Insane Difficulty: Stat Question - Insane Difficulty

Hey Chief,

Long time lurker on this sub forum first time poster. I've read the progress and can't wait to try this out - just re-bought FF7 during the winter steam sale to specifically try this mod.

Whenever I play I assign each character a class and give them materia in line with each of their pre-determined classes. That way I get to use each character in different situations and only certain ones can use certain materia. With your changes this mod seems to be straight up my alley with the changes to the magic damage formula and the rank up system.

I read through the readmes available on the main link page and after seeing all of your changes I'm curious to see how stats change physical damage/magic damage/accuracy/evasion and what each stat does.

In a different thread you broke down how Lucky Hit/Accuracy is calculated, which I thought was really helpful. Would you be able to do that with the other stats and what they govern?

In vanilla each individual stat wasn't really that big of a deal, but with your changes and the only way to alter a stat is via equipment or rank up, I'm thinking that each stat may have a greater effect on the attributes they govern.

In vanilla each stat affected the following: (copied from a guide on ign, so dunno how reliable the info is)

HP (Hit Points):
HP is a character's life. When depleted, the character will be KO'd in battle. When the HP of all characters in your party is depleted, it will be game over. HP is increased when a character levels up.

MP (Magic Points):
MP is used to cast Magic. Every spell requires a certain amount of MP to be cast. The points are deducted after the casting. When you have insufficient MP to cast a certain spell, you simply can't it.

Strength (Str):
Strength is used to power up a character's physical attacks. The higher your Str, the higher damage you will do with physical attacks.

Vitality (Vit):
Vitality is used to power up a character's defense against physical attacks. The higher your Vit, the less damage you'll receive from enemy attacks that fall under physical attacks.

Magic (Mag):
Magic is used to power up the magic that a character can use. This includes summons as well as regular magic and enemy skills. The higher your Mag, the higher damage you'll hit with magic.

Spirit (Spr):
Spirit is used to power up a character's defense against magical attacks. The higher your Spr, the less damage you'll take from enemy attacks that fall under magical attacks. This is an important stat, because there is a bug in the game that causes the magical defense that armor gives not to be taken in account. This means your magic defense is always just your Spirit stat.

Dexterity (Dex):
Dexterity is basically the speed of your characters, and it determines how fast their bars will fill up. Dexterity is ALSO an important part of a characters evasion against physical attacks. Thus, it's part of Defense% (= Physical Evasion). The higher your Dex, the faster your character will be, and the more physical attacks they will evade.

Luck (Lck):
Luck increases the chance to perform a critical hit with physical attacks. It ALSO increases the chance to get a 'lucky evade' in which case you will evade physical attacks. The higher your Lck, the more critical hits you will perform, and the more attacks you will evade. The chance formula for getting a lucky evade is like this: % = [Luck/4]. Max Luck (255) would give you a 63% chance because [] means you round down.


So with all that above said here are a few questions:

1. Does the mod change what each stat affects?
2. How much of an effect does investing in each stat return on the attribute it affects? (E.g., how much each point of VIT affects a character's defense score)
3. Is there any soft caps for a stat where increasing it higher would begin to yield a diminishing return? (E.g., I think each stat has a hard cap of 255, but would pumping a particular stat past a certain point return a nominal effect?

My main concern is I don't want to screw up the rank ups with stat point allocation because, unless I missed something, there is no "take backsies" so once you pick something you're stuck with it. I don't want to pick rank ups to push my character towards one role and invest one or two of my limited ranks to give them more def or m.def if its better to correct those character flaws with equipment.

mr_smartiepant, on 04 January 2016 - 10:30 AM, said:

1. All the stats still affect the game in the same way, but in order to weight the stats more equally NT has a few special AI formulas in place. I've set stat boosts to weapons, armour, and accessories to compliment the starting stats + potential boosted stats of the characters so that you can make very noticeable gains (such as 'fast' characters that can get extra turns or tanky characters that take noticeably less damage). This wasn't really possible in the default game with characters of the same level, due to how defensive stats are weighted and the low stat gains on equipment.

2. In the default game, a boost of 10 Vitality (from a Protect Vest) is almost unnoticeable. In older NT builds, I tried to compensate for this using high Vit/Spr boosts on accessories and sky-high defence ratings on Armour but more often than not it would hit the ceiling of 255; I didn't have a lot of room to work with, if that makes sense, as to make an Armour noticeably tougher than another it would need to have something like +50-75 defence over the weaker one; and as the game goes on, you find that end-game armour doesn't have a lot of 'room' to improve over older ones.

So as mentioned above, NT uses character AI to make smaller defensive boosts for the characters more effective. Before a battle starts, the AI takes the Defence and Magic Defence of a character and doubles it. Enemy defence is treated normally, because it's 'invisible' to the player and is set on my end rather than the player's end. It basically means that I can have, say, an Iron Bangle with 36 Defence on it be noticeably different to a Carbon Bangle with 18 Defence, whereas I would need 72 vs 36 without the AI.

In other words, a Source spent on Vitality and Spirit is now much closer to a point in Strength or Magic in terms of impact. As far as Luck and Dexterity go, you're getting two 'gains' from these Sources (critical hits and lucky evasion for Luck, and evasion, accuracy, and faster ATB for Dex).

3. If there's a diminishing return on a stat, then I'd say it's Dexterity but only to a certain extent and under certain circumstances. Unlike 'natural' Dexterity, Source-boosted Dexterity affects how fast the character's ATB guage will fill compared to the 'default' speed that the party's combined natural Dex stat determines (natural Dexterity and Source/Boosted Dexterity are treated as two different stats and have a different effect on how ATB behaves).

