praetarius5018

Final Fantasy V: Void Divergence - Discussion

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v0.780

  • altered several weapon elements, there should now be less off-type weapons (e.g. swords that aren't fire)
  • changed harps from fraction damage to regular damage
  • added new icons for certain relics
  • altered icons, names, stats and effects of relics
  • relic icon should now indicate whether it has a hidden effect or not
    -amulet grants either absorb or increased element resistance
    -rune grants that element's status resistances
    -rings hold all remaining effects
    -genji equipment is the only exception to the status resistance rule
  • increased weight and defense of lategame effectless relics by about 20%
  • added "Field" behind the field icons in battle for clarity
  • altered sorting rule to make axes and hammers treated as the same type (technically they already were)
  • fixed a bug in the abp gain for the 4th character
  • fixed a bug that dropped total exp to 0 on escape

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I signed up just to say that your work on this is impressive. The field effects are a lot more interesting than in the inspiration (just changing it from 3 slots w/3 chars to 5 w/4 chars makes it a lot less unforgiving), the added elemental variety makes caster jobs a lot more versatile, and so far the boss battles have been pretty fun and a decent challenge. Also I love how I can disable XP gain so I can just grind for ABP or items/blue magic without becoming overleveled. Having the consumable items have a cooldown and effects that vary on amount is a pretty bold idea on paper but works nicely in practice.

If I could suggest something, some sort of item-based substitute to !Scan would be wonderful, even if it consumes a turn like any other item. At a certain point it's kind of a waste of a slot and at times it's a bother to go check the element chart externally when enemies have element combos, so it'd be a decent compromise for being lazy or not playing on a PC. Kinda like Etrian V that gives you the option to use a turn in exchange for not using your union gauge on scans.

Some sort of ancient cave would elevate this to masterpiece tier, but don't take me too seriously, I think every story-based or linear/semi-linear game with good combat can benefit from one. I understand if you think it's like the worst suggestion ever, though, those things aren't easy to implement at all, even if there's already one for FF5 in particular, I don't think it'd be compatible at all after so many changes.

Still pretty great stuff. If it's already this good at an early version without too much balance and missing some jobs, when it's more complete it's gonna be ridiculously good. Good job, really.

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5 hours ago, Magpie said:

If I could suggest something, some sort of item-based substitute to !Scan would be wonderful, even if it consumes a turn like any other item. At a certain point it's kind of a waste of a slot and at times it's a bother to go check the element chart externally when enemies have element combos, so it'd be a decent compromise for being lazy or not playing on a PC. Kinda like Etrian V that gives you the option to use a turn in exchange for not using your union gauge on scans.

I can see where you're coming from - same with !Brave, really - but there's a tiny problem with that:
I don't have any items left to use.
The game is capped at 255 different items and they are already used.
Weapons, relics, consumables all fall under that.

The most I could do is replace something;
want to get rid of tents? cabins? Omega medal? Dragon crest? 3 summons?

5 hours ago, Magpie said:

Some sort of ancient cave would elevate this to masterpiece tier, but don't take me too seriously, I think every story-based or linear/semi-linear game with good combat can benefit from one. I understand if you think it's like the worst suggestion ever, though, those things aren't easy to implement at all, even if there's already one for FF5 in particular, I don't think it'd be compatible at all after so many changes.

I wanted more to go the FJF route, that's what the single job option is for.

5 hours ago, Magpie said:

Still pretty great stuff. If it's already this good at an early version without too much balance and missing some jobs, when it's more complete it's gonna be ridiculously good. Good job, really.

Then start giving me some feedback - what works, what doesn't?
There's already too many options for me to have an overview of which combinations are just way OP or what's 100% useless.
Does a job get usable too late (too hard to unlock skills in contrast to !White) or is it too dominant early?
Stuff like that.

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2 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

I can see where you're coming from - same with !Brave, really - but there's a tiny problem with that:
I don't have any items left to use.
The game is capped at 255 different items and they are already used.
Weapons, relics, consumables all fall under that.

The most I could do is replace something;
want to get rid of tents? cabins? Omega medal? Dragon crest? 3 summons?

Oh! That does make sense. Cabins seem kinda redundant with the current design unless I'm missing some extra effect, so they could be a candidate for replacement.

