Insane Difficulty: Seiken Densetsu 3 Sin of Mana - Discussion - Insane Difficulty

Current, I replace everything

Props for the super quick response & v0.851 patch. Was totally using the patch over a clean rom tho (or at least I think...); will give this one a whirl next time we get a chance and see what happens.

Oh, and for what it's worth, no dice on the trap debilitating effects etc either. We thought we were FUCKED when the poison hit, but realized our health didn't decrease at all. I too kind of assumed it'd kick in when the trap death penalty activates, but I guess that was wrong.

Valenhil, on 30 March 2016 - 05:15 PM, said:

Future me sucks at this.

Ok, then the straight forward solution:
send me your fully patched ROM in a PM if you play on tough or hard and traps don't work.
Preferably also including .srm savegame.

I did some more testing on the latest version.

* On Normal, trap effects don't work, but Smoke still gives your characters Poison status for that screen.
* On Tough and Hard, the trap effects that I tried seem to work: Arrow prevents TP growth, Smoke drains everyone's HP, Stone silences you, Death does all of these to the chest opener.

I did these tests by loading up an .srm savegame with characters on their final classes. Is there possibly some level limit that the trap effects won't activate until a certain level (IIRC, the DP for traps only activates on level 36+)?

This is probably it... I put the effects exactly where the DP for 36+ is added.
I guess I should change that then.

Do you still need to check my game or case closed?

If you were sub 36, case closed.

So, apparently you can be immune to Tinkle Rain thanks to a change I made ages ago, whoops?
Though it'll take some time before this gets old:
poison an enemy that has 20k+ HP and knows Tinkle Rain
see him frantically try to heal the poison and fail because he is immune, all while poison eats away his HP in 1k chunks, until he just goes boom.

This update is brought to you by... pure chance.
I actually wanted to finish the Kevin/Charlie path with the next update but luck wanted me to write a savestate almost exactly when the crash happened that seems to be plaguing Kanji, so maybe that'll be solved now? I've no idea, let's hope.

v0.853

• changed AI and stats of Heath, he now only uses spells Charlie can actually learn
  
• fixed a crash related to dead enemies wanting to execute a counter action

The dragon ring's hp absorb is very nice for a team without heal light before second cc. Especially on an offensive Kevin.

Am I under leveled for b&b2 at 33? Because they're kicking my ass.

Valenhil, on 21 March 2017 - 11:25 PM, said:

Unless I misremember they themselves are level 34 - doesn't mean much either way.

I played trough the whole game with the full patch. Id like to play it also with the bugfix only patch:

Any chance to add the graet updates to the controlscheme to the bugfix only patch? And maybe just a few very limited balancechanges to the worst balance offenders - like energy orb and possibility to combine buffs without it being overpowered. They seem to overwrite rather than stack. Im thinking of stuff that can be fixed/nerfed isolated without making a ton of other changes.

The chance for that is below 1%.
Those things depend on too many other things I've done before and that chains through for about 90% of the hack.
Plus it's too much work for negative profit; Vanilla with only a few fixes is a complete mess. Ok, the base isn't great. But just the fix for crits turns the chaos up to 12.
Adding running or strong hits - the game as it was wasn't ment for that.
Not even remotely.

For my favorite example why the half assed fix patch is beyond bad:
take an enemy with a lousy 320 attack, and have you max defense (300)
he'll hit you for 20 on a normal hit, but thanks to vanilla luck scaling he'll crit 20% of the time for 180, a.k.a. 9 times as much.
Plus, if you have an elemental saber on you on the matching day, this increases to 300 damage (yes backwards, but that is how vanilla handles it)
I don't see how this would be fun.

I almost don't want to post this because it may jinx my luck (LOL), but no crashes with v0.853 and did quite a few sessions over the last week or so. Props.

That said, rolling a new party up through Bucca Island so we'll see if it crops up again with those Potos in the mix.

Three players this time, should be even more fun. We had hawk get stuck at 1HP after being dropped by Tzenker, would have been dead but it seemed like he fell asleep at the same time, making him impossible to kill ... he turned into a tank for the wind spells while Angela casted / Lise poked. Even after the fight, he was constantly asleep and uncontrollable by anyone. Pretty hilarious but I do feel kind of bad accepting the win, hah

Seeing a bunch of weird stuff with the 3 player patch as well (sometimes P1 loses all control after dying once) but that's probably another rabbit hole entirely

I already jinxed my luck by starting this hack.

