get working, you know across untranslated version and several different translation patches, etc.
Help on that would be welcome.

Hello, Praetorius! I've been silently following your project for a few months now. I've played it on normal and hard by myself and normal with a few friends completely unfamiliar with the game.

It's been really fun, and I just wanted to jump in and say you do excellent work.

I think you really succeeded in remaking the game to offer various, meaningful choices, and even beyond that the added depth from running, "strong attacks" and counters and reworking the enemy ai make for a satisfying rpg experience AND action experience that, best of all, has replayability. The removal of grinds helped in that, too. 

That's what I mostly came here to say, and I really feel like I should have sooner.

I want to contribute what I can, too.

The Sage Stone (sudden cast ring) consumes MP when techs are used while equipped (sets MP to 0).  You can see this happening at 23'45'' in the latest video, #"46-48", of that let's play going on of your mod (coincidentally, they're how I found out about your mod!). You can see Lise's equipment at 25'36''. I encountered this bug myself.

I also remember something fishy about one of the Pedan armors, like it was supposed to have a major drawback only the penalty was bugged or something so the armor was too good. I'll try to provide specifics when I have time.

I'm sorry I can't offer more bugs. Maybe that's a good thing,  though! 

I haven't beaten the mod yet, but I keep coming back to it and am happy to start over.  The worst parts are the things you can't address as you've said like FSTs/Spells stopping all action, no in game descriptions of changes, slowdown and battle message spam and limited enemy tells to work with.  The worst offenders are buffs like mind up or power up, had square only made them with like 1/3rd second animations like protect up the screen freezing wouldn't interrupt the game's flow much. Is it possible to just make those play out faster like I do manually with frame skip?

It does make me wonder what you'd be capable of with a team behind you and maybe the freedom of your own game. I think you've got a great sense of balancing challenge and fun.  It also makes me think about other games that were so close to being good games that could be made less tedious and more interesting with some modification.  I know very little about modding or programming in general, but damn if Sin of Mana wasn't so impressive and such a good time with my friends for being such an old game that it hasn't inspired me to learn how and see what could be done with a game like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles or, you know, Legend of Mana.

Anyway, that's a lot of words and bullshit, so I just want to be clear and repeat. Thank you, Praetorius. You've done incredible work.

Despite ID being gone, the running gag of people getting my name wrong continues, great.

Sage Stone:
I should've seen this coming, "techs" are mechanically the same as spells..
And yes, I've already tried to have Angela cast Fireball as her Lv2 tech; it worked, except it didn't use TP up.

Pedan Armor:
ok, I'll wait for the info; guessing is a bit difficult when there are 4 of those per character..

Animations:
I've not really looked into that, only how to assign them to a spell.
At most I could add a bonus patch that just switches animations off for buffs, so it skips that completely.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hi. Recently been looking at this rom hack and It's quite interesting! And the bugfixes are especially attractive!!! The only change I'm not such a fan of is Carlie/Charlotte not having Healing Light in her base class and dark classes, as much early Holy Ball is nice it doesn't make much sense for her healing spell to be missing at all since she's a Cleric.

Any chance you might revert her back to having Healing Light in all her classes??? Or have that as an option in a separate patch?? Other than that what you got going with the spell lists is awesome!!!! Gives magic-users more utility without things getting too crazy.  It's so nice for characters besides Riesz/Lise to be able to get Stat Ups/Downs. And I LOOOOOVE that you gave Duran's Paladin class multi target Healing Light along with the other stuff he gets :3

Aside from that only other suggestion I can think of is that it would be nice for Kevin to get speed up as a Warrior Monk

2 hours ago, Gamerdude535 said:

Hi. Recently been looking at this rom hack and It's quite interesting! And the bugfixes are especially attractive!!! The only change I'm not such a fan of is Carlie/Charlotte not having Healing Light in her base class and dark classes, as much early Holy Ball is nice it doesn't make much sense for her healing spell to be missing at all since she's a Cleric.

You're mixing something up. She DOES have a healing spell, just not for HP.
Also, she's a cleric, clerics pray (or bring the world to ruin), healing is for medics.

Any chance you might revert her back to having Healing Light in all her classes???

Yes, the chance is roughly 0.000-1%.

To make it short: no.
Her dark classes are not allowed to ever learn heal light. So her base class can't either - forgetting spells is not a thing in this game.

How goes the progress to 1.0? A part of me doesn't want to start a new game again with the fear that a new patch will drop in the middle.

No idea when it will be done.

That means I can start a new game without worrying about an abrupt restart then. I got up to the moon godbeast in one of the older patches - maybe this time I'll write down my experiences with all the bosses as I go.

Started playing a bit ago with Duran , Kevin, and Angela, just got to Maia and find myself with more input to throw out there

Armor affecting HP is a sweet and interesting feature but some of them should probably be looked at. Not sure that Bezant Mail should be giving Duran less HP than Hard leather :P. The defense compensates for it a bit but it feels weird

And in terms of the story Angela not having Holy Ball in her potential spell list as Magician but getting Fireball and later Ice Smash before even meeting the matching elemental spirits doesn't make sense. 

That being said it's a great rom hack and I'm having a lot of fun so far.

I'm restarting the game after a minute of not dabbling in it. I keep pressing the b button with a full tech bar, but I'm not firing off a tech. I hold it down and I run around just fine though. 

Hi Praetarius, nice to see this hack still going.

22 minutes ago, velsper said:

I'm restarting the game after a minute of not dabbling in it. I keep pressing the b button with a full tech bar, but I'm not firing off a tech. I hold it down and I run around just fine though. 

As a general tip, reading the documentation files is highly recommended for this hack. For example, the Readme file contains the following information:
 

Quote

A: attack, confirm, interact
B: run (even in battle), cancel
X: open ring menu
Y: use techs (in battle), invert ally/enemy targetting for selected spell (hold while selecting the spell before starting target selection)
Y+B: open menu (out of battle)
L/R: hold to control different character
START: open inventory (out of battle), toggle control on/off (player 2&3)
SELECT: switch to different character

Another piece of advice I could give, the weapons and armor in the shops are never strictly better than the previous ones. Each of them have their own specific properties. Unfortunately, there is no way to add descriptions about them into the game, especially considering some people play SD3 in Japanese, some in English. That's why, it is recommended to keep the armor_elements_stats.xls file open while playing the game, and take a look at the file when you're making decisions on what to buy or equip for your characters.

Cool beans, thanks for the reminder there.

I reached Maia and all the level one accessories/rings are available for purchase on Kevin. Angela and Charlie can't equip their own accessories, but Kevin can equip all of them.

9 hours ago, Gamerdude535 said:

Started playing a bit ago with Duran , Kevin, and Angela, just got to Maia and find myself with more input to throw out there

Armor affecting HP is a sweet and interesting feature but some of them should probably be looked at. Not sure that Bezant Mail should be giving Duran less HP than Hard leather :P. The defense compensates for it a bit but it feels weird

And in terms of the story Angela not having Holy Ball in her potential spell list as Magician but getting Fireball and later Ice Smash before even meeting the matching elemental spirits doesn't make sense. 

That being said it's a great rom hack and I'm having a lot of fun so far.

Holy Ball is the same story with Carlie's Heal Light: the dark side class must not have it, so the base can't either because there is no "forget spell" mechanism.
And Fireball felt like a good replacement; it is the classic first spell for RPG mages and enough light can burn too, ask any vampire

Ice Smash from the earth spirit...
I mostly wanted to have Angela with all 4 base spells before she can get her Lv2s in the dark class at Tzenker.
If I kept ice where it was she could have earth at lv3 before ice lv1, that would be even stupider.

8 hours ago, velsper said:

I'm restarting the game after a minute of not dabbling in it. I keep pressing the b button with a full tech bar, but I'm not firing off a tech. I hold it down and I run around just fine though. 

As written above - working as intended.
Knowing the unmodified game is more a curse here than a blessing; control scheme/not running in battle, black market addicition, lv1 tech spam - probably some habits have to be unlearned, sorry.
You might remember the BS this hack was at the beginning? I want(ed) to get away from that, some bridges had to be burned.

7 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

Hi Praetarius, nice to see this hack still going.

Hi! Thanks for doing my job

5 hours ago, velsper said:

I reached Maia and all the level one accessories/rings are available for purchase on Kevin. Angela and Charlie can't equip their own accessories, but Kevin can equip all of them.

All accessoires should be equippable on all, you might have to pass them to other characters though via item transfer in the menu (middle top screen).
Buying is a bit weird in this game sometimes.

Hi Praetarius, do you still have plans to redo/update the current start menu screen? Even if you could just make it perform faster than it does now would be sufficient.

Equipping Charlie and Angela through the top middle inventory screen did it, thanks. I think I might've gotten an old version of the mod, though. Charlie has Holy Ball, which I remember reading a few posts up that you didn't want her to have before her class split? 

Edit: Huh, it says it's version 0.925 though...

Holy Ball is right, Heal Light is not supposed to be known to her until she goes to a light class.

14 hours ago, Lancalot said:

Hi Praetarius, do you still have plans to redo/update the current start menu screen? Even if you could just make it perform faster than it does now would be sufficient.

I've currently no plans beyond 1.0, that is the 3rd final boss and 3 weapons.

I have a question about the hate/revamped counter mechanic:

Does everything now add hate or is it like the old system, where every boss had a list of stuff that triggered counters?

For example Tzenker used to always counter earth coins, but never countered if Angela casted Earth Missile.

Basically, is knowledge of the old counter mechanics still worth a damn, or can I forget them?

PS:

Also don't forget to change HandAxe/Darts. Currently they cost the same to buy in black market, but Handaxe is lvl 2.5 damage, while Darts are lvl 1.5, making Darts completely useless aside from a scenario where you want to throw more than 20 physical damage Items in one battle. So either nerf Axes, or make them more expensive.

54 minutes ago, saryakan said:

I have a question about the hate/revamped counter mechanic:

Does everything now add hate or is it like the old system, where every boss had a list of stuff that triggered counters?

For example Tzenker used to always counter earth coins, but never countered if Angela casted Earth Missile.

Basically, is knowledge of the old counter mechanics still worth a damn, or can I forget them?

Forget about the old system.
Every enemy uses the same "list"; regular attacks (+critical), lv1 techs (except counters), lv2/3 techs, all spells count, doesn't matter what enemy type it is.

Most regular enemies don't live long enough to where it is relevant.
Also most regular enemies don't even have a "counter", neither do several bosses.

55 minutes ago, saryakan said:

Also don't forget to change HandAxe/Darts. Currently they cost the same to buy in black market, but Handaxe is lvl 2.5 damage, while Darts are lvl 1.5, making Darts completely useless aside from a scenario where you want to throw more than 20 physical damage Items in one battle. So either nerf Axes, or make them more expensive.

Thanks, I again forgot about that..

Sorry if this is asked before, but would it be difficult to implement a way to skip spell animations? Most of the time spend playing co-op is watching either of us casting spells and it gets kinda reduntant the more you play. 

Which ones? All? Non-boss-special ones? Only (de)buffs?
Should that happen always/automatically? Or just when you hold e.g. X when the top-messages appears and it would transition to an animation?

In short, no idea.

The animations that have bothered me the most are Mind Up/Down and Power Up/Down, as they take the longest. I don't mind something like Ancient or Catastrophe taking long, as they're supposed to be rare, ultimate spells, but regular stat spells like Mind Up/Down taking 10 seconds usually makes me press the fast-forward button. ^^; Maybe add an optional patch that removes those 4 animations, or replaces them with shorter ones from other spells?

I'll go with hold X (menu which is at that point blocked anyway) on any of the 3 controllers before the animation starts (while the spell name is displayed on top) to skip it completely.
That way you can choose yourself what you want to skip and what not.

It is now official, there'll never be a public release of a 1.0 for this hack.

v1.029

• added optional patch "skippable_spell_animation": skip spell animations via holding X before the animation starts
• adjusted Xan Bie's stats
• adjusted Lightgazer's stats
• adjusted Landumber's stats and specials
• adjusted Fiegmund's stats and specials
• Ninja Master's final weapon "Kongo Rakan" now forces targets into counterable state if a spell hits a weakness
• Nightblade's final weapon "Deathstroke" now increases Lv2/3 tech damage while below 300 HP
• Grand Divina's final weapon "Ganvantein" now adds saber effect for elemental spells cast at allies
• altered maxMP by level slightly
• added diminishing returns for maxMP, values below 20 stay as is, former 38 max MP gets reduced to 25
• reduced handaxe item from Lv2.5 to Lv1.5; same as cost-identical darts
• fixed a bug that made Lv2/3 techs drain all MP if a Sage Stone is equipped
• on easy difficulty and below enemies have halved chance to land status effects with their regular attacks

My oldest backup of anything related to this hack is dated 2014/07/22, so 3 years and 2 months total.
Thought it was longer.

Oh baby, another update. I'm holding back on playing this again until all updates are finished, and it's killing me. Maybe I should give it another go soon.

Anyways, 3 years and 2 months on this hack, working alone? That's some impressive perseverance you have there, man, and I love you for it.

Great job for finally exceeding version 1.0! I've been playing the hack since version 0.102, and I'm glad to see how it's progressed steadily during these years. A few questions about the change notes:

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

• adjusted Xan Bie's stats
• adjusted Lightgazer's stats
• adjusted Landumber's stats and specials
• adjusted Fiegmund's stats and specials

So no changes for the Dragon Emperor?

 

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

• Grand Divina's final weapon "Ganvantein" now adds saber effect for elemental spells cast at allies

What does this mean? Does it mean that whenever an enemy (or you) casts an elemental spell on your characters, the characters receive additional damage, as if the caster had a Saber buff? If so, that sounds like the weapon has very limited uses.  (well, you can make all characters resistant to some element, then the saber effect will make spells of that element deal even less damage, but it's a very specialized strategy) Or did you mean this: if Angela casts an elemental spell on your own characters, they receive the damage from the spell, but they also gain the saber of that element?

25 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

So no changes for the Dragon Emperor?

I knew I forgot something in that list...
yes he's done from my point of view.

24 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

What does this mean? Does it mean that whenever an enemy (or you) casts an elemental spell on your characters, the characters receive additional damage, as if the caster had a Saber buff? If so, that sounds like the weapon has very limited uses.  (well, you can make all characters resistant to some element, then the saber effect will make spells of that element deal even less damage, but it's a very specialized strategy) Or did you mean this: if Angela casts an elemental spell on your own characters, they receive the damage from the spell, but they also gain the saber of that element?

It means that if the Grand Divina casts fireball at your party they take some damage (greatly reduced compared to normal but still some) and they get the effect as if she had used fire saber on them.
With this she has basically 18 spells - her regular 12 plus 6 saber replacements.

9 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

I'll go with hold X (menu which is at that point blocked anyway) on any of the 3 controllers before the animation starts (while the spell name is displayed on top) to skip it completely.
That way you can choose yourself what you want to skip and what not.

Thank you, this will make the game a lot more playable when using casters!

20 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

• added optional patch "skippable_spell_animation": skip spell animations via holding X before the animation starts

I never knew I wanted this.

This makes using Sabers/Buffs/Debuffs so much nicer.

I was wondering if you can create an optional patch where you can access the save menu on any screen via a hotkey, as long as there are no enemies or treasure chests left on that screen? I know you can use save states if you're playing on an emulator, but I've now had to restart the Labyrinth of the Ice Walls 4 times in a row. Once because of dying just a couple of screens before the save point, and 3 times I've had to restart because of an incurable Snowman bug. Occasionally if a character is turned into a Snowman at the end of a battle, the status becomes unhealable. Tinkle Rain won't heal it, neither will moving to another screen, or even touching a Gold Statue. I'm getting tired of playing through the same 20-30 minutes again and again because of a glitchy game, and I'd prefer to be able to save more frequently.

So here is a bug i found , i got poisoned from a treasure chest while duran and hawk had the lifesteal accecorys equipped and my health would continiously go down even after i screen transinitioned.
Hawk was wearing the passive life regen accecory so i could understand if that was buggy and the game cant handle Dot and regen at the same time.
I cured the poison via screen changing and not healingherbs thou. (Lise had cobra earings and was ofc fine)

over lv 36, poison smoke trap, at least tough difficulty?
if so -> feature

I evaluated traps past 2nd class change to be a non-issue since every party should have heal light by then, so I added some side effects that last until the next victory.
Those effects require lv36 before they start appearing, something like a noob protection.
Also they currently only apply on tough and hard difficulty.

On 20.9.2017 at 1:29 AM, Serafie1999AD said:

I was wondering if you can create an optional patch where you can access the save menu on any screen via a hotkey, as long as there are no enemies or treasure chests left on that screen? I know you can use save states if you're playing on an emulator, but I've now had to restart the Labyrinth of the Ice Walls 4 times in a row. Once because of dying just a couple of screens before the save point, and 3 times I've had to restart because of an incurable Snowman bug. Occasionally if a character is turned into a Snowman at the end of a battle, the status becomes unhealable. Tinkle Rain won't heal it, neither will moving to another screen, or even touching a Gold Statue. I'm getting tired of playing through the same 20-30 minutes again and again because of a glitchy game, and I'd prefer to be able to save more frequently.

Was the character "dead" when the snowman was inflicted? That makes you unable to be "hit" by spells and item effects.
Or anything else special?
I'm quite against save anywhere, for the simple reason that it will cause situations like the ghost ship bug (corrupt save).

Glad the "final" version came out so that I could beat the Dragon Emperor.

Had to say it was a pleasant surprise that Death Spell was great against a certain roadblock. Unpleasantly surprised that the damn thing respawns.

On 17.9.2017 at 1:00 PM, praetarius5018 said:

I'll go with hold X (menu which is at that point blocked anyway) on any of the 3 controllers before the animation starts (while the spell name is displayed on top) to skip it completely.
That way you can choose yourself what you want to skip and what not.

I noticed while playtesting that the skip doesn't work on the third human controlled player. Otherwise the patch works absolutely great!

So just wanted to leave a comment here saying how amazing this mod is! Been playing it with my little sister for the past couple days and it makes the game much much more interesting.  Especially love the spell changes and the increased boss AI because lets be honest some vanilla bosses were a bit retarded XD.

Mark me down as another fan of the mod. I've been doing a weekly stream with a friend (I'm Light Hawk, he's Light Duran, Dark Carlie's our third) on Normal difficulty. I feel like the default is a little bit absurd, but that's what the other patches are for, so thanks for those.

I never actually finished the original (and my stream partner never played it), but so far no boss has wiped us more than once. Jewel Eater wiped us, which we fixed by getting a few levels (we were behind the curve anyway) and swapping to MDef gear, and Bill & Ben killed us, which... we haven't gotten past yet because it was time to end the stream. Genova and Tzenker were pretty close fights, but we got through on our first attempt.

I think our most likely issues throughout the playthrough are going to come down to being underlevelled and not having enough items, and that's just because we tend to get impatient. I normally dislike equipment juggling in a game, but so far I'm generally pretty pleased with its use here - the only issue I have is dealing with the Storage system, and that's just SD3's clunkiness, no fault of the mod.

Well I start playing, and to be honnest I actually never play the Vanilla version just start watching some LP and watch some reviews, originnally I wanted to play the vanilla version before this mod, but in the end I decided fuck it let's be crazy and I set the mod on the Hardest difficulty and start playing the game. So yeah here I am the newcomer that play this mod on Hard, I have read the classes note and keep the equipment file to see. As such I do not expect to get a optimal party or anything like that so yeah.

As for my party I took Lise as the main character, Hawk and Carlie as support gotta say with the Hard Mod the beginning with Lise can be quite with no means to heal, specially those assassin cause they can put poison, well at least it's a good way to acknowledge that getting poisonned is really bad, well at least it instantly vanish when you change screen, once I get to town buying some healing Items doesn't seem like a bad idea ^^, as for stat for now I primarly concentrate on STR and VIT for Lise, AGL and STR for Hawk and PIE for Carlie (even tough she has no spell at the moment).

Well I will not describe everything but anyway I made it to the first boss at LV8 with my party lose a couple of times because of this goddamn poison and his AoE attacks hit a lot and he can heal himself 100 HP how lovely I had to use almost all my Healing item just to survive, in the head I manage to beat him with only Hawk dead, speaking of Hawk I realise that his Max HP has been reduce after he dies which seems normal (the guy I was watching the LP that got me interest in this mod mentions something like that) but when I go to the menu I also realise that his Defense and MDef are at 0 and I have armor puts on him so is that normal ?

Anyway for now I stopped playing just after Duran release me from my cell.

When dieing (and not reviving via Angel Grail) you get a penalty to HP and both defenses.
0 def at that stage might be possible, not sure.
The next chance you get sleep at an inn to remove that penalty and check if def becomes normal again.

Just as a hint, you'll want some VIT and PIE on everyone, especially on hard difficulty.

I see so that's a Dark Souls 2 like penalty well I will check when I get the chance to sleep at an Inn.

YEAH the boss make me realise that the Defensive stats are important especially considering that it seems some powerfull attack (from boss especially) can't be dodge, and I will need PIE for Lise anyway to learn her spells from what I read, I will definitly put some point toward VIT for Hawk.

Well, dodging in this game is a strange thing.

If it freezes the action, it can't be dodged (every spell, Lv2+ techs, etc.), it just hits.

If it is a projectile you may be able to negate it by using a well-timed Lv1 tech.
If you don't, it might check four your evade. Though several projectiles are spells in disguise which auto-hit.

If it is a melee attack, the sentiment with Lv1 tech still applies but that is more or less down to luck.
Some melee attacks are the same as your Lv1 tech, those always hit as well if you are in range.

In short, there's a ton of damage that is just unavoidable.

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

Just as a hint, you'll want some VIT and PIE on everyone, especially on hard difficulty.

You'll need some LUCK too, or the enemies will just beat you up with critical hits. In the original game, the Luck stat is almost useless, while in this hack, it could be considered even too important compared to the other stats. It affects your chance to do a critical hit, your chance to avoid enemy's critical hits, your evasion (partially), your chance to cause status ailments with weapons, the amount of traps in a treasure wheel, your chance to get rare drops, the bonus damage for several mage classes and it powers up Light Hawk's traps.

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

Well, dodging in this game is a strange thing.

If it freezes the action, it can't be dodged (every spell, Lv2+ techs, etc.), it just hits.

If it is a projectile you may be able to negate it by using a well-timed Lv1 tech.
If you don't, it might check four your evade. Though several projectiles are spells in disguise which auto-hit.

If it is a melee attack, the sentiment with Lv1 tech still applies but that is more or less down to luck.
Some melee attacks are the same as your Lv1 tech, those always hit as well if you are in range.

In short, there's a ton of damage that is just unavoidable.

Well that's odd so basically is there really any point to evasion ? Because from the look of it it seems pretty useless to increase evasion and more efficient to just be able to take the hits.

It certainly sounds so but regular attacks are still the majority outside of boss fights.
I'd estimate about 70% are normal attacks there, so it is not entirely useless.

For bosses... rule of thumb:
if it is a human sized enemy evasion has a point otherwise evasion respecting moves are the minority.

Does that help?

So basically Evasion good for normal and some bosses I think I get it anyway I pass the Golems on the bridge they were way easier than the previous Boss even tough they hit hard.

Also got some recording of the boss fight if anyone interested :

Full Metal Hunger
Golems

Those Golems are supposed to be "easy".
You've just fought a hard boss and are close to the next hard boss, 3 brick walls in a row is not ok.

Also, it doesn't matter who uses coins, their base damage is based on level, not stats.

Stacking Evasion can be really effective on some Bosses. Bill&Ben are the prime example.

Well just beat Jewel Eater at this point it's clear that Random Fight aren't that much trouble however for bosses just have to throw everything I got in their face, I throw all my Attack Item (except Earth Coin as he nullifies Earth) also the item that increase Defense and multiple Holy Ball with Carlie, don't know how many HP he had but quite a lot I am LV17 (I had to grind a little I reach Jewel Eater at LV14 but couldn't beat him so I grind after that which give some nice items anyway so that's good) I don't know if I am underlevel or what but with the Defense UP item Hawk and Lise were pretty safe as long as I keep an eye on their HP I had to be more cautious with Carlie tough since she died in battle not so long before the boss so she Had less HP and was taking more damage (except for spell has she has an high PIE), by the way speaking of item what is a Demon Statue, the description say nothing.

Jewel Eater

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

Well just beat Jewel Eater at this point it's clear that Random Fight aren't that much trouble however for bosses just have to throw everything I got in their face, I throw all my Attack Item (except Earth Coin as he nullifies Earth) also the item that increase Defense and multiple Holy Ball with Carlie, don't know how many HP he had but quite a lot I am LV17 (I had to grind a little I reach Jewel Eater at LV14 but couldn't beat him so I grind after that which give some nice items anyway so that's good) I don't know if I am underlevel or what but with the Defense UP item Hawk and Lise were pretty safe as long as I keep an eye on their HP I had to be more cautious with Carlie tough since she died in battle not so long before the boss so she Had less HP and was taking more damage (except for spell has she has an high PIE), by the way speaking of item what is a Demon Statue, the description say nothing.

Note that you won't be able to level up beyond level 18 until you've performed your first class change, and after Jewel Eater, you'll need to clear

before the class change. That's 5 areas, though some of them are quite short. I'd say you're heavily overleveled at the moment. The levels of regular enemies should be a good indicator to how high your levels should be. As for the Demon Statue, I'll have to ask you to check the documentation:

Quote

===Death Penalty===

Each death that was not ended via Angel Grail increases a hidden death score (normal difficulty and higher).
Failing a trap chest from Lv36 on also increases it slightly (tough difficulty and higher).
Once death score is accumulated, max HP and defenses will be reduced.
Max HP decreases by ~10% per death, the lowest possible is 50% of the normal value.
Defenses drop by up to -90 over 7 deaths.
A death in the intro fights does count. For that purpose Kevin's "invincible" enemy has been reduced from 65k HP to 300.
Death score can be removed by using a Demon Statue or resting at an Inn.
These statues are ONLY awarded by beating certain bosses and appear unannounced in your storage; you do not get another status if you already have 5 in your storage.

9 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

Note that you won't be able to level up beyond level 18 until you've performed your first class change

you'll still gain the exp, so nothing is lost; same will happen later for lv38

bosses are generally 1-2 levels above their minions, mostly to give more exp for level rubber banding purposes.
also levels will matter less as time goes on, so don't stress over that too much. (de)buffs and equip will matter much more.

18 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

Note that you won't be able to level up beyond level 18 until you've performed your first class change, and after Jewel Eater, you'll need to clear

  Hide contents

Molebear Highlands, Forcena, Rabite Forest, Palo and Corridor of the Wind

before the class change. That's 5 areas, though some of them are quite short. I'd say you're heavily overleveled at the moment. The levels of regular enemies should be a good indicator to how high your levels should be. As for the Demon Statue, I'll have to ask you to check the documentation:

 

 

Overleveled really ? I'm kind of surprise as really the grind before Jewel Eater is really the only one willingly I did, but I guess being overleveled is a consequence of the fact that since I never that game before they were some point where I just didn't know what to do to progress and just wander around killing everything on sight while keeping the very first armor available (since they increase XP in this mod), but to be honnest with the Hard difficulty set it doesn't feel like I am overpowered which is good, so basically once I reach LV18 I will not be able to LVUP anymore until I got the class change well that's interesting.

OK so Demon Statue are basically like the item that restore your humanity in Dark Souls 2 well at least that is simple to understand. 

EDIT : 

Quote

 

you'll still gain the exp, so nothing is lost; same will happen later for lv38

bosses are generally 1-2 levels above their minions, mostly to give more exp for level rubber banding purposes.
also levels will matter less as time goes on, so don't stress over that too much. (de)buffs and equip will matter much more.

 

Well I figure that Buff/Debuff will be important considering how raising my Defense help me with Jewel Eater.

You don't have any mandatory fights between Jewel Eater and the class change, so you only moved the grind from after him to before basically.
You also fight a boss almost right after getting the class change - I expect player to got back and get Lv19 before taking on that boss since they get their first spells from that and those help a ton.
Just a warning though.

Alright also I think I have a glitch tough it's more of a graphical glitch as it doesn't impact anything as far as I'm concern, I don't know why but for the second time an armor pop up out of nowhere in Carlie armor first time it was a Leather Visor now it back again but this time it's a Silver Circlet more on it when I look at the stat I get this :

... And I can't equip it, fun fact tough I could sell the Leather Visor but I can't sell the Silver Circlet that pop up.

Still don't see it..
You've noticed that each character has their own unique equipment inventory and the buy/sell system handles like crap?

YEAH I notice each character have their own inventory as each time I want to buy Equipment I had to switch character and take of the character with which I want to buy stuff.

I noticed the same bug a few days ago too. Lise had a Leather Visor in her inventory, which is a helmet belonging to Duran, even though Duran isn't even in my party. He's not in Nesouk's party, either.

I'm afraid I need more info here before this turns into casttime 2.0 ...
Do those only appear in the armor tab? Any rough idea what actions happened before then?
Only Leather Visor and Silver Circlet or other too?
Do they get added or overwrite existing items?

Also, the hold X the skip animation patch also makes cutscene "spell animations" and boss explosions skippable just as normal spells, whoops?

From my experience :

-It only appear in Carlie's armor inventory in my playthrough
-I don't think they overwrite other item (at least they don't overwrite any equipment for sure) so I assume they just appear and get added
-I didn't realise the Leather Visor at first so I don't know when he pop up however I'm certain that the Silver Circlet appear right after I buy a Sailor Dress for Carlie

i have the same leather visor bug ^^

Then tell me how to reproduce it.
I tried - for 3 hours. No bug.

I have a quick question about the game's internal frame rate. Weapons have a delay of 50-70 frames. Does the game process 15, 20, 30 or 60 frames per second? In other words, does a weapon with a delay of 60 take 4, 3, 2 or 1 second to recharge? If you use a stronger version of the regular attack (holding A without direction), how much does that increase the delay before the next attack?

Weapon delay is not really in frames but "process units".
Those have a varying length, I think you can get about 30 per second of those.
With lag the amount goes down a lot.

Strong attack simply doubles the delay.

5 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

Then tell me how to reproduce it.
I tried - for 3 hours. No bug.

I honnestly have no clue I will see if I have any mean to go back before that happen (maybe restart a game for test) but to make things even more complicate, for whatever reason I reopen the game just now and now I could sell Silver Circlet (still couldn't equip it tough) then I sell it (sell for the 287 Luc by the way ^^) and guess what after I sell it (and I Buy nor sell anything else) when I go back to the armor menu of Carlie the Leather Visor is back once again.... and I can't sell it so yeah I really don't understand what is going on here.

