Insane Difficulty: Enemy-Only Abilities - Insane Difficulty

I posted this in the release thread, but I thought I should give this its own discussion thread.

The following abilities have been removed from the player's hands. This list will be updated.

• Focus
  
• Meditation
  
• Aura
  
• Gloom
  
• Douse

The reasons should be fairly obvious. Focus and Meditation break the 999 stat cap, Aura is too powerful (I'm fairly sure its damage is hard-coded) and honestly I'd like to see a wide variety of Dragon Transformations used instead of just Myrmidon with Aura spam.

Aura may be making a return. Focus and Meditation, however, will not.

Gloom and Douse are simple: they both reduce their respective resistances (Holy and Fire) to 0. While that's pretty OP in its own right given what I plan on doing to stats, what makes it worse is that the game rolls them as if they're status effects; it checks against the enemy's status resistance.

This means that if I allow these, every boss (some enemies as well) will have to have 7 status resistance (immunity to status) to avoid these abilities trivializing the fights. That's flying in the face of what I want to do with this hack regarding statii; I want them to be valuable throughout the game. Some of them, at least.

This post has been edited by Advent: 24 October 2013 - 10:33 AM

Damn that sucks

This pretty much answers my questions from the release topic.

Sucks that certain things are hard coded. I would have still loved to see all the abilities reworked in a way where all your options are viable and strategically used.

Should encourage people to be more clever in battle! That said there needs to be "more than one way to skin a cat" programmed in with all the other options.

I hope the tweaks/changes you are able to make can make that possible! Very excited to dig in!

I can dig those being gone. I don't actually remember using them that much, anyways.

DrROBschiz, on 18 October 2013 - 09:31 AM, said:

to rework/create/change formula of skill is needed to rewrite game's entire code, and this isnt possible right now

Are these limitations specific to the platform?

Would you have access to better tools with the PSP version?

DrROBschiz, on 18 October 2013 - 10:59 AM, said:

No, and even if I did I wouldn't be interested as it's not nearly as accessible, both for me and in a more general sense.

If the tools weren't there I'd basically have no documentation, because the code could be (and likely is, to an extent) completely rewritten as it's for a different platform.

That being said, chances are it's not platform specific, as shitty coding is a part of Crapcom's MO.

Aura is indeed problematic.
What's wrong with Focus and Meditation? wait now - get 2x later - has always been an interesting move.

maxi, on 21 October 2013 - 11:36 AM, said:

It breaks the max barrier on the stats, I believe.

maxi, on 21 October 2013 - 11:36 AM, said:

Advent, on 18 October 2013 - 08:29 AM, said:

^

Not sure what this means.
It means they can't function at full capacity because it caps at 999, or it means that weird behaviour starts happening due to overflow errors?

It means they can become absurd with their attacks and rape you so hard you'll never shit right again, I assume. And the same for if you could use 'em.

No, they completely ignore the 999 stat cap. There are no overflow errors, they're simply too powerful for the player's hands due to those factors. If I could change them, I would.

What, if I may ask, did you replace them with as compensation?

A hard mod

Radiant_Gene, on 22 October 2013 - 02:06 PM, said:

Nothing. They didn't need to be replaced; if anything Meditate's removal will make Enlighten stand out more, and Focus's the same for Might.

Advent, on 22 October 2013 - 01:20 PM, said:

Please walk me through this.

How is an attack that does nothing for a turn and makes your next turn 50% stronger is more broken than just doing the same attack twice? That is doing an attack this turn and then doing another 100% of the same atack next turn.

The advantages of focus that i can see exist in form of less resources per point of damage and less reprisals. Also there are some situational tactical advantages that create potentially interesting gameplay. These are actually the real reason people like using abilities such as these.

The only way i can see it as any sort of broken depends on how the game does defenses. If armor / mdef is simply substracted from the attack value, then Focus-likes become very strong against armored foes. Is this the case in BoF?

the same reason people use it to fight Archmage, if he plans to have monsters with regen, and you need to fight through said regen, focus could give the ability to one shot (my aura did 1500ish to arch mage, i focus twice and it does over 3000, so it dies and i don't have to worry about his hp regen)


ya dig?

joeafro, on 23 October 2013 - 12:13 AM, said:

Archmage is an extreme example with incredibly heavy regen.
I doubt there'll be a lot monsters like that around, difficulty or not.

And even then spending 3 turns to 1-shot a single random mook is kind of a lot. A dungeon where every clear requires you to spend 3 full turns taking a beating in every random battle is that much harder to clear.

Bosses should have enough hp to not be 1-shottable by focus etc to begin with.

Yes but Return 2 in 1.3 didn't one-shot Altima, did it? It still trivialised the fight when used properly though, didn't it?

My assumption is that Advent made the decision to remove said skill from the player's hand because it would trivialise most fights in the game, plus make skills like Enlighten and Might redundant.