Insane Difficulty: Hey. - Insane Difficulty

Hi there. I will start with the classic "I love this mod" because this is my favorite game of all time, probably the only game I have played more than 3 times. (Chrono Cross aside for char completion and Type 0 aside for... Well, not replaying it means no extra stuff.)

Anyway, I am up to Soulcage, just killed it. I read somewhere LandonRay's missing? Maybe an old thread, dunno if things are still that way. However, I would like to ask questions to the people who have played the mod.

Was Soulcage easy for you? Would you change something about it? Was it dumb?

These three questions... My answers.
1. At first, no, because I was surprised by his perma reflect+haste. I got the timing later on in the fight but it was tough to recover from several mistakes I made.
2. Well, part of the reason I got to recover from those mistakes was that he kept using Mustard Bomb on my characters, and all of them had Body Temp. It certainly made things much easier. Too easy, honestly.
3. I asked this because, well, he cast Fira on a reflect'd Vivi, bounced back to him, and dealt enough damage to finish him off. This may be part of the AI's flaws. Even in vanilla, my first time fighting Ozma, he cast Doomsday while he was on his Holy type, killed all of my party and himself, but Zidane had Auto Life so he won... So yeah, I was just kinda wondering.

Thanks in advance for taking your time to read this.

Hello Laith!

Glad you're liking the mod, it's also one of my favourites, in fact I'm thinking of doing a Let's Play of it. How far along are you now?

I don't think Soulcage is too easy, he follows a similar pattern to most of the bosses, that if you prepare for their specific shtick then you'll mostly be okay (be it a certain element or status). From what I recall I used Reflect Carbuncle and mass Bio to kill him fairly easily.

I wouldn't change him. Sure if you prepare for Mustard Bomb and have reflect up then he can be a bit ineffectual but that's kind of the point I think.

Yes the A.I can still make bad calls. Don't think there's much anybody can do about this.

Hey there. I stopped playing at Deathguise, probably a few days after I made the topic.

Reason? Well, I believe I'm underleveled, or well, that was kinda the point for the run I was doing. I wanted to keep my levels as low as possible and progress that way.

Currently, my characters are between levels 28 and 31. I'm currently unable to get through Deathguise successfully without getting a lucky low damage Meteor from the beginning. When I realized that, maybe, the solution was to gain a few levels, I decided to leave it at that, I'm not really in the mood for grinding right now. Had I played the game naturally, I wouldn't have stopped at this point. xD

I might actually think of a way to deal with it on my current level, it will prove to be quite the challenge. Wouldn't like to say it's impossible, not until I've done everything I can think of.

It's almost certainly not impossible. FF9 ai is random, so unless any combination of attacks kills you faster than you can possibly heal, its possible.

Of course, I don't like "impossible" being thrown around in any game involving rng. There is a difference between "I'll die of age before the rng lets me win" and "impossible."

Yes, I think pendants are stylish.

Beast, on 30 September 2015 - 07:49 PM, said:

You didn't see my call at modding the game then
It's quiet feasible using a tool I released (though not that simple).

@Laith : Yeah, Deathguise is a RNG slot machine, unfortunatly. The only way I can think of now to bypass Meteor without relying solely on luck, is to use Quina's Mighty Guard. But you still need some luck to get hir have a turn before Deathguise.

Tirlititi, on 17 October 2015 - 02:48 AM, said:

Wait, did you actually get the Ai to not act randomly? I thought FF9 enemies had a selection of abilities, and a % chance of which they used.

I didn't remove the randomness of attacks, but it can be done (it's actually way easier to make a non-random AI than a random one when scripting a FF9 AI).

There is a section of abilities, but there's no figure about the % chance of using them. The randomness is in the AI.
If you're interested, you can look at AI scripts I deciphered by hands here :
Kraken's AI
Necron's AI
Ozma's AI
Lani's AI

Using my program Hades Workshop, you can see the script of every enemies, but they are even harder to understand (mostly because the variable names are nonsensical).

Tirlititi, on 17 October 2015 - 04:30 AM, said:

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Well, I have still yet to try playing in "Wait", since I've been on Active all along. So that's one thing to make it a bit easier. The other thing is, while I did have to rely a bit on RNG on certain boss battles (namely just before Terra and onwards), like Tirlititi said, it's a slot machine. Also like Kjata said, it could take years before I actually get an opening to start mauling away, not to even think of the fact that I might not even be able to seize that moment the way I should because of mistakes...

I suppose I'm just gonna wait it out a bit. Taking a break then will come back to it, with "Wait" ATB and some other strategies I've been thinking about for a while.

Edit:

Tirlititi, on 17 October 2015 - 02:48 AM, said:

I see what you did there.