EDIT : OK I realise something I reload my save before I sell the Silver Circlet and then try to sell another armor and I realise that even if I don't sell the Silver Circlet no matter what armor I sell the Leather Visor pop at the very bottom of the armor menu, more thing when he pop at the bottom I can't sell it but when I switch Armor He start going up case by case once he is at the case just after my last armor then I can sell it.

Is this reproducable on that savegame? If so and it is is not a savestate, please send me the .srm file, that contains the normal savegames.

anyone that was around back when - do you remember when you could sell "time"? (the timer for MP regen)
this time you're basically selling death

What do you mean by that "selling death" ??

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

this time you're basically selling death

Does this mean the items are accidentally added to your inventory when you receive a death penalty, or maybe when you're sleeping at an inn to recover from DP?

v1.032

• increased monster level on Golden Road where you only need to go later from 10 to 13
• fixed bug that allowed to "sell death penalty"
• fixed bug that added armors when selling with a character that has death penalty
• reduced cost of Stone Cloud, Stun Wind, Cold Blaze and Blaze Wall from 10 to 9

in RAM the next entry after the 8th armor is the death penalty.
When you sell armor it moves all "armors" behind the sold one one slot in front so there are no gaps.
Except SD3 goes one slot too far. So it moves the death penalty into the 8th armor slot.
It is all numbers in the end, so "died but slept in an inn" is the same as Duran's first helm, "died, slept, than died once more but did not sleep" is "Silver Circlet".
Makes perfect sense. To the game at least.

Thanks for the patch! I've got a question about applying additional patches. I typically like using optional patches, such as the one that restores saving in Ghost Ship, and the one that skips spell animations. Will everything work correctly if I apply them to a vanilla, non-headered ROM, and only after that I apply the latest patch of Sin of Mana? It's quite troublesome first applying the latest patch, and then applying all the optional patches all over again.

No, the optional stuff has to go last.

I basically create some "do nothing" instructions where the function calls of the optional patches will go.
The optional patches just replace "do nothing" with a function call.
But if you apply the main patch it will write the "do nothing"s again there.

May I ask what is troublesome about this process?
Usually you'd just need to double click the patch and then select the ROM.

What program do you use? This is what I typically do, when I'm using SnesROMUtil:

1) Patch SEIKEN3_noheader.smc with the latest patch ips.

2) (optional) Backup the newly created ROM in case I don't want to play with any of the optional patches.

3) Apply patch ghostship_savepoint.ips to SEIKEN3_noheaderSeiken Densetsu 3 (J)_sinofmana_v1032.smc (or whatever the patch is called).

4) Apply patch skippable_spell_animation.ips to this.

5) Delete old SEIKEN3_Hard.smc, rename SEIKEN3_noheaderSeiken Densetsu 3 (J)_sinofmana_v1032ghostship_savepointskippable_spell_animation.smc (whew, what a name monster! ^^;) into SEIKEN3_Hard.smc. Delete the intermediate ROMs.

6) Apply tough, normal, easy and wuss patches to SEIKEN3_Hard.smc, delete old tough, normal, easy and wuss ROM files, rename the patched files into SEIKEN3_Tough.smc, SEIKEN3_Normal.smc, SEIKEN3_Easy.smc and SEIKEN3_Wuss.smc.

Not exactly hard, but it's tedious to do after every patch, especially if there will be frequent patches.

I just have LunarIPS set as default for .ips files.

Then a double click on an ips file opens the dialog where I have to choose the ROM, select it, press ok, done.
No renaming or deleting.

Also you can patch the difficulty patches over each other, no need to keep 5 separate ROMs.

Alright so got the first change class then I got in the area prior the crystal to gain a LV (well I basically level up to LV20 in one fight) to learn te first spell and gain some stat, so I tried the boss and I get recht cause I had some casualities on the way and some death penalty and AoE Defense Down + Supersonic effectivly hurts my character a lot so I got ALL the way back to the town sleep at a Inn and then go all the way to the boss (also was wearing the very first armors for the XP bonus all the time and did all the battle so I went up LV22 on the way back to the boss also for mobs these knights are pretty scary), at the end of the day the boss wasn't that bad throwable items are so much usefull (especially the Earth Coin for this boss) some Protect Up with Lise (specially on Hawk since he is the one with the least HP), Carlie spam Holy Ball, use an item that give Earth Element to weapon for Hawk and Lise and just finish him with regular attack and LV2 skill tough it was confusing to see when I could actually attack him directly since he flies, didn't use Hawk's Earth Jutsu I guess it could have been usefull but for now the casting time is to high I will have to give him some point to PIE.

Tzenker

Nesouk, I see you chose Valkyrie, Ninja and Priestess as your 2nd classes. A combination of Light Lise, Dark Hawk and Light Carlie is pretty solid in both the vanilla game and this hack. You'll have all stat-ups, all stat-downs, healing and sabers. Your team is physically somewhat fragile, as Lise is your only heavy-hitter and tank, and your team consists of 3 support-oriented characters rather than direct damage dealers. You should be fine most of the time, but these are the biggest threats I see for your team:

1) You won't have much elemental magic to strike against enemy weaknesses, although a combination of Mind Up + Fire Jutsu (if applicable) + Saber that exploits enemy weakness + Jutsu of that same element can somewhat make up for it.

2) You won't have Anti-Magic for your team. For bosses, you can probably farm or buy Specter's Eyes (just remember, they cost 3000+ a piece), but in regular fights, the lack of Anti-Magic may be very problematic. If an enemy absorbs some element or is immune to it, that means Hawk's Jutsus won't work against them, so you'll be unable to apply those debuffs. Especially if an enemy is immune to physical attacks, there's not much you can do against them without Anti-Magic, except spam offensive spells, which aren't exactly your strong point (see Note 1) above). Enemies like Giga Crawlers, Slime Princes, Carmillas, Blood Wolves, Wolf Devils, Gremlins and Boulders will be very tough enemies for you, since you have no good ways of taking them down. Status ailments are probably your best choice for defeating them.

Here is how i dealt so far with those enemys since i have a similiar team, starlancer/ninjamaster/lord
slime princes/giga crawlers really dont like mindup fire jutsu attacks (flamecoins from zombies,if you fight at night, are also really good against the early slimes)
against carmillas i used durans in your case carlies heal light on them and for the wolfs i recommend a poison weapon at least on 1 character at all times
you have holy magic on carlie for gremlins and you can poison them
just run from boulders

There are two basic types of physical "immunity".
One that has an immunity to physical (meaning half taken damage early game and quartered for high tier enemies) like a fire elemental is immune to fire - those can be removed with anti-magic and bypassed with weapons like Acala, Pain Tooth and Satan Flail.
The other, rarer kind (afaik only one very late boss) has maxed out physical defense, the same stat armors give you. Here anti-magic is useless.
You can theoretically increase your attack value high enough to bypass that with very specific items but any such setup leaves you a one hit wonder.

Jutsus are still physical attacks but not "physical element". Meaning they are ok against the first kind but useless against the second kind.

9 hours ago, LittleBigTrouble said:

Here is how i dealt so far with those enemys since i have a similiar team, starlancer/ninjamaster/lord
slime princes/giga crawlers really dont like mindup fire jutsu attacks (flamecoins from zombies,if you fight at night, are also really good against the early slimes)
against carmillas i used durans in your case carlies heal light on them and for the wolfs i recommend a poison weapon at least on 1 character at all times
you have holy magic on carlie for gremlins and you can poison them
just run from boulders

These are good hints. Poison could be dangerous against the Wolves, as it will make them more eager to use Suzaku Sky Dance or Seiryu Death Fist, but you can use petrify against them. Stone Cloud should kill them, or if you can save up for one petrify-inflicting weapon from Wendel/Pedan, that would definitely be helpful. Boulders can be poisoned or petrified.

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

There are two basic types of physical "immunity".
One that has an immunity to physical (meaning half taken damage early game and quartered for high tier enemies) like a fire elemental is immune to fire - those can be removed with anti-magic and bypassed with weapons like Acala, Pain Tooth and Satan Flail.
The other, rarer kind (afaik only one very late boss) has maxed out physical defense, the same stat armors give you. Here anti-magic is useless.
You can theoretically increase your attack value high enough to bypass that with very specific items but any such setup leaves you a one hit wonder.

Jutsus are still physical attacks but not "physical element". Meaning they are ok against the first kind but useless against the second kind.

I hope this boss isn't a certain colored Rabite who you should never hit with spells as he always counters them.
I can't test in my current game since I don't have Sabers, but if an enemy is immune to physical attacks (the first type) and you use Sabers that hit the enemy's weakness, how well will the Sabered physical attacks damage the enemy?

14 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

These are good hints. Poison could be dangerous against the Wolves, as it will make them more eager to use Suzaku Sky Dance or Seiryu Death Fist, but you can use petrify against them.

No, no, no! Poison is the right answer! ESPECIALLY against their boss!

14 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

I hope this boss isn't a certain colored Rabite who you should never hit with spells as he always counters them.

a: no
b: that is not how counters work anymore in this hack

14 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

I can't test in my current game since I don't have Sabers, but if an enemy is immune to physical attacks (the first type) and you use Sabers that hit the enemy's weakness, how well will the Sabered physical attacks damage the enemy?

with saber your regular attack will be physical element AND the saber's element, multiplicatively.
So you'll deal 1.5 times 0 damage.

13 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

No, no, no! Poison is the right answer! ESPECIALLY against their boss!

Was this sarcasm or seriously speaking?  Whenever I poisoned the Bloody Wolves in the Moonreading Tower with poison weapons, it felt like they went on a happy spree of Suzaku Sky Dance.

EDIT:

Quote

The other, rarer kind (afaik only one very late boss) has maxed out physical defense, the same stat armors give you. Here anti-magic is useless.

I think I've found two such bosses:

On 04/10/2017 at 0:06 AM, Serafie1999AD said:

Nesouk, I see you chose Valkyrie, Ninja and Priestess as your 2nd classes. A combination of Light Lise, Dark Hawk and Light Carlie is pretty solid in both the vanilla game and this hack. You'll have all stat-ups, all stat-downs, healing and sabers. Your team is physically somewhat fragile, as Lise is your only heavy-hitter and tank, and your team consists of 3 support-oriented characters rather than direct damage dealers. You should be fine most of the time, but these are the biggest threats I see for your team:

1) You won't have much elemental magic to strike against enemy weaknesses, although a combination of Mind Up + Fire Jutsu (if applicable) + Saber that exploits enemy weakness + Jutsu of that same element can somewhat make up for it.

2) You won't have Anti-Magic for your team. For bosses, you can probably farm or buy Specter's Eyes (just remember, they cost 3000+ a piece), but in regular fights, the lack of Anti-Magic may be very problematic. If an enemy absorbs some element or is immune to it, that means Hawk's Jutsus won't work against them, so you'll be unable to apply those debuffs. Especially if an enemy is immune to physical attacks, there's not much you can do against them without Anti-Magic, except spam offensive spells, which aren't exactly your strong point (see Note 1) above). Enemies like Giga Crawlers, Slime Princes, Carmillas, Blood Wolves, Wolf Devils, Gremlins and Boulders will be very tough enemies for you, since you have no good ways of taking them down. Status ailments are probably your best choice for defeating them.

Thanks for the tips I take note

Quote

Jutsus are still physical attacks but not "physical element". Meaning they are ok against the first kind but useless against the second kind.

So Jutsus are neutral ? Meaning I can use for instance a Fire Jutsu on an ennemy that absorbs Fire ?

12 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

Was this sarcasm or seriously speaking?  Whenever I poisoned the Bloody Wolves in the Moonreading Tower with poison weapons, it felt like they went on a happy spree of Suzaku Sky Dance.

Yes.

12 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

I think I've found two such bosses:

weird, I could have sworn the former had the other kind

8 hours ago, Nesouk said:

So Jutsus are neutral ? Meaning I can use for instance a Fire Jutsu on an ennemy that absorbs Fire ?

No, they are fire elemental and hit against physical defense.
You can use them against fire absorbing enemies after you use anti-magc on them. Only then will the debuff work.

OK I am at a boss named Genova and in all seriously I don't see how I am suppose to beat this guy, his minions seems to take Random form which makes the fight basically random dependly of which form they take, he use so many that I'm sometime completly unable to open the menu, the room is so small that casting spell is almost a guaranteed to get your character killed, and of course he has AoE version of Protect Down, Attack Up and Mind Down, I check on internet and it doesn't seems I can exploit his weakness I saw that Moon Coin can reduce his Max HP but that doesn't really help me. 

ah Genova ^^ since he summons swarms of minions praetarius didnt give him much health (i would assume) if you are controlling hawk use his backslash/lvl 1 tech instead of silhoutte slice, if not change his behaviour in the menue before hand.
he took me a couple tries too but at somepoint he died to multitarget damage from hawk and lises lvl 2 tech and i didnt even focus on him
dont be shy to spamm item seeds, carlie is weak to earth so rocklide will do a lot of damage, use dreamsee herbs till you are not on a fire (meltwave) or earth day (spikes earthslide)

Yeah, in general watch what "day" it is in the menu; if it matches to the element the boss uses change it ASAP because it boosts all damage of that kind.
Stay at an INN, use dreamsee herbs or just run another round to the dungeon.

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

 I check on internet and it doesn't seems I can exploit his weakness I saw that Moon Coin can reduce his Max HP but that doesn't really help me.

That won't help much; I changed AI behaviour, stats AND weaknesses.
Btw. the stove is weak to ice and earth, most classes can abuse the later weakness earlier so I gave him both.

If you don't have diamond saber, buy the respective claw in the black market in byzel for your main attacker.

Also, be happy: in the original you fight a second much tougher boss right after with no option to leave inbetween.

27 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

If you don't have diamond saber, buy the respective claw in the black market in byzel for your main attacker.

You can't backtrack to Byzel if you've already started the battle of Rolante.

I've got a question for those who play on the hardest difficulty: how hard is the money management there? If you need to spend all your money on restocking healing items all the time, will you ever be able to afford any of the more costly weapons or armor? Even on lower difficulties, I just skip the last sets of armor, as paying over 30k for such a highly specialized armor just doesn't feel worth it.

i play on highest difficulty but im only lvl 55 atm , preparing for my second of the 8 GBs.
Beastman collars on all characters and i usually go to golden road and aoe jutsu everything, i ignore  treasure chest during those sessions thou, the traps are not worth candys and item seeds

Hey there, nothing to contribute yet other than: I've been readin' the updates on this mod for a while now. I meant to get into it earlier, but I lost some of my incentive since I couldn't seem to register on the old forum. Anyway, neither here nor there. Thank you for all of your hard creativity, diligence, and implementation on this project, praetarius! I look forward to sinking my teeth into a fresh take on one of my favorite games from adolescence. 

5 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

Yeah, in general watch what "day" it is in the menu; if it matches to the element the boss uses change it ASAP because it boosts all damage of that kind.
Stay at an INN, use dreamsee herbs or just run another round to the dungeon.

 

That won't help much; I changed AI behaviour, stats AND weaknesses.
Btw. the stove is weak to ice and earth, most classes can abuse the later weakness earlier so I gave him both.

If you don't have diamond saber, buy the respective claw in the black market in byzel for your main attacker.

Also, be happy: in the original you fight a second much tougher boss right after with no option to leave inbetween.

Well I have Diamond Saber but honnestly Diamond Saber + Thunder Jutsu to decrease Genova's Defense aren't that great, but my real problem with Genova is more surviving him I am on Gnome Day, with his minion does damage, he freeze the action with his spells many time I can't open the menu to heal or cast spell, in the end he just kill me on time or because I just couldn't open the fucking menu to cast the items.

I think I will just reload a previous save before Rolante's Fight see if I can get better equipment, grind and refill my healing items cause right now I clearly have no way to beat him.

Oh yeah, the good old Genova fight, where the clunky menu system is your worst enemy. I remember being salty about the battle in the ID forums, since it's pretty much a matter of luck whether the game registers you mashing the menu button. I wouldn't remove buff/debuff messages completely, as otherwise you have no way of knowing if some spell has (de)buffed you, but I'd like it if the game kept a list of status messages it is going to show you, and if there are over 3 messages in queue, it would simply show the first 3 messages and skip the rest. Alternatively, allow menu accessing during the display of status messages.

I fought FMH in the Dark Castle. What a terrible lag! It didn't help that I had to beat him twice, since I was accidentally holding the menu button during the moment when he died, which caused his death animation to skip, and as a result, I was stuck in the room, with no way to leave or even accesss the menu.

Genova

OK I don"t understand how but I retry him and beat him pretty easily I guess it's random sometime with the same strat it just doesn't work at all but this attempts did go pretty well.

And after that we have yet an other boss YEAH screw this I go back all the way to Palo to refill my inventory and sleep at the inn to remove the death penalty and I will try the next boss next time.

7 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

I fought FMH in the Dark Castle. What a terrible lag! It didn't help that I had to beat him twice, since I was accidentally holding the menu button during the moment when he died, which caused his death animation to skip, and as a result, I was stuck in the room, with no way to leave or even accesss the menu.

That's interesting. I thought the animation was just for show
Do you happen to have a in-game save still before the boss?

Just beat Bill and Ben they weren't as annoying as Genova but this was still an intense fight.

Ben and Bill

I beat

That was an intimidating fight, especially whenever he started to cast some spells. Nice to see the enemies casting some spells which I don't think anyone else has cast before, such as

There's supposedly a boss that was planned and either not finished or just dummied out (I found nothing to summon him at least) - either way his spells are there.
And I certainly didn't let those and a dummy spell or two go to waste.
E.g. "100 tentacles" (yes it is called that) went to a certain clown.

I think the only spell I haven't used anywhere is Ancient 3.
As if doomsday 1.0 and 2.0 weren't enough...

What's the difference between Ancient, Ancient 2 and Ancient 3? Do they have different animations, or are they just the same spell with a different base power?

I finally defeated

That battle felt like it took forever, probably about 40 minutes. It was mostly a battle of Archmage spamming elemental spells, Rogue spamming Silver Dart and Vanadis healing and reapplying buffs, and hoping he would die before I run out of healing items. He didn't seem to take much damage from physical attacks, even after Anti-Magic, Power Up and Cutter Missile. BTW I noticed that when he hit a character with Demon's Scream (reduces HP to 1 and MP to 0), the character started to "bleed out" HP, and if he died, Angel's Grail revived him with only 1 HP. Is there a way to dispel this "bleeding" effect?

21 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

What's the difference between Ancient, Ancient 2 and Ancient 3? Do they have different animations, or are they just the same spell with a different base power?

2 and 3 were just dummies, they only had a name and spell data that amounted to "do nothing".
So I took 2 and gave it the Ancient animation (since I had nothing better) and stats I thought appropriate for that boss.

26 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

He didn't seem to take much damage from physical attacks, even after Anti-Magic, Power Up and Cutter Missile.

I think I made it so one of the final bosses has 0 evade but (comparatively) high defense, one has lowish defense but high evade and the third is inbetween.
I guess this was the former.

I mean he is a few levels higher than the previous boss and his shifting weakness/resistance scheme makes it useless to use sabers, so maybe that's why it felt low?

23 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

BTW I noticed that when he hit a character with Demon's Scream (reduces HP to 1 and MP to 0), the character started to "bleed out" HP, and if he died, Angel's Grail revived him with only 1 HP. Is there a way to dispel this "bleeding" effect?

None, same as for his uber anti magic

Archdemon was supposedly the hard path in vanilla SD3 so I held almost nothing back on that final boss.

Also if nothing bugged up this time he should have given you a lot of time at the start of the fight.

Gorva

Well it's an A-RPG so of course there has to be at one point or another a boss that isn't really difficult just boring and annoying cause he keeps teleporting and go out of my reach for my physical fighter, so YEAH boring boss.
Also YEAH graphical glitch here Hawk is a Ninja but because of the Curse cutscene before he has his Thief's Color.

42 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

I mean he is a few levels higher than the previous boss and his shifting weakness/resistance scheme makes it useless to use sabers, so maybe that's why it felt low?

None of the characters (Vanadis, Rogue, Archmage) have Sabers anyway, which is what I would consider the party's biggest weakness. If I understood correctly,

Quote

None, same as for his uber anti magic

Does his Uber Anti-Magic only remove your buffs, or will it heal his debuffs too? I just assumed it dispels everything, so I went to reapply both buffs and debuffs.

Quote

Also if nothing bugged up this time he should have given you a lot of time at the start of the fight.

That's right, it took him like a minute or two to do anything, and for a while, I was wondering if the AI script was broken.

Just out of curiosity, have you beat all the bosses, including the final bosses, on the hardest difficulty, to make sure that they can be beaten?

2 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

Does his Uber Anti-Magic only remove your buffs, or will it heal his debuffs too? I just assumed it dispels everything, so I went to reapply both buffs and debuffs.

Only all your stuff.
Though he should have used a big buff afterwards on himself as well.

2 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

That's right, it took him like a minute or two to do anything, and for a while, I was wondering if the AI script was broken.

Well, there's a story to that. I know noone cares about it so I'll tell it anyway.
It is possible to defeat vanilla Archdemon completely, both "forms" (well, shared health pool, just a different sets of moves really), so fast he gets 0 attacks in, not even enough time to transform into the phase 2 sprite.

Also if it took 1-2 minutes on your site, the timing was indeed perfect

So my notes on how to make this boss harder were basically: "...does he even attack? maybe have him attack at all would be a start"

For extra hilarity DragonScholar's files on boss AI ALSO do not listen any AI for that boss.

2 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

Just out of curiosity, have you beat all the bosses, including the final bosses, on the hardest difficulty, to make sure that they can be beaten?

Does it count if I developed only on hard difficulty and had test teams that were more or less normal (or in some cases actually disadvantaged because of huge version difference between their creation and current state of art)?

3 hours ago, Nesouk said:

Well it's an A-RPG so of course there has to be at one point or another a boss that isn't really difficult just boring and annoying cause he keeps teleporting and go out of my reach for my physical fighter, so YEAH boring boss.
Also YEAH graphical glitch here Hawk is a Ninja but because of the Curse cutscene before he has his Thief's Color.

Could you please put videos in spoiler tags? I think that'd make it easier on navigation/load times.

I think the 2 spells where supposed to go to a planned boss on bucca island , a giant octo-monster , i read that it was planned but scrapped

I put the videos as links that should do.

3 hours ago, Nesouk said:

I put the videos as links that should do.

Thank you.

9 hours ago, LittleBigTrouble said:

I think the 2 spells where supposed to go to a planned boss on bucca island , a giant octo-monster , i read that it was planned but scrapped

Well, 3 spells - 100 Tentacles, Tidal Wave and Squid Ink.
And supposedly sprite exists in the game as well.
I'm happy we didn't get the boss there - just imagine doing Genova, Bill/Ben, Gorva, Bucca Island and only THEN finding out you don't have enough black market supplies or certain armor items or whatever.
If you want to get them you have to reload a pre-Genova save in vanilla and do it all over again.

Also story wise there weren't any unaffiliated bosses (either with the 3 factions or monster feeding on the mana stones or the like), so he'd probably take the spot of the water/ice boss and the manastone would have been somewhere around bucca? hmm... maybe that is why Fiegmund looks so fishy and less like an ice boss.

I got some questions that are probably more due to the fact that I am new to this game :

-Is there an efficient  way to make money cause at first I didn't have trouble with money however now the equipment start to get really expensive and ennemy really don't give much and selling item doesn't seem to give any better to plus I have to buy healing item cause honnestly healing item are for now the only viable way to heal in battle (Healing Light is one target only for now and the casttime make it not really usefull when ennemy can basically 2-3 shot any of your character with some of their attack).

-Also is there any ability that allow you to analyse ennemy in game something like the Libra spell in the FF series ?

4 hours ago, Nesouk said:

-Is there an efficient  way to make money cause at first I didn't have trouble with money however now the equipment start to get really expensive and ennemy really don't give much and selling item doesn't seem to give any better to plus I have to buy healing item cause honnestly healing item are for now the only viable way to heal in battle (Healing Light is one target only for now and the casttime make it not really usefull when ennemy can basically 2-3 shot any of your character with some of their attack).

I've never found a decent solution to this. However, note that new weapons and armor aren't automatically better than the previous ones. Keep the armor_elements_stats.xls file open while playing the game to know what the properties of each piece of equipment are, and plan which equipment you're really going to need. Remember, you won't be able to afford everything, so choose carefully. For example, in my last game, I wanted to make Lise (Vanadis) a level 2/3 tech user, Hawk (Rogue) a high-risk crit user and Angela (Archmage) a strong offensive mage. Therefore, I gave Lise equipment that will boost her tech gain and tech strength, I gave Hawk equipment that will increase the frequency and strength of his critical hits, as well as giving him a "thorn" armor (reflects much of the physical damage back at the enemies), and I gave Angela equipment that will boost her magic strength. After I had got all the equipment for these builds, I simply skipped most of the weapon and armor shops after that, unless I really needed something special for a boss fight.

Here's some tips LittleBigTrouble wrote before:

Quote

i play on highest difficulty but im only lvl 55 atm , preparing for my second of the 8 GBs.
Beastman collars on all characters and i usually go to golden road and aoe jutsu everything, i ignore  treasure chest during those sessions thou, the traps are not worth candys and item seeds

For your other question, there is nothing like the Libra spell in SD3. You'll just have to experiment, although some weaknesses are obvious. You can also check the monster_bosses.xls file for the weaknesses and status vulnerabilities of normal monsters. As for bosses, I tend to try different things to see what works, and write notes about their weaknesses, strategies that worked etc.

This was a conscious design desicion.
You're not supposed to buy every weapon/armor - and neither would you have the inventory space for it, unless you like fighting with the storage system which is horrible.

Theoretically there IS a libra like effect - but every translation patch I've tried breaks it.
And on J it is almost too fast to read it anyway, not that it was flawless there to begin with.

So in other word I'm screwed should I have know this right from the beginning I would have put more thoughts into it OH well I guess I just have to do what I can with what I have for now.

This is exactly why I posted this before:
 

Quote

As a general tip, reading the documentation files is highly recommended for this hack.

Another piece of advice I could give, the weapons and armor in the shops are never strictly better than the previous ones. Each of them have their own specific properties. Unfortunately, there is no way to add descriptions about them into the game, especially considering some people play SD3 in Japanese, some in English. That's why, it is recommended to keep the armor_elements_stats.xls file open while playing the game, and take a look at the file when you're making decisions on what to buy or equip for your characters.

EDIT: Looks like it's also said in Praetarius' original post, as the 1st point: "Equipment offers various bonuses instead of a simple attack and defense progression"

Fortunately, there are no bosses in the double dungeon after Gorva, so if you can't deal with the fights in Bucca and Seashore Cave, you can just run from all the fights until you get out of there. After that, you'll have a chance to grind for money to buy some of the newer equipment. I recommend getting at least a Whitelight Ring for Lise and Carlie, as it upgrades most of their spells to multi-target.

And I have follow this tip everytime I reach a new town before buying I was always watching the Armor-Stat and take what was interesting me I just didn't think money would be that much of an issue, and that the prices of equipment would increase so fast that plus the fact that I am new to this game so I surely make mistakes.
That's not the end of the world tough I will manage somehow, I already pass Bucca and Seashore Cave the fights were manageable (except these freaking birds that keep petrify my party member and didn't want to die damn they were annoying) tough I had to use some Demon Statu cause the Death Penalty (honnestly in Hard any member that die at least 2-3 times became useless cause they get killed extremely fast (if not one-shot)) is really annoying here since there is no inn (or at least I didn't found it).

Are the armor and read me documents available somewhere on this site?

In the same archive as the patch.

I reloaded my last save with Vanadis, Rogue and Archmage, and I practiced playing on the Tough difficulty. I was able to beat

and now I'm thinking of fighting them on Hard difficulty. Before I fight the final boss again, though, I have a few questions about him, and the game mechanics:
1) Do Red Moon Horns do anything against him?
2) Are there any weapons that work well against him? If a weapon uses a different stat for attack, will it still hit against his huge physical defence stat? Or if a weapon uses a different stat for attack, is the same stat also used for tech damage (instead of STR)?
3) Are his weaknesses really weaknesses (150% damage), or are they just neutral elements (100%), while the other elements are either halved (50%) or absorbed? I ask this because I'm wondering whether Archmage's Spirit Cane can have spells do 200% damage against him or not.
4) Does the "remove weaknesses" armor remove ALL elemental weaknesses from the character, not just one of them? If it removes all weaknesses, does that mean the armor also protects you from the

EDIT: I noticed that you can skip

death animation, which results in the game becoming stuck forever (I guess you can consider it skipping the ending too :D). This also happened with FMH (2nd fight) before. Is it possible that you tweaked the spell skipping patch so that boss death animations can't be skipped, since skipping them seems to freeze the game on several occasions?

1) they work on everything that has enough levels left to drain

2) those weapons only change your atk stat but defense is the same as for regular weapons

3) former boss is neutral with resists, later boss has proper weaknesses

4) yes, all

5) yeah, should probably do that - though it was funny to skip a minute worth of animations in charlie's intro alone

Hey, wasn't there something about cutting buff/debuff text in order to reduce lag? Or did I dream that?

Also there's something I've always wondered. Sometimes when a character gets a debuff, some colored lines will appear around it. What's that mean?

Was suggested but didn't work out.

The lines are for speed up/down buffs, I think.
Just yet another way to icnrease lag in this game.

Yeah, but they don't always show up. Was wondering why.

But would removing the text boxes reduce lag?

When I tried it made no difference whether the text boxes were shown or not. Menu was unreachable for equal lengths.

Well, I did it.

as the saying goes:
"pic or it didn't happen, pic and it was photoshopped" - congratz

Thank you Praetarius5018 for the mod AND the terrific documentation. My question for you is:

Does Mind Up increase atk power for

If so I want to try them on a Duran and Hawk light path build.

No, they don't actually change the stat, just the the relevant numerical output. For Mind Up, that's magic damage taken, dealt, and healed. Even if your weapon uses Int, it's still increased by Power Up.

Well personnaly I'm stuck reaching the Sub-Zero Field and I just can't make any progress cause :

-Ennemy one or two shot my characters, I have to heal any damage because sometime bullshit happen and for some reason character get hit multiple time light speed (so fast in fact that sometime the game take account the damage while I am in the menu -_-), and Protect Up doesn't really help
-Heal Light sucks right now compare to healing item due to the castime Carlie can get killed while casting it, and by the time she cast it who know if my other character would still be alive (cause Evasion is just not reliable and not to mention ennemy spells that are just not avoidable (as well as ennemies sometime cast spells 2 time in a row without me being able to do anything)) so YEAH Healing Items are definitly the key to survive but....
-I'm almost running out of them, and have no more money, and ennemies gives almost no money at all, and selling stuff give you nothing

So yeah I think I'm screwed and wonder if I should just restart a new game, right now the only thing I can really do is grinding, definitly not sure that would help tough.

