raics

Feedback and Suggestions

599 posts in this topic

Sweet, v 88 is sounding like a big one!

 

Also never thought to try that, this pumpkin is totally becoming one now.

 

....ok, I tried it, and the pumpkin can't seem to learn songs, for some reason. She can learn seemingly every other singer skill. 

Edited by coffee potato
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Won't really be that big, I did the cursed weapon rework, fixed some spells and a few other minor things, I'll try squeezing in the remaining elements for all weapons somehow, probably by using the upgrade slots for lower level gear, you don't even have access to crafting at that point.

Songs as in scrolls or the skill? They use Art of War skill now so you can't learn the Songs skill. Thanks for reminding me, though, I forgot to switch over the Songs skill back to song spell group, it should be done so you have access to them through both skills because enemy songstresses won't have Art of War.

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My bad, must have been a bit too asleep yesterday, I thought I had assigned AoW, but had forgotten to slap it on there while running AI grind fights. 

So does this mean these weird jank weapons get to stick around a while and triple-overkill dragons while sweet new stuff gets added to the POTD?

Also, for Your hard mode down the line, were resurrections via priest sticking around for that one, or just necros? I forget if this was asked.

Edited by coffee potato

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Got to wondering today, maybe instead of removing resurrections there could be an XCOM approach? Seems like Consecrate already has a countdown stopper, maybe it could be a stabilize move?

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Probably not, I've been intending to remove resurrections altogether. Dunno how feasible would a countdown stopper be, maybe some kind of evacuate move that removes the corpse from the battle so you're left one man short but his life is saved.

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That sounds like fun, would be great for KOs to matter. Do You think there will be a reworking to craftbook contents later? Stuff like Armorcraft having only two pairs of pants, the Legguard enchilada having shoes and no armored boots or leggings, or the Headgear book having only Holy Crowns?

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So when You're doing more craftables, could You add a few items that could be useful all game through as sidegrades to existing stat bonuses?

Let's say...like a shield that gives a massive deflect bonus, but no stats (could be one of them samurai balloon shields), or boots that boost health by 100, give 2 parry, but lower resistance by 50.

Maybe a helmet that can cast trueflight, or earlier availability of the different terrain traversing abilities?

Ooh, gauntlets that give 4 Overpower, but lower agility significantly. 

Maybe a Pollaxe that hits with high amounts of all damage types, but has only moderate base damage?

How about the Fairy Net, a Bola that gives a massive bonus to Faerie damage, increases sacreology, and just generally deals with annoying fairies, but only has maybe 20 base damage?

What about a Dragonslayer, once again, moderate base damage, very high racial damages, but preposterously high RT

Is there a way to implement an item effect to show up as an active skill? Say...a self pushback? Moonwalker boots!

Maybe a Phalanx Pike that uses 3-3 range, has high racial damage abilities, but high RT. Like a crappy back liner spear for poking at squishies from afar for Hoplites (or just Tamuz).

A pistol that inflicts stun and resets RT sounds fun. 

A distracting, shiny shield that can reset TP when smacking someone!

Is there a way to implement a blunderbuss with preposterous scaling damage over an AoE and horrible armor penetration with RT that would make anyone cry?

Gag as a secondary weapon for a healer assassin? Moderate damage with 80% silence?

Teutonic Armor, just a grossly heavy set of mid game armor with double weight, high defenses, and the ability to fortify? (For those AoE2 references that totally make sense here)

I suppose in general just stuff that would scale well, have a unique purpose, and just add some fun variety to the item pool. I was thinking earlier, this kind of stuff, while not implemented correctly in the original, was one of the very few things I liked about how they implemented crafting for the original. 

 

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Sure, I can do some of those and some I can't, however room is the problem now that we can't count on those extra 34 slots from cursed weapons. I could use the +1 weapon slots for those alternatives because it isn't really doing much for the game currently. I was planning on using some of those to cover extra elemental weapons anyway but that's weeks worth of just shifting stuff around and fixing what I inevitably messed up.

Boots, shield or those gauntlets are fine but I have to be careful not to exceed +4 total bonus from all items you can equip at the same time or it starts counting back from 1. There's probably no point in having more movement effect items, I can just shift the ones we already got to be available earlier.

The Poleaxe can't work, however, an item can have only one damage type, one element and one racial affinity.

All endgame elemental items have a bonus against some race so it wouldn't be adding anything new, it also applies only to that extra damage from stat difference so you'll likely do more damage with a high ATK weapon to some enemies than a low ATK one with high racial damage bonus.

Depends what kind of active effect you had in mind, the system is kinda restricted.

A longer range spear is no problem at least.

Stun pistol is fine but it can't have both stun and TP reset, unlike spells and skills an item can have only one on hit effect.