So if your boosted Dex is high enough, you won't be gaining extra turns past a certain point basically because of the minuscule time losses of the command menu popping open and the limitations of player input. Even if holding the Confirm button to attack as soon as the turn pops, you still lose a few ticks. This, however, can be counteracted by your ATB settings. If you have it set to Wait on the slowest speed, then you'll be getting significantly more out of your high Dex compared to Active on full speed (where you'll struggle to get an extra turn at all as enemies don't have the delay for command input that the player does).

All that being said, you're still getting physical evasion and better physical accuracy from a high boosted Dex so it's still not really being wasted. It's just something to keep in mind when going into a battle with 200+ Dex; it may take a quick adjustment of your ATB settings to get the utmost out of it.

4. I'll give a quick rundown on each stat; some have interesting effects (particularly Dexterity).

Strength & Magic: Used for attack formulas, these stat are equally weighted with each other but their associated formulas are not equal. Early on, low level means that physical attacks don't hit as hard as magical ones even with higher base power (a Lv.10 enemy with 100 strength & 100 Magic will hit for less damage with a physical attack using 32 base strength than a magic one using 8 as it's base strength).

This changes as the level gets higher; Magic spells need to raise their base power exponentially to keep up, the reason for this being that physical formulas lean heavier on Level, meaning that they begin to leap ahead.


Vitality & Spirit: Very light stats, they don't impact the damage of physical or magical attacks unless they reach a high number. The Guard Scorpion and Air Buster bosses in the default game actually set their Magic Defence to 256 and 300+ respectively through their AI but a low level party can still inflict a chunk of damage to them using the low-power spells. Spirit is, by grace of the poorly scaling Magic formula, the 'stronger' of the two as a Spirit of 510 will reduce magical damage to virtually nil while a maxed Vitality will still let some damage through from physical attacks.

In NT, these values are doubled for the player party meaning that they influence incoming damage a lot more.


Dexterity: There are two Dexterity stats. Natural Dex, and Boosted Dex. Natural Dex is used to calculate the default speed of your enemy's ATB gauges in relation to yours; it takes the party average on natural dex and then calculates that against the enemy speed. This determines how fast the enemy will fill their ATB gauge. The party's ATB gauge speed is instead determined by their individual 'boosted' Dex; if a character has raised their Dex to, say, 200+ using a combination of sources and equipment then their ATB gauge will fill much faster by comparison.

Because of this odd system, it means that you need to take two things into account when setting up a party's Dex. First is the average value of their total natural Dex; if you have a character like Barret or Cait Sith on your team, their naturally low Dex will drag down the party average and make the enemy team 'faster', even if you've boosted their Dex with equipment. On the other hand, if you put a team of Tifa, Red XIII, and Yuffie together then their combined natural Dex will slow down the enemy team and let you make much better use of their boosted Dex.

Finally, Dexterity will raise your physical evasion but because of another oddity it will also increase your physical accuracy. This means that a character with high Dex can land commands like Deathblow more often.


Luck: As mentioned, it's used in two checks; Lucky Hit (undodgeable critical hit) and Lucky Dodge (evades a physical attack, even if it has 255% accuracy). Both are calculated as Luck / 4 with Lucky Hit being checked first (it will ignore Lucky Dodge if it triggers). This means that the attacker is always at a slight advantage against the target when it comes to Luck. A max of 255 Luck means a 60-ish% chance of landing a crit or dodging an incoming physical attack (not taking into consideration the attacker's Lucky Hit chance).


5. :I

This was incredibly helpful, thank you ! I think I get it!

The whole natural dex vs. boosted dex for enemy ATB seems really quirky and almost counter intuitive, that is definitely something important to consider when I assign each character a particular role.

I really can't wait to get started! I saw earlier you mentioned a new version is right around the corner, so I'll try to wait for that to come out!

Is 1.35 still the most updated edition? I'm finally getting around to playing!

mr_smartiepant, on 29 January 2016 - 01:30 PM, said:

1.35 is still the most up to date version, but remember to patch it with the scene & flevel hotfix patches to fix a few issues (unless you're using the 7H version through the catalog, which should be fully up to date). The patches are found on the pinned download thread here on NT's sub-forum; they're installed the exact same way as the main installer.

Ok thanks Chief! I'm not using 7H because I couldn't really figure it out. It seemed way too complicated for someone like me who isn't familiar with mods. I did have a question - I'm using the steam version of FF7 - downloaded the converter, NT file, and the two patches noted above; however, my game doesn't seem to run midis at all, so no area music, no battle music - its just blank. I messed around with the config and when I did the sound/midi test it works through my speakers and I hear all the sound effects and battle effects, but there's no music at all.

Anyone know how to fix it? Did I mess something up with the mod install (it seems to work fine and do what its supposed to do)? I can't figure it out, so I figured someone here might have had a similar issue and know how to fix it.

mr_smartiepant, on 03 February 2016 - 06:37 AM, said:

It's maybe the converter? The steam version is supposed to have a folder containing looping OGG files that replace the MIDI files (these get muted). If you ran 7H's converter and it changed the install address then maybe it either can't find that folder or it's now relying on Aali's driver/config. To run NT, you don't need to convert the game; it'll work on the normal Steam version.

Oh, well I just feel silly.

Thanks again Chief!