On 12.10.2017 at 9:35 PM, Nesouk said:

Items are definitly the key to survive but....

-I'm almost running out of them, and have no more money, and ennemies gives almost no money at all, and selling stuff give you nothing

So yeah I think I'm screwed and wonder if I should just restart a new game, right now the only thing I can really do is grinding, definitly not sure that would help tough.

This is what I was the most worried about trying a game on Hard, getting an unwinnable "soft game over" by running out of healing items and money to buy healing items. Try farming for gold in the previous areas, such as Maia's Golden Road and Palo's Path to Heaven. Have you tried the farming method with 6 Beastman Collars that was proposed before? If I remember correctly, the Desert of the Scorching Heat had easier fights than the Sub-Zero Snowfields, so you may want to level up there. You should be around level 32-35 for the Snowfields. If everything else fails, try reducing the game's difficulty level until you're able to advance. I'd say it's still a better choice than giving up and restarting, since this is your first playthrough and you're still not far enough to have learned all the battle strategies that this hack requires.

Praetarius: thanks for the battle tips!

not even 2 weeks without a new patch despite me being "done",

v1.035

• excluded a few cinematic and boss death animations from being skippable via optional patch
• fixed light-Angela having wrong weakness to fire instead of ice
• fixed bug that made spell power armor not turn spells non elemental
• replaced "magic up" with "increases generic magic and damage item power" in documentation for greater clarity

Quote

Enjoying this mod on "normal" mode. Using Lise, Duran, Hawk and going Fenrir Knight, Paladin/Lord, Rogue. Currently at Bucca Bucca.

 

On 14/10/2017 at 2:33 AM, Serafie1999AD said:

This is what I was the most worried about trying a game on Hard, getting an unwinnable "soft game over" by running out of healing items and money to buy healing items. Try farming for gold in the previous areas, such as Maia's Golden Road and Palo's Path to Heaven. Have you tried the farming method with 6 Beastman Collars that was proposed before? If I remember correctly, the Desert of the Scorching Heat had easier fights than the Sub-Zero Snowfields, so you may want to level up there. You should be around level 32-35 for the Snowfields. If everything else fails, try reducing the game's difficulty level until you're able to advance. I'd say it's still a better choice than giving up and restarting, since this is your first playthrough and you're still not far enough to have learned all the battle strategies that this hack requires.

Well I tried and currently grinding money cause yeah Golden Road from Maïa to Byzel gives around 2000 Luc with 6 Beastman's Collar so that works and I sometimes fight Ogre Box they scales with your Level and so gives 2100-2200 EXP when I defeat one so why not currently LV34 with everyone gonne farm some more and then give another shot to sub-zero fields.

You should maybe farm the lone enemy south of the snow town to get enough ??? seeds for the class change.

7 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

You should maybe farm the lone enemy south of the snow town to get enough ??? seeds for the class change.

I did this on "normal" just to get up to where I could deal with the rest of sub zero fields. Race to the Golden  Goddess fighting only the forced encounters. Just make sure you don't get sniped running through the Sub-Zero boards.

I meant the first screen south of that town that has an enemy; that way you only have to fight one enemy per chest (actual rate depending on difficulty) instead of 3-6 enemies for one chest.

Also, are those quotes supposed to be empty or does something not load on my side?

I couldn't remove the spoiler fields on my phone. I was also referring to the lone enemy. I used him to gain experience and $ and made a beeline to the next statue. I didn't check the monster drop table to see if they drop ???. If it does, I'll revisit. With death penalty (which I absolutely love as a mechanic), I don't casually level up on my way to a boss in case I lose Hawk a couple times and have to run back to an inn.

You could use one of the demon statues that some bosses add to your item storage to remove the penalty.

Speaking of which, Nesouk, if you still have those, you can sell them for 2k each.

8 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

You could use one of the demon statues that some bosses add to your item storage to remove the penalty.

Speaking of which, Nesouk, if you still have those, you can sell them for 2k each.

I have 2 of these left but considering their rarety, the fact I play on Hard and on Hard sometimes the random ennemy pull some bullshit that may kill one of your character in a mere second (plus the fact that the AI isn't really good at survive especially Hawk if I don't directly control him he dies way to often) and the death penalty is really bad for boss fight so I'd rather keep these Demon Statue just in case.

I can't sell the Demon Statues fast enough. 2000 luc is  a lot of dough!

 This is a great re-imagining of the original game. Sometimes it reminds me a bit of Dark Souls. I'm at the point where I'm just stacking TP gain and and Tech damage. The early-game chest pieces got me all the way to the HP boost/Thorn tier armors. I was surprised at how effective the thorn armor was. I use save states to try all of the things and then settle on 1 certain piece per character per slot (until Luc becomes more disposable) . I haven't intentionally utilized the L1 counter tech strat much because I peg my tech bar so fast. I've read up on the aggro system and I'm wondering if it will be something I will need to implement later, or if blowing up bosses with debuffs, traps and L2/3 techs  will continue to be a relevant strat. Resetting boss aggro with counters seems like a great mechanic. I'm sure I'll need to be more creative once I attempt the harder difficulties. Currently at Mintos.

PSA: FUCK DOLAN 

I dunno why we're having so much trouble with this dude. Probably I am drinking too much when I play this game. I think we're on to the 'strategy' but it just seems to take forever to whittle him down. One mistake and we're done, LOL. Again, this is awesome.

Has us thinking of wimping out of the moonreading tower for now, but then we realized we only have lightgazer left after that so it's kinda like ehhhhh. Level 69 and having trouble with the regular enemies too, so maybe we're underleveled. Gonna keep working it.

PS, cheers for hitting the v1.0 milestone. Will enjoy a Duran run... one of these days

If you want some Dolan cheese

How do Elements on weapons work with different sources?

Afair you can only have one saber effect on a character active and new ones override older ones.

How does this work with the accessoires that grant saber-like effects, e.g. Gyralhorn or Steel Gauntlet?

Like what happens if I equip a Steel Gauntlet in one slot and a Snow Crystal in the other one?

Do they stack and my Attack Element is now Fire/Ice, or does one supercede the other?

If they stack, would a saber spell now override my Fire/Ice element, or add another one to the list?

priority order is simply:
saber > top accessoire slot > bottom accessoire slot

sabers override each other, only the newest stays

We had a bit of a permanent snowman problem in the Labyrinth of Ice Walls. Duran got Snowmanned by something, Frost Dragon I think, and we killed the rest of the enemies on the screen with him basically acting as a barrier between Hawk and Carlie and the other enemies. He did not de-snowman. We went into the next room, with a Grell Mage. He did not de-snowman. We tried Puipui Grass, Tinkle Rain, Stardust Herb (at this point, why not), and even a Magical Rope. The snowman didn't clear until we got on Flammie.

We're running the Normal difficulty patch and no optional patches other than that.

Tried, can't reproduce.
Snowman ends immediatly on victory here no matter what I do.

I also had problems with the permanent Snowman bug when I played the Labyrinth of the Ice Walls over a month ago:
 

Quote

I've now had to restart the Labyrinth of the Ice Walls 4 times in a row. Once because of dying just a couple of screens before the save point, and 3 times I've had to restart because of an incurable Snowman bug. Occasionally if a character is turned into a Snowman at the end of a battle, the status becomes unhealable. Tinkle Rain won't heal it, neither will moving to another screen, or even touching a Gold Statue.

If you want to reproduce the bug, try winning a battle at the moment when an enemy is using an ice breath animation (it's not a spell since it doesn't pause the game) to inflict Snowman status on your characters.

I've experienced similar results with the petrify status. Maybe it has to do with status effects in general. I have also experienced some graphical glitching in path to the heavens and the area that you find salamando. Not quite sure what is triggering it but it seems to be certain tech/magic animations. Once the glitching is triggered, it only resets if I save at a Goddess and reset or return to a previous save. Hope that you find this somewhat productive, Praetarius.

Sorry, I'm not interested in hunting down vanilla bugs.

That graphic glitch is already known, it is caused by "something" that occurs over long playtime (save and load via savestates does not help in case you use that), especially spell animations - which will happen more often compared to vanilla.
Ingame reload is the only cure for that.
Or rather call yourself happy; that same thing can cause lockups and worse stuff.

I wouldn't be surprised if the snowman thing is related to that as well.

So should I not use states at all? In certain areas even if I save at a goddess and then restart, I still encounter the graphic glitch. I only use save states to try multiple shop items that I cant afford all at once and also before bosses. 

Think of savestates like a timemachine; everything that happened between save and a later load did not happen.
That bug I mean occurs after several hours in the same play session. In one of my cases it took 8-10 hours before it became easily visible.

If you save ingame and then load ingame you start a new session.

If you make a savestate, switch your emulator off, return later and reload your savestate to continue where you left off then you continue your old session.

What can happen?
more frequent slow downs
palette mishaps
monster AI disappearing (they become dummies, but also immortal sometimes)
random game reset
left over sprites from stuff that is long dead; like half od Dolan's arm sticking around
spell animations running into an infinite loop
...this

I recall reading an article once about a bug with spell animations with similar results (real hardware crashing) being a supposed reason why we never got an english version.

v1.042

• high AGL reduces weapon cooldown
• added effect to headgear tier helms to reduce weapon cooldown
• added effect to hero's crown tier helms to resist death effects
• added cap of 320 damage (400 with day bonus) for fraction damage spells like Half Vanish, Slime Prince special, etc.
• change a few regular enemies to resist snowman status effect
• fixed defense stats on Wind Demon Mail and Silverwolf Pelt
• corrected displayed name for Dark Lich's Anti Magic

Is the AGL effect on weapon swing relative to LV or an absolute value?

AGL from 19 to 30 reduce weapon delay by 1-12  so 1 point per point over 18
and its halved for hawk and kevin for obvious reasons

Well, what he said, and the changed helms give -10 delay for single hitters, -5 for double hitters.

Anti magic can still be bought from the markets right?

yes. from the black market, 3k each - and considering how important that is I won't remove it from there

Thanks for that. The ingame description threw me off a bit - I guess  i was just expecting "casts anti-magic".

Thinking of giving this mod a shot. But before that tho, this is the SD3 JP with english patches right? So I should patch a clean ROM first then add the English patch, etc., etc.?

If you want to use one, a translation patch must be patched before this mod.
Most use an english one, I develop on JP (not that I understand anything there) - no problems there for the most part.
Then make sure your rom is unheadered (e.g. via SNESUtils) and then apply this mod.
Next you can add one of the difficulty modifiers from the sub folder, the default patch is set to hard.
Afterwards there are some minor bonus patches included in the misc_patches folder you can apply as well if you want, though there's no "undo" option for those, so keep a backup in case you find you dislike those extras.

How would I know if it is unheadered? What's the file size if it is?

headered 4097 kb
unheadered 4096 kb

OK cool, just patched the game, now what are the misc patches for? Some are obvious but two of them not so much.

Edit: Oh never mind found it in the readme. What does PIE mean?

PIE = piety, most games would call it spirit instead

Oh, so that's it...and btw happy fun times is kinda vague? Is it for difficulty or some other thing?

There's a random chance that regular enemies get replaced on spawning.
E.g. if I've placed a Molebear in a spot the game may randomly decide to give you a Poron or Myconoid instead.

That patch adds some bosses to the potential replacements, only the small ones though; huge boss sprites kill the game obviously.
They ARE scaled to the current area's level though.

I have been playing a version of the game that does not include your patches with some friends. We just beat the first god beast.  And now I discovered your amazing patches.

But I don't we dont want to replay the whole game from the start. My idea is to solo rush through to the first god beast with the wuss difficulty patch and then switch to a more demanding difficulty patch to continue with my friends.

Am I likely to encounter any problems with the safe files or other issues if I switch the difficulty mid playthrough?

On 12/1/2017 at 6:10 PM, praetarius5018 said:

There's a random chance that regular enemies get replaced on spawning.
E.g. if I've placed a Molebear in a spot the game may randomly decide to give you a Poron or Myconoid instead.

That patch adds some bosses to the potential replacements, only the small ones though; huge boss sprites kill the game obviously.
They ARE scaled to the current area's level though.

Ahh I see. Should have some text in the readme for that tho, the current one just doesn't describe the patch in detail.

1 hour ago, pfanne said:

I have been playing a version of the game that does not include your patches with some friends. We just beat the first god beast.  And now I discovered your amazing patches.

But I don't we dont want to replay the whole game from the start. My idea is to solo rush through to the first god beast with the wuss difficulty patch and then switch to a more demanding difficulty patch to continue with my friends.

Am I likely to encounter any problems with the safe files or other issues if I switch the difficulty mid playthrough?

No, the difficulties are just an additional modifier applied after everything. You can switch between them at your leisure.

3 hours ago, pfanne said:

Am I likely to encounter any problems with the safe files or other issues if I switch the difficulty mid playthrough?

That is no problem, but you may have problems as a player since the patch has to change a few controls and expands what you can do in battle, e.g. run.
When you start in the middle you basically skip all the "tutorial" time (this game has no explicit tutorial) you would have to get used to those changes.

Xan Bie's heat beam and Landumber's crashball deals 999 damage. Is that supposed to happen?

Depends, what's your level compared to theirs (random mob of same area +2)?

I'm level 84, mobs are level 70 (5 god beasts down). Meaning Xan Bie and Landumber are level 72?

Ok, then its normal - those two skills deal more damage for every level you are above the "caster".

Alright thanks. Are there any other bosses that do similar attacks?

All chest traps and Dragon Emperor - though the later doesn't matter unless you go above 99 which is not possible without cheating.

First thing, I love all the bug fixes. I've played SD3 so many times, and I was amazed to see critical hits the first time. I have a couple gripes with this patch though, but my biggest one is Carlie.  I picked her for this play through with the sole job as a healer/support and intended to put her on the path to become a bishop. I feel the patch made her useless. She lost her heal light for her base, and with holy ball as a replacement, she's pretty much an offense spell caster that I can only use for bosses.  When I finally got heal light on the light path, I found out it costs 9MP! At lvl 20, she has only 12MP available. After casting it once, her support role is null, and I have to use a walnut after each cast to keep her relevant. Keep in mind I've been increasing intelligent and spirit in an attempt to buff up her support role. I'm playing this with easy difficulty, as I just want a casual vanilla play.  I understand that her base does not have heal light so her dark class does not have it, but her role in the game is mainly a support character. If someone wants an offensive spell caster, that's what Angela is for.

You get full MP on victory, and regenerating MP during battle - trust me, you can use it a lot more than it seems to.

And pre class change noone is not really supposed to have much in the way of spell casting. You're mainly supposed to "learn" regular combat.

As for who is and isn't a support class - that depends on you; basically everyone learns spells that fit that criteria.

27 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

You get full MP on victory, and regenerating MP during battle - trust me, you can use it a lot more than it seems to.

You are correct. For battling through the dungeons, this works out great. Boss fights is what makes it particularly frustrating. Maybe I'm doing it the wrong way. Thank goodness for the 20 per item cap increase. Without that, I would've gotten steam rolled by the bosses, due to the expensive heal light.

Has anyone found use for Light Carlie (Bishop/Sage) or Grand Divina yet? I'd like to hear party combinations where those 3 classes work effectively with the other characters.

On 12/19/2017 at 10:59 AM, mugenbb6 said:

You are correct. For battling through the dungeons, this works out great. Boss fights is what makes it particularly frustrating. Maybe I'm doing it the wrong way. Thank goodness for the 20 per item cap increase. Without that, I would've gotten steam rolled by the bosses, due to the expensive heal light.

So I've been doing it wrong. Didn't realize mp regenerates, but with the low mp cap and slow mp regen, that means I'm throttled.

On 12/15/2017 at 5:19 AM, Awkward said:

Xan Bie's heat beam and Landumber's crashball deals 999 damage. Is that supposed to happen?

I have the same problem. I also get into an endless gigaburn loop.

2 hours ago, mugenbb6 said:

So I've been doing it wrong. Didn't realize mp regenerates, but with the low mp cap and slow mp regen, that means I'm throttled.

There's leaf saber - which recovers 1+ MP per hit - , a weapon has that as innate effect or an accessoire for the same.
Or an accessoire that allows to pay in HP instead.

2 hours ago, mugenbb6 said:

I also get into an endless gigaburn loop.

Care to elaborate?
If it is an animation that doesn't end, there's an unfixable bug with the game if it has been relatively long since you re-loaded your save file (savestates do NOT count!!!!) which has all kinds of weird effects....
I repeat this line like every page in this thread....

36 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

Care to elaborate?
If it is an animation that doesn't end, there's an unfixable bug with the game if it has been relatively long since you re-loaded your save file (savestates do NOT count!!!!) which has all kinds of weird effects....
I repeat this line like every page in this thread....

It's not an animation that doesn't end. It constantly recasts with a second between each, just enough time to use an item. I don't use savestates. It could be that unfixable bug as I've been playing for a couple hours straight. I restarted the game via retroarch, and it didn't happen again. Really wierd.

BTW, are the god beasts intentionally made uber difficult compared to vanilla? I'm just playing on easy, and feel they're insanely op. Maybe I should go down to wuss.

Depends what kind of trouble they give specifically.
Each godbeast is numerically weaker than most regular bosses of their level would be.
Though each has a trick (or fifty) to them that more than makes up for that.

If Duran equips two shields... does he get twice as much hate? Or is the extra threat only counted once?

Awesome progress by the way, loving the hack and all the options you give the players.

Is counted only once.

How necessary is Anti-Magic in the latest version? In some of the earlier versions (around v0.5), it was practically compulsory, as Specter's Eyes cost way too much in the Black Market, some enemies were immune to physical attacks, and some bosses were just almost impossible to damage without Anti-Magic

In the latest versions, though, there are weapons that bypass the physical immunity, the hate mechanics work in a different manner, and the boss designs have been completely changed. Praetarius, would you have a list of bosses where Anti-Magic is needed, so I can consider if it's worth it having a party without Anti-Magic, the answer depending on how many Specter's Eyes I need to buy/farm?

More or less the same as before.
Only major change that you should be able to get some from enemies' rare drops (e.g. from Boulder, Evil Shaman).
On most physical resistant regular enemies you should be able to just ignore them, for everything else there's damage spells.

just for damage:

other effects:

often mistaken for physical immune but aren't:

On 12/26/2017 at 4:05 AM, Serafie1999AD said:

Has anyone found use for Light Carlie (Bishop/Sage) or Grand Divina yet? I'd like to hear party combinations where those 3 classes work effectively with the other characters.

   omg

I had a quick look through the discussion and i saw something about counters being changed.    what is that?   we have a new counterattack mechanic now?

There are even two "counter" mechanics.

1) The retaliation spell enemies/bosses had; from vanilla: usually when you hit an enemy's weakness via spell or any Lv2/3 tech at all they'd "counter" with a strong attack of their own.
This has been changed to an incremental built up (let's call it aggro) instead of a 1:1 trade but now also includes normal hits and Lv1 techs; "weaker" types (normal hit, lv1 tech) take longer until they trigger a reaction than stronger types (lv2/3 tech, spells).

2) Completely new, a counter attack by the player;
if you hit an enemy with a lv1 tech during their attack animation or shortly after (I think up to 3 secs after), you deal increased damage (how much more depends largely on weapon and to a minor degree on enemy type) and reset the aggro of enemy's counter.
Certain weapons or accessoires give additional benefits to this, like permanently reducing defense (stackable even) or healing the party.

21 hours ago, Caliber70 said:

   omg

Death Hand, Duelist and Bishop? It sounds like there's quite a lot of redundancy with the Sabers. I'd probably have used Dervish instead, to get Protect Down and Speed Down. Protect Up and Magic Shield as your only buffs, too. Tell me, on which difficulty did you play, and how was it to play with such limited buffs/debuffs, and next to no elemental spells?

6 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

2) Completely new, a counter attack by the player;

if you hit an enemy with a lv1 tech during their attack animation or shortly after (I think up to 3 secs after), you deal increased damage (how much more depends largely on weapon and to a minor degree on enemy type) and reset the aggro of enemy's counter.
Certain weapons or accessoires give additional benefits to this, like permanently reducing defense (stackable even) or healing the party.

I have two questions about this counter mechanic:
1) can you counter enemy spells and techs too, not just physical attacks?
2) can you counter non-sprite bosses too (e.g. Full Metal Hagger, GBs, final bosses)?

it was normal.   Carly heals, and both fighters crush everything with power and lvl 3 techs.  I have overwritten that save so i cannot test that team on a higher difficulty setting now but i might do that again at a later time.  nonetheless fun to crush everything on the screen with lvl 3 tech spam.

7 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

I have two questions about this counter mechanic:

1) can you counter enemy spells and techs too, not just physical attacks?
2) can you counter non-sprite bosses too (e.g. Full Metal Hagger, GBs, final bosses)?

yes to both

there are a few problems with this game, and i am going to compare it to pokemon because you added types into this game like pokemon.  both these can be fixed relatively easily and are related.  these problems are less noticeable on normal, what I have been playing 1 year ago, and real apparent on hard what I am playing now.

first is the gameplay process.  you go into battle, you buff or you debuff, or both.  you attack according to the strength and weakness chart, finish and heal up.  sounds exactly like pokemon?  ye.  that is not a exactly a big problem for pokemon, mainly because they have in some ways fixed it, so that battling it just simply flows along.   in SD3 that combat is not currently designed like that, we have to consult a document file outside the game to be performing at our best, and this switching between the game screen to the document screen outside becomes a chore, it slows down the flow of combat and it is an extra step to drain our energy as well as break our game immersion, while in pokemon everything you need to know is given inside the actual game.  in pokemon we have "IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE" or "IT'S NOT VERY EFFECTIVE" or "IT HAD NO EFFECT".  With those simple 3 messages a first time player in that game will eventually memorize the entire type chart simply from knowing the unit's type and attack's type, assuming the player is literate and paying attention.  SD3 is flawed, glitchy and feels rushed, you were patching the vanilla game I am sure you already knew this, it is still an amazing game. 

The second problem is documentation.  The weapons having extra properties also have the same problem, they were simple weak to strong power progression, so adding extra text boxes for weapon descriptions in the shop was not needed, if it was new it was worth the cash in vanilla.  This is not something you can help with and i get that, we have to consult the document file outside the game.  the current equipment document is not set up to be easy to read, for me, knowing what each shop in each city is selling for ALL characters is far more useful to me than knowing what the whole list of equipment for one character is, for example to check the list for Kevin's weapons in Forcena I need to scroll down to the Kevin section, find the city, then to check Lisa's I have to repeat the process, when having a "Forcena" section, the entire stock listed there, weapons armor accessories and all for each character would be far more useful and easier to use.  The boss documentation is also incomplete, I am currently reading the file from patch v1042 and Landumber's weakness is listed as "stereotype", which is completely useless information.

For fixing this I propose two things.  First you can give it some time and redesign the document and group all items by city and by character on another page/tab and place all the important information in the first few columns/lines and release this with your next patch update.  I could also do that if you would like but that will wait until when I return home in around 5 weeks, and if I do it I am only including the important information, things like price/hitrate/critbonus (mostly the numerical mumbo-jumbo) I would just leave out.  The boss documentation i cannot help you with.  knowing that Landumber's weakness is "stereotype" is completely useless to me.

The second fix I suggest you consider simplifying the type chart to some degree, this might just be years of conditioning from pokemon but I never got why the cockatrice was weak to water but not thunder or earth.  maybe for example all the units using the same sprite recolored could have 1 or 2 common weakness and one more weakness  and strength that distinguishes it from its recolored variation?  Also to help with the combat flow, change the damage numbers according to strength and weaknesses.  "super effective" would be red numbers, neutral would be yellow, not effective purple?  healing and magic steal green for both allies and enemies, reflect blue? crits white?  whatever it is, to me the super effective/not effective color split is the most important and useful change that can be done for the player.  okay now i apply earth saber, oh look red numbers on target 1 and purple on target 2, great now i will remember that for the next time.  To not improve the game combat flow would be turning a singleplayer classic into more of a chore and losing game immersion than a grindy MMORPG game where types are taken out and buffs debuffs and power only matters.  what do you think? 

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

there are a few problems with this game, and i am going to compare it to pokemon because you added types into this game like pokemon.

what types? there are none.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

in SD3 that combat is not currently designed like that, we have to consult a document file outside the game to be performing at our best, and this switching between the game screen to the document screen outside becomes a chore, it slows down the flow of combat and it is an extra step to drain our energy as well as break our game immersion, while in pokemon everything you need to know is given inside the actual game.  in pokemon we have "IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE" or "IT'S NOT VERY EFFECTIVE" or "IT HAD NO EFFECT".  With those simple 3 messages a first time player in that game will eventually memorize the entire type chart simply from knowing the unit's type and attack's type, assuming the player is literate and paying attention.  SD3 is flawed, glitchy and feels rushed, you were patching the vanilla game I am sure you already knew this, it is still an amazing game.

sorry, but this comparison is completely ass-backwards.
how is it harder to learn 100 types over 8 elements than 700 with 18 elements!??
you can/have to look up a type chart in both cases.

in pokemon you have potentially over 700 monster types for which you'd have to either learn or look up their types. and you absolutely MUST follow those types AND learn a type chart.

here you have only about 100 monster types. there is NO type chart you have to learn. every monster has their own "type logic". plus you have several non-elemental options.
"it's not very effective, the opponent still died in one hit because of move power, STAB, EV, genes and other crap" vs "wrong type, you deal 0/1 damage, the end", sorry but the later is more consistent.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

The boss documentation is also incomplete, I am currently reading the file from patch v1042 and Landumber's weakness is listed as "stereotype", which is completely useless information.

How so?
What is the stereotype of a rock-like enemy in gaming? Maybe unreasonable resistant to (physical) attacks? Let's equate that to physical immunity here.
What can you do in the scope of this hack then? Anti-magic?

These hints are not meant as a straight forward cheat sheet. I mean if I gave you every solution to this game there'd be no game left - boring.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

the current equipment document is not set up to be easy to read, for me, knowing what each shop in each city is selling for ALL characters is far more useful to me than knowing what the whole list of equipment for one character is, for example to check the list for Kevin's weapons in Forcena I need to scroll down to the Kevin section, find the city, then to check Lisa's I have to repeat the process, when having a "Forcena" section, the entire stock listed there, weapons armor accessories and all for each character would be far more useful and easier to use.

outside of the seed-only weapons, all items are identical across characters. the weapon in forcena for Duran has the exact same properties as the one for Hawk.
the only difference is the name and who can equip it.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

The second fix I suggest you consider simplifying the type chart to some degree, this might just be years of conditioning from pokemon but I never got why the cockatrice was weak to water but not thunder or earth.

There is no type chart.
Each enemy type has a unique setup of elemental strength/weaknesses, according to what I thought made sense - and a few diviations to make certain elements not universally dominant, I'm looking at you holy and fire.
Cockatrice is not weak to earth because it can petrify others. It is not weak to air because it can evolve into a bird which would be massively unfair when you start casting an air spell while it is a cockatrice but finish casting when it has evolved into its Cockabird form which is immune to air. I had about 5 enemies weak to ice at the time and 12+ weak to fire, and deep frozen beings have a hard time to "evolve" or adapt to life changes.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

Also to help with the combat flow, change the damage numbers according to strength and weaknesses.  "super effective" would be red numbers, neutral would be yellow, not effective purple?  healing and magic steal green for both allies and enemies, reflect blue? crits white?  whatever it is, to me the super effective/not effective color split is the most important and useful change that can be done for the player.

The general idea is ok but it can't be done.
The most stupid reason: the game only has 4 colors for such text popups (yellow, green, red, purple). I tried the "5th" color and got a screen full of rainbows spit at me.
The second stupid reason: there's a big disjunction between where the damage is calculated (start of a swing for all enemies that are "currently close enough but might not be anymore when the attack finishes") and where the popup happens. The gap is so big that the game doesn't even know yet if the attack actually hits the target.
It just throws the potential damage number on a per-character pile.
For the current crit/lv1 tech indicator this is a bit different because I still know when the hit happens who is currently attacking (for Lv1 tech) or what "kind" of attack it was (a crit has a bit different routine than regular)

Plus it'd be impossible to show at the same time whether a hit was a crit or effective. And there is no other indicator for crits except higher damage.

Also it'd be yet another chart you'd have to study: "what did purple numbers with green border and white dots mean again?"

Hello! I'm a big fan of this mod and have been for a while, and I'm especially a HUGE fan of the relatively recent addition of "Hold X during a spell title to skip the animation." It's a great solution to the emphasis on spell and buff usage for this mod and for an action game with so many flashy and long spell animations!

Coincidentally, when I used to play the game as a kid, I would always make a party without casters not only because physical attacks were so much better / magic was countered / Hawk and Kevin were my jam, but because casting all the time made the game feel slower!  Something I wish more games would consider when making animations you see a lot.  How long they take and how much they interrupt the flow. Not just RPGs, either!

Anyway, Mr. Praetarius, my most recent play I've been using Lord, Archmage and Dervish on hard, figuring I could avoid taking mind up and power up by careful use of the "Dragon's Mail" tier armor on bosses I'd need the buffs, the ones that "change buff effects into debuffs and vice versa".

However, I found that they don't actually change the (de)buffs applied to the character wearing the armor, but rather they change the buff the character casts themselves, which I think might be unintended.  I know the armor is actually functioning this way because when Angela casts power down on an enemy while wearing the Dreamdevil Coat, the message "Attack power up" appears, and when when Dolan uses Spiral Moon, everyone's max hp is lowered.

My reasoning:

An attack that damages and debuffs (like Icicle or Demon Breath) is tougher to recover from than just one that damages, so having it buff your stats instead is a strong resource saving tool. This was meant to be offset by the armor tier's light and light physical/magic defense. In addition, it would allow you to have one character with all (de)buffs (any Lise class) handle all stat effects for your team and your enemy.

Currently, there's no benefit to the current armors that I can see other than allowing you to have one character buff your team while another with the exact same spells debuffs enemies, in case you happened to pick two characters with the same (de)buffs as each other. 

If the intention was purely to allow you to have more variety in which classes you can build your team with and reach more buff coverage, might I suggest giving the armor more defense since then it's just shoring up a weakness (not enough team variety) instead of giving you a strength?

Also, Lord's speed down isn't marked as multi-target in the classes.txt but functions as such in game.

Thank you for all the good times!

47 minutes ago, Larc said:

However, I found that they don't actually change the (de)buffs applied to the character wearing the armor, but rather they change the buff the character casts themselves, which I think might be unintended.

No, that is the intended effect.
The alternative would have not worked with black curse and messed up spell learning.