7 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

Then start giving me some feedback - what works, what doesn't?

There's already too many options for me to have an overview of which combinations are just way OP or what's 100% useless.
Does a job get usable too late (too hard to unlock skills in contrast to !White) or is it too dominant early?
Stuff like that.

I think the main thing is that while bosses are interesting and fun, regular encounters aren't any more exciting than in the base game. Since health regenerates to a degree, it has two interesting effects, one positive and one negative: the positive being that grinding is super convenient, the negative being that once you have gotten some levels and skills, you might as well reduce encounters and just go fight the boss because enemies aren't really draining your resources in any significant way, nor are particularly exciting. The most interesting fight were the Gigases because they hit like trucks at that point so it required me to actually brain to get the stuff in time.

As for the jobs, it's hard to tell because I'm still kind of focusing in my favorites and leveling them up at this point, but I've noticed:

!Brave -> It's great to borrow a turn now, but it's usually one of the first skill slots to go because it's more preferable to !Def and potentially get more than one extra turn eventually. It also kinda burns when the enemy gets to act between your !Brave-d turns (Byblos was a particular repeat offender).

Mages -> They feel more practical and manageable than in the regular game, so far Lenna with !Red, !Time and !X-Magic is doing very good damage and utility but not really overwhelmingly so, so I'd say so far so good. On the other hand I made Lenna be the "omnimancer" so gotta prioritize, thus I'm kinda nerfing myself there.

Summoner -> I find the summons are a bit on the cheap side, although they aren't doing all that much damage either unless the field is primed, so I guess it's okay? At least at this point of the game (just about to fight the Cannon) and having Faris as the summoner it seems fair in damage terms and I like stuff that makes use of the field. Although I feel shiva/ramuh/ifrit should all cost like 25MP or even up to 50MP either way.

Tinker -> I just love this class, and since I tinkered with it the most I can give the most in-depth analysis. No...pun intended, by the way.

I just love classes that do things with items in general so I'm biased, but it's really interesting and makes heavy item usage (since every consumable item is pretty much a new skill for the team) a viable strategy. The item-related commands are great, although I feel that Load has like no noticeable effect at times. Like I was having Galuf doing like 3 consecutive casts of Load on himself and the the item bar seemed to remain the same. ...unless that's some quirk of the underlying ATB. I don't use Shock very much but I know I should. HeRoBot is just great. The hit itself is meh but the HP Leak is so useful and seems to have a good rate. Guardian I'm finding myself not using very often, and I keep forgetting what WingBoot does. (Doesn't help FFV was terrible at conveying information during battle). !X-Item doesn't feel overly powerful, since attack items aren't affected, and healing is good but you can't seem to be able to mass-revive with Phoenix Downs, and stuff like elixirs have a reasonably high recharge time...so feels fair. Overload is ridiculous (but I love it), poor Galuf like imploded at one point and I'm wary of it at the moment, but at the same time when I am far enough in the game it feels like that amount of health is going to be borderline negligible. I honestly wouldn't mind if !X-Item an elixir + Overload results in like 9000 damage. (On the other hand it'd be hilarious to abuse Overload in that one fight with Galuf, maybe with !Throw)

The leveling method for !Tinker is kind of wacky though, because you only have a bomb for a few hours of game, then you become able to buy them so you can max them out in no time. Making bombs for more elements would be a solution but are already dealing with the uint8 item limit so...yeah. And also it'd kinda run over !Throw's territory as well. Making bombs more expensive would make it just a grind, like it'd be to limit them to steal-able items or enemy drops. It's hard to suggest something better, but then again !Tinker isn't terribly overpowered at this point of the game, so maybe it's fine?

Crusader -> I didn't play much with this one yet, but !Esemte is...a mixed bag. At low levels or damaged it only gives you Cruzfire and maybe Recover, but Cruzfire is...terrible. The damage is pretty low and it refuses to target more than 1-2 enemies, and doesn't even carry !SpellSwd elements. Execute seems like just a regular attack unless it has some instakill ability that I never managed to trigger.

The fire-based recover I kinda love as a concept. Having healings in more elements is useful for managing field effects, so it's nice to have. As for the other !Esemte skills they sound like great utility in general and I like Shield Bash as a general concept as well. I have to see how the damage scales with the later.

