Insane Difficulty: No Sir, I'm not doing that. - Insane Difficulty

In my first playthrough, I actually had Alma dead for the fight. I also berserked all the demons and put Ramza in a corner with them, with Escutcheon II, a mantle, and Abandon, so he wouldn't get touched ever. I sacrificed a unit to get rid of all of them, seemed like a fair trade since I didn't have to deal with them anymore.

Did it make everything a bit less annoying? Yes.

Was it still annoying, anyway? Oh, yes.

It just seems overly punishing and unrewarding, the fact that you can lose multiple times even if you do things right every time.

Augestein, on 18 October 2016 - 09:51 PM, said:

This kinda reminds me of this picture:



Anyway, bosses don't have to be poorly designed. Queklain was likely the best fight of the mod, and Velius/Adramelk were pretty solid given the restrictions of the vanilla engine at its base. One issue is in scaling - Velius and several other bosses had *way* more HP than they needed. A boss should have enough HP vs. damage characters are able to deal to reduce the chance of players just rng'ing through it or ending it with 5 priests targeting it with Holy, while having a low enough HP amount that the fight doesn't feel tedious after a while.

Another issue is in the interaction of status effects, stat draining, and unique moves with the boss. While some status effects aren't worth designing a major boss around (anything immortal blocks, and stuff like poison or berserk too due to how easy it is to stall these out in most cases), stuff like Silence, Innocent, Blindness, Confusion can be designed around. And it definitely makes the fight more interesting if the player is given something that they can do that shuts down the enemy just enough to be worth considering, while not so much that the fight could be considered "free" after a certain point. Stat drain can similarly be designed around, since enemies whose offensive stats are drained to single digits are much more likely to use status effects, fractional damage, defense ignoring moves (Ulmaguest and similar). As for unique moves, stuff like Demi should be made immortal immune (since it allows the player to rng their way through a fight to deal 999 per hit), while stuff like that move that cancels charging/perform can be designed around by making it a good option in some fights and a poor option in other fights.

The main issue though with bosses is thinking of how its own moves interact with the player's options such that the boss does different things in different parts of the fight. For example, giving it stuff like status effects to use if the player drains them to 1 pa/ma and not giving the player the option to block every status effect on the same unit. Or making a boss that starts out with higher PA than MA but give them MA save and a few spells that the AI is less likely to use until it gains some MA. Stuff like that. Most importantly, checking out the AI flags of the enemy and getting rid of anything dumb vanilla did to them. This is a large part of the reason that Zalbag was terrible - it still had the vanilla AI flag to only target Ramza if Ramza is alive, and I know Archael knows how to change this because he changed it on Algus...

Augestein, on 18 October 2016 - 09:51 PM, said:

Yes, but it's something that's been around all throughout the game. You're making it sound as if it was something new and exclusive to this fight. The only difference is that this one's a two-parter, which comes with being the final battle.

TenaciousDingo, on 18 November 2016 - 01:50 AM, said:

It's something that starts happening like crazy in chapter 4 (and starts in chapter 3). More specifically, not only did you remove part of my response and only respond to a portion of it, but you didn't even understand my point in its entirety. No it's not. I've never been RNG screwed to the point that I've just lost because of the RNG. Early on, evasion an be dealt with by hitting enemies with stop, confuse, don't act to deal with high evasion, so there's considerably less RNG garbage going around. Enemies that have high evasion? Hit them with magic for a better chance of accuracy. High magic evasion? Attack them with physical attacks. There are most definite ways to ensure the RNG doesn't bother you. IE, if you can't cripple a specific enemy, you can go for something to boost yourself. Usually when I say "RNG screwed," I mean highlight moments where the RNG didn't swing my way. I don't call RNG screwed "I was dumb and kept making ineffective moves because I tried something like say charm at 40-50% and it kept missing."

The issue here, is that the best way to play later chapter 4 fights are ALL RNG specific. Man, I hope that Hamedo procs 3 times in a row, or man I hope you don't miss that enemy ONE time because he has 560 damage base compatibility which means that the option of targeting yourself to boost yourself to a safety measure is no longer an option because the enemies do so much damage that you die for using something as foolish as a barrier to lower damage. If you want to see an example of this, look at my fight with the 3 Shrine Knights before I go to the end of the game.



I miss like... Once on my turn, and my reactions don't quite go off how I wanted them, and that causes the enemy to be able to retaliate against me and kill like... Most of my characters. And it does so much damage that it kills itself. It literally shows everything that's wrong with the design. Enemies that are way too fucking fast, have multipliers that are way too high, enemies that have No Charge because of the stacked speed problems from before, and enemies doing so much damage that DAMAGE SPLIT, a reaction ability does more concentrated damage to them than any attack I did. All of the fixes that were done here are band-aid fixes that don't actually serve any purpose, and I can most certainly say that Vanilla's version of this fight was way harder on the account that you had to do stuff like not just stack high hp on your party and have damage split and push reset until they all go off for a quick victory. It's a gross misunderstanding of what difficulty actually is. And more pressingly, you can see that the RNG was kinda bitchy here to me and I still won.

This is most definitely something that doesn't happen in the entirety of the game. That's what makes me come back and say "this is bad."