That's why the effect reads as "change buff effects into debuffs and vice versa" and not just "exchanges buff spells with equivalent debuff spells"

55 minutes ago, Larc said:

Currently, there's no benefit to the current armors that I can see other than allowing you to have one character buff your team while another with the exact same spells debuffs enemies, in case you happened to pick two characters with the same (de)buffs as each other.

The intent was stuff like that, especially to have more options for a "full buff" char that isn't yet again for the billionst time light Lise.

44 minutes ago, Larc said:

Also, Lord's speed down isn't marked as multi-target in the classes.txt but functions as such in game.

And now the big question is which is the typo? in the txt or in the ips?

On 1/28/2018 at 10:55 AM, praetarius5018 said:

And now the big question is which is the typo? in the txt or in the ips?

I for sure couldn't presume to know which you intended!

On 1/28/2018 at 10:55 AM, praetarius5018 said:

The alternative would have not worked with black curse and messed up spell learning.

That sounds interesting. So black curse cast onto a character wearing the armor I imagined (granting the target all buffs instead of all debuffs) would mess with the program in some way?

And having the armor equipped at all would cause characters to learn the wrong spells?

How does that happen?

On 1/28/2018 at 10:55 AM, praetarius5018 said:

The intent was stuff like that, especially to have more options for a "full buff" char that isn't yet again for the billionst time light Lise.

My mistake.  But if that was your intention, I do stand by the idea that the armor should be on par with the +healing armor's defenses if "medium" is considered middle of the road because it seems like an unnecessary cost for choosing flexibility in party makeup instead of flexibility in party aptitude.

Anyway, I'm guessing you're probably on other projects by now and in the wide scheme stuff like this (read: some internet nobody's criticism (read: blatant opinion)) doesn't really add or subtract from what you've created very much, so thanks again for the excellent mod and always taking the time to reply to everyone.

14 hours ago, Larc said:

That sounds interesting. So black curse cast onto a character wearing the armor I imagined (granting the target all buffs instead of all debuffs) would mess with the program in some way?

And having the armor equipped at all would cause characters to learn the wrong spells?

The game has potential counterparts for power up in power down, etc, but there is no opposite of black curse. That's what I meant.

Well, the game uses the same function to "get" the spells for your ring menu and for checking against already learned spells;
if I'd really replace power up with power down, on the next level up you'd learn power up again and the armor would change that then to a second power down, repeat until you know 12 times the same spell. Not a good end point for characters that have 12 spells already.

14 hours ago, Larc said:

My mistake.  But if that was your intention, I do stand by the idea that the armor should be on par with the +healing armor's defenses if "medium" is considered middle of the road because it seems like an unnecessary cost for choosing flexibility in party makeup instead of flexibility in party aptitude.

This can go either way; I think that if you'd choose the inversion armor it grants you a real advantage over just using the "boring" wendel armor (which was supposed to be the point of reference for an "average" armor).

Hey, first of all absolutely well done praetarius! Well thought out, rounded and up to the point I played, well balanced. You did it! You spoiled the vanilla game for me: if they were to release it on the switch on the bugged state it was then, I wouldn't and couldn't touch it. Great job!

Is there any other patch you would recommend / have worked on for a SNES jrpg (or game)?

One other question. I can't seem to find the secret shop, I think I must be blind. Any hint more specific than the one in the readme?

Keep up the good work!

1 hour ago, Mck said:

Is there any other patch you would recommend / have worked on for a SNES jrpg (or game)?

What I'd recommend?
Check the download section here. That's as biased an answer as you'll get from me.

What I've personally created?

My current project is a FF5 hack though that is in no playable state right now.

1 hour ago, Mck said:

One other question. I can't seem to find the secret shop, I think I must be blind. Any hint more specific than the one in the readme?

Desert town. Dude doesn't look like the regular traders.

12 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

 

 

Thank you, I'll check it out later, after Sin.

12 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

My current project is a FF5 hack though that is in no playable state right now.

How far along is development?

12 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

Desert town. Dude doesn't look like the regular traders.

Once again thanks. I would not have looked there. Too near to a hub.

One other thing: can you target enemies with heal light? Tried it and didn't work, but then again perhaps I messed it up. You mention that it hurts undead in the support files.

1 hour ago, Mck said:

One other thing: can you target enemies with heal light? Tried it and didn't work, but then again perhaps I messed it up. You mention that it hurts undead in the support files.

hold Y when selecting the spell, not when selecting the target

I've spent most of this mod feeling like I'm playing it wrong. Right now I'm running Duran/Carlie/Angela as Paladin/Magus/Sage on the default difficulty and I'm playing by myself; I played the original like ten years ago so this may as well be a brand new thing for me and I picked my party because they reminded me of the party in Secret of Mana. The game's handed my ass to me several times in various ways. For instance: 

-my physical attackers don't seem to hit a lot. Like a lot a lot. I put out a lot of swings but like half of them miss, if I'm lucky. I've tended toward weapons with high hit rate (mostly the broadsword, although I recently switched to the silver blade when it became available), but the tradeoff there is that I don't seem to be cresting 20 with any individual physical hit, and this is against physical neutral creatures. If I match their element with a saber I might get up to 30-ish on a normal attack, with a strong attack getting up to 40. Maybe this was my mistake for not immediately maxing Dex and using a falchion instead but it's kind of disheartening.

-apparently the way I picked my party in the beginning meant I only had two characters (Duran and Carlie) for Full Metal Haggar and I replayed that fight so many times I was afraid I simply couldn't win the damage race and would have to restart. At the end of the day I used basically all the consumables I had managed to scrape together, including two bulette's scales I'd stumbled into because I happen to like going after Ogre Boxes whenever I got treasure and the panel was there. 

-my strategy for the vast majority of boss fights has basically been to make sure I'm carrying around a full stack of candies (and later chocolates) and heal whenever anybody's below max so I don't get exploded by whatever burst damage counter limit break thing thing the boss has in its pocket. Not only does this mean my whole party's contracted diabetes, it's kind of impacted the playability of the game, because it starts feeling a lot less like an action RPG and more like a weird turn-based one. Most of my fights have been with my party being equal level to the boss and I've only sat down and grinded a couple of times. If I'm "supposed" to be fighting them at a higher level than they are, then I'll do it, but that's going to run out eventually because I'm pretty sure I'll be hitting cap at the rate I'm going before the last couple of bosses. 

-Money's tight. Clearly at least part of this is that I'm personally buying up every country's supply of sweets, but weapons etc. are damn expensive and that's bad for my collector tendencies. Even despite that, though, it's odd that the weapons are all supposed to be balanced with each other in a rough sense, yet each "tier" seems to double or triple in price from the previous one. It certainly doesn't feel like the amount of money I'm getting from higher level monsters is increasing at a similar rate. Also, I haven't been able to cover buffs for everything given my party layout; this has specifically stung me in the butt whenever something pulls out a dex debuff, since none of my characters have the corresponding buff. Stardust Herbs make that okay if that's what they lead off with, but if I've put any of the buffs I do have on before they hit me then using the herb will waste all of them. There are items to fix that-in particular I managed to get a bunch of bird scales in Rolante from drops-but if I'm looking to get particular ones I have to spend money on them, and as noted money's tight. 

-I don't know what stacks and what doesn't as far as item properties go. Like, yeah, obviously the numerical increases all work together, but if I stick a Revelation Cane, Bunnydress and White Snow Veil on Angela, do all of those damage boosts stack or not? Experimentally it doesn't seem like they do, but it's hard sometimes seeing what numbers go to what attack the way the game resolves. And does wearing six Beastman Collars actually boost your money gain six times over and it's just that money drops really are just that tiny? I've done that when it was feasible (i.e. when the enemies weren't able to kill me if I wasn't using an accessory layout that gave me actual stat boosts) but it doesn't feel like it makes that much of a difference.

-For the most part I haven't felt like there's been a "only one strategy" for bosses. I've muddled along with the SOP my characters seem capable of (figure out what element the boss is vulnerable to and have Angela spam it and try to keep her from suicidally running into the melee, Carlie threw a lot of Holy Ball but now I have her use sabers and mind up now that she knows them, Duran pushes people around and maybe swings for 20 damage every once in a while and spams candies and chocolates) and made it through more or less intact. There were three boss fights where actually having an AoE nuker felt like a positive (Gildervine, Robots 2: Electric Boogaloo and Sephiroth's Mom) instead of just something I had. But there are two boss fights now that I can't imagine being able to do with anything but a specific gear layout and resultant strategy, given the team members I have. That's the first Bill and Ben fight and now Dolan, the first God-Beast I chose to fight and the current brick wall I've hit. I don't think it's numerically possible to beat Bill and Ben with my team if I don't do basically the opposite of everything that makes sense with two of the characters I have. 

The problem is that I didn't have the gear that enabled that strategy, and you can't leave Rolante once you've acquired Jinn until you beat those two, so I couldn't go get it from where I was. I ended up rolling back to an earlier savestate and making a run to the Dwarf Village and Maia, then doing all that stuff with Tzenker and Genova and them over again. Which kind of damaged my morale having to first figure out how much progress I had to lose (since I didn't know exactly when I got locked out of leaving) and then of course go through that all over again, and even then it was more of a resource blowout than usual. I mean I suppose I could have sat there beating up needlebirds until I had enough money to buy 20 Angel Grails too but that seemed like even more of a trial.

Now with Dolan, I've figured out what I need to do against his moon hadokens and it turns out I lucked into the gear that enables it totally by accident. 

The problem in this case is simply losing the damage race. I cast my buffs and spammed my spells and techs and items and went through full stacks of candy/chocolate/grass and the six angel grails and honey drinks I had because I was saving my money trying to buy some neato weapons for a change but it just wouldn't f***ing die. I've increased Carlie's Dex but it still feels like it takes forever for Heal Light to resolve and meanwhile he's Howling and Graviton Pressing and just making everything a f***show. I could do a different item layout but then I wouldn't have room to fit in debuffs so I could actually do damage, and of course it would light all my money on fire. Again. Which is why I'm starting to wonder if I'm missing something else, or if there's something more fundamentally wrong with my playstyle than I thought. Like maybe I prioritized my stats wrong, or maybe it was just a mistake not to have any of Hawk/Kevin/Lise in the first place. I'm really at a loss at what else I can do at this point. (I mean, besides just play an easier mode, but I like getting a chest after every fight even if it's just a candy half the time and also I don't plan on quitting this far in.)

The default difficulty is hard - and it reads like you'd enjoy it more if you'd lower it at least one stage. Though I can be wrong about that.

As for what stacks: mostly everything that doesn't say a variant of "does not stack with self" or is just an activator (e.g. resistance, MP steal) or removal (e.g. weaknesses)

Um... I'm not entirely certain what just happened, but I suddenly have ~172 million experience points on everybody. I was trying to get some money to buy more grails with and then suddenly I was gaining a level every fight starting around level 55 I think (I'm at 57 now, this just happened). 

Edit so I don't keep double posting, I finally beat that stupid wolfgoat. 

Further progress edit: Dolan seems to have been the worst of them; I've beaten every other one but the light and darkness ones and haven't had that much of a problem. Usually an expeditionary fight to figure out its thing was enough to figure out what to do. I didn't keep using the glitched save file with all that EXP though, and I didn't get it to happen again when I tried to do similar things. It might just be one of the original game glitches,  I suppose. And I haven't lowered the difficulty. I'm glad I got Dolan out of the way first because I can't imagine fighting him at full power. 

I stopped by Wendel to get ready to go to the Light place and there's a guy there selling the Pedan weapons. I kind of wish I'd have known that before I went in some of these dungeons because petrify procs would probably have been really useful there, but there's no use crying over spilt milk. 

Finally beat it today. It was very fun. I'm probably not going to replay at hard mode because it gave me a headache sometimes, but it was worth it the first time at least. If I had to complain about one thing, it would be the pricing of the weapons and armor. 

I just started a game but am unsure if i patched it correctly. For one, B button doesnt respond right away for running. It lags about 1 second before they run. Also, the Y button doesnt bring up the menu unless i press a directional button + Y. Its been a long time since i played the original game, but i vaguely remember that running in combat took some time to respond, possibly for combat balance. Did the combat mechanics modification from this patch make it so running is delayed out of combat? Just wanna make sure things are running correctly.

EDIT: Sorry nvm lol. I just read the changes_overview and the first couple lines answers all these questions

I stopped getting new spells for some reason. My duran has 11 int on gladiator but only learned the first 2 sabers. Same for lise. Hawk got 17 agi but only learned the first 3 spells. According to the text file, they should all have gotten all their spells by now. I even leveled up a few more times after that but still no spells. Im kind of frustrated with the hack in general though. Its basically just a matter of grinding gold to stockpile on healing items and just spamming heals all day on bosses. The equipment balance part is a nice idea but you pretty much have to go back to the excel file everytime you change equip or buy gear.

58 minutes ago, wazzur1 said:

I stopped getting new spells for some reason. My duran has 11 int on gladiator but only learned the first 2 sabers. Same for lise. Hawk got 17 agi but only learned the first 3 spells. According to the text file, they should all have gotten all their spells by now. I even leveled up a few more times after that but still no spells. Im kind of frustrated with the hack in general though. Its basically just a matter of grinding gold to stockpile on healing items and just spamming heals all day on bosses. The equipment balance part is a nice idea but you pretty much have to go back to the excel file everytime you change equip or buy gear.

You need the corresponding spirits to learn the spells: water spirit for Ice Saber, Mind Up and Water Jutsu, and fire spirit for Fire Saber, Power Up and Fire Jutsu. It was that way in the original game too, though for balance reasons, there are a few spells that are exceptions. The spells tab in the skills_consumables_traps.xls mentions the element of each spell.

16 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

You need the corresponding spirits to learn the spells: water spirit for Ice Saber, Mind Up and Water Jutsu, and fire spirit for Fire Saber, Power Up and Fire Jutsu. It was that way in the original game too, though for balance reasons, there are a few spells that are exceptions. The spells tab in the skills_consumables_traps.xls mentions the element of each spell.

oh boy, how could i miss such a basic thing.. its just been too long since i played the game haha. As far as the patch is concerned ill try to lower the difficulty setting to see if i can get more enjoyment out of it. Challenge is one thing, but being forced to heal after you take any damage or risk getting wiped  wasnt my idea of fun. The annoyance with item juggling and not displaying item properties in game cant be blamed on the hack. He did what he could with the limitations of the game. You can only add so much complexity to such a stupid equipment system lol.

Is there a list of spells affected by whitelight ring? Trying to decide on 2nd class changes and this info might affect my decision. Basic sabers and stat magic seems to be affected by it but not the elemental jutsus.

Also, what does it mean by the curse mod on spells. "Additional weapon damage is always shared with 100%"?

1 hour ago, wazzur1 said:

Is there a list of spells affected by whitelight ring? Trying to decide on 2nd class changes and this info might affect my decision. Basic sabers and stat magic seems to be affected by it but not the elemental jutsus.

Also, what does it mean by the curse mod on spells. "Additional weapon damage is always shared with 100%"?

Check the skills_consumables_traps.xls file, spells tab, the F column. If the spell has multi-target as a possible upgrade, it means it is affected by the Whitelight Ring.

magatama/curse dark magic, i assume you are glaring at nightblades black rain, means if you curse them with black rain or blow needles and they attack you with physical damage they take the same amount of damage back, doesnt work with techs like whirlwindsword but it reflects physical spells like enemy ninjamasters, a cursed ninjamaster casting multitarget shuriken on your team will get hit by his 3 salves of shurikens and probably kill himself in hilarious fashion while you take nothing in return ^^

One thing I noticed in my Duran game is that Turn Undead doesn't affect ghosts and specters. Was that in the original game too, or something you decided on? 

I think it should affect them - is your level at least on par with them?
That was a limitation in the original as well.

omg... I finally got a healing spell on the 2nd class change and its like a different game due to full heals after battle. I should have just gone light on duran to save myself so much headache up to this point.

or light Kevin or light Charlie would have been choices as well for that

How does chance to deny counter attack work? Does it mean when you use a spell or something that they would normally counter, it has a chance that it wont? Or does it just decrease their hate meter when u normal attack it?

When the hate meter reaches the point where the boss would normally use a counter move, you get a random chance that he will not use his counter move; either way the hate value drops down to 0.

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

When the hate meter reaches the point where the boss would normally use a counter move, you get a random chance that he will not use his counter move; either way the hate value drops down to 0.

Is it an aura effect that just passively does its thing? Or do you need to hit stuff to proc the effect at the right time. Does it stack if you have more than one such effect in your party?

entirely passive, doesn't stack

Just beat the game. Near the end, my Hawk was being so broken with his shurikens. With maxed out Agi and spirit + faster cast helmet and increased spell lvl armor, he was dishing out like 3 shots that do 500 dmg each in the time it takes for duran to swing once. With walnut spamming, i would throw 6~9 before the boss can even make one move. I had another char that was wearing the hate reducing armor which probably worked into how that was possible. I have to say, this romhack was really good. The boss battles were very unique and varied. I really support your decision not to spoil all the boss mechanics in the text file. Equipment options were great and I could think of lots of different combinations that would be fun to try if i ever decide to play again. The only thing id like to point out is that equipment prices scale way too much compared to gold drops. It seemed like high lvl monsters dont even drop more gold and it just all comes in bulks from bosses. Seemed a bit weird that they cost so much since all equips were basically side grades. The side effect of this was that you have so much gold near the end from god beasts and selling the unneeded seed equipments that you could buy any number of expensive consumables. Thats a stark contrast to the mid game where you had to grind gold just to buy a few pieces and couldnt waste too many consumables. Oh and the default difficulty should probably be set to normal. Its still quite a bit harder than vanilla sd3 while not being so frustrating, especially in the early game.

I didnt realize back then how comically bad the story in this game was lol. Your party including the fairy are utter morons. [spoilers**] Oh lets open the gate to the holy land. Oops, it was a trap. Lets take the sword which supposedly makes you a god. Oops, it was a trap! Lets not use the power of the sword to do anything and give it to the bad guys. Lets kill the god beasts. Oops it was a trap. I mean its probably hard to make a coherent story with 6 possible main chars but they didnt even try lol. The "emotional" scenes fall flat due to their abrupt nature and how little you care about any of these characters. Like when the pink girl serving the dark prince suddenly reveals her motivation before dying (cue sad music), all im thinking is 'why should i care about you or some villain thats mentioned about 2 times throughout the game?'

Umm.. i dont know why Im ranting about the story here though. The game has always been purely about cool class changing and combat which the hack makes way better! Thanks for the nice work.

The default difficulty being the hardest was a conscious decision.
Basically you are 99% certainly required - thanks to limitations of both the base game and my hacking skills - to interact with the documentation, if only to find out how to open the menu now...
so the default difficulty being the highest is my little test (a.k.a. dick move): did you understand what you read.

If I would set it to a different default, it'd be easy since that is closest to what vanilla would be.

Well, money is a topic of its own;
since you can spent money only once, either on new gear or consumables, those that "know" what they need are clearly at a huge advantage here.
Though the items (or money by selling them) you get from chest is supposed to be counted into that as well, so...
dunno, I'd probably have to make equipment super-cheap across the board and reduce boss gold?
but then you can just buy the perfect gear setup for each boss which is something I don't want either.

The money game falls apart mid game from increasing gold gains (mostly bosses, mid game is a huge boss rush), less need to buy new equipment since 90% of the stuff was already available and the increasing chance that you have someone that knows heal light to cut down on healing expenses.

I see no good solution for this.

I think the most important thing would be to ensure that the players won't end up soft-locking the game. If you end up in a situation that you're unable to proceed until you spend several hours to grind for gold to restock your healing items, and even after that, if you're not able to proceed until you can afford some the of the newer equipment, that's just weak game design in my eyes. I've never encountered this problem on the Normal difficulty level, since you usually won't use so many healing items during dungeons that you'll have to spend all your money to restock them (also, I never buy Angel's Grails until late-game, and I don't buy equipment that I don't need). However, I'm not sure how badly resource management becomes an issue in early/mid-game on the hardest difficulty.

Softlock is "easy" - the ghostship+volcano sequence

resource management on hard is a bit easier and harder;
easier because chest drop rate is higher
easier because a bad streak sends you to the title screen instead of into the reds
harder, well obviously because of how fast the bad streak can happen

Hi Praetarius,

Returning to this game after several years, I am amazed that someone has put in the effort to follow up on old discussions about how to re-balance and improve this game. Team formation and battle strategy were the aspects of this game that always had the most potential for deeper gameplay, and from everything I've read, it seems that you've put a lot of thought and effort into developing these.

Some quick questions from the class skill lists as I plan my parties for my playthroughs:

1) Grand Divina seems to be completely rethought and the only class of Angela's that does not graduate to Level 2 magic. It looks like you were aiming for a classical Red Mage with her.... But this leaves her one or two spell damage levels behind her other final classes. With these changes, is Grand Divina still an effective choice in the endgame?

2) Carlie's dark classes can no longer heal. I see the reasoning behind this, but in the original game her summons were not nearly powerful or varied enough to make her competitive with Angela in terms of damage. Plus, the stat/effect spells, like Mind Down or Anti-Magic, seem to be much more distributed among the other characters this game, further removing some of the uniqueness of Carlie's dark classes. Does this leave dark Carlie with any real advantage over Angela?

3) Why does Duelist get Leaf Saber? I understand the addition of Anti-Magic, but seeing as how Leaf Saber doesn't damage MP, wouldn't Moon Saber seem a more natural choice for a physical-based fighter?

4) The max stats of your final classes are more leveled (much less variation between stats of any particular class) than in the original game, but based on the level 99 cap, this may not matter too much because they appear to be unattainable. Is the purpose of this to give the player more flexibility in character growth?

Also, just a couple of questions after a five-minute play-test with Duran:

5) I miss a lot. After reviewing the message board, it appears that I can increase my hit rate through using strong attacks instead of quick attacks. My question concerns the AI for my eventual partners. Will they automatically choose strong or quick attacks or a mix of both, and can I set their preference?

6) My quick attack did 3 damage, while my level-one tech did 48, with yellow numbers. Is this yellow-numbered hit the long hidden critical hit? Also, the difference between 3 and 48 is 16 times. Does the difference between these get tighter as the game progresses, or can I always expect to more than ten times as much with a critical hit on a tech? (This will affect how I raise my Agility for sure.)

Thank you for your efforts and I look forward to more discussion!

1) She is sorta a red mage, yes.

The general idea is that spells have now proper scaling, even Lv1 spells deal damage late game.
The difference is roughly +30% for each full spell level increase (so Lv3 is +60% over Lv1) in exchange for higher MP cost and longer cast time.
GD with max AGL casts her Lv1 spells instantly. Which helps e.g. with random enemies to knock them back and this is godlike when enemies can kill you in about 4 hits.
Meanwhile Rune Master and Magus take their sweet time to cast but then deal "you die damage" especially with Stone Cloud (because petrify on enemies is death).

2) First of she uses PIE instead of INT making her more resilient to spell damage.
Debuffs are typically less spread out compared to buffs, meaning only Lise has a class with all 4 basic buffs while several classes have access to all 4 debuffs; Charlie has one of them.
Angela is more geared towards MT damage, Charlie stands better against bosses (PIE, debuffs, ST elemental spells).

3) Leaf is now a real element, some enemies and bosses are weak to it. Plus he can use it on caster allies to support them for a change.
Also his ultimate weapon runs on MP.

4) The stats are so that you can max 4 out of 6 stats and have the other 2 barely above minimum; or a good mix of stats, depending on preference.
So in a sense, yes, player choice.

5) AI is stuck to strong attacks. In total the allies are too random for my taste so they keep to the attack that is less problematic in that regard.
They already can't really dodge, just standing there waiting to be cut down, so I tried to patch that with a hidden evade bonus for AI.
Plus the game already has quite a "lag" problem, having all allies spam the quickest attacks would just enhance that issue.
And by lag I mean I can with just Hawk and Kevin under my control kill the AI completely if I try hard enough.

Also if you miss a lot, AGL helps a bit and different weapons have different hit bonuses. Later speed up/down helps as well.

The only thing you can really set on the AI is for them to not rush forward to their death at battle start by using the "most distant" AI option.
Probably a favorite for caster heavy parties.
Every other AI setting is just "lemmings"

6) Yellow numbers show either Lv1 tech damage or criticals.
You may have gotten a "counter" hit on your lv1 tech which has also increased damage. Counters are only possible on lv1 techs btw.
But in general the gap between normal attacks and lv1 techs is much more narrow.
About 1:2-5 depending on if you compare to quick or strong attack, if you get the counter, if your weapon has a good lv1 tech bonus damage, etc.
Certain enemies even have extra damage bonuses on counter hits; one boss in particular is meant to be duelled that way.

Thanks for the quick response!

1, 2, 4, 5, 6) Great, I will see how these play out more when I start playing through the game.

3) Ah, I didn't know about his final weapon. Makes sense. But the Duelist as a support character seems odd to me; this guy should be focused on the "duel", the single-minded one-on-one battle. I get that there's a distinction from the Swordmaster who can cast his sabers on multiple people, though, a limited buff capacity could make sense. Have you considered giving him both Moon and Leaf saber? If you think this is overpowering then you could make them both self-cast; that way he could still add MP for his final weapon, or HP instead if it was more important.

One more general question: Effective team building in the original game was generally done by building groups with only one goal, physical or magical damage, so more balanced groups that could do both at the cost of maxing out one or the other did not work as well. Would you say that your build is similar, or do the requirements at each stage in the game vary enough to require a group with multiple damage focuses? It seems that your increased skill allotment for each of the characters might be designed encourage the latter.

No, he'd be too similar to swordmaster then - also everyone has an element-less HP leech option with a specific weapon or an accessoire.

The only team building advice I give:
don't try to rely on the black market, the item prices there have gone up quite a bit.

A pure melee team would at least need anti-magic to dispel physical immunity in a couple cases.
Or spent a fortune on spell casting coins or the eyes that cast anti-magic from the black market.

A pure caster team has more problems with enemies that are a little too touchy-feely (like werwolves, ninjas) or just are very resistant to magic;
I'd be surprised if they could even deal notable double digit damage to a certain boss.
Their options would then be weapons that use alternate stats and going for Lv2/3 techs (attack bonus through INT).

It seems that with all the new weapon options and damage requirements, maybe planning everything completely in advance will prove too difficult and waste some of the discovery.

One last question for today: Are there any skills that you would recommend be absolutely included on every team? If I have time, I'd like to start four groups so I can take every first class upgrade to the second class upgrade and at least have the option to experience each of the final classes. If I have to distribute the first class upgrades so that each party has potential access to, say, Anti-Magic or something by the second class upgrade, it would be good to know ahead of time. I'm thinking that it may be best to do this on normal or tough difficulty to start with so I don't box myself into any corners.

1) Heal light for the auto-heal after battle, best QoL skill.
2) a way to deal with physical immune, either damage magic or anti-magic
3) for the highest difficulty def up and power down plus their magic counterparts are basically required

Sounds good, I think I can manage some or most of these conditions for four groups of distinct classes. I did think of one more question though which I'm dying to ask since I won't be able to play this for the next couple of days. I notice that a lot of people on this board indicate that they spend a lot of time running to avoid fights, enabled by the added mechanic of running during battle. Since this should only work for the character you control, how does this work out during gameplay? Are your AI-controlled partners able to catch on and follow you safely, or are they constantly getting slaughtered as they stick behind and try to fight?

AI was always able to run in battle, it just rarely does so. Mostly to run into danger.
If they are not yet in combat mode (you did not push the attack button) they'll just run to follow behind you.
If you attack even once though they'll run towards enemies.

So I take it from your previous responses that in general, while the original game may have encouraged a strategy based around offensive buffs (Power/Mind up, Protect/Mind Down), your mod demands defensive buffs (Protect/Mind Up, Power/Mind Down) as survival is much more of a challenge.

Kind of.
At least on the highest difficulty those buffs are a must.

It may also stem from the fact that damage buffs are kinda nerfed now.
Originally they gave you 33% more damage before defense now it is 25% after.

Managed to play this for an hour last night; I had a great time! Even on normal difficulty the fights are much more exciting.

Also, I noticed a bug: In Full Metal Hugger's cave some enemies would turn me to Chibikko; when this happened, the screen would glitch with random bitmaps and wouldn't fix itself unless I reloaded my game. Is this a known bug, and is there anything I can do to correct it?

Never heard of that, might be a bad patched rom.

I repatched it in Windows Vista/7 in case Windows 8 was giving me problems with one of the programs.

I ended up choosing these four teams to give me all of the classes by the first class change:

Quest 1: D/L, A/D, C/D
Quest 2: K/D, H/L, C/L
Quest 3-1: H/D, L/L, A/L
Quest 3-2: L/D, D/D, K/L

I spread out the Heal Lights, Anti-Magics, and Buff/Debuffs as much as possible without reusing classes while giving each team a focus. These will also allow me to test out some different strategies in your mod. I definitely have ideas for most of the second class changes but am leaving them open for now; I may test a few at that point. I just got started this week and am excited to make some progress. Great job on this, it has really made me rethink this game!

I had a question regarding W/A seeds. Where would you recommend farming them, and what would be the ideal level? I'm currently at the moontower with 4 godbeasts down, and still had no drops. Am I reading the droptable sheet wrong?

The enemy needs to be level 60+, not necessarily you.

At 0 godbeasts they should've been around 50-52. Goes up by 2-3 each defeated beast...
I don't think the enemies were high enough so far?
Unless you wear multiple Earth Bracelets?

Sorry, I don't know I good farming spot; ideally a room with just 1-2 Lv60 enemies that can be petrified and have W/A seeds in their drop list.

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

The enemy needs to be level 60+, not necessarily you.

At 0 godbeasts they should've been around 50-52. Goes up by 2-3 each defeated beast...
I don't think the enemies were high enough so far?
Unless you wear multiple Earth Bracelets?

Sorry, I don't know I good farming spot; ideally a room with just 1-2 Lv60 enemies that can be petrified and have W/A seeds in their drop list.

For example, enemies at the moment are without level boosting items around 66. I encounter in this particular area bloody wolves which should have the seed in their table (@60+: rare 5 W/A seed and rare 6 Ghost's Eye). I get chests, and I try to get them to drop the seeds by save/reloading, no luck so far.

Is there something I'm missing regarding drop mechanics? Is it just a bad luck streak?

Should I go somewhere where there are mobs that have the seed as there rare 5 and 6? (like King and Great Rabite).

It is down to pure luck, though that may also be a printing error for the bloody wolves - try different monster types.
The luck stat only increases your chance to get rares in the first place.

I got the seeds to drop now, dropchance is just horribly low. Was a bit dismayed that the seed can still produce armor, so the chance to get weapons is even lower. Can the seeds produce items for class combinations that you did not take? If so, can D/D Hawk wield the D/L weapon, as there are no restrictions for armor. (In this case it would be Kongo Rakan)

I didn't adjust the w/a seed drop table so you'll only get the current final weapons of your class.
I considered them even less essential than in vanilla so I didn't bother; there they were clearly the strongest weapon with a full STR multiplier more, here just an alternative roughly on par (I hope) with the rest.