Tamer -> I just wanted to go grab !Control but then I saw Mastery and I'm intrigued, still leveling it up but it can make it a viable job if you can potentially spam your pokemon. I'll get back to you on this one.

Mystic -> It's a bit of a pain to figure out which passives will give you a !Fight to use !SpellSwd with, but the added elements and effects make it worth having a !Fight for sure. Damage is pretty excellent but it's not like one-shotting bosses or anything, at this point in the game it feels strong but not terribly so, at least. Huge improvement, personally.

!Blue -> I mean it's blue magic it's ok if it's a bit on the crazy side. Although the modified spells are actually kind of interesting, Exploder not killing you is kind of exploitable but at the same time you need to plan it up well to not die anyway, specially since the ATB quirk can let enemies act during extra turns, so it's balanced in an odd sort of way, specially with the big cooldown on phoenix downs and that it's kinda inevitable someone will lack !Item at some point. It's still pretty risky even if potent. Snowstorm doesn't hit super hard but it's nice to have that extra elemental variety and possibility of blinding. Crusher I just got so I didn't try it properly yet, but sounds potentially useful. The nerf to White Wind I didn't get to experience yet, but sounds reasonable. And having Aqua Rake actually be water-elemental is just nice. Having less stuff be immediately breakable with Lv.5 Death is also good, imo.

Bosses and "LP": I would have done the same, honestly.

So yeah the classes themselves seem well-thought and none of those I tried, at least up to this point, feels like an instawin button, the infinite consumables sound like a boon but it's a huge handicap in battle (and I like it a lot), field effects are good, most things feel generally under control. But the random encounters are kinda meat roadblocks that rarely do anything interesting or threatening. And then you reach a boss and you gotta actually use your brain which has been on standby for most of the dungeons and scenes, so it goes from 0 to 100.

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Sorry to double post but after a bit of grinding I found myself in this situation:

For some reason and suddenly, Bartz's health keeps dropping to 0 after every fight, so he dies every second fight (since you can't raise his health unless using a tent). Tried reloading, tents/inns but it keeps happening even if I change jobs. Not sure what triggered it but ouch.

This is in 0.780.

 

out5.png

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...wow that was fast. I can confirm it's fixed, thank you!

As well as the summon thing (although I didn't think it was a bug, at least with the ones I have it looked kinda intentional like channeling the power of the summon or something).

 

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finally some comments from my side, better late than never

On 30.11.2018 at 1:46 AM, Magpie said:

I think the main thing is that while bosses are interesting and fun, regular encounters aren't any more exciting than in the base game.

Interestingly, other people voiced the opposite opinion - that randoms were the harder fights than the bosses.

Fact is, I don't really care much about the random battles at this point. You have around 50 boss fights during the whole playthrough, that should be enough imo, no need to pad everything with pseudo-required grinding of random battles.
They are just there to give you ressources: exp, abp, blue magic, items (with first copy of rare drops now guaranteed)

 

Summoner was one of the harder cases to make interesting; going by animations it comes with 3 "fire spells" in Ifrit, Phoenix, Bahamut and not many summons that lend themselves to anything that isn't damage. And ofc it has competition in the black mage for basically the same position.

Anyway, I feel like 25 MP would be way too expensive. Summons now do lose some damage against multiple targets (in vanilla they always dealt 100% damage) but not as much as regular black magic spells, against 8 targets they would deal hardly double damage (25% vs 47%);
Ifrit has 92 power at 9 MP, Fire is 100 power and free; in general with no extra effects I want 100 power at 0 MP (baring other modifiers same damage as !Fight) and about 1.2~1.5% more damage per MP (mostly just eye balled).
The stronger increase from field effect is just a way to provide an alternative to X-Magic since that would just be the automatic go-to option for optimization.

 

Load (and Time/Renew is 1:1 the same) may not show a difference if the remaining cooldown exceeds 20 "turns" since that is the max I can show but the cooldown can go up to 255 e.g. if you use a 1-stack elixir.

WingBoot is basically a mini-haste; it sets the weight to 0 which would otherwise increase the length between 2 turns.