Mentioned this before, but the game doesn't really have a distance-limited cone AoE for your blunderbuss, only an infinite one which will probably freeze the emulator on weaker devices.

Teutonic armor is ok, no idea if anyone will use something that heavy, though, we like our RT low :)

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I know I, for one, like to load the most preposterously heavy armor I can find on my leader on Ironman runs, it usually tends to work surprisingly well. My brother always laughed when I used the Teutons in AoE2....until their lumbering butts made it all the way across the map 3 hours later and burned everything. Even better when a mod came out to give them spears....

I keep forgetting about the AoE thing, sorry, bad memory.

The active effect was a self pushback, which I assume wouldn't work, but just had the idea earlier when using my resident Jedi warlock for slashing a guy and pushing them for the next in line. If they could move one tile, could work for a sort of hit and run item. Also useful would be a low attack dagger that allowed for anyone to use Sneak Attack for massive damage. Or, maybe a Lance that gives Dash. 

Bummer on the Pollaxe, the sheer swiss army stickness of that thing always was cool.

It certainly would be nice to have more movement items earlier. I see absolutely no use whatsoever in them where they are and how they are right now. Like...situational doesn't even begin to describe that situation.

Never knew about the 4+ thing, are there any that currently don't have a bonus that could fit in that oddly specific hole?

So a high racial bonus item wouldn't work as a highly specific anti-whatever item early on?

So.....shield ideas

-No phys armor or evasion, but maxed out affinity shield, basically a non-crap version of the Mind Shield from Runescape.

-Shield, probably using another version of the Pelta sprite, that gives a crossbow bonus

-Surfing shield, moderate defenses, gives water walk

-parrying dagger, no defensive bonus, preposterous evasion bonus, looks super classy

-book, gives an int bonus, evasion bonus, but no defense. Mostly just an excuse to dual-wield books

-A Crusty super old cheeto-covered laptop from the 80s, gives charmproof, no one wants to be friends with that. (comes with a free combover)

Other ideas:

Kheraizen- a reference to a game probably no one playing this would have played, but would be a pistol with a dagger bonus. (It's SOTS The Pit, a small studio Roguelike)

Blackjack- staff that can hit with sleep

Handcuffs- Low damage 2-range Bola that Shackles

Wooden Sword- low damage training weapon that can hit with curse. (emulating weakening as opposed to killing stufff)

Pacifist- Fist weapon that uses whatever effect the old bombs used to not be able to kill stuff

Lobber bombs that inflict envenom

Iron Boots- Steadfast from armor

Troutsers- pants that smell like fish and maybe combine with the reeking set to allow water walk? (no part of this one seems like a good idea, actually..)

Sniper- 15 range rifle with a massive agility penalty and high RT

Maybe the winged shoes can get an RT penalty? I mean...seems like You should be able to run pretty fast in them things.

Mortar- A cudgel that can fast Firestorm 3 a few times

Can reflect work for all damage? Maybe some armor that grants a use of Reflection?

 

I can probably spout out a few more awful ideas, but maybe something here will inspire some amazing 40x better version of the above. As always, thanks for this amazing mod!!!

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Sure, it's possible to have any spell, active or special as a usable item ability. There are special cases of some passive skills working too, like reflect damage/magic, it could be a craftable alternative for barbed and baldur shield.

I was also thinking about using books as a zero defense shield. Some of those ideas could be interesting, we'll see what works once I shuffle the things around and see how much space I have to work with.

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So....I feel that Charm maybe needs to be a little less strong. Obviously all things have wards and whatnot, but just did a part where I underestimated the sheer numbers of healers one of the San Bronsa fights had (As in every single one having Heal 3 and heavy armor), and seemed to get into a predicament with absolutely no chance to win. Then I remembered Charm was a thing. Over the course of the next half hour, every party member was throwing out 100% charms over and over, with only a couple times where one of their units broke free and full-healed each other. It actually felt a little surreal strangling the crap out of their group like that, inching away little by little, petrifying and sleeping those that didn't need to be charmed yet. Bewitch got reduced to 2-3 turns, but yeah, I had enough time to re-up charm over and over in this case. Is there some way to make it to where debuffs become less accurate when used over and over? It was certainly a fun fight, just can't see why any NPC army wouldn't have a billion Sultry Politicians backing up their front lines.

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Yeah, I've already reduced it to the same duration as bewitch for next patch. Did a minor pass over some skills and spells too, I'll probably release what I did up to now and leave the serious item tweaking for another time. Status accuracy decay would be 99% impossible, I think.

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Sweet goodness!

Random note, the musical scores are still a thing apparently, I've been picking up a few travelling around San Bronsa. They don't have a Sprite, though.

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Yeah, saw that one and took care of it today, didn't remember they could also drop besides being available at deneb's shop so I haven't replaced them back then.