9 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

I didn't adjust the w/a seed drop table so you'll only get the current final weapons of your class.
I considered them even less essential than in vanilla so I didn't bother; there they were clearly the strongest weapon with a full STR multiplier more, here just an alternative roughly on par (I hope) with the rest.

Ok, I get that and I find them interesting because of the possible builds based on them, and it's cool that they are not the obvious go-to. Considering my class combinations, for L/D-heal Kevin the W/A weapon still seems by far the best weapon at least for boss battles, and for my Buff/caster L/D Lise the W/A weapon complements her really well. On the other hand, for my D/D Hawk, the W/A weapon seems situational at best, and I think going with the petrify weapon for mobs and the anti-physical immunity weapon for bosses (because of it's high damage) would be the best choice. Making choices is interesting, and so in my opinion your design goals for them are fulfilled.

Sorry to bother you again, I wondered how the W/A weapon heal bonus works of the Holy Claw (L/D Kevin). Is it+1 heal power per tick (total of +8ish?) of tech power or per tier (total of +3)?

it should be 1 TP = 1 effective PIE

Hi Praetarius,

I'm having a great time with this. I tested out a few teams and decided to restart with a new approach to team building. I'm finding balance and multiple options to be much more important in this mod than in the original.

I have some questions about a few of the final classes as I restart:

1) Swordmaster: His final weapon being dependent on critical hits, does he rank among Duran's final classes in terms of damage per time?

2) Duelist: You mentioned that his final weapon runs on MP - in what way? I could not find any note on this in the documentation.

3) Wanderer: I'm not seeing much of an endgame for this class, unless his Half Vanish becomes close to instant. It seems that his abilities have been spread out to other classes with better damage or support options.

4) More generally, do you have any summary of the strengths, weaknesses, or changes for each of the classes in this mod? This might be useful for someone just getting into this mod, with or without experience from the previous game.

Thanks!

1) I didn't measure the dps, though you'd best pair him with Ninja Master for the analyze crit (de)buff and throw a lot of luck stat and crit gear on him.
70~80% crit rate? forgot how high but at least 50%+

2) no, I remembered wrong, the MP thing was a weapon design I thought of at one point but dropped.

3) give him his final weapon and he'll deal around buffed Angela level of spell damage to later bosses if not more.

4) only what is in the zip file

3) This will be only true for the highest difficulty though, correct? Or does that 320 cap scale with the player damage bonus of lower difficulty levels?

no it's fixed 320 - or 400 on luna day

I could be wrong but I'm guessing that 320 damage means a lot more on the hardest difficulty level than it does on normal, where other characters might be able to melee that damage more easily or cast it more quickly, meaning that Hawk's Wanderer is a class that scales favorably with difficulty relative to other classes.

I'm also wondering about the Rogue's final weapon. Doubling his spell damage with luck could be a lot of fun. And it turns landmine into a MT shuriken? I previously shied away from this class but it's looking more attractive now. I suppose it's weakness relative to Hawk's other classes is that it lacks any debuffs or support for other characters.

hawk is the only class whose cast speed scales with spirit,
a defensive stat that boosts magic resist
a stat that allows him to learn spells as a wanderer
a stat that can allow him to skip strenght entirely with his Spirit weapon , therefore he doesnt even loose meele damage
0,5 second castspeed is what we are talking about two half vanishs make deathspell look like a joke ability in terms of dps
especially with a tree spirit ring on top of it.
dont underestimate the wanderer
he also has an int weapon that gives him bonus tech damage, capped str+int for low points , no str needed

I guess I'm wondering whether the Rogue can still beat him for sniping, aside from having a decent MT spell.

One more question, about Vanadis's final weapon. It is described as giving her non-elemental spells the element of her saber, but her only non-elemental spell is Freya (besides Heal Light). This would imply the purpose of the weapon is to enhance Freya. But this spell reduces enemies to Chibikko state. What would be the purpose then of making this spell stronger, unless just for boss fights or enemies with immunity?

Forgive my ignorance, I've never played Vanadis (Star Lancer was so much better in the original), so I may not understand exactly how Freya works.

Also, can dark-path Duran equip shields in this mod?

On the Wanderer topic, I watched some of the hardtype playthrough and saw him refularly dealing much more than 320 with Half Vanish. Unless this was an older version if the mod, it seems that this 320 damage cap is applied before buffs. Based on this, I can see him being a very decent sniper after all.

And Praetarius, I think your formula for the double spell damage from the Rogue's final weapon may be backwards in the spell mechanics. You have it listed as "if RNG[0..127] > LUCK+3: damage×2", but this would imply that greater luck leads to less of a chance for a double hit. Unless this is the point?

there's a post edit function for a reason...

I'm quintuple post blind, sorry

Sorry for the flood of posts, I'm new to forum-ing and still learning the decorum. I will edit in the future. Since I can't delete the previous posts, I combine them here:

1) Vanadis's final weapon is described as giving her non-elemental spells the element of her saber, but her only non-elemental spell is Freya (besides Heal Light). This would imply the purpose of the weapon is to enhance Freya. But this spell reduces enemies to Chibikko state. What would be then be the purpose of having this spell do more damage, unless just for boss fights or enemies with immunity? (Forgive my ignorance, I've never played Vanadis since Star Lancer seemed so much better in the original, so I may not understand exactly how Freya works.)

2) Can dark-path Duran equip shields in this mod?

3) On the Wanderer topic, I watched some of the hardtype playthrough on YT and saw him regularly dealing much more than 320 with Half Vanish. Unless this was an older version of the mod, it seems that the 320 damage cap must be applied before other multipliers. Can you confirm this is still valid for the current version?

4) I think your formula for the double spell damage chance from the Rogue's final weapon may be backwards in the mechanics. You have it listed as "if RNG[0..127] > LUCK+3: damage×2", but this would imply that greater luck leads to less of a chance for double damage. Unless this is the point?

If you can and wish to delete the previous posts, please go right ahead.

1) Freya and non-elemental throw items; also several enemies are immune to chibikko state

2) yes, even without any class change at all

3) that was an old patch probably

4) yeah typo

5) I set them to hidden

I noticed when reading through the forums that Hawk's jutsu spells hit against physical defense. Are all of Hawk's spells like this, i.e. trap spells or breath spells, or is this something specific to jutsu spells? What about Carlie's summon spells? Also, does LVL damage for consumable spell items imply that the strength of these spells is stat-independent?

All spells that deal damage based on STR, AGL or LUCK work against physical defense (STR is used on almost all boss-exclusive spells, nowhere else).

Consumable items deal damage based on the caster's level.
The Lv1-3 notifier is also used for spells and represents relative strength; around +15% for each half level.

So for physical spells like jutsus or traps, does Power Up or Mind Up affect their strength? I would assume that any spell that worked against physical defense would be enhanced by modifiers that increase physical attack.

it should be mind up on caster but def down on target that affect the damage of his spells

Thanks for all your responses so far. I also noticed in one of the previous posts a reference to Carlie's "energy shields" which increase max MP by 10 and double MP regen, but I couldn't find anything like this in the documentation. These would be greatly helpful in the team I'm planning. What items were the poster referring to and do they exist in the current version of the mod?

do you mean Bishop's magic shield spell?

That would be it. I don't remember that spell being so powerful in the original. Looks like Paladin has it too. I was thinking of casting it on a Necromancer since her most powerful spells cost so much MP. It will be a choice between Paladin and Lord for her partner on Duran's quest; I was initially leaning Lord but now I'm leaning Paladin.

What would you suggest between Paladin/Wanderer/Necromancer and Lord/Wanderer/Necromancer? With Paladin casting Anti-Magic I could go Rogue instead for extra damage, but I would lose the Poison and Mind Up. I know Bishop is always a great choice but I want to try Dark Carlie on this team.

I switched my initial plan to three groups, one for each final area, and my plan is to run the above group, Dervish/Arch Mage/Sage, and Dragon Master/Warrior Monk/Rune Master. All of these groups are pretty magic intensive but that's my preferred play style. One of the things I love about your mod is that more class combinations at least appear on paper to be more viable. From these groups, I get to try 9 of the 12 first class changes. I'm missing only Dark Duran, Light Lise, and Dark Hawk, which I know is a classic team itself and considered running for a fourth group, but in this mod it seems that buffs are not enough and I'd be hurting for healing and a way to deal with high physical defense.

it was useless in vanilla; it did only half of what mind up does and can never be multi-target, also you can just buy mind up for almost nothing in the black market.

So I switched up my teams one last time, one team per quest:

Quest 1: Team Sass - Duran, Hawk, Angela. This team is rocking big attitudes and big hair. Duran and Angela will go light, Hawk will go dark. The light classes will give me some options for heal and support at the second class change, but I'd love to pair Grand Divina with Ninja Master and just spam low MP sudden cast spells all day. Paladin or Arch Mage may be required though for Anti-magic to support Hawk's jutsus.

Quest 2: Team Spirit - Kevin, Lise, Carlie. This team holds it together with strong fundamentals. Kevin and Lise will go light, Carlie will go dark. Again the light classes will give me options for heal and support. Carlie will almost certainly go Necromancer to pair with Lise's stat-up spells, so I'm thinking God Hand for Kevin for the missing Saint Saber (especially if I can multi-target it plus Heal Light with the Whitelight Ring).

Quest 3: The Dream Team: Lise, Kevin, Angela. This team is the team I've always wanted to try but never had the motivation until this mod. Kevin will go light, Lise and Angela will go dark. I'm thinking Dragon Master, Warrior Monk, and Rune Master. This team will be very strong in the elements and excel in both physical and magical damage, with Lise having the option to work as more of a caster.

One question: Did you ever consider giving the Wanderer single-target Heal Light and Tinkle Rain? Or Moon and Leaf Sabers? All of the other characters have at least one Heal Light option: Duran, Kevin, and Carlie at the first class change, and Lise and Angela at the second. This would add Hawk to that second group with a limited healing option at the second class change and make him stronger in terms of basic support. It seems that the Wanderer, even spamming Half Vanish with his final weapon at a 320 damage cap, may have difficulty excelling in terms of damage, and his support options, while useful in many situations, don't cover the fundamentals: healing, stat recovery, buffs/debuffs, and sabers. Increasing his viability as a support character would make him much more useful on many teams, as you wouldn't need to make room for an extra healer. 

Not really, I'd say he's good enough as is.

At his basic he's already a top tier fighter, basically #2 after Kevin.
3/4 classes are basically Angela light in terms of nuking.
Ninja Master can turn FenrirKnight Lise into a decent healer if both have their final weapons.
The dark classes are already an easy pick for most teams as they cover debuffs and lots of damage options.

I've a strict no for further characters to have both heal and anti-magic at the same time - that's paladin's niche - so no for Wanderer.
And rogue... he'd just be another Grand Divina.

Not everyone needs to cover all the fundamentals, that's what the rest of the team is for.
Wanderer Hawk covers more niche tactics.
Have you ever considered casting Lunatic on your team? Try it against certain bosses that love their fraction damage moves.
Or the opposite, Life Booster on the boss - helps with reaching the 320 damage cap for Half Vanish and has some affects on enemy AI;
ever had trouble with a boss that has a desperation move that heals him above the threshold and then lets him do it again *cough*black rabite*cough*
you can use Life Booster to trigger that move when you are ready, not the boss.

Admittedly I never knew what to do with Rogue - tons of unique spells, most stuck as ST because of animations with at most a debuff making him just another Nightblade.
Probably the hardest class to include in a team.
Though Heal Light just wouldn't fit into the class image I think.

If I "had" the option I'd have taken Heal Light from Kevin - but there's little else that fits his classes, so we're stuck at 5/6.

You're right that not everyone needs to cover the fundamentals. It just seems that with so many fundamentals to cover, including healing, buffs/debuffs, physical damage, magic damage, elemental damage, and dark/light damage, it's rarely the case that two party members cover enough of them to completely free up the third. I actually see this as more of a problem with Duran and Kevin than with Hawk: in how many cases is going dark with either of them a better option than going light, seeing that their light classes get healing (at the first class change!) and (in general) better buffs? Going light with these guys frees up other would-be healers to go dark, often enabling them to cover more of the fundamentals like magic damage or debuffs. I'm not suggesting that it's never beneficial for Duran or Kevin to go dark, or for Hawk to go light, it just seems that there are fewer groups for which, considering the entire course of the game, this actually makes sense.

I'm just thinking about this from a design perspective. How does the game entice players to explore other options? And I also get that choosing the best strategy is not always the main point: Duelist, Dervish, and Rogue just look like fun classes to play. Mostly, I want you to know that I appreciate your work and vision with this mod. I loved Secret of Mana as a teenager, and the sequel always held so much promise in terms of gameplay and mechanics. Getting a chance to play this and talk theory with the (re)designer is a total thrill for me :-)

You kinda forgot anti-magic and aura wave in your list of things to cover.

I think my design idea was more that there is so much stuff you "need" that it is impossible to cover everything all the time.
And then have the player play around whatever they had to leave out.

Duelist fits relatively easy into teams with his sabers, aura wave, anti magic and strong mt tech.
For me the hardest classes to fit into a team were dark Kevin (mostly dark Duran with a bit more damage and less spells), dark Lise (there are a lot of alternatives with the full debuff set but light Lise has the only full buff set, so light is usually better) and light Hawk (usually too niche for what I want to do).

I'll be honest; for me SD3 held promise but never delivered on it.
If you play normally and don't go out of your way to grind you probably won't see the second class change.
Half the options are bugged (e.g. energy ball, wolf form, saber spells) or downright detrimental (Lv2/3 techs, damage spells trigger counter attacks and are barely more damaging than swinging a stick once)
and balance... needs some work (damage scaling for dual-hitters; you can debuff bosses to deal negligible damage but run into endgame ninja master and your party can randomly eat 500+ damage multitarget damage before you can ready your weapon).
And the thing where in battle you're unable to move faster than a snail while enemies clearly can...

You are right about Duelist (there is still a chance I may choose him for my first team with dark Hawk and light Angela, especially now that I see that Grand Divina's final weapon can give me Saint Saber via Holy Ball). Duran in general is much more fun in your mod with strong and weak slash options and counter attacks, though I haven't played far enough to see how much more useful Level 3 techs have become.

For light Hawk, I've been thinking that throwing Moon and Leaf sabers on the Ranger would give him an attractive early niche (HP and MP recovery) to balance against the Ninja's (debuff options). It would also fit with light Hawk's Moon/Leaf theme.

Dark Kevin is more difficult, but perhaps more buffs or debuffs is the way to go.

SD3 delivered on it's basic battle engine and overall design ideas; it's the details and execution that were underdeveloped or rushed. Which is why your mod is so exciting! (Unfortunately there's not much at this point that can be done to fix the stories, which could have been MUCH more interesting in terms dark/light branching or character interactions.)

Sorry but both light Hawks are at the 12 spell cap - I can't add additional spells for them.

So, I'm nearing my first class change and I need to make a decision. My plans for my final two teams are pretty set, but my first team of Duran, Hawk, and Angela has some options. Please rank and/or let me know what you think about these potential teams:

1) Paladin, Ninja Master, Grand Divina: Two healers, two MT buffs, all debuffs with Anti-Magic to support them, and two instant casters with Level 1 MT spells, one hitting physical defense and the other magical defense. The strategy would be to spam these spells. No Aura Wave to support the Paladin though, and Speed Up ends up being be wasted on my two instant casters, except for Double Spell.

2) Lord, Ninja Master, Arch Mage: Similar to previous with one less healer and same buffs and debuffs, but now Speed Up will better serve Arch Mage with her Level 2 spells. Arch Mage can support Lord with Aura Wave on bosses, but her time might be better spent casting damage spells. Ninja Master and Arch Mage MT casting now staggered which may be better (or worse) to keep enemies back. No Turn Undead on non-undead enemies but I never loved the over-level strategies anyways.

3) Paladin, Wanderer, Arch Mage: One healer, no debuffs before the second class change, and no instant MT support, but now the two most important buffs and debuffs that don't need Anti-Magic support, including Mind Up to support Arch Mage, and two classes with Aura Wave to support Paladin so the more important damage spell caster can keep at her task. Also two classes with Anti-Magic for more caster options or group treatment if necessary. The ability to inflict poison status should also be useful in several situations.

4) Lord, Wanderer, Arch Mage: Similar to previous but now three buffs and three debuffs. Speed Up will serve both Arch Mage and Wanderer well. Aura Wave on Lord will be less useful for groups but more useful on bosses and single enemies I'd prefer to snipe. There is a lot of skill overlap here but the skills are all good, and the team synergy seems strong.

Right now, my preference leans towards 2) or 4), with 1) behind and 3) in the rear. The immediate decision I have to make is whether to make Hawk light or dark at the first class change. I'm intrigued by the Wanderer's potential, and Mind Up would be great, but losing the debuffs at the first class change and MT Shuriken at the second seems like a lot to give up.

It seems like your overthinking this?
Unless you're playing on hard the differences shouldn't matter too much.
Just go with your intuition.

If you're really unsure - go with 1 and you essentially can't die with all the healing, imo a good way to earn some play experience.

Thanks for the advice!

What is the Dervish's Berserker wolf form, by the way? Is it a buffed version of his normal wolf form, or is it an entirely new color palette? Is it on automatic attack or no spells or techs?

It is just more atk, less def.

Just an update, I ended up scrapping those teams and simplifying my approach with just two teams I think have more creative potential:

1) Paladin/Lord, Wanderer, Necromancer: I'm really intrigued by the damage potential of the Necromancer. Her skills are generally high MP, but Paladin can support that with Magic Shield, or Lord with Speed Up in case I decide to give her Rune Earrings. Necromancer also supplies Paladin's missing Tinkle Rain and gives another saber option. Wanderer can support Necromancer with Mind Up and Paladin/Lord with Aura Wave. If it looks like I'll need extra physical damage, Aura Wave will work great with the Lord's final weapon and level 2/3 techs. Power Up is missing but Paladin/Lord can use seeds. Also, both Wanderer and Necromancer have Half Vanish for high MP defense battles.

2a) Vanadis, Dervish, Arch Mage: This team has everything except elemental sabers: healing, all buffs/debuffs, Anti-Magic, Aura Wave, strong physical attack, strong magical attack with element diversity. I was never a fan of Vanadis's summon, but if Chibikko gives you experience now, it might actually be useful. In fact, this team may be TOO good, in which case I may go with:

2b) Dragon Master/Fenrir Knight, God Hand/Warrior Monk, Rune Master: Angela would have better sniping ability here and elemental sabers to support the team. Kevin would get Heal Light at the first class change. Dragon Master may be the better choice here for Anti-Magic, but Rune Master may be able to snipe most enemies that need it, and Fenrir Knight's final weapon looks amazing for support. God Hand for Tinkle Rain or Warrior Monk for Mind Up, whichever seems more useful by my second class change. (I also considered a strategy based around Death Hand's final weapon and Lise's debuffs, but in the end it seemed impractical and maybe a little slow when Kevin could just be using his Power Up'ed/sabered level 1 tech instead.) The disadvantages here would be no Protect Up or Speed Up and no Aura Wave, but I can buy seeds for the buffs if necessary and Kevin in general seems fine with his level 1 tech. Also, no Pink Typhoon. In the end, this team has more holes than the previous, but it may have better damage potential and may ultimately be more fun to play.

Thanks for your helpful responses and insight. Hopefully by the first class change I'll have decided which 2) to go with.

Chibikko gives exp but not the value of the original enemy; the state basically erases the original enemy and spawns a new one.
In vanilla this enemy type had 0% exp rate, here it has about 40%.

I've got some questions about your mod's mechanics:
1) If you cast Sleep on enemies, will it lower their aggro?
2) Lord's ultimate weapon (Sigmund) has a description, "Lv2/3 tech gets attack bonus based on target's attack and enables counterable state." What does the note "enables counterable state" mean?
3) Will Evil Shaman's ultimate weapon (Juggernaut) and the Red Moon Horn accessory lower even bosses' stats?

1) no

2) it activates the timer during which a Lv1 tech would count as a counter

3) yes

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

1) no

I see, I misinterpreted the part in the change overview file that said:

Quote

aggro bonus is negated by death, petrification, snowman and sleep

Do you have any practical strategies for using Sleep Flower? For the first 3 playthroughs of Sin of Mana, the spell has been utterly useless, and I have never found any use for it.

If it is the change I think it is, that refers to Duran's shields - they do not provide increased aggro while he is incapacitated.

No special strategies - just use it to disable some troublesome enemies and then take the pack on 1 by 1 or profit from the increased crit chance on the waking-up hit;
also, no boss is vulnerable to it - there were some sleepwalkers >.>

57 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

also, no boss is vulnerable to it - there were some sleepwalkers >.>

there is one boss who is 1/3rd vulnerable to it ^^

What does "spell upgrade: curse" do? I apologize if I missed this somewhere in the documentation.

hmmm...

sorry, forgot - I just know it was quite useful.

Are the accessories that grant weapon element function the same as saber spells, i.e. do they increase damage of spells cast from that element? (I tested this and it seems to work.)

No, they shouldn't. They only give the element on a non-saber'd physical attack.

That's interesting, I seemed to get a 10% damage boost with and only with Fireball when I equipped the fire-element one I got from the Dwarf Village. I will test in more detail later.

Also, can self-target spells, like the Magus's Mind Up or the Rogue's Speed Up, be upgraded to multitarget?

Yes, they can be upgraded.

Those were mostly meant as a "accessoire tax".
For those classes no additional spell was too weak but a normal single target spell a bit too good (relative to what the whole class can do);
but multi-target at the cost of one accessoire slot - sure, why not.

So before I decide on Duran's final light class, I'd like to ask what kind of non-elemental damage Turn Undead does with the Paladin's final weapon. Spell level? Fixed? (I can't imagine it's 999.)

Also, what's the max bonus damage for the Lord's final weapon? It looks like it would be great for boss battles.

Turn Undead against non-undead with the weapon does damage based on INT, PIE, level and target m.def.

Lord's weapon adds 1/4 of the target's atk, so just imagine that you have 100-120 more effective attack at the end.
E.g. Bigieu has about 500 attack value. Others more towards 400-ish.

Sounds good. One more technical question, this time about spells that hit with multiple elements, like Rainbow Dust. How do those multiple elements interact with enemy resistances and weaknesses? Do the multipliers stack? For instance, if the enemy happens to be weak against one element and strong against another, will the multiplier be 1.5 x 0.5 = 0.75? Or if the enemy is weak against all four elements after a Dragon Master hits them with an empowered Anti-Magic, will the multiplier be 1.5^4 = 5.065? This would be an absolutely killer combination.

They stack multiplicatively BUT you can only get one case of weakness and one case of resistance.

So if the target resists all four elements it deals the same damage as if it resists only one element.

So one quick question, because I've yet to try these: do SPI and INT weapons hit against magical or physical defense? This could be a way around monsters with high physical defense, especially for characters like Hawk who's magic hits against physical defense.

They are still physical.
To deal more damage to physical resistant enemies you may want the weapons with "ignore physical resistance/immunity" effect.

Ok after more than a year I decided to finally continue my playthrough of this mod, so previously I was stuck on Sub-Zero Fields couldn't make any progress there, so I follow Serafie's tip and tried the Desert area, effectivly mobs are easier there (except this goddamn Cockabird and their petrification fuck them), so manage to make my way through Bill and Ben were ridiculous Earth Jutsu and Speed Up on everyone does make dodge their regular attack occur more often but they still does crap ton of damage, if they decide to spam Thunder Jutsu or their Special Physical attaque well no way to win, so yeah RNG fight basically and when they split the fight became impossible, but throwable item exist so manage to kill one of them with this and kill the last one normally. Valley of Flame's ennemies are much stronger but thankfully no boss fight in this dungeon, so I got the Fire Spirit, guess the abilities he grant will be usefull for later. Since I'm LV37 I might grind to LV38 and get the second class now.

EDIT : Well got the second class change so I will go with Ninja Master, Bishop and Star Lancer. Don't know if that will do I will see.

Machine Golem 2

Goddamn these freaking Golem good thing I could reduce their Magic and Accuracy with Hawk, buff speed, strength and Defense with Lise and apply Thunder Saber with Carlie (which after that just spam Holy Ball), these guys do love to spam their spell and almost always crit, thankfully my team tank better now so by keep an eye on the HP I can handle their damage, Hawk being the main Damage Dealer so yeah pretty intense fight.

EDIT 2 : Well I guess this is finally becoming a little more manageable, now that Lise and Hawk can AoE I can properly use debuff and buffs a lot easier which help a lot, also Lise's summon Mandruke is quite good for Mob Fight, Carlie with the saber can contribute and Holy Ball and Saint Beam aren't bad for damage. Now I think I'm gonna focus on Critical with Hawk got the Elf Dagger that increase Crit Rate and Crit Damage, he learned Detect which allow to crit more (sadly One Target still good for bosses) and Lise just learn Energy Ball. 

Lugar

So just beat Lugar, he hit like a truck fortunatly Water Jutsu (Attack Down), Shuriken (Hit Rate Down), Protect and Speed Up help survive he is insanely resistant to physical tough (even with Power Up and Thunder Jutsu) but magic work well so Carlie's spell and Lise's summon does good damage (especially after Mind Up).

Gildervine

Welp Gildervine down, honnestly that was kind of a relaxing fight after the three previous bosses, doesn't mean that's a walk in the park tough, the first phase is the hardest because of his minions they are way more troublesome than he is, Sleep and Poison makes things harder, the second phase is easier cause we have only one ennemy to look out for, his damage output is not very high (statut ailment are his main offensive here), so a good amount of Puipui Grass and Tinkle Rain really help in this fight.

So basically since he is a plant, I theorize he would be weak to Fire, and I think I was right so Flame Saber (from Carlie), Power Up (from Lise), Energy Ball on Hawk, Thunder Jutsu to reduce Defense, Detect to make it more vulnerable to Crit and Hawk does wonderfull damage here (and Lise does good to). 
To tank him I put Protect Up, Speed Up and Reduce his Magic with Fire Jutsu (I didn't use Water Jutsu maybe I was wrong but since he is a plant I thought Water Jutsu wouldn't work), so for the First phase I buff myself and debuff him, with Hawk I focus on the boss (except when using Justus) while Carlie does the AoE with Holy Ball (I prefer Holy Ball to Saint Beam cause Holy Ball's cast time is way faster and it can be AoE) if she has the MP for it Lise's Madruke can be good here to, once we hit the second phase no more mobs and he put counter Magic so I focus on healing with Carlie and keep attacking physically with Lise and Hawk.

So I have just defeated my first God Beast Mispolm but I got some question (gonna put on spoiler in case it reveals some intended mechanic for this boss) :

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

So I have just defeated my first God Beast Mispolm but I got some question (gonna put on spoiler in case it reveals some intended mechanic for this boss) :

Yes, all of that is intended.

That is still the same as in vanilla;
each time you beat any godbeast the remaining godbeasts and their minions gain ~3 levels (2 in vanilla),
order doesn't really matter, it is up to preference.

Well, except for a few screens in the earth god beasts area - that is frozen at minimum level: map data has not enough space to hold the updated levels

In vanilla you could delay certain godbeasts for later to gain 2nd class change and maybe a few of the new spells (if you were willing to grind), e.g. if you had dark Angela as she only has Lv1 spells and dark force before that but could gain Lv2-3 spells afterward.

But you should have every spell here by the time you reach the first godbeast.

I'd advise you to check if any one of the god beast areas looks like a good/comfortable exp grind spot in case you need it later and keep that boss for last;
when you beat a godbeast all mobs of that area stay gone.

Also if you need money, the wind godbeast gives the most gold but least exp out of the pack.

Well I got to the Moon God Beast got totally reckt, I figure his mechanic but don't have the tool to counter it, I need money so following your advice I got fight the Wind one and.... :

OK beat the Wind God Beast legit this time.... goddamn took me 42 minutes to beat this fucker, he wasn't even that hard (except the last phase cause I forgot to put a Specter's Eye in my inventory to dispell his Thunder Saber), he just won't die cause for some reason 75% of the time my party member weren't attacking him for I don't know what reason (and his high evasion), and I had to took control of Carlie (or Hawk when Carlie was full on MP) most of the time as I was using her as my main healer (this fight is just to long to rely on items) with Heal Light (improve by her weapon) and using the Ring that allow her to steal MP (combine with Magic Shield) to be able to cast as soon as needed so I need to attack with her (and as I mention for some reason the IA wasn't attacking most of the time), so Yeah that was kind of a war of attrition. And I did him as the second God Beast, I don't even want to imagine how much time it would have take if I had fight him later.

Dangaard has the "nice" property that he basically moves within 1-2 pixel of your max range but just 1-2 pixel outside of AI pathfinding.
That's nothing I can fix.

Ok got it, now I'm on the next one Dolan and in all seriously I haven't a single clue as how to beat this boss :

I can't believe this my emulator just glitch on me and erase all my save files, thankfully I had a save state after I defeated the Wind God Beast so I didn't lost that much progress, but that mean I have to do that shitty fight against Dolan (and the grind I had put for it) AGAIN..... I think I'm curse with this boss, out of all the bosses of this game, this had to happen on the one I dislike the most so far. I genually think I'm gonna put the game on Easy or even Wuss in order to speed up the grinding and then go back on hard to defeat him.

58 minutes ago, Nesouk said:

I can't believe this my emulator just glitch on me and erase all my save files

Which emulator are you using? I've never had that kind of problem since I stopped using ZSNES

Snes9x it's the first time it ever happen to me.

Weird, maybe it was some bad interaction with something else you were running? When I had that problem it was with ZSNES netplay desyncing back in the day (we crashed during the final boss and lost the save file, kick in the balls), but I have no idea how it would happen on single player.

Hello, I have registered exclusively to say that I love this mod, and I'd like to ask the author if he intends to address an issue that while minor, has bothered me for quite a long time.
(thanks for all the bugfixes by the way, they are amazing).

The issue in question has to do with Kevin's dark classes. I always suspected Dervish and Death Hand were reversed position wise regarding Kevin's class tree in the status screen and also the palettes were swapped around.
To substantiate my suspicions I ran a few tests and what I found is that both in the unpatched (Japanese) and English patched rom the palettes are indeed wrong for the sprites (they remain correct in both cases in the status screen itself.

As for the dark class branches being wrong, I actually found proof today in a table contained here: https://wiki.superfamicom.org/seiken-densetsu-3 
considering the format of the class index in the game's memory, it's pretty clear that Dervish is Dark-Light and Death Hand is Dark-Dark as I always suspected.