Overload was the one skill I am most wary of turning OP; 2 users of X-Item elixirs and Overloading each other? ehhh... no, thx

The issue with bombs is that they are really only meant to allow any party composition to deal with the 6 Puroboros bomb boss - any other use past that is just incidental.
Making it not multi-target by default would just break the purpose of the item.

 

On 30.11.2018 at 1:46 AM, Magpie said:

Crusader -> I didn't play much with this one yet, but !Esemte is...a mixed bag. At low levels or damaged it only gives you Cruzfire and maybe Recover, but Cruzfire is...terrible. The damage is pretty low and it refuses to target more than 1-2 enemies, and doesn't even carry !SpellSwd elements. Execute seems like just a regular attack unless it has some instakill ability that I never managed to trigger.

The fire-based recover I kinda love as a concept. Having healings in more elements is useful for managing field effects, so it's nice to have. As for the other !Esemte skills they sound like great utility in general and I like Shield Bash as a general concept as well. I have to see how the damage scales with the later.

All physical techs should use the SpellSwd effects, just not show them in the animation.
They also do not suffer from damage reduction based on number of targets - so I had to set the power and accuracy (more AGL helps) lower to compensate for full damage against 8 targets situations.
In general I had a simple overall problem during the entire job design process:
because of technical stuff, spell/skill sets need to have exactly 8 spells/skills.
Physical skillsets basically only need 2 skills, one hit-all and one hit-one hard move - or I could even skip one of those to mix it up - everything else is just bonus; changing weapons takes care of the element part.
Magic skillsets need only one spell no matter the target amount thanks to the damage penalty - but element is fixed, so I need one spell for every element the set should cover;
and I don't want (up to) 8 spells that are just element swaps and otherwise identical. That would be plain boring.
tl;dr:
I had problems creating a whole 8 skills for physical sets without useless bloat and trouble keeing it down to 8 for magic.
E.g. recently Arcanist got 2 full sets (so 16 spells) and I still had to drop about 10 spell ideas...

So if a few physical skills are less useful? sadly to be expected.

Execute is only 5% stronger than base, but it uses STR/AGL instead of whatever your weapon normally uses which is more useful for characters that had a lot of AGL heavy jobs in the past.

 

On 30.11.2018 at 1:46 AM, Magpie said:

Mystic -> It's a bit of a pain to figure out which passives will give you a !Fight to use !SpellSwd with, but the added elements and effects make it worth having a !Fight for sure.

The passive itself doesn't matter.
Skills should be added in the order: !Item, !Fight, !Brave, !Scan

 

Snowstorm profits/suffers from the quirk of spells with status effects; the only spell types that can deal damage and inflict status are level-based instead of MAG-based.
And that formula has no variable for spell power but instead has a fixed value for all level-based spells (mostly used by monsters, so changing that wouldn't be too smart);
formulas can only have 3 parameter and they are needed for accuracy, status chance and inflicted status.

 

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15 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

finally some comments from my side, better late than never

Interestingly, other people voiced the opposite opinion - that randoms were the harder fights than the bosses.

Fact is, I don't really care much about the random battles at this point. You have around 50 boss fights during the whole playthrough, that should be enough imo, no need to pad everything with pseudo-required grinding of random battles.
They are just there to give you ressources: exp, abp, blue magic, items (with first copy of rare drops now guaranteed)

Thank you for your time.

Interesting, I see myself steamrolling most random encounters but dying a few times against the bosses until I kinda figure out a valid strategy. I see your point though, I guess I can just proceed as now, grinding and getting their resources and disabling them when I'm ready to hit the bosses.

15 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

Summoner was one of the harder cases to make interesting; going by animations it comes with 3 "fire spells" in Ifrit, Phoenix, Bahamut and not many summons that lend themselves to anything that isn't damage. And ofc it has competition in the black mage for basically the same position.

Anyway, I feel like 25 MP would be way too expensive. Summons now do lose some damage against multiple targets (in vanilla they always dealt 100% damage) but not as much as regular black magic spells, against 8 targets they would deal hardly double damage (25% vs 47%);
Ifrit has 92 power at 9 MP, Fire is 100 power and free; in general with no extra effects I want 100 power at 0 MP (baring other modifiers same damage as !Fight) and about 1.2~1.5% more damage per MP (mostly just eye balled).
The stronger increase from field effect is just a way to provide an alternative to X-Magic since that would just be the automatic go-to option for optimization.