That said, I will not mess with the 3 player patch; it is there in case you want to use it but Square deactivated 3 player support for a reason.
The patch only had to change 2 bytes which is as good as nothing.
Also, it is not mine, I just included it, so you don't have to search for it and mess with header/no header differences.

hey i just finished this game first time without any patch running kevin hawk carlie. i was looking for a higher difficulty patch for my 2nd play and found this place.

just wanted to ask you guys if its a good idea to use this patch on my 2nd play since its gonna be entirely different characters this time so different story.

gonna play again with duran SM, angela RM and lise SL. will this work with this patch? i like it to be harder nd fun but not have to grind 20+ more levels to move past a boss lol

and with the patch would i be able to complete it without any errors or crashes? i know some crashes are likely here and there but will i be able to move on past some few crashes?

thanks

and i tried the patch for a few mins. one thing i noticed was the running feature in battles. THANK YOU!! during my 1st play i always thought the game would be so much fun if it had that lol

Running even during battles is one of the greatest features of this hack. I tend to use save states after winning battles, and only load if the game crashes (if I get a game over, I reset and load from the previous in-game save at a statue). However, this is mostly a habit from the times when the game used to crash a lot. Nowadays, it is rather stable. I may have had 2-3 crashes during my last game, which means the hack is amazingly stable these days, considering how buggy the game is.

I can't really recommend your team of Swordmaster, Rune Master and Star Lancer. SM and RM have an overlap with Sabers, you have no stat-downs, no Anti-Magic, and no healing. In the original game, this wouldn't matter, but on this hack, a bad party choice makes the game extremely tedious, if not downright impossible to beat. Here's a few teams that might work for Duran, Angela and Lise:

Lord, Magus, Dragon Master - Duran provides Heal Light, Tinkle Rain, Def Up, Speed Up, Life Booster and Energy Ball. Angela provides Power Up, Mind Up (so you have all stat-ups), Lunatic and some powerful spells. Lise gives all stat-downs, Anti-Magic and mass poisoning with Jormungand. Unfortunately, no Sabers, and your physical AoE attacks are very limited, as only Lise has a level 2 FST, at a max Str of 30. Aura Wave could also be useful.

Swordmaster/Duelist, Archmage, Vanadis - Duran gives you all the Sabers, and Energy Ball on himself (an additional Anti-Magic and Aura Wave, and a stronger level 3 tech, if he becomes a Duelist). Angela gets Power Down, Mind Down, Anti-Magic, Aura Wave and MT level 2 spells. Lise has all the stat-ups, Heal Light, Tinkle Rain and mass Chibikko with Freya. Make sure to give Lise a Whitelight Ring on the Ghost Ship to upgrade all of her spells into multi-target. This is one of the best parties on this hack, IMHO. The only thing you're missing is Def Down, Speed Down and maybe some utility spell like Lunatic, Half Vanish or TransShape.

qweqaz, on 24 March 2017 - 12:50 PM, said:

I'd suggest you try the norma difficultyl for a start; easy is supposed to be close to the base game's difficulty.

qweqaz, on 24 March 2017 - 12:50 PM, said:

gameplay wise this is very different from the base game.
gear doesn't get strictly better but gets different side effects, running, strong/regular attack split, etc.
plus most bosses are very different from their vanilla selves. Especially the god beasts are no longer just "element swaps" of each other.

qweqaz, on 24 March 2017 - 12:50 PM, said:

you won't even be able to. your levels are capped at 18 (and later 38) until you perform the class change. also you gain less exp if you're higher levelled than the enemy (the opposite is also true - on my last test run I got 2-3 levels per god beast for some reason).
if you really feal like you need some levels, there's a few items that let you get more exp, if you stack all of those you get about 700% exp.

qweqaz, on 24 March 2017 - 12:50 PM, said:

Nah, it still has several errors; I've two to three (near) crashes on my issues list I got once and wasn't able to reproduce further and which I most likely didn't accidently fix.
And the hopefully well known issues with the ghost ship events are still present; I side-stepped the save corruption by simply disallowing saving on the ghost ship.


Well, at least we have no more funny crashes with rapidly inflicted sleep states. Those were fun times.


As for party setup, listen to Sefie. She knows how mean I am.

Sefie1999AD, on 24 March 2017 - 02:28 PM, said:

Apart from lag/slowdown, 3 player issues and the ghostship crap, what of those are left?

Sefie1999AD, on 24 March 2017 - 02:28 PM, said:

out of ignorance, which one would be strictly impossible and why?

Machine golems down, almost single handedly by Kevin.

The fact there's 3 of then attacking is mitigated by the fact I have 3 targets to hit. Geared for evasion and critical with the dragon ring, Kevin would take huge hits when he didn't evade, but it was simply not enough to go through the incredible stream of self healing he was putting out.

After power, protect, and speed up, Kevin could safely simply mash the attack button.

And then night fell.