What I'd like to ask is if this is fixable in your hack and if so, if you'd be willing to integrate it.

I appreciate your time and keep up the good work.

Also post my videos of these fights if anyone interested :

Mispolm
Dangaard
Dolan

12 hours ago, Red_Shine said:

As for the dark class branches being wrong, I actually found proof today in a table contained here: https://wiki.superfamicom.org/seiken-densetsu-3 
considering the format of the class index in the game's memory, it's pretty clear that Dervish is Dark-Light and Death Hand is Dark-Dark as I always suspected.

I don't see proof there, mind pointing it out?
All the game data I've seen has been in the regular order
Godhand, Warrior Monk, Death Hand, Dervish

But then again, what is the Light/Dark categorization? Ingame there's no mention of that concept, it only exists outside of it.

3 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

I don't see proof there, mind pointing it out?
All the game data I've seen has been in the regular order
Godhand, Warrior Monk, Death Hand, Dervish

But then again, what is the Light/Dark categorization? Ingame there's no mention of that concept, it only exists outside of it.

Well, I believe the manual mentions it, and even if we are to discredit the manual, the classes on the lower branch have a clearly more "evil" theming to themselves: Death Hand's name and weapons (Skull Dissect) also the way the Duelist dresses, the fact Fenrir is the god devouring wolf during ragnarok and so on.

In any case, allow me to try to explain the table.

Let me use Duran as an example that follows the correct order that you pointed out.

The table data structure is as follows:

Class family is a value from 00 to 05, with 00 being the Fighter classes, 01 being the Grappler classes, and so on.

Class changes is 00 for the base class, 01 for a second-level class, and 02 for a third-level class.

Light-dark scale can range between 00 and 03, with 00 being light-light and 03 being dark-dark.

Fighter                00-00-00           Fighter
Fighter                00-01-00           Knight                    3-step cut
Fighter                00-01-01           Gladiator                Whirlwind Sword
Fighter                00-02-00           Paladin                   Flashing Sword
Fighter                00-02-01           Lord                       Magic Circle
Fighter                00-02-02           Swordmaster           Vacuum Blade
Fighter                00-02-03           Duelist                    Eruption Sword

This is Duran's table. Notice how dark class branches increment the last value with each class change (even if you don't care for the name of the branches, please bear with me for the sake of argument). Dashes aren't present on the table, I just added them for legibility.

Now for Kevin here's what you have:

Grappler              01-00-00           Grappler
Grappler              01-01-00           Monk              Whilwind Kick, Tornado Throw    
Grappler              01-01-01           Bashkar           Water-Moon Slice, Bastard Slam
Grappler              01-02-00           God Hand        Byakko Shockwave, Stardust Bomb         
Grappler              01-02-01           Warrior Monk   Genbu 100 Kick, Blow Impact
Grappler              01-02-02           Dervish           Suzaku Sky Dance, Veritubach (wrong translation, should be BTB, Belly to back, as in the throw move).
Grappler              01-02-03           Death Hand     Seiryuu Death Fist, Dead Crush

The index of the first value went up by 1 because I assume Kevin is the second character in memory. Notice that to match Duran's table, Death Hand should be the last class of the "low" branch.

A few more points of interest: Dervish and Death Hand have their palettes wrong, they are swapped around when you compare them to the status screen art, which would make zero sense unless something was afoot. (I can try to supply screen shots of this if you'd like).

Also, at least in vanilla SD3, Death Hand is clearly stronger, while Dervish has more survivability due to HP sapping saber magic. In terms of raw damage though Death Hand wins out, which doesn't match up with any of the other characters.

I'm not trying to convince you, but I honestly think the developers made a mistake.
            

I just think the table on that side is wrong,
everywhere in code I've looked it is by order of ids:
Godhand stuff
Warrior Monk stuff
Deathhand stuff
Dervish stuff

I think it'd help me more if you told me explicitly what you want changed.
Then I may look into it, no promises.

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

I just think the table on that side is wrong,
everywhere in code I've looked it is by order of ids:
Godhand stuff
Warrior Monk stuff
Deathhand stuff
Dervish stuff

 

I think it'd help me more if you told me explicitly what you want changed.
Then I may look into it, no promises.

Well, even if you aren't able to check it out, I appreciate the fact you've been replying.
I realize this may kind of sound like wild speculation out of nowhere, but the fact remains that at the very least the Death Hand and Dervish palettes are wrong on Kevin's map sprite (Death Hand has Dervish colors and vice versa, they look fine on the status screen though).

So if it was possible to revert the palette mix up, it would be great. If you were to go an extra mile I'd be extremely happy if you could change the class branching on the status screen for Kevin to read:

                Monk - God Hand

                         - Warrior Monk

Grappler --
                  Baskhar - Dervish

                               - Death Hand

Which I believe is the intended class branch order. I know it's a pretty nitpicky request, but there you have it.

Never noticed about the swapped palletes, but Death hand not being dark-dark always bugged me out as well. It's purely aesthetic, but would be cool if it doesn't take too much work to fix

1 minute ago, Kei said:

Never noticed about the swapped palletes, but Death hand not being dark-dark always bugged me out as well. It's purely aesthetic, but would be cool if it doesn't take too much work to fix

Haha I'm glad I'm not the only one that things so.

Ok think I've got a glitch I was fighting the God Beast of Earth, fight was going normally but then the boss completly freeze and stop doing anything for the entire fight giving me basically a completly free win, unlike the god beast of wind however I didn't put any statut effect on him so I don't have a single clue about how this happen.

EDIT : Well beat him without the glitch this time :

Might be one of those "too long ago since you reloaded ingame" memory leak bugs?

3 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

Might be one of those "too long ago since you reloaded ingame" memory leak bugs?

I don't think, I barely use save state, and had just load the game (with a normal save).

HMM got a softlock in the Ancient Ruin of Light, basically Lise and Carlie are froze in their casting preparation stance, their a bunch of number for damage around them, I theorize that's the Spiked armor type that results into to many information the game could handle, never happen before tough.

So Lightgazer down :

it's been well over a year, is development for this done? or should i keep on waiting for a update?

I'm not working on this anymore.

12 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

I'm not working on this anymore.

Just a little thing I've noticed on my last playthrough, the spell upgrade: Sudden ring doesn't seem to be reducing cast time at all, but it does still 0 your MP.

I think it has more to do with the game itself than the accessories effect, sometime I noticed the castime for was varying a lot sometime spell are casted almost instantly sometime they take a while, same with Techs, I think it's just the game having trouble to load. 

only supportive spells like buffs sabers and debuffs, except black curse can be casted instantly ^^

It also works with statut effects spell (Sleep Flower, Body Change...etc...), but in any case for me the Sudden Upgrade is useless anyway the only accessory that gives it to you makes the spell cost all your MP, and it is a late game accessory if I'm not mistaken not really worth it, I say increase the stat that allow faster cast-time, equip equipment that reduce the cast-time and Speed Up and the castime is already non-existent (when the game doesn't have trouble loading), and on that note Carlie, Hawk and Lise all 3 have access to weapon that use the same stat that the one that reduce their castime making STR potentially irrelevant for them even if you plan to use physical damage with them ^^.

Sorry, I posted that in a hurry before I forgot about it and didn't put much substance into it so it came through as a bit of a non-sequitur. I was traveling but I'm home now.

Anyway, Praetarius, I know you're not working on this anymore, but I'd been using my break to play this with friends so I'll just relay what we found so far and you'll at least have the feedback. Team is Lord, Rune Master, Dragonmaster. We're up to the first go at the Holyland, so the halfway point. We will continue this when possible.

• Duran's shield aggro mechanic has huuuuuge strategic value and completely changed some fights, like Bill&Ben. I'd recommend also giving Lise access to them so the effect is less exclusive.
• Dragonmaster player felt severely underwhelmed with a crit build even rushing points into luck and switched to tech gear. Maybe ties into the next point if it's a case where it performs better at the end of the game.
• A lot of gear available in the first part seem to only be useful for the latter half, like the elemental and status resistances (The only status resistance that sees use is Petrify because of Gorva, really). Maybe switch them with some crucial build gear that is only available in the second half, like cast time reduction and crit bonuses
• Speaking of Gorva, while not too hard per se, that fight does take an abnormal amount of time even with Angela casting. Melee only teams should be even worse, given its high evasion. I recommend giving it very low physical defense to properly reward hitting it when it's within range.
• One mentioned Nightblade and Ninja Master's techs seem switched around, thematically speaking. Think I also said that once.
• Angela player has been accounting for most of the team's damage even if not hitting a weakness, Lise player was frustrated that despite equipping for physical damage, fights were defined almost entirely by the spell going off. I believe physical attacks could stand to be brought at least a little closer.
• Bill&Ben round 2 died without splitting up

47 minutes ago, Valenhil said:

Duran's shield aggro mechanic has huuuuuge strategic value and completely changed some fights, like Bill&Ben. I'd recommend also giving Lise access to them so the effect is less exclusive.

That's honestly something I wanted to do - specifically for dark Lise; but it isn't possible with how shops work.
They are limited to 12 items at once; if the game loads 13+ slots it'll glitch around a lot.
Any item can only have one condition.
So "have Duran and/or Lise in the party" is not possible to set.

If you have any idea how I should set shops up for that, we may talk.

52 minutes ago, Valenhil said:

A lot of gear available in the first part seem to only be useful for the latter half, like the elemental and status resistances (The only status resistance that sees use is Petrify because of Gorva, really). Maybe switch them with some crucial build gear that is only available in the second half, like cast time reduction and crit bonuses

I wanted to have my basics covered, second half items are supposed to be heavily specialized stuff.
This way I have less to worry about when I throw everything and the kitchen sink at you.

54 minutes ago, Valenhil said:

Speaking of Gorva, while not too hard per se, that fight does take an abnormal amount of time even with Angela casting. Melee only teams should be even worse, given its high evasion. I recommend giving it very low physical defense to properly reward hitting it when it's within range.

maybe

57 minutes ago, Valenhil said:

One mentioned Nightblade and Ninja Master's techs seem switched around, thematically speaking. Think I also said that once.

I disagree, if only on the grounds that it is consistent with the enemies techs (B/B are ninjamaster and use shadowdive just like NM-Hawk, nightblades use split image slice like NB-Hawk)
and in vanilla it works so that ninjamaster has his MT option in spells and nightblade his in the Lv3 tech while the other stuff is single target.

1 hour ago, Valenhil said:

I believe physical attacks could stand to be brought at least a little closer.

and how would I do that?
the big problem is how much more buffable physical is compared to spells.
power up + def down is the same as mind up + m.def down
but did you include sabers? only +10% for magic but +10% for physical and another potential +50% for weakness hits that didn't exist before
energy ball?
aura wave?

also magic deals more high number but rarely occuring damage
while physical is low to medium damage but all the time.
how do you compare that?
or is that just the same problem as with Duran's recovery? purely psychological

45 minutes ago, Valenhil said:

Bill&Ben round 2 died without splitting up

You can perform the same in vanilla, for both B&B fights.
The condition is HP below half but you can burn that down before the game is able to execute that action.

3 hours ago, Valenhil said:

Angela player has been accounting for most of the team's damage even if not hitting a weakness, Lise player was frustrated that despite equipping for physical damage, fights were defined almost entirely by the spell going off. I believe physical attacks could stand to be brought at least a little closer.

Hmm I disagree here in my current playthrough I gear Hawk to be my main Physical Damage Dealer and OH Boy does he does the job very well, granted I use a Crit Build but even without with the exception of when the ennemy resist or is immune to physical he does good damage with his attacks and LV1 Tech, and if you manage to found the ennemy weakness, set the day you are fighting to the one of the corresponding spirit and use the corresponding Sabers and you will do good damage by the time caster is casting + the animation of the spell (and if you want big numbers Crit can happen and LV2 and 3 taking the sabers elemental into the equation can do some huge numbers).

3 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

That's honestly something I wanted to do - specifically for dark Lise; but it isn't possible with how shops work.
They are limited to 12 items at once; if the game loads 13+ slots it'll glitch around a lot.
Any item can only have one condition.
So "have Duran and/or Lise in the party" is not possible to set.

If you have any idea how I should set shops up for that, we may talk.

I guess you could do away with the status resistance shields, since those are already covered by other accessories, and make half the shields for Lise, and Half for Duran?

3 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

I disagree, if only on the grounds that it is consistent with the enemies techs (B/B are ninjamaster and use shadowdive just like NM-Hawk, nightblades use split image slice like NB-Hawk)
and in vanilla it works so that ninjamaster has his MT option in spells and nightblade his in the Lv3 tech while the other stuff is single target.

I did say "Thematically speaking", as in how you don't expect a Pyromancer to start throwing Ice spells. A Nightblade is a class halfway between the Rogue and Mage points of the Warrior-Rogue-Mage triangle that's characterized by using shadow magic or illusions related to the cover of darkness, their shadow, or the target's shadow to attack, which is exactly what Shadow Dive is. Since I don't think either class is too dependent on having a ST or AoE tech, I'd say they could be switched around for that thematic consistency.

3 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

and how would I do that?
the big problem is how much more buffable physical is compared to spells.
power up + def down is the same as mind up + m.def down
but did you include sabers? only +10% for magic but +10% for physical and another potential +50% for weakness hits that didn't exist before
energy ball?
aura wave?

also magic deals more high number but rarely occuring damage
while physical is low to medium damage but all the time.
how do you compare that?
or is that just the same problem as with Duran's recovery? purely psychological

I'm comparing to angela's spells that were not hitting a weakness. Also, physical attacks can miss. I was playing a Duran completely ignoring physical stats and in full Defense gear, so I didn't mind being a meatshield just walling the enemies away from the team, but since the Dragon Master was fully equiped for physical offense, I guess he's not wrong to expect to have a larger impact on the fight, but frankly speaking, he could be equipped the same as me and fights would still go the same way: the spells were accounting for too much of the damage. While it's alright for a tanky build, I don't think a physical powerhouse should be feeling they're just buying time for a spellcast.

Even accouting for the fact that Duran naturally does more damage than Lise, I think physical attack gear(of all types) could stand to have more of an impact to widen that gap.

But accouting for Nesouk's feedback, I can assume crit builds just take a while to start showing results.

I'd also like to know if that Lise has as much STR investment (or relevant stat for alternate stat weapon) as Angela had INT level ups.
Or what type of weapon light? heavy?
...there's too many variables...

Yes, he was consistently raising STR and Luck while using the crit-focused gear. They were both maxed before both class changes. After the second class changed he switched to the 2x tech weapon and accessory and tech damage up helm, and felt an improvement over the crit build, but Angela was still way ahead. But I don't feel angela was doing too much damage, only that the way we were, the Lise was risking take way more damage for no real reason. He really could just switch to defense gear and we wouldn't progress all that slower, if at all.

I think it stands to be said that standing still for casting turns into an advantage when the enemies are all drawn far away from the caster by the shield's aggro effect, while the melee hitters still risk getting hit even with the shield

For physical damage I think AGL should be raise in order to avoid the ennemy dodging your hits, Speed Up and Speed Down can help to. 

All that being said I think Hawk is better for Damage than Lise, for Crit Build Hawk in Ninja Master also has the Detect ability that reduce the target resistance to Crit Rate and Damage, on top of gear and Energy Ball, plus Hawk has the Double hit so that's 2 chance to crit (same with his LV1 Tech), admitadly I use Lise as a Star Lancer more as a support/tank than for damage which means I didn't increase her STR (tough as I said I max out her INT and use the spear that use INT instead of STR) that much and didn't touch her Luck so I can't say how a fully offensive oriented Lise could turn off.

Well, I guess I could increase physical power a bit.

Though I'm afraid how that'll turn out, 700+ attack in max attack gear is already possible (normal ends more around 400) and very stupid.

I don't think increasing power would be a good idea plus we are talking for Lise and Hawk, but what about Kevin's Werewolf form (which is even stronger in Dervish) ? Or Duran's Duelist that get a innate boost for his LV3 Tech ?

Well, I am speaking relatively. Two points, in this case:

How does your the physical character's damage compare to your dedicated caster's, and do your fights go much slower when that character is not equipped for physical offense?

Those were my observations. Riesz was not doing enough damage above a full defense duran (not putting a single point in STR, even), and too much below a dark angela, but both those characters feel right in the damage they do so I thought bringing only the gear dedicated to physical offense a little bit up would be a good idea. Individual issues would require individual tuning, but I don't think there's any reason to assume this at this point, and praetarius has a better view on that anyway so whatever conclusions he reaches is probably better.

Do you have numbers for me how different the damage between the 3 was?

The problem with boosting phys offense gear is just how much it can escalate between if you stack "nothing" and "everything".
Magic has just magic up, m.def down, saber, maybe speed up for cast time, can hit one weakness.
Physical... power up, def down, speed up, speed down, saber, energy ball, aura wave, analyze, weapon "strength",... I'm probably forgetting something.
Can potentially hit 2 weaknesses, but also be resisted on the physical side and then needs anti-magic...
And most of these are multiplicative with each other.
The problem is, most parties will have about half of that?
And that is not even getting into how simple magic gear selection is (just magic up) versus physical gear (atk up, crit up, tech up, ...)

The numbers I have now aren't as good because the Lise has been leveling only Spirit for new spells, so the disparity is even lower, but even when the Lise had max STR and the Duran close to minimal it didn't feel worth it.

Riesz has 16 STR +1 tech weapon and accessory, tech up helm, Attack armor and accessory
Duran has 17 STR, MP drain weapon, Phys Def armor and helm
Angela has Magic helm and armor

Porobin Hood

Gets hit by Duran for 26, Tech 152
Gets hit by Riesz for 36, Tech 231
Angela Explodes for 291, cast time is a bit under 3 hits from the others
Hits Duran for 41
Hits Riesz for 127

So I defeated Jagan :

OK so going through the Final Dungeon :

Tinkle rain only protects against status from basic attacks; spells are always 100% chance

I'm on Bigieu :

9 hours ago, Kei said:

Tinkle rain only protects against status from basic attacks; spells are always 100% chance

thanks for doing my job

So encounter that Black Rabbit (from what I understand he is optionnal in Vanilla here he is mandatory) :

And now stuck on the final boss :

Took him down jesus I thought he would never die :

I will write my conclusion for this mod later.

Change of topic, but I just wanted to mention how much I love the first Bill & Ben fight in this remake. After the first class change, the stat bump and MT magic upgrades make it seem like the game just got a lot easier. Genova is a pushover if you have MT Holy Ball, but then come Bill & Ben with their incessant physical attacks, Thunder Jutsus, and powerful tech chaining. If you are attempting a deathless run, this fight becomes much more difficult as you basically need to keep your HP above 75% or so to avoid any surprises.

I like the new dynamic for this fight in this remake. Previously, the ninjas could outrun and corner you, but now, you can run circles around them, which is a bit ironic in a fight against ninja bosses. I suppose this is the trick to keeping their physical attacks focused on just one teammate at a time. I've found the other most consistent way to mitigate their damage in a deathless run is physical defense armor to protect against their techs, their most powerful attacks, plus a ton of Stardust Herbs to cancel their Thunder Jutsu effects. Again ironically, Angela is my rock in this fight, as she can blast off consistent damage and keep the fight advancing at a regular pace. She is rather vulnerable during casting, but you can keep your other fighters on the other side of them and again avoid being crowded by their physical attacks, or lead or push them away if necessary.

This is one of the fights that I believe would benefit most from having two or three human players to enhance your mobility and better control the space.

For that fight I mostly wanted it to be a "mirror boss" fight for dark Hawk.
In vanilla he'll be just a thief (no class change) up against ninja masters (2 class changes up).
Here it can be fresh ninja against 2 experienced ninjas.

You may notice that Bill/Ben can no longer use fire or water jutsu at that point, which you can't have here either.
The only thing Hawk shouldn't be able to do what they can is shadow dive - and that is just a technical limitation; there's no other lv2/3 tech that works for that enemy type.
Apart from that, the options are identical:
single target thunder/earth jutsu, shuriken
double attack
triple attack ~ Hawk's L1 tech
running and cornering

Honestly, you always profit from having a human partner, the AI is just bad, especially against "small" enemies (anything player sized).

It's interesting that you thought Bill & Ben were easier than the prior bosses; I actually thought this was clearly the hardest boss battle up to this point, because of how hard and how frequently they hit (including their techs which they often end up chaining).

I've never tried this, but I wonder if it's possible to silence them with the silence weapons?

Well don't get me wrong they are definitly hard boss and took me few try, however I think previous bosses were tougher :

-Jewel Eater was hitting like a truck for the point of the game he is, and the fact that he can inflict Silence and increase his defense makes him really hard for me, this is actually one of the very few bosses I had to grind to beat (most bosses I was able to manage somehow at the LV I reach them).

-Tzenker can be extremely annoying due to the fact she can spent a lot of time out of reach which allow her to safely damage you from far away, however I assume that if I had Angela and Earth Spell maybe this fight would have been a lot easier.

-Genova is just one of the toughest boss for me, and one of the most random it all comes down to what form his add take in my playthrough if they were taking Lise apparence I was screwed due to the LV2 tech being FST, then there is MT Power Up, MT Mind Down and MT Def Down against which I had no way to properly respond at that time, like I say this is quite a random fight, I died to this guy a lot of time and when I actually beat him he and his minions were being very nice for some reason and so he went down in less than 4 minutes with a strat that I had already tried (and I didn't grind), what a troll boss.

Compare to that while they were strong I find Bill and Ben not doing as much damage as Jewel Eater for the point of the game they respectly are (not to mention that I had stack up Evasion so a lot of their hits were missing me), and for me they were more consistent than Genova.

I agree that Jewel Eater is tough for where he is. I think what makes him especially tough is that he can hit hard both magically and physically, so you have to be prepared for both. Similar to Bill & Ben, keeping your HP high is crucial. But with Bill & Ben it just seemed that those attacks come so much more quickly; I take my eyes off of Angela's HP for three seconds and lo and behold, she's down at 15%! You have to react almost instantly, and I think I ended up using at least three times as many items in my fight against Bill & Ben as with any previous boss. I would definitely rank Jewel Eater as a tough boss, though (my girlfriend lost it when I threw my controller down and yelled at the screen "This f---ing mole!").

The Genova fight can be made easier if you manage to time your MT spells and level 2 techs effectively. I usually try to control the character with a MT level 2 tech, and chain that with a MT Holy Ball when he summons a fresh batch of a-holes. As long as I keep up the attack between summons he usually goes down without too much of a problem. The nice thing about the Genova fight is that when he's putting his effort into summoning and buffing his minions, he's not focusing his attack directly on you, giving your characters not involved with the minions a chance to get some uncontested damage.

Well if we compare to Jewel Eater, I actually have the opposite feeling since at this point I had Speed Up and good Evasion equipment Bill and Ben weren't touching me that much + it's actually easier to see when they attack, while Jewel Eater I honnestly couldn't see what hit me 70% of the time, sometime he just double hit a character instantly killing it, and yeah his AoE spell were also hiting really hard and he use them more frequently than Bill and Ben were using their jutsus.

Hmm.... The problem for me with an evasion build is that if I don't pump up my physical defense, Bill & Ben's techs hit for over half my life, meaning that if they happen to target the same character, I'm done. Speed Up is an option, though Lise is way too slow at this point for the spell to be useful, especially with Earth Jutsu ready to negate it. I usually sell all my Bird's Scales for extra cash.... Maybe I'll start saving them for the early game next time!

Jewel Eater's design was meant to scare player away from being purely defensive; at the time I edited him the most common play style was "just max VIT/defense".

Tzenker was designed with getting 1 level after class change in mind as basically everyone learns something useful for the fight.
You know, use the shiny new feature you just got.
Duran: heal light or diamond saber
Kevin: heal light or ... well, it is still Kevin
Hawk: arrows or shuriken (both physical damage, one of Tzenker's weaknesses, the other being earth)
Angela: she should already have diamond missile or even learn earthquake
Charlie: heal light and/or holy ball, isn't too bad
Lise: def up or speed down

Otherwise the disparity of bosses is easily explained: I've no good guideline what the player really has at any point past Tzenker.
the most I can expect the player to really, really have after Tzenker is Lv2 techs, everything else is optional.
So I tried to hold a bit back in the early game and for the godbeasts I just said "screw it"; you should have enough money and potentially monster drops to have now access to mostly everything; so yes, hard required defense buffs and attack debuff as the bare minimum.
Honestly, hard wasn't meant for a new player. Far from it.

Gildervine though, was just a casulty, him and I have... history >.>
so I just used him to feed the player exp so that you really have 50 around the time godbeasts arrive and therefor have access to all your spells.

Quote

Honestly, hard wasn't meant for a new player. Far from it.

Yeah I realise that when I saw how clueless I was on some aspects of the overall gameplay which lead to my 1 year rage quit, but after 1 year I just say "fuck it I'm gonna finish that" ^^. At least due to being accustome with J-RPG (especially Atlus's game) I pick a team that could use all main Buffs and Debuffs, tough I choose Carlie kind of randomly as I just wanted a healer originally turns out her Sabers where much more valuable than I thought they would (especially since some fight resolve around the use of Sabers in the second part of the game) as well as Magic Shield which I found good use for, I think I had a good team for beginners like me as I was covering almost all the basics (Buffs, Debuffs, Healing, Sabers, good physical offense and decent magical offense). But overall beat this on hard while being my first time playing this game is pretty damn satisfy not gonna lie ^^.

26 minutes ago, rpschamp said:

Hmm.... The problem for me with an evasion build is that if I don't pump up my physical defense, Bill & Ben's techs hit for over half my life, meaning that if they happen to target the same character, I'm done. Speed Up is an option, though Lise is way too slow at this point for the spell to be useful, especially with Earth Jutsu ready to negate it. I usually sell all my Bird's Scales for extra cash.... Maybe I'll start saving them for the early game next time!

Honnestly I didn't know how Evasion Build would turn out, I just though for Hawk "Well he is a thief/Ninja so he must be fast and evade ^^." turns out Evasion is handy on some fights like Bill and Ben Shadow Dive was dealing a little less than half of HP thanks to Protect Up but the chance of them hitting the same character are low and hey Angel's Grail were there just in case ^^, I had realise how scales could come handy thanks to Jewel Eater (yeah him again) so after him I never sold them.

I'm trying decide on final classes for light Lise and light Angela for two teams. Two questions:

1) Does Freya return full exp if you kill the enemy outright with it, rather than first inducing chibikko?

2) Is there a damage reduction for spells cast on your own team for sabers using Grand Divina's final weapon?

1) yes, though if even 1 HP remains you get nothing and the enemy is replaced with a full-HP chibikko of the same level (or higher if you wear +monster level items)

2) yes, it should be -75%

Started a duo game now, just got out of Bucca. Team will be Rogue, Archmage, Vanadise. Since the Vanadise is the AI character, she's basically just a meatshield healbot.

Comparing this Hawk's and Angela's performance's to the previous team's Lise's and Angela's, Hawk does feel to be quite a bit closer as a damage dealer than Lise was. So now I'm inclined to say that it's Lise's jack of all stats nature that holds her down if you try to use her as a dedicated physical.

sudden is meant for support spells, see skill sheet, the affected ones are listed there

Lise is meant as a jack-of-most-trades; you can dump her into most teams and she'll easily fill holes in your skill set but she'll never excel.

On my part I started a second playthrough with Duran, Kevin and Angela as I mentionned in the other topic I did go Gladiator, Monk and Sorceress (planning to go Swordmaster, Warrior Monk and Arch Mage for second class), I just get through Bucca Island and man having AoE Evil Gate for the Cave makes it so much easier, as everything in this cave except the Slimes is weak to Dark so really this place was Angela spamming Evil Gate, with Duran covering her and doing some damage with Kevin.

I notice that globally having Duran with a Shield to make ennemies focus on him while Angela is casting and Kevin is punching everything is a really viable strategy (+ since ennemy focus on him he is more likely to hit 2 or more ennemies with the weapon that double his Tech Point it allows him to build his tech pretty fast and FST Tech is nice not gonna lie ^^), for now it looks like compare to my previous team I will have an easier time with mob fight, Bosses might more challenging tough (up to now Genova and Bill&Ben were noticably harder with this team for me)

Yeah, about the shields, would it be possible to put half of them as Lise-only after all?

The Item limit could be circumvented by keeping Duran's in Forcena, but putting Lise's in Byzel instead. Byzel has 1 armor for each and 6 accessories, so it has 3 slots open.

Removing the status resistance shields, we have exactly 3 shields for each.

hmm...
I could maybe fit 3 shields in there without removing them from Duran.
In that case 3 shields (to be decided which) would be available in Byzel if you have Lise in your party.
The loadout in Forcena would still require Duran.

So if I go with that which 3 shields would you want on Lise?
Dark classes only, light classes are good enough with MT buffs and potentially heals.
So you might have to grab them via backtracking after Tzenker or after the island expedition.

Since I don't see Star Lancer as being too overloaded with the addition of the shield, I take it the problem would be mostly Vanadise stepping on Light Duran's toes. However, since Vanadise can't AoE heal or cleanse without the Whitelight Ring, she's already pressed enough on accessories to allow it, in my opinion. Equipping both means no increased healing, for example.

You could just keep the Def/MDEF/Eva options for both, probably being worth less than the accessories that only grant those effects, or give Lise different options, perhaps one offensive, one defensive, and one caster themed, to go with her jack theme.

Aesthetically, could differentiate them by making the kite shields (Gold, Sacred, and Adamant) Duran's and the bucklers (the elementals minus Earth) Lise's. Dragon and Oath shield are ugly as sin anyway, but they could be kept in altena/deen/mintos as a gimmicky endgame shield for each.

Vanadise with shield would simply be Lord in better, and I can't do a class requirement of "any except LL".
I can only do: any, any light, any dark, LL, LD, DL, DD - exactly what you would expect from the vanilla weapon/armor distribution.

I think I'll go with 3 status protection shields otherwise Lise would get access to a def shield before Duran - which would be weird given that it is his gimmick originally.

Hmm I think Vanadis doesn't need more option, Lise's Light Classes are already the only class among all character that can apply every buffs (while for Debuffs Hawk and Carlie Dark Class can cover them all to) and she can get every buff right from the first class change, so I think that's already a pretty big advantage (not to mention her Light Class's summons are good for mob fights and Vanadis has a pretty strong LV3 FST if I recall).

Actually looking at her classes even in her Dark pass Dragon Master looks pretty damn good already, the only class of Lise that don't appeal to me is the Fenrir Knight (even tough the final weapon looks pretty damn amazing).

Not giving Lise a defense shield makes sense, but the status protection shields don't work too well either. There are already accessories that do that, they're useless most of the time, and the times they are good they're TOO good (Example, take the sleep resistance shield to Gildervine, it'll only cast Sleep flower on the only target that's immune to it, removing the need for the other party members to carry their own status resistance) for a single accessory slot. It'd be better to give her new effects if defense is no good. Since Lise isn't that good an attacker, offensive bonuses would make more sense as it furthers her generalist nature as she'd still need to be raised defensively to make the most of the shield.

