Insane Difficulty: I (kind of) Give Up: Ultros 1 - Insane Difficulty

Just wanted to pop in and confirm I was on the regular difficulty rather than casual! Also gameplay-wise was using the nATB and esper balance patches.

I hope some of my less ranty feedback was useful--I really think that tweaking some of the AI's (or maybe just slowing down the bosses a bit--they all seemed obscenely faster than my entire party) would've probably fixed most of my problems. Regular encounters were very manageable, if still difficult though. I hope I communicated well why I felt this was really frustrating to me---I had gotten all the special equipment I could find (including the stuff hidden in the basement in Seascape and all the magic-teaching equipment), tried to exploit as many strategies as I could think of (with magic, equip setups, and ninja scrolls), and I was still running into a brick wall on those bosses.

I definitely agree with you Gi that this hack does not feel like I need an obscene amount of levels ~90% of the time, just during those boss fights.

Like I said, I'll probably give it a go some other time in the future, maybe without nATB just to maybe test what you were saying about potentially balancing some bosses around being able to fill the ATB bar while they act.

magictrufflez, on 01 September 2016 - 05:48 AM, said:

Shouldn't the fact you were actually playing with standard difficulty and nATB defeat the whole purpose of the rant?
I mean, your intention in the first place was to play this hack in casual mode, right?
On a side note nATB is born to erase the exploit a player can do with ATB to get more turns, which means this is a patch
aimed to make the battle more difficult, a thing that shouldn't be used from a player who wanna play in casual mode...

I'll definitely try things out with it applied and most likely have it turn down the speed of the monsters/bosses by a considerable amount. I bet I would have done that had I tested and played through the hack with it applied - the monsters do have considerably more speed due to the vanilla atb system which allows pretty much all the characters to get a turn in for the monsters one... So yeah take away that aspect and I'm sure it needs balancing. I'd bet you would of had a much less stressful experience! I can probably do this for the next update, for all it is would be dropping the speed of monsters by a somewhat considerable amount. But yeah, for now using the no-atb patch with this hack I'd recommend doing casual for sure.

Gi Nattak, on 01 September 2016 - 08:20 AM, said:

Beware doing that, the last time nerfed Zuriel main problem was right the fact that his speed was lowered too much.

Well I mean I'd have the monster's speed turned down just for when the no-atb patch is applied by adding the speed nerfs to the patch, to balance out the injustice in speed. Without the no-atb patch applied no monsters would be effected.