Insane Difficulty: fix-only Patch - Insane Difficulty

Since people. Just. Won't. Stop. Asking.
Download V1.2
The patch is for an unheadered ROM, use SNESutil or similar to remove an existing header. Should be 99% compatible with translated ROMs.

• enabled AGL/evade for actual hit/evade mechanics instead of animation-only
  
• increased chance for critical hits from fixed 0 to 2+LUCK
  
• corrected issue with level-ups where max stats were sometimes those of later levels
  
• Transshape has fixed duration of 12 instead of 25 minus luck
  
• Heal Light no longer "heals" maxHP up/down (effect was only visible on next maxHP check)
  
• prevent HP overflow from healing enemies with 65k+ HP
  
• force attack recalculation on map transition to prevent wolf bonus stacking abuse
  
• Blaze Wall and Flame Breath no longer remove status ailments from the target (they try to inflict non-existing burn state)

for the curious, light Duran's shields grant:

• Gold: nothing!
  
• Red Heat: fire resistance
  
• Water Dragon: ice resistance
  
• Earth: earth resistance
  
• Thunder God: wind resistance
  
• Dragon: fire, ice, earth and wind resistance
  
• Sacred: dark, moon and leaf resistance - it was seemingly intended to have immunity to dark; I refuse to go that far
  
• Oath: status immunity to sleep, poison, moogle, chibikko and one ailment that doesn't exist
  
• Adamant: best evasion

This patch will not be supported any further than necessary.
You've been warned.

This post has been edited by Praetarius5018: 13 May 2015 - 08:32 AM

EDIT : I erased my post since I figured out the problem.

I will note, however, that it's important to apply the patch with a program like LunarIPS.

For those less familiar, the patch expands the ROM size to accommodate the bug fixes. I'm not sure if it's necessary to remove the header but the unheadered ROM I have right now seems to work fine.

ZSNES auto-patch doesn't work with that file.

Dudejo, on 22 April 2015 - 04:42 AM, said:

It almost always is, because that's going to throw off the data offsets that the patch is changing.

Dudejo, on 22 April 2015 - 04:42 AM, said:

The ROM must be unheadered, I added a note for that in the first post.
ROM expansion was unavoidable. I never found stuff like left-over from resistance handling for heroes so I had to add that from scratch.

What about the Sabers and the Energy ball skill, how much critical adds the last one? May the Mana Godness bless you for this patch.

Loto, on 29 April 2015 - 05:13 PM, said:

Sabers add 10% atk/ element, Energy ball adds 10% crit chance

Kei, on 29 April 2015 - 05:34 PM, said:

I'm sure I left Energy Ball at "set to 50%" here - people wanted only bug-fixes, not balance.

Sabers set attack to 110%, but this overwrites the power up/down effect of +/-33%.

Praetarius5018, on 29 April 2015 - 10:17 PM, said:

Hah, ain't that right.

I'm not sure if this is supposed to happen but Kevin is still getting a free power-up when he gets damaged as a werewolf.

I tried it out during his intro fight against his puppy.

Dudejo, on 02 May 2015 - 04:24 PM, said:

I think it's supposed to happen, the fix only prevents you from stacking it.

Kei, on 02 May 2015 - 05:01 PM, said:

Really? How did that bug work?

Dudejo, on 02 May 2015 - 05:32 PM, said:

I'm not sure since I never used it; I think it involves using flammie while transformed or something so you keep the bonus because you never actually end the battle. Praetarius knows the details.

You're mixing two things up:
get-hit bonus and transformation bonus

If Kevin gets hit, he simply gets the normal power-up spell effect. That seems to be intended as the byte for "has power up buff" is set when he transforms (I removed it in the regular hack).
This is properly removed when you call flammie as it doesn't modify base attack, only the derivated value.


When Kevin transforms into a wolf, he gets a well-known 1/7 bonus to his base attack.
This overwrites his base attack. His original base attack is stored in a backup variable.
Normally, when he transforms back this backup is loaded and stored as his base attack, so all is back to normal.
But if you call flammie while he is in wolfform this is not executed; his current base attack keeps the wolfbonus.
So when you land and transform again, you get another 1/7 on top of that and the original base attack is overwritten with the base attack that has 1x wolfbonus.
Repeat until he reaches 370 base attack - that is a cap solely present for wolf-Kevin.

This lasts until his attack is recalculated; in vanilla this is only the case on level up (just be in wolfform then to avoid the loss...) or when you go weapon shopping as Kevin (why would you need to?)
So my fix is simply to force recalculation on every map transition.

So does that mean both bonuses are intentional?

Dudejo, on 03 May 2015 - 02:44 AM, said:

Maybe.
No way to know for sure.
Like crits were probably disabled on purpose instead of what is commonly assumed to be a bug (it's a constant 0, not a misaligned pointer).

But we have no way to know either way.

Praetarius5018, on 03 May 2015 - 03:10 AM, said:

We COULD pretend that Kevin wasn't supposed to have a get-hit bonus.

God knows he's powerful enough as it is without a free boost in damage.

Dudejo, on 03 May 2015 - 04:31 AM, said:

That's what I did with the main patch.
But if I started on this patch with nerfing OP stuff I'd also have to nerf critical damage and probably physical damage in general and ... more stuff .... and it would end up more or less like the main patch on one of the easier settings, so why bother.

Praetarius5018, on 03 May 2015 - 04:39 AM, said:

You wouldn't be nerfing Kevin.

You would be fixing a bug that inadvertently makes him the best character in the game.

Dudejo, on 03 May 2015 - 05:57 AM, said:

And it could be considered a bug that there's no mini-boss fight in the final manaland before the final boss with 3 black rabites. Or that Landumber takes 5 units of break between attacks.
Let's not go that way.

This fix-patch is a blatant physical-oriented powertrip*. One nerf won't change that.
With saber, Kevin's double attack goes beyond the damage cap on a crit or Lv1 tech; there is nothing even remotely balanced here.
2x600 Lv1 tech should be possible even without stacking wolf bonuses.

If you want anything resembling balance - this is the wrong patch, seriously.
For that the "hardmode" patch is a bit more suited, I think the easy version gets quite close to the original difficulty.



*Duran is with shields even more unkillable, Hawk doesn't care about half the attacks thrown at him (enemies have 0 accuracy).
Crits deal as much damage as Lv1 techs, with Energy Ball you have that on every second attack; kinda OP seeing how Lv2/3 techs were already worse than Lv1 - lacking saber element, too much tech bar needed but worse damage than elemental Lv1, time stop, trigger counter attacks, no double attack (Hawk/Kevin)...

Aw, you're no fun.

Nah, kidding.

EDIT : Seriously, though, there seems to be a big problem with the hit rate and evasion.

Against some of the bosses, the system seems to randomly fall apart and it becomes impossible to hit them.

As far as I can remember, it happened against both Jewel Eater and Gorva. It seems they trigger some sort of invulnerability state that doesn't properly de-activate.