Vanadise is good, no mistake, and the main intent of allowing Lise to equip shields is to enable more team compositions to have access to one, not strenghtening Lise's classes further, which is an inevitable side effect. But the dependency on the Whitelight Ring is a very real downside, and the addition of the shield furthers that. I guess, if push comes to shove, reverting her buffs to single target would further that "accessory tax" even more, but I do believe making the shields attached to two characters instead of one character and one pathway would be overall healthier.

I've no intention of changing the effects of shields at this point.
Duran will keep his 9 shields, only 3 on which will also be usable by Lise.
I'd say the ones that protect against poison, silence and chibikko since those are mostly on enemy melee attacks.

I think I'll indeed go with the ST buffs on Vanadise then and Lise in general gets shields.
Otherwise she can do literally everything half-decently or better; buffs, heal, spell damage (elemental with class weapon), physical damage and tanking.
She's a single rare drop (Shadow Zero Eye) away from being a one woman party.

So we've basically three character groups now:
physical damage dealer: Hawk and Kevin
magic nuker: Angela and Charlie
tanks: Duran and Lise

I think I can live with that.

Wait, I'm confused. I thought you said you couldn't set shields to Duran and Lise, only one or the other?

in the shop offers, there I can only check for one of the other.
if they can equip it is a different check and there it is no problem

Without giving the two different effects, I think that's as good as it'll get. The main draw would be the aggro effect, regardless, so that's covered.

yeah, originally - way back when - I just wanted to make one shield with aggro effect; the status resist or def is just the icing on the cake

Well continuing with the Swordmaster, Warrior Monk and Arch Mage, I really how this is playing differently than my previous game. 

Bill and Ben second fight was hell with this team, man at least in the first fight they don't deal that much damage outside of Shafow Dive and Jutsu, here 2 single hit from their normal could kill Duran (He had a good VIT but he was lacking in Armor (still had the first one cause I didn't think the armor available up to now where interesting) and Angela (Not Kevin cause he has a high VIT) once they split in 2 it become ridiculous, manage to somehow beat them Jinn's Day + Thunder Saber make Kevin in Wolf Form hit very hard and Angela's Air deal a lot of damage, basically I used a hit and run strat with Kevin and constantly casting with Angela, had to use some throwable items at the end cause I had only Angela left, no Angel's Grail and 1 of the 2 was dead so I bet all on throwing items at the end.

Machine Golems a fun fight with this team (with Carlie, Hawk and Lise I was more on a defensive strat) cause they can destroy me very fast just as I can kill them quite fast, Thunder Saber + Power Up + Wolf Form Kevin's damage are impressive (and his LV1 Tech is really good), Duran LV3 FST is quite good to (almost 300 damage), Angela with Mind Up and Thunder Sabers was dealing 320 with MT Air Blast, so it's basically comes to who kill the other faster.

This team has so far no problem with Mob fight at all however the lack of Def Up is severe for bosses (even tough I had Bulette's Scale for Bill and Ben), I gonna have to invest (or farm) on Bulette's Scales a lot (also when I will have the Armor that invert Buff/Debuff which I plan to equip on Duran Bulette's Scale will also give me Def Down which is the only Debuff I lack and might be usefull for bosses).

Man the fight with Gildervine was ridiculous.... in my way for once XD. I think I never reach that much Damage Mind Up, Mind Down, Flame Sabers, Salamando's Day and Angela was dealing over 700 damage with Explode XD, Duran with his LV3 Tech was dealing over 500 with Flame Sabers and Power Up (didn't have Def Down I would have low to see that XD), so YEAH he didn't last long.

I'd like to hear some strategic views about physical attacks: when is it better to use normal hits, and when should you use heavy hits? In case you're wondering, I'm talking about this (from the readme file):

Quote

The regular attack is freely available, does little damage but generates tech points with each hit.
...
A stronger version of the regular attack is available by holding the attack button but no direction button;
attack power is increased based on strength, miss chance and crit chance is reduced and delay before next attack is increased.

 

For me, the basic difference is whether I want to generate damage with the attack or simply use knockback to control the field. I find quick attacks to be useful for keeping incoming enemies out of range for melee damage, for instance, if Angela is casting a spell that will kill the enemy and I just want to guard her and avoid taking damage while she gets the spell out (I find this works especially well with Hawk, who can basically keep his double swing going constantly). They can also be used to quickly build up points for a level 2/3 tech. Otherwise, I tend to use strong attacks for general damage purposes.

Also depend on which kind of build you play if you play a Crit Build like I was with Hawk I see no reason to use Strong attack since they reduce Crit Rate.

I'd rather base it on the target.
Something with high evade like Ninjas? Strong attack.
Something that is about to become unhittable (FMH, Gorva, Fiegmund)? Give it one strong attack when the longer cooldown doesn't matter.
Otherwise you're likely better off to use quick attacks.

Just for clarification, because I assumed it was a typo: Do strong attacks increase or decrease chance for critical hits? I assumed anything that would increase hit chance would not reduce critical hit chance.

Or do I need to improve my critical reading?

strong attack has more base damage and less variance:
less chance to get misses
less chance to get crits

Then just a minor criticism (extended pun ++): I would interpret strong attacks as a focused attack (a strike) and quick attacks as less focused (a fend). A focused attack should take more energy, and so should more likely result in the desired result, including a critical hit. Quicker attacks resulting in more critical hits implies that the extra damage somehow comes from less focus... then why focus? In the simplest sense, the strength of the attack should lie along one axis. And if a critical hit is harder to achieve, then it should not result from a cheaper swing.

in that comparison the light attacks would be more like wildly swinging around; more likely to miss than to hit but may also catch the opponent off guard (crit)

strong attacks have 2 ups and 2 downs:
+more damage
+more accuracy
-longer cooldown
-less crits

I see... the balance is important. I was thinking the cooldown was so bad it must account for +strength, hit, crit.

In general terms of combat, I don't think that swinging wildly around will result in critical hits. Critical hits are incisive and require concentration... a carefully aimed shot from a sniper is more likely to hit home than a shot fired hurriedly with the main purpose to outshoot the enemy.

This is a minor criticism. I am loving every minute of this game, and of all the areas to enjoy I am spending the evening in Seaside Cave collecting ??? seeds and Poto junk. Four beers in and two ??? seeds to go. I think I can make it to three before I pass out?

If you need the class change items you can just buy them in the mid-desert town.

No need; I managed to pull 8 ??? seeds, 6 from farming Papa Potos and 2 just from fighting through the cave. From these 8 seeds I managed to pull all 6 class change items, which I consider pretty lucky since the RNG was harder to jostle than I anticipated. With a 1/10 chance to pull a ??? seed (wearing 2 Beastman Collars), I must have farmed about 60 Papa Potos, resetting between each to limit the exp gain. All in a night's work! The jazzy music helped.

So, I am nearing my second class change and would like some input on final classes. I'm running dark Hawk, light Lise, and light Angela (the first two deathless; thanks Gorva). I probably can't choose wrong with this group, but I am thinking about two teams in particular:

1) Ninja Master, Vanadise, Arch Mage: This one seems obvious. Mind Up and Mind Down for Arch Mage already getting a 200% bonus on weaknesses with six elements, Anti Magic to support Ninja Master, and recovery spells on Vanadise. Multi-target Fire Jutsu followed by level 2 spells to clear screens. No sabers, though; attacking would be mainly to keep enemies occupied during casting. With two casters, though, this would be mostly up to Vanadise.

2) Nightblade, Star Lancer, Grand Divina: This one seems more fun and possibly more adaptable. All three characters have stronger attack to make use of Grand Divina's saber spells (60% attack bonus on weaknesses). Grand Divina does not get the extra 30% (extra 80% for weaknesses) spell boost from Arch Mage's level 2 spells, but she has Mind Up and Mind Down to support her; plus, her spells come out faster, and so she may be able to get twice as many spells out which would make up the damage. No Anti Magic to support Ninja Master, but the ignore physical immunity weapon and the spell level boost armor should help him get around this. Two options for silencing, one single-target and faster and one multi-target and slower, and Aura Wave as well to support the fighters. Grand Divina really stands out to me as a fun class on this team: every one of her spells is useful, and she gets 18! For this team, I could switch out Nightblade for Ninja Master to help with screen clearing (although Nightblade's upgraded multi-target Shuriken or FST plus Grand Divina's spells might be enough), and it's not clear to me which of these two classes has the better final weapon, although on paper Ninja Master's seems more interesting. I could also switch out Star Lancer for Vanadise if the extra recovery options, saber-able summon, and FST are worth sacrificing the multi-target silence, Aura Wave, and higher attack.

Any advice from people with experience with these final classes would be appreciated!

Also, on the Lise-shield topic: I feel like the shield is Duran's niche. Plus, spears are two-handed, and I'm thinking it would be difficult to program a shield onto Lise's sprite (though I could be wrong). One option that could be interesting for Vanadise would be sabers from the four basic elements (which would also make her self-sufficient for her final weapon). You could take away Tinkle Rain to balance this, giving her recovery options equivalent to the Paladin but with more buff spells as opposed to Paladin's shield options, Saint Saber (arguably the best saber), Anti Magic, and Magic Shield (which is an awesome spell). You could also make everything single-target if you think this overpowers her.

Wouldn't that make Vanadis overlap with Carlie's light classes tough ?

Yes, it would bring Vanadis closer to Bishop and Sage as well. Bishop and Sage have Holy Ball though, one of the best damage spells in the game and acquired early, so light Carlie still has a niche. Also, depending on which final light class light Carlie chooses, she will either become a better melee fighter or caster than Lise and still end up with a direct damage advantage. Because of Vanadis's increased buffing power, it might be better to rebalance Lise's final class stats, trading Vanadis's max strength with Dragon Master's (and maybe Star Lancer's with Fenrir Knight's).

The main purpose of giving Lise the basic sabers would be to create more options for team building (especially for magic-oriented teams), and making Vanadis self-sufficient in a limited way would be a nice bonus.

I guess what I would want to avoid is Duran and Lise becoming too similar. As physical damage dealers, Hawk and Kevin are different enough due to their different approaches, Hawk with multi-target options and Kevin focusing on the rushdown. As magical damage dealers, Angela and Carlie are different enough through their focus on pure offense vs. mixed offense/defense. As tanks, Duran functions as a traditional tank with his aggro shields, while Lise increases the tank-ability of all characters through her buffs. If you start giving her shields then I'm afraid their roles would blur together.

I guess I see your point but the problem is if you add Sabers to Lise's Vanadise you get a character that get access to all buffs, Heal Light, Shield AND Sabers this is to much IMO, and if we do that then same problem Lise overshadowing Duran completly, Duran's Light Class focus on Defensive Buffs (Def Up, Magic Shield, Speed Up) and healing (Heal Light) meanwhile his Dark Classes focus on Sabers, Lise's Light Class cover all buffs which is already better than Duran's buffs and Vanadis have both Heal Light and Tinkle Rain, add her Sabers and I fear Vanadis will then almost remove any reason to take Duran in the first place as Vanadis would step on both Duran's Light and Dark classes at the same time.

I would not give her shields, and I would remove Tinkle Rain. Vanadis would be a solution for minimal functionality in healing and sabers, only excelling in buffs, kind of a catch-all for support. Paladin would have the advantage with aggro shields, Anti-Magic, and Magic Shield, making him more useful for magic-oriented teams. Saint Saber is not as good as all four basic elemental sabers, but it's better than any single one of them. I would see these two classes as reasonably well balanced.

I agree though that there's no real need to improve Vanadis. I was offering an alternate take on the class, the elemental warrior or magic knight. My main point was that giving her shields would distract from her role as master cheerleader and conflate her role with Duran's.

Vanadise's kit is pretty set. Even reverting her buffs to single target won't bring it down too much. Giving her sabers on top of it is pretty much entirely unwarranted. If anything, Star Lancer should be the one to get them to further her as a physical support.

Lise being able to equip a shield is not a numerical buff, but a strategic one. It's a very valuable (and more importantly fun) tool, and keeping it restricted to only Duran limits its applications too much due to party compositions. Don't see it as a buff to Lise, because it is not. So much so that all other of Lise's classes haven't even been mentioned yet, despite the fact they'd also be getting the shields. The perceived problem is not the addition of shields, but Vanadise's kit being too complete in its current iteration.

Having now made progress to the god beasts on that Rogue-Archmage-Vanadise team, I do still believe she's fine like this. Sometimes, Stats speak louder than spells, and Lise's even stat spread ends up hurting her in spots Duran doesn't have to deal with. Furthering her dependence on the Whitelight Ring (of which Duran has none) will also have an influence with how many accessories she has to worry about, Shield now included.

A point could be made that Light Duran should still get something over Light Lise, but Lise being able to equip shields has nothing to do with that and would be very beneficial to team compositions without upsetting some sort of balance between their kits. I believe Lord could get Leaf Saber (Or perhaps Analyse to turn it into some sort of dedicated critical support instead of stepping on Warrior Monk's toes), and Paladin just replace Magic Shield with Mind Up.

To be honest I just feel Magic Shield and Counter Magic should be scrapped or turned into something else.

I agree; I was thinking a Vanadis/Star Lancer split on recovery spells and sabres would be a great way to distinguish Lise's light classes. I just think the class with the elemental final weapon should be the class that gets the sabres.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by her kit being too complete, but If you think Vanadis is overpowered, just remove Tinkle Rain; she would have recovery options on par with Paladin and Warrior Monk.

I also agree that Magic Shield is a bit of a hodgepodge, but the MP recovery effect is very useful and enables some low intelligence builds. If anything, the spell should be renamed (and its effects maybe reoriented) but I don't think that's possible.

On Lise equipping shields, I will defer to the judgment of players who have completed the game multiple times with Lise and Duran. As a novice player on this mod, shields represent an area where Duran has increased adaptability over Lise. Giving Lise extra options, especially options that change her role, would make me even less likely to choose Duran (unless he gets his Level 1 tech fixed!).

15 hours ago, Valenhil said:

To be honest I just feel Magic Shield and Counter Magic should be scrapped or turned into something else.

Partially disagree for Magic Shield it's quite usefull especially for Carlie's Light class, I litterally played Bishop without investing a single point in INT and this spell was one of the reason why, higher MP Pool and MP recover and Stronger Heal Light (at one point I was healing over 700 with Bishop's MT Heal Light), is a huge deal for support class that need a lot of MP for using their support ability but at the same time doesn't get anything from increasing INT, Magic Shield help to not give a damn about INT for Carlie's Light class (since she litteraly gain nothing from INT). It's less usefull for other potential Healer as they get something from INT (Decrease Castime for Kevin, Duran and Lise and stronger Elemental spell + learning spell for Angela).

It's really not as useful as it sounds compared to MP absorption.

And for a conclusion on Lise, I believe with the addition of shields Vanadise would be fine with just the ST buffs, and the other three could still get something extra. That's because even though their kits are very good, this game doesn't reward Lise's even stat spread much so it evens out. What's truly pushes people to use Light Lise isn't her being particularly good, but that people just need the stat buffs.

Excluding Light Lise, this is their current spread:

Def Up: Lord, Paladin, Bishop, Evil Shaman
Mind Up: Warrior Monk, Wanderer, Magus(self), Sage
Power Up: God Hand, Warrior Monk, Magus
Speed Up: Lord, Swordmaster(self), Rogue(self), Grand Divina

As you can see, the problem is not that there's few classes that can use the buffs: it's that there's very few names that show up more than once in this list. This results in there not being even a single combination of three classes capable of covering all buffs without completely forgoing other types of spells without Light Lise, while as far as debuffs go not only are there three other options with complete coverage (dark hawk and necromancer), there's also some duos that taken together also cover all debuffs, like Arch Mage and Rogue, which I'm currently running. To distribute these in a way that actually opens the possibility of replacing Light Lise, there's two points to account for:

1 - Power up and Speed Up are more personal buffs and can easily be added only as self only to some classes that need them

2 - The classes that do get team stat buffs should generally have them in pairs so teams can be properly built between them to have enough coverage. By doing this with only the classes in the above list, several viable combinations should appear.

Here's an attempt:
Def Up: to Grand Divina (instead of Sleep Flower), God Hand, Rogue(instead of Body Change)
Mind Up: to Paladin, Bishop(instead of Magic Shield), Magus not self only,
Power Up: to Lord, Evil Shaman(instead of Ghost, Ghost Road to lv 2), Death Hand(self), Dragonmaster(self)
Speed Up: to Sage(instead of Rainbow Dust), Wanderer(instead of Body Change) Fenrir Knight(self)
 

v1.050

• allowed Lise to equip Red Heat, Thunder God and Gold Shield, buyable in Byzel with her in party
• Vanadise-Lise no longer learns her buffs MT, only ST
• increased crit damage factor by luck stat from 110-140 to 115-150
• increased attack bonus from gear
• reduced gain from castspeed stat by 7%
• lowered Gorva's HP and physical defense
• added a small randomizer program

don't expect much from the last bullet point; I just wanted to practice byte math a bit because I've to deal with that at work a lot soon - and yes, in that language >.>

Well, despite my previous objections, I'll now be starting a new Lise-led group to take advantage of the shields.

Any description of the randomizer program? (I can't find any files in the zip that I can open with my text editor.)

Also, has anyone been brave enough to run a team without Heal Light? It seems like Moon Saber/Dragon Ring and items may be enough, but I haven't made it as far as the final areas so I'm not entirely sure. Also, some final weapons that run on low HP would benefit from avoiding the post-battle heal.

randomizer is in a seperate zip, you'll need java installed to run the file

uploaded a v2 of the randomizer which prevents item shops from potentially getting the same consumable item multiple times and disables exp randomization since that caused underflows

I'm thinking of starting a two-tank team with Duran and Lise both using shields, to spread the aggro between them. This should distribute the damage more evenly and keep the third member, a caster, even more protected. Let me know if there is anything about aggro mechanics that would disrupt this strategy.

by itself it should be no problem though I don't know how enemy's spell single target selection would work out then - I guess it should favor character #1 then

Does the lise shield change require a new game? They're not in Byzel in my current run.

No it shouldn't.
Shops are recalculated whenever you open them.

You have the shop with accessoires for 525 Luc and armors for 678?

Sorry, bad thing about playing in 5 different places is it gets hard to keep track of what's patched and what's not.

I interpret that as stuff is working as programmed intended.

Going through the Valley of Flames, forget the fire godbeast, these Swordmasters are two-shotting my tanky Lise with their conveniently two-hit attack. They're the real threat here.

In Pedan now, Weapon and armor seeds seem really rare and have a really wide number of possibilities, getting these final class weapons appears to be really grindy.

Hello,

can you teach me how do i turn this on ? lol

i was tried snes9x but nothing can run up.

and also i tried to installed the java,but still don't know how to use it

If you have java installed you should be able to just double click that .jar file and then it should open the program's UI.

I apologize for this,

but i m fucking noob for this.

can you give me  more clear guide plz ?

guide for what exactly?
what do you have problems with?

how do i solve "ROM does not seem to valid" when  use java to open or export ROM?

You need to give it a SD3 rom that already has the Sin of Mana hack applied to it and has no header.

Oh...

So  i need hack guide for now

or can i get the file which you have hacked it?

Does the one in the readme not suffice?

@nightmare9913256 -- He is referring to this guide, which is in the file you download to get the patch:

Quote

Seiken Densetsu 3 - Sin of Mana, v1.050
Praetarius

===Patching===

The patch is for an unheadered ROM, use SNESutil or similar to remove an existing header.
NEVER patch over an older version of this hack, get a clean ROM!
Whether the ROM has any other patch (e.g. translation) on it shouldn't matter.
 
Apply the main patch "Seiken Densetsu 3 (J)_sinofmana_v1050.ips" first; you may need LunarIPS for this.
Afterwards you can apply any of the difficulty changers from the "difficulty_changer" folder if you wish, default is set to hard.

The "misc_patches" folder includes some bonus patches.
1) "bonusfight__BlackRabite_Bigieu_DKS"
replaces the random enemies in a dead end room to the right of the very final savepoint with a Black Rabite, Bigieu and Darkshine Knight.

2) "ghostship_savepoint"
allows use of the ghost ship savepoint that leads to savegame corruption if used with only 2 characters. USE AT OWN RISK!

3) "super_happy_funtimes"
The name says it all.

4) "3_player"
Turns on option to use a third human player. Already included in the main patch.

5) "hardcore_death_penalty"
Death that is not removed via Angel Grail now also permanently reduces one random stat. Enables death penalty on all difficulties.

6) "skippable_spell_animation"
Hold the X button an any controller while the spell name is displayed on top to skip the spell animation.
Must be done before the animation starts.

thank you two guys helped =D

I have done that and started yesterday.

and  I have two question:

1.what is mean about "curse:Additionally weapon damage is always shared with 100%."?

thank you for reply =D

1. you put the curse on an enemy, when that enemy hits you with a physical/melee attack they get the same damage as well (think Diablo2 thorn aura or iron maiden curse)

2.

Im enjoying your mod but Ive been looking for hours to find the secret shop of rings. Its supposed to be in the desert town but I cant find it anywhere. Ive looked at the readme file and that doesnt help either. Ive been through the desert everyday, every night of each spirit days too. 

Im stck at Lightgazer because he makes healing so weak that he eventually kills me because i cant keep up. I thought that maybe HP draining rings could help.

The art of talking to every NPC in town seems to be a lost one...
try the north side.

Thank you, ill check.

I already did spoke to every NPC in both desert towns on every mana day AND night lol

I even finished the original over 12 times ans your hack 2 times,:p

My God, found him...he was totally outside the walls, didnt think it was possible to go there. Thank you

Another thing that I looked everywhere both in your hack and the original...just what is Counter Attack?

README:
If a Lv1 tech hits an enemy shortly after they start their attack or cast a spell, you've performed a counter-attack which deals increased damage (depending on weapon).

there is anyways to clear out LIGHTGAZER's heal reduce debuff?

yes, win the fight

that is thing i m trying to do lol

i have spend two hour for that and failed

do you haveany tips?

resist light and air
attack with earth
HP steal or HP regeneration accessoires
buffs, debuffs, standard stuff

thx for tips <3 but why earth?

dark saber is useless for LIGHTGAZER?

btw HP regeneration accessoires never work at LIGHTGAZER fight

because light removes the dark
ah dang, yeah right, HP regen is blocked by his debuff

I feel a bit cheated by most of the elemental weaknesses of enemies...especially God Beast's!
I guess it's by design but they all seem to be strong against the element they should be weak to...

Anyhow, I was looking for ways to mod the game and I really can't find any tools other than save game editors.

The only thing I feel like changing is the name of the equipment. At this point, I would prefer if the equipment was names simply by their attributes. It would be ugly but a lot less tedious than looking back at the excel file.

I would probably simply mod it for myself and/or share the separate IPS file to only apply that change to current and future versions for people that would prefer it.

Thank you

12 hours ago, Maniacodepressif said:

I feel a bit cheated by most of the elemental weaknesses of enemies...especially God Beast's!
I guess it's by design but they all seem to be strong against the element they should be weak to...

eh, I just followed a bit different logic than square on this

I had 2 tools for this: a hexeditor and mapjester, a map editor that doesn't - it only let me edit monster levels and which monster spawn; and it also drops important $80 from a huge range of values...

Since I didn't include any translation with this I couldn't change the gear names to reflect their bonus at least a little bit.
Would be cool if you could make this patch available for the public, people would want that.

I'd definitely like a way to know which equipment does what without having to look at the excel, as that's pretty much the only thing making me and my friends too lazy to play effectively

can I dsiable/turn off random mob spawn setting?

because it make saber spell a little bit useless exspecial when three mob with three different weakness lol

Mobs would still have different weaknesses even if you disabled that.

at least most of them will have same weaknesses.

example:i can use air saber for valley of gem,even if slime's weak are fire.

Is there any kind of documentation on which weapons / armors / accessories does what exactly?
Kinda hard to figure out what they do.

Edit: Actually found I file I didn't have in the zip that contains all the info I needed.

All the documentation including mechanics comes with the patch. The weapon/armor/accessory, spell/item, and enemy attribute descriptions are in the xls files in the root folder.

@praetarius5018

Hello again,

Can i post your moded game to Taiwan forum?

only if you link back to here

okay,I will do that and send link to you after i post it.

@praetarius5018

i have posted your moded game in Taiwan forum,

and link is here:https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/C_Chat/M.1560437143.A.35E.html

thx for your support. 

I had a question,Everytime i casted Rainbow Dust and it heal monsters

How do i solve this problem?

Don't cast it on monster that absorb any of its elements or cast Anti-Magic on them before.

Will there a be a patch to make it work with the official translation/rom from Collection of Mana?

why should there be?

Official translation/rom is a bit better than Neill's one but doesn't work with the current patch.

you tried the fix only patch? wherever I left that one..

either way I won't try to make that compatible, not worth it, got better stuff to do

5 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

you tried the fix only patch? wherever I left that one..

either way I won't try to make that compatible, not worth it, got better stuff to do

tried it, doesn't work. (worth pointing out that the 3-player patch by parlance works, though) i'm guessing it's the more intense routines of your fixes (kevin wolf fix, prevent healing overflow on enemies, heal light no longer healing maxHP) that make your projects incompatible.

you might wanna put up a disclaimer in sin of mana's thread that neither sin nor fix-only are compatible with trials of mana. but w/e fuck it, it doesn't really matter that much tbh. if people are horny enough for trials' title logos/text with your projects, they'll just shit the official text into the LNF+Neil Corlett+SoM2Freak translation

Eh, it's not worth messing the switch port right now. Better to wait and see how the Remake turns out, see what changes they did, and since it's on PC someone could even make tools for it.

24 minutes ago, Valenhil said:

 since it's on PC someone could even make tools for it.

This reminded me that this mod was basically made just with hex editing. Imagine if he had a decent tool (and a decente engine) to work with...

Quick question if somebody doesn't mind: How do (de)buffs stack, if at all? Like does each one overwrite the last? Is there any point to trying to have more than one debuff active on a boss at once?

Example: A mob casts Agility Down on Hawk. Another mob casts Power Down on Hawk. Finally, I cast Defense Up on him. Does he now have:

a) Just Defense Up? 

b) Power Down and Defense Up?

c) Agility Down, Power Down, and Defense Up?

Based off of my testing so far, I thiiiink b) is the case, but I wasn't sure. I do understand that buffs now work in tandem to Sabers, but this is specifically in regards to the primary state (de)buffs. 

Thank you so much! 

You can stack all 4 buffs/debuffs on a target, but the buffs from the same type will cancel the debuff and vice-versa. They work in a "minus/neutral/plus" way (e.g. Enemy casts Agi down on you (minus), you can cast Agi up on yourself to cancel the debuff (neutral), but you'll need to cast Agi up again if you want to buff yourself (plus))

No kidding? That's great to know! Thank you for the quick response, too.

Kinda want to try out Vanadis party cuz it got multi-target buff, according to the class skill excels. But the patch v1.050 nerfs it back to single target  

18 minutes ago, tkh1208 said:

Kinda want to try out Vanadis party cuz it got multi-target buff, according to the class skill excels. But the patch v1.050 nerfs it back to single target  

You can still equip a whitelight ring to make it multitarget, just gotta sacrifice that accessory slot now

15 minutes ago, Kei said:

You can still equip a whitelight ring to make it multitarget, just gotta sacrifice that accessory slot now

Oh I didn't know that. Thanks  

By the way, what stat raises the non-elemental damage of Paladin's Turn Undead with his final weapon equipped? I assume it is PIE?

2 hours ago, tkh1208 said:

Oh I didn't know that. Thanks  

By the way, what stat raises the non-elemental damage of Paladin's Turn Undead with his final weapon equipped? I assume it is PIE?

Would make sense if its PIE but I actually don't know. Didn't see anything specifying on the sheets either, so wait on Praetaerius for that

level, int, pie

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

level, int, pie

Thanks.

Another dumb question: Does Magic Shield stack with Mind Up for stronger magic resistance? Or Magic Shield is just Mind Up without magic effectiveness increase?

the m.def buff part is the same, so it doesn't stack more than mind up + mind up

Ok I give up, how are you supposed to defeat Dolan? Sometimes his spiral moon does 999 damage like seriously?

The hardest god beast so far, other one was fiegmund where my hp was brought down so fast I had no idea what to do but spam healing items, managed to outlast him lol.

Had to make an account to figure that out.

oh that one is easy

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

oh that one is easy

  Reveal hidden contents

energy ball gives him a buff that makes spiral moon deal 999 damage, you can cancel it via lv2/3 tech

 

Ok thanks, after knowing that the fight indeed wasn't difficult really.

Next is Lightgazer,  then finally Zable Fahr.
 

Lightgazer wasn't that difficult, tho to be fair I checked before on how to prepare for this one, apparently his wekaness being earth so I had an idea what awaited me, I understand the reasoning behind his weakness:

" Lightgazer: shadow is just absence of light, so adding <nothing> to light changes nothing; you're better off blocking the light out by say dropping a mountain on the source "

But based on that shouldn't moon also be a weakness to lightgazer more or less?

Or if dark element has anything to do with blackholes, even light cannot escape once they enter, just food for thought tbh that got me thinking about Lightgazer weakness or even zable fahr ( if light remained it's weakness, haven't tried that one yet).

So far this mod is a pretty fun experience, only complaing I have is going back and forth the sheet and the game at times it got tedious but that besides I had still fun.

1 hour ago, smileless said:

But based on that shouldn't moon also be a weakness to lightgazer more or less?

please leave moon out of this.
the game handles that element in a weird way at times.
like a pure damage spell like fireball but with moon element would not damage the target and heal you but instead it hurts the caster. or half vanish is moon elemental in the sense that it profits from that day but not in the sense that it can hit a moon weakness.

1 hour ago, smileless said:

only complaing I have is going back and forth the sheet and the game at times it got tedious

well, that's a technical limitation I can't get around

I assume party-wide accessory effect like increase gold gain/rare treasure chance, enemy level up/down... can stack, right? Like I run around with 6 Beastman Collars for x6 effects of gold gain/rare treasure chance.

Sorry, double post cuz network problem.

Yup, they do stack

Defeated Zable fahr and Darkshine Knight - the later was quite troublesome tho I figured lv1 tech was the way to go there.