Hm I get your logic. I'm at the second world right now and I think it's pretty fun to set the field up for a full blast of <elemental summon>. Sylph I never see myself using, it's been reliably doing like 200 damage (thus almost no healing), same with Remora, as I think the Tinker's paralyzing is more efficient overall. But the elemental blasting at full power feels pretty satisfying to do and I generally feel it works better than the CC version of it (where you could only summon at 3/3 field charge and it wasn't really better than just physical attacks. Sadly that's a bit of a concern I have about CC in general, it totally misuses its tactical options by making physical beat up everything just fine).

15 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

Load (and Time/Renew is 1:1 the same) may not show a difference if the remaining cooldown exceeds 20 "turns" since that is the max I can show but the cooldown can go up to 255 e.g. if you use a 1-stack elixir.

WingBoot is basically a mini-haste; it sets the weight to 0 which would otherwise increase the length between 2 turns.

Overload was the one skill I am most wary of turning OP; 2 users of X-Item elixirs and Overloading each other? ehhh... no, thx

The issue with bombs is that they are really only meant to allow any party composition to deal with the 6 Puroboros bomb boss - any other use past that is just incidental.
Making it not multi-target by default would just break the purpose of the item.

Oooh I see. So when it doesn't have an effect it's because that's just how much the bar can represent?

Which makes me wonder, does the cooldown increase per use? I found myself using two X-elixirs on the Cannon and when I tried to overload poor Galuf just popped out of existence with 32K self-inflicted damage, which totally clashes with the 1500 or so I normally get when just using one (also meaning what I said earlier was totally wrong, so...yeah).

I see about the bomb as well. Well, I guess they are nice to have at 99 stack, it sure does help with grinding stuff like bombs (the enemy) before leaving world 1.

15 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

All physical techs should use the SpellSwd effects, just not show them in the animation.

They also do not suffer from damage reduction based on number of targets - so I had to set the power and accuracy (more AGL helps) lower to compensate for full damage against 8 targets situations.
In general I had a simple overall problem during the entire job design process:
because of technical stuff, spell/skill sets need to have exactly 8 spells/skills.
Physical skillsets basically only need 2 skills, one hit-all and one hit-one hard move - or I could even skip one of those to mix it up - everything else is just bonus; changing weapons takes care of the element part.
Magic skillsets need only one spell no matter the target amount thanks to the damage penalty - but element is fixed, so I need one spell for every element the set should cover;
and I don't want (up to) 8 spells that are just element swaps and otherwise identical. That would be plain boring.
tl;dr:
I had problems creating a whole 8 skills for physical sets without useless bloat and trouble keeing it down to 8 for magic.
E.g. recently Arcanist got 2 full sets (so 16 spells) and I still had to drop about 10 spell ideas...

So if a few physical skills are less useful? sadly to be expected.

Execute is only 5% stronger than base, but it uses STR/AGL instead of whatever your weapon normally uses which is more useful for characters that had a lot of AGL heavy jobs in the past.

 

Interesting, so !Esemte actually has synergy with !SpellSwd? I'll give it another shot then, would fit well with the current thingy I got going on with Bartz and save a slot for Galuf. (I kinda like the utility for !Esemte so had him do stuff like SizeUp and such. I like debuffs, heh).

Your reasoning isn't bad, either, yeah it's better to have a bunch of element+secondary effect than just elements for sure. I also like how some spells are essentially free, but doesn't quite give you full elemental coverage, so you aren't quite prepared for all situations if you aren't caring for MP. Kinda reminds me of the "Etrian Odyssey design logic" (from some interview: give your party options, but not all the options so you kinda feel like you are missing something for the ideal setup.) but it's nice for the caster classes to have at least one attack option if you aren't replenishing your power, which helps not needing to carry a !Fight all the time.

To be fair, I like what you did with both the black and white magic options. More elements is great, and I think it's way better to have just one spell of each type that scales as you go than a variety of redundant spell levels for the same element. And having some elemental variety in white magic can help making a challenge run where you can't get !Black on your white mage have them do something that isn't just Holy or healing and twiddle their thumbs otherwise. It also makes red mages a bit more interesting, since you can choose to Smite a single target or multitarget Bolt for when it's multiple.