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One more quick question. So once You get there, will You be adding some of the crafted gear into the NPC pool? Say like the Wallister have smaller numbers, so maybe they have a chance of better armor, or the Galgis love their mages, so they have better staves kind of thing? I'd assume plain randos might just invest into weapons and helmets. Is that something You would consider or could do down the line maybe? Might add some spice to the grind fights to find the one random deserter that invented the gunblade xD

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I could, but not to separate factions, gear is added to the random pool globally. Can't be on just some of them unless you force equip it to a certain enemy that appears in a certain fight, which I haven't found the table for yet.

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A few small things I noticed:

The description of the skill "Princess's Whim" could use a dot and a space at the end
And Lightburst II is listed above Lightburst (this is annoying me more than it should :p)

All in all i'm loving this mod

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Right, if a skill description is missing punctuation or a space, in 99% of the cases it means I had no room for it and it's better than abbreviating. Sometimes it seems there's enough room but it still truncates the text a bit strangely for some reason, which is the case with Whim so I'll just shorten it a bit and it should be fine, thanks for reporting it.

The situation with burst spells is similar, instill spells have more space in their name slots so bursts II had to go there, there isn't enough room below. You can rearrange the spell list for every character so it isn't too much of an issue, I hope.

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You said adding a casting efffect to an item takes a second slot, right? I was curious if there was an interesting place for a set of bows with Bringer abilities, something to allow for a turn of setup for maybe 2 turns of guaranteed debuffs? Is there a way to limit the different sources of different buffs? Is there a way to make an instill move for racial effects?

 

Random non mechanical note, why do You think they hated maces so much in vanilla? I've been trying to make Denam into an unstoppable mace God on a vanilla Ironman run to set the bar for the modded one.

Edited by coffee potato

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I've changed those endgame sniper gauntlets to have a few uses of Benumb, you can't change the duration just for the item, however, unless you make a whole new skill just for using it on the weapon. When an item has a usable skill it uses the same one, except it has no cost and you have to spend a turn on it, so an active skill on an item would use up your main action too. Can't see any way to create new racial buffs yet, maybe some day.

Dunno, can't say they hated them too much, maces are a perfectly normal crappy weapon, meaning anything that isn't a dagger, katana or bow.

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True, but they're also the only one to have that bizarre damage scaling tip to where they basically do 1 damage before upgrades, skill ups, and a crap ton of dragon steak. Getting Denam to hurt dudes with that thing on vanilla took several hours of grinding and basically stacking him for offense. Kind of funny to see him go all kingly on folks now, though. 

Just finally got the Zephyros, is it supposed to have a greyed out background? I thought these all got shiny golden goodness?

Is it possible to add a couple more casts to some of the end game weapon spells? That wind god must have gotten tired fast if 1 deadshot tires him out. Notos needs a gym membership

Is it possible to add a spell that has the Reeking effect? Maybe a Draconic thing dropped by an Ogre, just covers someone in whatever horrid stuff they cover Abercrombie stores in?

Lastly, were there any plans to relocate some of the drop spells from SB (teleport specifically)?

 

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Yeah, Zephyros was an oversight, fixed it.

I'll replace the spells on high end weapons with something else rather than buff the use count, I've started changing them a while ago. For instance, Caliburn has 2 uses of Boon which is a small nod to FFT Excalibur, Oracion grants INT bonus instead of AGI and has one use of Requiem that does spell damage so it's a good weapon for hybrids. It's usually some kind of attack skill except for caster weapons which still have spells and it will be limited to gear that is harder to get so you have more incentive to go through the trouble.

No idea where set bonuses are, it's done differently than other stats.

We'll see once I find the drop and steal table and start working on it, a lot of things is likely to change.

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Sweet, thanks man!

Do You think You'll be adding more unique stuff to the steal tables by rank when that's found? As far as I can tell, the only benefit to getting a maxed out thief so far was slightly higher grade healing items and the Reaver Ring at 5. Plus side, they basically speed up crafting in their current state. 

General curiosity here, but how many different versions of Denam did they make?

I hope one of those caster moves can be like the Illusionists from FFTA2. As much as they were pretty much a walking smartbomb, I always expected that to be the Apocrypha, or maybe for it to work like the Scholar from that one, where it basically nukes both teams. But yeah, maybe one of the instrument can whip out those sweet electric guitar riffs that split the sky and bring down lightning for miles. So far the closest I could get was giving lightning summons and a ukulele to Iuria. So...uhh.....get on that! (can't wait to try those others!)

Any chance of a 2hander that does the ice hold move?

P.s. How awesome would it be if they made the emblem system for this one, and it just needed to be turned on somewhere in there?

Edited by coffee potato

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