Anyway I defeated Tzenker too but I forgot to equip one of my characters with anti petrification equipment and and the Zombie Dragons done me in one hit lol, lost all my progress salt is real, I was glad I saved after Darkshine knight this isn't too bad, served me as a reminder tho I got salty a bit haha

Pesonnaly after finishing the Archdemon storyline with Hawk and Lise, I want to try the other stories with the 2 corresponding characters in the team, so I started with the Dragon Emperor's scenario, gonna say starting with Angela on Hard is just hell, I think she is legit the worst character to start with, she is so fragile that she dies to quickly, killing anything takes forever and even after a second character join she is nothing but a burden and defeating Full Metal Hunger with her, unless maybe the partner is Kevin, I feel like it's not gonna happen for me.

So I resolve to restart over with Duran since he is more Durable and hit harder than Angela the beginning is much more manageable and took Angela as the third member so at least when she join she will have one spell to actually do something usefull, so my team is Duran, Lise and Angela plan to do Duelist, Vanadis and Arch Mage (yeah I know no Heal Light before a while (LV43 minimum), judging by my previous playthrough however I think Gladiator and Sorceress are both quite efficient at killing the mobs due to Sorceress having all elemental spell with Dark Duran to boost them, and Gladiator's Full Screen Tech with Lise to buffs I think it will be tough but I can handle, for bosses even in my Star Lancer, Ninja Master and Bishop playthrough I was relying more on item to heal anyway).

So recently beat Tzenker, somehow so far this is the lowest LV I reach her accross my playthroughs (beat her at LV18 so I change class but didn't get the first ability) which both worries me and reasure me (worries me cause I'm underlevel I assume, reasure me cause that a good sign about that team performance I think), so far Full Metal Hunger did go surprisingly well with only Duran and Lise manage to do a deathless fight against him on the first try, Jewel Eater was the worst boss so far Yeah I still think he is a good candidate for toughest boos of the game, his spell and special attacks are manageable but the worst really are his normal attack does a crap ton of damage for that point + Silence, and when he put Protect Up Duran and Lise damage become pathetic so only Angela was doing decent damage with her spell. For Tzenker I had a shit load of Molebear Claws, so you can guess what I did, she isn't to bad really (just have to dispel that Protect Down ASAP), then Duran and Angela are dealing a lot of damage to her so she dies quickly, the bitch manage to kill Duran just before receiving the final blow tough what a troll.

EDIT : I think I definitly found the ultimate way to stupidly make a "Soft Game Over" on Hard, I don't know why the fuck I didn't check sooner, but I haven't realise that Duran's Dark Classes, Angela's Light Class and all of Lise's classes are naturally weak to Dark, as a result if you didn't buy byzel Armors that remove weaknesses then at LV24 Gorva is impossible on Hard his Evil Gate, Regular attack and Black Rain are a guaranteed one shot (not mentionning Deathspell) and since we can't go back to Byzel after beating Tzenker, then yeah I'm fucked, only way to pass the fucker is to lower the difficulty.

I play with Dervish/Archmage/Vanadise, which gives me access to all buff/debuff/heal for bosses (the day of 43 level relying on chocolates/candies after every two screens have been over!). For normal monsters, I equip six Beastman Collars (a bit tight on money now), and have the +25% EXP bonus armor on all three characters. My screen-clearing consists of holding X and running around in circle while my Angela nukes everything with an element of choice a few times until everything dies

I don't know how to use Freya summon properly, though. It is cool to have easier transformed monsters to deal with, but they have reduced EXP and my Angela still have to cast one or two spells to clear the screen, and I get fully healed post-battle, anyway. It is kinda a shame cuz it would be a good screen-clearing magic that I can cast hand-in-hand with Angela spells. Any advice?

Also, if I hit a physical resistance monster with a saber, will the damage be full or physical resistance still counts?

Sorry, I'm so dumb that i clicked the quote button instead of edit and make another double post >.>

16 hours ago, tkh1208 said:

I don't know how to use Freya summon properly, though. It is cool to have easier transformed monsters to deal with, but they have reduced EXP and my Angela still have to cast one or two spells to clear the screen, and I get fully healed post-battle, anyway. It is kinda a shame cuz it would be a good screen-clearing magic that I can cast hand-in-hand with Angela spells. Any advice?

Hmmm I think the best way to use Freya would be to try to use it as the finishing blow like you make it so that Angela cast 1 or 2 spells and chain with Freya, cause if it kills the ennemies you will get the full XP, also Vanadis's final weapon allow Freya to take element of sabers for weaknesses sadly your team doesn't have Saber outside of Moon, Leaf and Dark so can't take advantage of that without using items.

So anyway had to cheese Gorva by lowering the difficulty but that entirely my fault, had I realise all my team was innatly weak to Dark I would have bought Byzel's armor that remove weakness to Dark, so that team is doing well on Hard outside of that :

-The Rolante invasion wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, most ennemies were manageable.

-Genova is still trouble mostly cause of technical issue as sometime the game just can't handle the fight and don't let me open the fucking menu to heal, other than that Diamond Saber from Duran combine with Diamond Missile does a good job at cleaning the mobs as well as damaging Genova, the mob are troublesome tough as both Duran and Lise has FST and if the mob take their appearence they can use the LV2 FST, Duran's FST is good to clean mobs tough.

-Bill and Ben really aren't that bad, the main issue is the IA sucks at staying the fuck away from them -_-, so my strat was to buffs Duran with Lise's Protect Up and Speed Up (Protect Up being mostly so Duran can survive Shadow Dive), then don't give a damn about her and then I was just doing hit and Run strat with Duran (using LV1 Tech only) while Angela was spamming magics (I was using Diamond Missile I don't know if they have an elemental weakness, I assume it would be Dark as all Ninja type ennemies are weak to Dark but I don't have dark elemental spell), when they split I just focus on one specific until it dies, if Angela get killed while casting I used Angel's Grail (I honnestly don't think a Deathless fight is possible on Hard considering if both of them focus on the same target they can melt his/her HP in a flash).

-Bucca Island : Was worry that I might be short on items for this but I had enough, before the cave the worst thing are definitly the Cockabird this things can just go burn in hell, they petrify (but this isn't an issue as I off course buy the accessory that protect against petrify, cause fighting them without these is fucking suicide), they hit hard and they seriously don't want to die, outside of them the island's mob are not bad. As for the Cave Angela is true MVP, outside of Slime and the rare Necromancers EVERYTHING in this cave is weak to Dark, so you can guess this was an ultimate Evil Gate's spam throughout the all caves.
Also I bought 2 Whitelight Rings on the ship, can definitly tell that Duran as Duelist and Lise as Vanadis will love getting these ^^.

EDIT : So found a little way to grind money rather easily, go to Eland then trigger the night, in the first Zone of Sub-Zero field there is only one ennemy and there is quite a high chance a Papa Poto spawn, and I realise that Papa Poto have quite a good chance to give ??? Seed, just farm these and use them and you can sell each Class Change item not needed for 850 each manage to get a good amount of money this way, also bought the HP Regeneration Accessories for each character it honnestly help a bit while I'm waiting for Heal Light just have to win there and stand still a bit waiting for my character to be heal by themselves takes a long time but a good way to save items.

So Bill and Ben was my last fight before Second Class change, easier than the first due to having MT Protect Up and Speed up, I just did the same thing as the first time (Lise buffs, Duran set a Diamond Saber on everyone (it was Gnome Day) then I do a hit and Run strat with him (using only regular attack and LV1 tech) while Angela spam Diamond Missile, using Angel's Grail when she fall, did that until only one remain which I solo with Duran), so get the Class Change Duelist, Arch Mage and Vanadis.

Got to say Duelist rocks, my gosh using Power Up, corresponding sabers and the helm that buff LV3 Tech and his LV3 Tech can perfectly compete with Angela MT spells, I will not get Def Down sadly but I'm really excited to see how much it will reach once I get Duelist's Final weapon, also realise that all his spell (except Anti-Magic) can get the Sudden upgrade, since outside of Sabers (which mostly gonna use one per boss battle) and Aura Wave gonna be usefull for mob fights it might be interesting to get the Sudden upgrade for him (which will allow me not have to give point to INT pass the one needed to learn spells and focus on STR, VIT, PIE).

As for the 3 Golem fight, buff with Thunder Saber, Def Up and Power Up then Angela and Duran did most of the job with Air Blast and Erupted Blade, still a tough fight cause they can kill the character really fast.

Does HP/MP drain ring/weapon works together with Leaf/Moon Sasber, or with each other?

On 7/6/2019 at 6:30 AM, Nesouk said:

EDIT : So found a little way to grind money rather easily, go to Eland then trigger the night, in the first Zone of Sub-Zero field there is only one ennemy and there is quite a high chance a Papa Poto spawn, and I realise that Papa Poto have quite a good chance to give ??? Seed, just farm these and use them and you can sell each Class Change item not needed for 850 each manage to get a good amount of money this way, also bought the HP Regeneration Accessories for each character it honnestly help a bit while I'm waiting for Heal Light just have to win there and stand still a bit waiting for my character to be heal by themselves takes a long time but a good way to save items.

I put the poto there way before I made the class change item shop, so kind of intended

On 7/6/2019 at 6:30 AM, Nesouk said:

Got to say Duelist rocks, my gosh using Power Up, corresponding sabers and the helm that buff LV3 Tech and his LV3 Tech can perfectly compete with Angela MT spells, I will not get Def Down sadly but I'm really excited to see how much it will reach once I get Duelist's Final weapon, also realise that all his spell (except Anti-Magic) can get the Sudden upgrade, since outside of Sabers (which mostly gonna use one per boss battle) and Aura Wave gonna be usefull for mob fights it might be interesting to get the Sudden upgrade for him (which will allow me not have to give point to INT pass the one needed to learn spells and focus on STR, VIT, PIE).

in case you missed it, INT also boosts damage of Lv2/3 techs so you could dump some points later into it

34 minutes ago, tkh1208 said:

Does HP/MP drain ring/weapon works together with Leaf/Moon Sasber, or with each other?

you can only drain HP or MP, not both at the same time; in doubt saber has priority
but they stack in the sense that one item increases the limit for HP drain - this also applies to moon saber

7 hours ago, smileless said:

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Black Rabite sure did wear me down a lot lol

 

And the Dragon Emperor sure kicked my ass first time around, he has a lot of attacks that lower your stats sometimes makes it hard to keep up what got even lowered.

I think I should save my sahagins scales for Angela while Kevin uses counter magic on himself and Duran and other buffs.

As far as I can see Dragon Emperor doesn't have any weakness and unlike in original game he absorbs even the moon saber which he didn't originally,  but it makes sense for him to do that consider he has that phase. Good to know now.

 

Ugh I just got a softlock on Gildervine I think he was going to go into his second phase, but never got into it and so he became totally invincible, his mobs were not respawing and since he does nothing outside of Sleep Flower I can't even force a death.

Anyway finally got Heal Light after Ludgar, Ludgar was tough nothing to add he is just a physical powerhouse and that's all, having Protect Up, Speed Up, Mind Up and the saber help (didn't have Anti Magic yet).

Diorre's forest has some annoying ennemies (especially a lot that love to poison you and also this damn Crawlers that highly resist physical), the boss Gildervine however is probably the easiest of the game, setting all buffs, Flame Saber with Duelist (by the way giving him the Sudden upgrade is definitly the good move), then the hardest part is the mobs that spawn on the first phase, however spamming Fire Spells and Duelist's Eruptive wave (which deal over 400 to Gildervine) make short work of them, Gildervine's second phase is easy don't deal to much damage, Duran was dealing around a 100 per hit, 400 with Eruptive Wave and Angela around 300 with Fireball, so he dies rather quickly, and we get Dryad.

And so now I'm convince Duelist is a late bloomer, really Aura Wave is amazing on him cast it at the beginning of a mob fight (with Sudden Upgrade to cast it faster), Power Up with Lise while your building tech bar then Eruption Wave more if you can manage to make the mobs next to each other to hit multiple of them at once to build tech bar faster. Also I don't know if it is possible but if Aura Wave give 5 TP regardless of if the Aura Wave's buff is active or not, then once Arch Mage get Aura Wave to thing could get interesting as I could build up LV3 rapidly with 2 cast of Aura Wave.

Leaving Wood God-beast until monsters get to above lv60 is a right choice. Almost every single monster in Wood dungeon has a chance to drop W/A seed.

I got my final weapons now. Archmage's final weapon is amazing at nuking. Dervish's final weapon, for some reason, is not the one that stops him from using throw, but the one that gives him stronger wolf form, thus double his damage output during nighttime. Vanadise's weapon is kinda meh for my party cuz lacking of Saber buff, save Moon/Leaf/Dark, and summon doesn't benefit from elemental-weapon rings.

Giving Rune Earring + shorter-cast-time helmet to classes that an multi-target heal (either default or Whitelight Ring) is kinda fun. They basically never run out of HP to cast healing and other spells, and they can just heal up with item if necessary, which is cheaper than walnut. Give them Moon Saber/Dragon Ring/HP-drain weapon, and let them use the revive armor cuz they never use MP is a nice combo.

Talking about Revive Armor, does it help you to keep the buff on your dying character? Or the character just go back to a clean state?

3 hours ago, Nesouk said:

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My God I hate Dolan I truly despise him. I still consider him the hardest boss in the game for all the wrong reason, just because he take forever to die because absolutly nothing does good damage against him even after Anti-Magic, and while you are trying to kill him, you can die in such a cheap way like for instance just because the fucking game doesn't want to load your Tech, like game please I enter the input for Duran to do his Tech just after Energy Ball Dolan had the time to cast Half Vanish AND Spiral Moon before Duran cast it so unavoidable game over after over 15-20 minutes of fight.

 

Maybe try to farm at least one Revive Armor so that there will be someone survive to throw Angel's Grails? Well, if you have a Light-Dark class in your party, of course. Otherwise, good luck.

none of the armors are locked by degree of lighting

Well beat him, still consider him as the worst boss fight of the mod, the gimmick is to luck base and way to much Defense (seriously how many VIT and PIE he has ? This is ridiculous 23 STR, a Saber spell of corresponding day, Power Up and Duran don't even reach 50 damage per hit (arond 120-130 for Eruption Sword), Angela with Mind Up, Mind Down, Saber of corresponding 22 INT does arond 180) which make the fight way to long.

He resists all elements, in a sense weak to neutral element.

Hmm something interesting I don't know if it's a glitch, but some months ago you told me that once you defeat a God Beast, the mobs in his dungeon dissappear, well turns out it doesn't seem to be the case, as I beat Dolan 2 days ago then save, but when I load my save yesterday I took Flammie and then realise that on the world map the Red Dot on Moonreading tower was still there so I return to it and turns out the mobs are still there and they were LV58 (I was LV56), I should check if it's only specific to the Moonreading tower or if other as well keep (the only other God Beast I have beat for now is Dangaard).

should be vanilla behaviour
the red dots stay until all 7 bosses are beaten
admittedly I never checked the disappearance at the tower..

Well I think I can safely say the ennemies does not dissappear I just go back to the Corridor of Wind (and I beat Dungaard before Dolan), and the mobs are there and they are LV59 (I'm LV58) so their LV has increase to.

By the way is there a good farming point for W/A Seeds ?

On that note I beat Lightgazer and Mispolm not much to say they are among the easiest god beast, for Lightgazer Duelist with Diamond Saber was pretty valuable and his LV3 Tech was dealing around 400 damage, Arch Mage was usefull with Mind Down and the second damage dealer with Earthquake while Lise was on full support with Tinkle Rain and Heal Light (stacking equipment hat boost healing she heals decently despite the healing debuff), as for Mispolm Duran was the main damage dealer thank to Aura Wave and weapon that fill the tech bar 3x faster he get 4 Tech Point per hit and Eruptive blade for 1650 damage, nothing to had other than this is the only boss where casting Power Down on your team and Protect Up on him is actually a good move XD.

13 hours ago, Nesouk said:

Well I think I can safely say the ennemies does not dissappear I just go back to the Corridor of Wind (and I beat Dungaard before Dolan), and the mobs are there and they are LV59 (I'm LV58) so their LV has increase to.

strange, no idea why that is but that is not really a problem, imo.

13 hours ago, Nesouk said:

On that note I beat Lightgazer and Mispolm not much to say they are among the easiest god beast

Mispolm is kinda like Dolan - know the 2 tricks or die over and over.
Lightgazer is more of a problem when he lasts longer since he shaves off maxHP with each spell - or kill you with his opener when you are weak to a certain element that isn't light.

Well got Duelist and Arch Mage's final weapons (not sure if I'm gonna go for Lise's Final weapon cause she is more of a support in this team so sadly Freya rarely see the day), which are pretty nice, fought Fiegmund and man this team completly reckt him, Duelist cast Dark Saber on everyone, Leaf Saber on Lise and Aura Wave on himself then Power Up, Mind Up and Speed Up with Lise (I don't think he has any physical attack so for once Protect Up isn't needed) Arch Mage cast Mind Down, then Lise is on full healing duty with Heal Light and items, Arch Mage spam Dark Force for nearly 600 damage per cast and Duelist attack (he deal 120 per hits for me) and use his LV3 Tech whenever available (the damage vary lowest I got was around 700, highest was 900).

I think it's better to keep Duelist's final weapon for boss only tough, for mob fight the weapon that increase his Tech Bar 3x faster makes him more relevant as by the time he got his LV3 Tech Angela would have nuke everything, at least with faste tech bar fill he can pull off Eruptive Blade allowing for faster screen cleaning and save Angela's MP in case other mobs pop up after the first wave.

Well Xian Bie down he was so much easier than my previous team mainly cause Jesus Duelist with his final weapon is OP, with Ice Saber and Power Up he was dealing 999 with Eruptive Blade, quite ridiculous honnestly

God beast of earth the MVP this time was Angela dealing around 880 per thunderstorm after Antimagic, Mind Up, Mind Down, Thunder Saber on Jinn's Day, Duran was dealing 120 (sometime over 200 which I guess were counter) and 800 with Eruptive Blade (with his Final Weapon, thunder saber and Power Up), after 3 Protect Up Duran's damage goes down to 500 with Eruptive Blade but Angela was still dealing around 770 per thunderstorm, this God Beast is definitly a piece of cake with this team XD. I think this team is definitly a boss buster team

I'm going to buy Papa Poto's Claw to prepare for the God Beast of Darkness.

Well Zable Fahr was fairly easy, Saint beam and Duran's Eruptive blade where key here to deal massive damage, Lise was the healer and buffer, otherwise it's the exact same strat as my previous playthrough kill the 2 heads, once the middle head appear kill one of the other 2 to make this fight a 3 VS 2 and then don't give a shit about the other head and focus on the middle one.

OK Darkshine Knight is an interesting fight through trial and error I found he is weak to fire, and I also found out that you can actually use the field to your advantage by making sure than one of the pillar on the left is between you and him and if you position correctly he will not reach you, so what I did is I equip Duran with 2 Shields so that he can lure him (otherwise he is almost useless in this fight as a Duelist cause physical doesn't work at all on him and using Eruptive Blade cause him to do the same) while Lise is putting the buffs (Mind Up and Speed Up mainly), Angela setting Mind Down and Power Down then it's full Explode spam with using Magic Walnuts to regain MP (if I get the chance I can risk casting Fire Saber, also not forgetting using a Moon Coin on him), at one point it was actually funny Angela was casting so fast that the Darkshine Knight didn't had the time to get closer so Angela was keeping him at distance.

Sounds cheap but honnestly without doing so I don't see how to properly beat him on Hard, even with Protect Up and Power Down his attacks 2 shots my character, and once he use a Saber his damage become insane and he basically one shot character, and he seems to always crit.

Did you try to use counterattacks on him?
On my end he's literally designed for that combat style.

Note2self:
update SD3 again and make DKS auto gameover the party if even one character hides in the coward corner and then delete all save files.

Considering I don't really understand how to land a counterattack (I think sometime it happen but that's honnestly luck on my side), I'm unable to use this mechanic as a viable strat.

On that note Jesus christ, compare to Dark Castle Dragon's Hole is hell, not only it's a big maze where everything looks alike but it's like all the most annoying ennemies have been putt in it.

1) bait out an attack so the enemy does his attack swing animation then hit with the lv1 tech within a couple seconds after that
2) hit with lv1 tech after the enemy has cast a spell

in case of DKS you should see about 800+ damage with that

Ok I manage to pull this off and beat him with counter attack just use the Fill Tech Bar x3 weapon and use Aura Wave so I only have to hit him 1 time with Duran to access the LV1 tech, then I just keep Lise alive so that she can heal in order for Duran to not die, the timing is a little tricky but when pulled off it does around 580 damage (didn't have Def Down and didn't bother to use Flame Saber the damage would have pobably been better with these). So yeah this works.

Dumb question inbound.

I'm finally getting around to trying out some of the "converts buffs to debuffs and vice versa" items and I'm finding that I'm having issues with targeting now. I'm trying to cast Power Down on my allies with the reversing item equipped but it still says only "one/all enemies" as acceptable targets and I can't hit my allies with the spell even after cycling through all possible targets. It does cast Power Up on enemies when I use i however.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here. Any advice?

Dunno, maybe try the README?

I did say it was a dumb question and that I probably missed something obvious, in my defense  thanks bossman.

is ok, there's too much info to take in in all the manuals after all >.>

Hmm just wanted to share some glitchs I encounter while playing my Kevin, Hawk and Carlie's playthrough :

-Mispolm, I think this one is the same kind of what cause your character to be petrify when he cast Stone Cloud on himself, turns out that it seems that effect will occur with anything that can inflict statut effect, as during my first try I had forgot to remove Hawk's weapon that can inflict Silence, and at one point when I was attacking him my character were instantly getting silenced, as soon I change Hawk's weapon it never happen again.

-Silver knight, I don't know why but for some reason after using Demon Breath and Rogue's Crescent Silver Knight was just spamming Tinkle Rain until I kill him he was doing nothing else, it makes him really easy on one hand but on the other makes him annoying as he is constantly pausing the action for that, this has happen 3 times by now.

-Lightgazer, OK this one is weird cause I never had any glitches with him in my previous playthroughs, there is some weird thing happening in this fight like sometime Lightgazer is starting to reappear then instantly teleport on another place (it's NOT his usual teleportation this one is instant, and give a weird animation where his eye is floating wide open while the rest of his body appear as normal), even worse he can completly dissappear from the fight and never come back, the weirdest thing about this is that this happen to me 2 time in a row and both time I could hear his jumping sound effect once (despite him not being on the field), and then nothing he just completly dissappear forcing me to reset.

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

-Mispolm, I think this one is the same kind of what cause your character to be petrify when he cast Stone Cloud on himself, turns out that it seems that effect will occur with anything that can inflict statut effect, as during my first try I had forgot to remove Hawk's weapon that can inflict Silence, and at one point when I was attacking him my character were instantly getting silenced, as soon I change Hawk's weapon it never happen again.

The stone cloud thing is intentional - that's why he casts it on himself in the first place.
The thorns take the last "spell" that the thorn-bearer was hit by and inflict status based on that;
did you hit Mispolm with a lv2/3 tech before the silencing?
Those count as spells as well - lv1 doesn't.

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

-Silver knight, I don't know why but for some reason after using Demon Breath and Rogue's Crescent Silver Knight was just spamming Tinkle Rain until I kill him he was doing nothing else, it makes him really easy on one hand but on the other makes him annoying as he is constantly pausing the action for that, this has happen 3 times by now.

I feel like I had that question like a billion times - that is still the same behavior as in vanilla.
The AI runs its checks for what to do next faster than it gets to execute them because of spell queues, lag and stuff so it runs the same check 2-5 times before it gets the spell off and puts the spell that often into its queue.
This is necessary else you could completely skip revenge spells or certain phases by pushing sufficient aggro at the right time.
Or create an infinite loop by having an enemy that reacts both to negative status and low HP but queuing tinkle rain and heal light and overwriting each other.

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

-Lightgazer, OK this one is weird cause I never had any glitches with him in my previous playthroughs, there is some weird thing happening in this fight like sometime Lightgazer is starting to reappear then instantly teleport on another place (it's NOT his usual teleportation this one is instant, and give a weird animation where his eye is floating wide open while the rest of his body appear as normal), even worse he can completly dissappear from the fight and never come back, the weirdest thing about this is that this happen to me 2 time in a row and both time I could hear his jumping sound effect once (despite him not being on the field), and then nothing he just completly dissappear forcing me to reset.

I swear I had the same issue with Landumber here as well - and Fiegmund as well in both this mod and vanilla; just like my nemesis Gildervine at one point in vanilla just refused to end his invulnerable phase transition in vanilla.

I don't know what it is in this game; something can cause the AI to literally just die.
I'd guess it is related to whatever causes other weirdness to creep up when you don't reload a save ingame for some time.
But I could never find that out either.

Hello all - quick question for anyone who can help!
I've just patched this onto a clean, unheadered, translated rom, and all seems well. I then start the game as Lise - however, upon comparing her starting stats to the stats listed in the Classes notepad provided in the mod download, they're entirely different... I appear to have her vanilla starting stats. Is this intentional? Are the stats in the document just her final stats for the class before the class change occurs, or are they supposed to be her base stats?
I spent quite a bit of time playing around with Lunar, Tush, the mod, various ROMs, and so on, just to make sure this was done correctly as I'm extremely excited to replay one of my favourite games with a brand new (and much more difficult :D) polish - so I'd like to think that my methods shouldn't have an issue. I'm using Snex9x for what it's worth.

Is there anything I'm missing? Are her base stats of 5/5/4/4/4/3 intentional or are they supposed to be the 11/11/10/10/10/9 listed in Classes.txt? Sorry if I'm just being dumb! Just want to make sure things are working for me before I invest time into this.
Thanks in advance for any help!

All stats in the readme are the max stats for each class. You definitely ain't getting stats in the 10s at level 1

36 minutes ago, Kei said:

All stats in the readme are the max stats for each class. You definitely ain't getting stats in the 10s at level 1

So everything is as should be then - wonderful! Thanks for clarifying.

Any way to reduce the grind for W/A Seeds? There's too many possible outcomes, getting final weapons is being incredibly time consuming

If you don't mind save states and want to save some sanity just kill a monster that can drop a W/A Seed (preferably with Beastman Collars), make a save state before opening the chest then just open the chest and reload over and over again until you get the W/A Seed, this sound cheap but frankly I don't like that kind of tedious thing that are just make to waste your time.

I guess he meant the other half as well - W/A seeds have many possible outcomes and those are harder to save abuse.

And no, I've no idea how to reduce that.

I found an easy way to get all the final weapons pretty quickly, usually in less than an hour, that doesn't use save states. After the third Godbeast, head to Moonreading Tower. Save outside. There are two rooms on the first floor; go back and forth until you find a Lesser Demon. Use Beastman Collars to farm these guys until you get three W/A seeds - these should be all you need. Then head back to Mintos, make sure you have 20 item seeds, and save at the inn.

Reload from your save point to start. Plant all three W/A seeds; if there is a final weapon in them, remember the position. Reload from your save point and fill the non-final weapon positions with item seeds. Basically, you can advance the list of final weapons by planting item seeds; if the third W/A seed is a final weapon, then using two item seeds followed by a W/A seed will also give you that weapon, but save you the other two W/A seeds. If you want, you can go even further down the list by using more item seeds before W/A seeds; with 20 item seeds and 3 W/A seeds, you have 23 list positions to check. There are even more positions to check if you keep mixing the order of the seeds, but 23 positions should on average give you the three final weapons. If you can't find one or two of them, keep your extra W/A seeds and check later when the the RNG has reset. The basic trick here is that restarting from a save point does not seem to automatically reset the RNG with respect to items from planted seeds. I have not looked at the code at all, so all this was just found by experiment, but I imagine it should work with any setup.

Note: ??? seed items seem to be on a separate list that item seeds do not advance, so you cannot choose your class change items this way. But you can use item seeds to advance all the other seed items I believe.

8 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

I guess he meant the other half as well - W/A seeds have many possible outcomes and those are harder to save abuse.

And no, I've no idea how to reduce that.

Just follow this steps once you get the seeds :

-Save at an inn.
-Plant a seed if you get something you want save and plant again.
-If you don't get something you want then do as follow :
1-Reset the game (to get your seed back, you can use save state before plantig the seed for that)
2-Save (a real save not save state) in a different Save Slot
3-Reset and Load your save
4-Don't plant the seed right away else you will get the same result, go kill some monsters (usually I do this in Jad cause at this point you should one shot the mobs) you don't need victory just kill 1 or 2 monsters.
5-Save and plant again you should get a diffrerent result.

Repeat this process until you get what you want it doesn't take to long, unless you are really unlucky.

that sounds less like gameplay and more like pure work..

Cardinal Eye: Does Pressure work on Lightgazer? Has anyone found any other use for it? Magatama's Curse is so useful, I'd suspect there would be some great use for it's counterpart.

lightgazer, fmh refight, heath, archdemon, a couple random mobs - honestly, it is less useful than curse

3 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

lightgazer, fmh refight, heath, archdemon, a couple random mobs - honestly, it is less useful than curse

One issue is that spell that can get the pressure upgrade are Holy Elemental, and I think outside of Silver Knight who only half Holy other mobs than can heal themselves Void or even absorb Holy.

well, you can use anti-magic first.

the thing is, any change I make to the "pressure" effect would also affect the lightgazer godbeast

For the Fire God Beast is there any defense against Heat Beam? It's kills one of my characters and than sets there max HP to 100.

You must be overlevel, Heat Beam does more damage the more you are overlevel compare to Xian Bhe.

So regarding Dragon Emperor

10 minutes ago, smileless said:

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It seems like as long as you don't cast any buffs or debuffs, none of his spells will ever do a stat down effect. And the stat down effect depends on the buff/debuff you casted. Hmm not sure how you get beyond that one, I guess you will depend on the set up you have equipment wise, use things like energy ball, aura wave, a strong healer, and spam offensive magic?

 

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

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If his spell don't do stat down that means you're already debuffed at -1 and can't go lower ^^, I still honnestly think Dragon Emperor is the hardest boss in this mod, a huge amount of HP, constant full debuff, very powerfull attacks, this is really a huge war of attrition and very long one at that, you definitly need a strong healer and to keep your buff (especially Mind Up) up to keep up, as for damage I would suggest relying on an element he doesn't use like Dark and Earth (if possible make sure to be on Gnome day, and of course avoid being on the day that ehance one of his attacks (so avoid Salamando, Undine, Jinn and Luna days) so use Magic of these, using Leaf saber to keep your MP up is also a good idea as well as physical damage depending of your team.

 

33 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

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FINALLY someone gets it! 
dragon emperor just wants a fair fight,
you debuff him, he debuffs you
you buff yourself, he undos it

 

29 minutes ago, Nesouk said:

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OH Jesus really that was it ? Goddamn no wonder I had this much trouble, I was just throwing a Shadow Zero'Eye at him right at the beginning , think I'm gonna try him again I still have my old save files with Duelist, Vanadis and Arch Mage see how it goes.