All-Ultima is a non-avoidable attack that will do 999 damage (not a thing in Vanilla, so unless you look at the patcher, there's no way you'd know this which is already shitty design in itself as it was shit when it was on Reis' rescue fight, but at least THAT could be dodged). You're not at the mercy of just standard RNG, but AI RNG and standard RNG here. lvl ? Angelic can range from wiping 5 of your characters to none if you don't get the chance to reach the enemy in time to debuff it. If you cluster to use shell, you're setting yourself up to be at the mercy of the RNG from Grand Cross (I guess you better use all females and then give Ramza a status reducing shield to completely remove the RNG here!), killing the ultima demons leaves you at the mercy of the RNG because you have to pray Awakening isn't used, and the response of confusing or berserking the Ultima demons isn't much better because you have to hope they have higher faith and/or good compat, AND you hit them to even make them berserk or confuse in the first place. If you hit them with confuse, you have to hope they don't turn to you and attack you, OR know each other out of confusion. If you use Heretic Strike for dispel, you have to hope it procs status removal (seriously?). You have to wait for Bard Song to go off constantly so you can do good damage to Altima because without that, you're at the mercy of possible terror spam + All-Ultima. If you have Battle/Magic Song being used, you have to pray that Altima decides to NOT target your Bard until you've properly debuffed its strength (more RNG), and have Hamedo on so you can not be OHKOed by Altima in the meantime. 2nd form is all of this minus the physical attacks and instead add terror, and every time you touch the boss it gets CT-Save. Was that necessary? Sure, I can use Mocking Strike on it, but my god, this is so tedious. Every turn it goes I have to pray I randomly don't get blown up or it uses something stupid which means that I need to have buffed MA/PA to dispatch of it fast so I'm not killed. The only response is the same damn thing you've been doing the whole game "Damage Rush." Don't attack Altima at all until you're doing the maximum possible damage and then rush her down. That's stupid. Because you're not even doing anything else except literally lowering Altima 1's stats into the ground and then standing around waiting for songs to actually finish buffing you. That's definitely unique to Altima, because never before was waiting for RNG stacked on top of RNG on top of RNG a thing.

So yeah, I'd say it's worse here than anywhere else. Because the RNG success for player to AI is totally stacked against you and done in a tedious method for winning rather than an actual well designed and thought-provoking method. Plus, the fight goes on for way too long. It's boring.

I try to gauge how appropriately hard something is by asking "How many strategies could the player use to beat this?" The crazier RNG gets, the less viable strategies there are. I lost interest in 1.3 very late into the game because of this.

Its a hard pill to swallow for me because I love the concept of pushing the envelope for player strategy. It just seems like when the enemy gets as ridiculous as it gets at times in 1.3 that it tends to pigeon hole the player pretty hard.

I can guess based on Archael's previous statements that he designed this to be hard in all aspects. Not just hard with regards to the actual battles but hard with the time you may have to put into it, the randomness that makes it hard, etc. I'm not saying its great design but it lives up to its name. If the battle took someone 4 hours to complete just on their final attempt, it probably took them a lot more hours to complete and I am sure that time investment was "difficult" for them.

Although as I type this out and read it back to myself it sounds silly to say. Maybe my views on this topic are changing as time goes on.

There's nothing bad about it: Time passes and things changes with it, so the real question is that you will stay the same or you're following the flow of time?

(and going back into the topic: 1.3 really needs a new version: not only because of these problems, it's just that the game itself needs a fresh start)

ronlyn, on 20 November 2016 - 10:12 AM, said:

I wonder if that will ever happen unless someone else does it? Arch seems perfectly content with the last released version. Even if someone else does it not everyone will like the changes. Whatever changes are made will reflect the person making them so it would probably be best for that person to just make their own version of FFT which we have already seen from Emmy for example.

All in all 1.3 does what it seeks out to do but there will always be arguments on the merits of certain decisions.

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Pushing the envelope for the player is a good thing. Adding a bit of resistance from the computer is good thing. Having things like Weapon Guard Monks no longer being in the game is nice. Having enemies actually having relevant gear as you travel through the game is also a good idea. The reason that the game starts pigeonholing you is simply because of the stupid ass multipliers added to the enemy and just really bullshit game design. For instance, on Rofel, let's say you use a strategy to drain everyone's MP because most of the enemies have MP abilities. That sounds like a great idea, but nope, Archael put a move "Poison/Frog" on every unit on this map, so draining their MP is actually a TERRIBLE idea because even assuming you somehow manage to eat through 200+ MP per unit, now you have to deal with something potentially worse, and that's before you even consider that all of these enemies have innate Short Charge and Concentrate, so dodging isn't an option, and tanking isn't either because they are tankier because they have Defense Up and Magic Defense Up and their support slot uses maintenance. Stuff like that is what makes people say "fuck it" and then you see Damage Split, Meltdown etc. Because it's honestly not feasible nor a good strategy to do anything else. I also forgot to mention that all of these units have M.Barrier as well.

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True enough, and I'm starting to think that it's more that FFT has lived its course in that sense. It's almost 20 years old at this point.

Augestein, on 22 November 2016 - 05:50 AM, said:

Gotta wholeheartedly disagree. I see FFT as having evolved as some kind of parallel to a sport, where it doesn't just live its course, it's just reimagined in new mods, challenges and events. However, I would say that 1.3 is in an "old mod" state already. What were questionable design choices for some, are now widely known quirks about 1.3, and I know a lot of us would love to see a similar mod to 1.3 but with a more refined balance.

Also, the members of the site have evolved. Buuut, that's for a different thread, agreed?

Hart-Hunt, on 22 November 2016 - 08:12 AM, said:

Hmm... I suppose that's a better way of looking at it. Yeah, that does make a bit more sense. Sort of how in other communities (like Fire Emblem's community), FEGheb is kinda looked at with a sort of mixed respect because while the game is essentially a mess, it did one thing for the community: it proved that people could edit the random encounters, and more specifically, the tower of Valni. Hacks from that point on borrowed that knowledge to do even more, and Fire Emblem 8, a game that was once thought to be harder to mod than FE7, has reversed over the years.

Yes. Indeed. +1 post. Literally made me change my mind.