I got to try out the Arcanist recently and I actually really like the options, got Lenna doing that full-time and it can be tricky but worth it. Makes me kinda wonder what was left in the cutting room floor, heh. Stuff like GrimWail or ChainBolt and SineShot are totally up my alley.

15 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

The passive itself doesn't matter.

Skills should be added in the order: !Item, !Fight, !Brave, !Scan

 

Snowstorm profits/suffers from the quirk of spells with status effects; the only spell types that can deal damage and inflict status are level-based instead of MAG-based.
And that formula has no variable for spell power but instead has a fixed value for all level-based spells (mostly used by monsters, so changing that wouldn't be too smart);
formulas can only have 3 parameter and they are needed for accuracy, status chance and inflicted status.

 

That's strange, I totally thought some skills would be biased to give one or another command, like magic-related ones gave you !Item first while physical ones gave you !Fight first...at least that seems to work reliably, like stuff like Bulwark or Pierce conveniently giving me !Fight while stuff like Recycle or TurboMP giving me !Item. Huh, I wonder if I had other ones set up and didn't notice.

Also I see, I decided to give !Blue to Bartz and noticed his damage with Snowstorm wasn't great but was a lot higher than I expected from his build and gear. I guess those are the compromises that come with having to build over the existing base. On the other hand if it's gonna get better over time, it's not so bad because even mostly fighters will be able to get something from it. Gotta try how it goes with a herodrink or something.

Well, all in all, and despite the manual's claims to have no balance, I think the changes are generally well thought out and very fun. I'm having as much fun as with something like a legit Etrian Odyssey game. I'm usually pretty open to romhacks but wow. I really like your style and can't wait to see the full class set.

-------

Oh, talking blue magic, I've been trying to learn DoomClaw from the "Torrents" (heh, cheap romanizations) because I missed my usual learn spot earlier in the game due to time constraints, but they never seem to be able to hit with it and have been trying for a few hours...with turbo. It's because it's a bad choice of enemy for it or is something wrong with it? Should I go for Gilgamesh instead and stop bothering? I normally have it at this point in the vanilla version so I don't know if I'm wasting my time with these.

EDIT: I've been trying controlling the RockMinds but while DoomClaw seems to work when using against enemies, it's never hitting anyone in my party, so I think something is wrong with it. I tried even stripping of all gear in case something was giving me resistance or something, but nothing seems to work.

Edited by Magpie

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3 hours ago, Magpie said:

Sylph I never see myself using, it's been reliably doing like 200 damage (thus almost no healing)

give it a poison field, maybe poison boost from a venom rod or the like and a weak to poison enemy, maybe some poison type relics - maybe not enough to replace a pure healer but certainly an aid

 

3 hours ago, Magpie said:

Oooh I see. So when it doesn't have an effect it's because that's just how much the bar can represent?

Which makes me wonder, does the cooldown increase per use? I found myself using two X-elixirs on the Cannon and when I tried to overload poor Galuf just popped out of existence with 32K self-inflicted damage, which totally clashes with the 1500 or so I normally get when just using one (also meaning what I said earlier was totally wrong, so...yeah).

I can see where 16k would come from (maxed out cooldown) but 32k?
also, no, the cooldown should stay the same for the same moves

 

4 hours ago, Magpie said:

Your reasoning isn't bad, either, yeah it's better to have a bunch of element+secondary effect than just elements for sure. I also like how some spells are essentially free, but doesn't quite give you full elemental coverage, so you aren't quite prepared for all situations if you aren't caring for MP. Kinda reminds me of the "Etrian Odyssey design logic" (from some interview: give your party options, but not all the options so you kinda feel like you are missing something for the ideal setup.) but it's nice for the caster classes to have at least one attack option if you aren't replenishing your power, which helps not needing to carry a !Fight all the time.

Yeah, kinda like that; note how !Black e.g. can't deal too well with regular poison type undead (=weak to wind and light): no light damage spell and the wind spell is HP drain which gets reversed.
Where as that is basically the main domain of !White with wind, light and cure spells.

Alternatively to using the free spell, you could defend and gain some MP while subverting the usual trope of full-time squishy mages.
This is in contrast to the other 3 stats which have direct defense benefits. (AGL = evade, VIT = HP&dmg reduction, STR = can easier equip heavier relics = more def)

 

4 hours ago, Magpie said:

I got to try out the Arcanist recently and I actually really like the options, got Lenna doing that full-time and it can be tricky but worth it. Makes me kinda wonder what was left in the cutting room floor, heh. Stuff like GrimWail or ChainBolt and SineShot are totally up my alley.

-Feedback, damage (water+bolt) based on caster current MP
-Meltdown, fire+wind, damage based on single digit of target HP and own MP (similar to FF5 predict)
-AntiFlow, invert slow <-> haste on all
-GigaNova, terrain set and LOCKED to void, nobody gets damaged...
-Drain Sphere [name too long], gives *everyone* auto-HP leak (only while terrain is 5/5 poison?); stacks with regular HP leak
-Balancer, takes HP of living party members and distributes them evenly

I know I had more but I seem to have deleted those notes.

 

4 hours ago, Magpie said:

Well, all in all, and despite the manual's claims to have no balance, I think the changes are generally well thought out and very fun. I'm having as much fun as with something like a legit Etrian Odyssey game. I'm usually pretty open to romhacks but wow. I really like your style and can't wait to see the full class set.

There's also availability of items, or the fun out of battle stuff:
is it ok to allow 4x dash speed? (3x speed gave me a land boat that could enter a town, that was a fun journey)
or the terrain obstacles - you've infinite antidots, are the poison bushes still relevant? is regular terrain damage too harsh now that you can't really heal it out of battle?
what about the time limit in karnak escape? (why can I now imagine a FF5+Super Metroid combo-randomizer?)

Or the (15) NG+ mode(s)? Well... they don't really need to be balanced.

 

4 hours ago, Magpie said:

Oh, talking blue magic, I've been trying to learn DoomClaw from the "Torrents" (heh, cheap romanizations) because I missed my usual learn spot earlier in the game due to time constraints, but they never seem to be able to hit with it and have been trying for a few hours...with turbo. It's because it's a bad choice of enemy for it or is something wrong with it? Should I go for Gilgamesh instead and stop bothering? I normally have it at this point in the vanilla version so I don't know if I'm wasting my time with these.

EDIT: I've been trying controlling the RockMinds but while DoomClaw seems to work when using against enemies, it's never hitting anyone in my party, so I think something is wrong with it. I tried even stripping of all gear in case something was giving me resistance or something, but nothing seems to work.

all attacks that target their own side auto-hit/succeed so that should explain what the controlled torrent could hit other monster but for the rest...
DoomClaw has 70% base accuracy, Torrent has decent MAG which should help with landing status effects...
do other status effects by enemies succeed at all?

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1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

give it a poison field, maybe poison boost from a venom rod or the like and a weak to poison enemy, maybe some poison type relics - maybe not enough to replace a pure healer but certainly an aid

Hmm I think I got a good way to set up poison with my party that I got just now, I'll try it out!

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

I can see where 16k would come from (maxed out cooldown) but 32k?

also, no, the cooldown should stay the same for the same moves

Strange. Although this was during the Cannon fight and Galuf, specifically Galuf, was acting kind of strange. He was getting one-shotted by the missiles while everyone else was getting obvious "final fantasy gravity" damage. That save I sent earlier was just before fighting the cannon so you should be able to get there from it, if you want to give it a check. Pretty sure it was 32K too, since it was the first (and only time so far) I've seen a number higher than 9999 (from XXXX). I think what I did was use one elixir, Swap the gauge with Lenna, and later on used another and tried to Overload. It's like his damage was getting doubled, I assume? Strangely that only seemed to be the case in that fight.

 

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

Yeah, kinda like that; note how !Black e.g. can't deal too well with regular poison type undead (=weak to wind and light): no light damage spell and the wind spell is HP drain which gets reversed.

Where as that is basically the main domain of !White with wind, light and cure spells.

Alternatively to using the free spell, you could defend and gain some MP while subverting the usual trope of full-time squishy mages.
This is in contrast to the other 3 stats which have direct defense benefits. (AGL = evade, VIT = HP&dmg reduction, STR = can easier equip heavier relics = more def)

That....actually makes a lot of sense. And yeah back row and !Def makes them surprisingly durable, and since you are encouraged to !Def to replenish some MP, it kind of works out nicely.

 

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

-Feedback, damage (water+bolt) based on caster current MP

-Meltdown, fire+wind, damage based on single digit of target HP and own MP (similar to FF5 predict)
-AntiFlow, invert slow <-> haste on all
-GigaNova, terrain set and LOCKED to void, nobody gets damaged...
-Drain Sphere [name too long], gives *everyone* auto-HP leak (only while terrain is 5/5 poison?); stacks with regular HP leak
-Balancer, takes HP of living party members and distributes them evenly

I know I had more but I seem to have deleted those notes.

Huh, those are kind of interesting. Pity the engine is limited in that specific way. Kinda have to wonder how GigaNova would react with the few void spells you can get.

 

1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

There's also availability of items, or the fun out of battle stuff:

is it ok to allow 4x dash speed? (3x speed gave me a land boat that could enter a town, that was a fun journey)
or the terrain obstacles - you've infinite antidots, are the poison bushes still relevant? is regular terrain damage too harsh now that you can't really heal it out of battle?
what about the time limit in karnak escape? (why can I now imagine a FF5+Super Metroid combo-randomizer?)

Or the (15) NG+ mode(s)? Well... they don't really need to be balanced.

Ah I see. I think 4x is perfectly fine, you got places to go and turboing your emulator gives you speed of light (and that includes super-fast input reading). Although are you supposed to run with boats and stuff? Because running seems to have no effect on vehicles right now.

I'd say the poison bushes or Lenna getting poisoned are indeed kinda redundant. Poison on the field is a bit of a relic of the past where it was actually the most lethal status to obtain at a game's start, nowadays it's just limited to battle, which might just be the best solution. I'd opt for just healing all status after battle, because even wounded can be easily fixed once you have your first phoenix down, which kinda makes it redundant to revive.

The time limit in Karnak was very tight, I had to retry a few times to get all the items, and ended up having only like 3 seconds to spare. A randomizer would be fun and would break the monotony of the linear route. Something like the recent free enterprise thing would be great but I can see how much work that'd be.

I didn't try NG+ yet. I'm interested but also internally groaning at having to do the part without the wind crystal again. I kinda wish one could just start there every time with the first batch of classes already unlocked and the most important/missable loot. This time it was fun because I was playing with completely new and fun mechanics, but the next time it's gonna be a pain. That's kind of my major issue with rpgs, I guess that's why I love the concept of ancient cave so much, lets you replay things but you don't have to wait 2 hours to unlock <some feature or game mechanic that's locked by the plot>.

But I digress, I'm interested in giving those a shot.

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

all attacks that target their own side auto-hit/succeed so that should explain what the controlled torrent could hit other monster but for the rest...

DoomClaw has 70% base accuracy, Torrent has decent MAG which should help with landing status effects...
do other status effects by enemies succeed at all?

Yeah stuff like old, poison and other effects seem to work, got berserked by that one blue magic earlier in this version and pretty sure i got poisoned earlier today. I got a save nearby if you need, kept going a bit further on another slot, will go back if it's a fixable thing.

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50 minutes ago, Magpie said:

Huh, those are kind of interesting. Pity the engine is limited in that specific way. Kinda have to wonder how GigaNova would react with the few void spells you can get.

Eh, if I let this argument count 10 out of Arcanist's spells wouldn't exist or Brave, half the Tinker's arsenal, Blue/Crusher, Time/Shift, some more I'm forgetting.

I just had to draw the line somewhere (the number of active and passive abilities has a similar restriction as items) - and at least 2 of those spells may appear on a different job at one point.

 

55 minutes ago, Magpie said:

Ah I see. I think 4x is perfectly fine, you got places to go and turboing your emulator gives you speed of light (and that includes super-fast input reading). Although are you supposed to run with boats and stuff? Because running seems to have no effect on vehicles right now.

I'm not entirely sure on the internal workings, but the issue with 3x was probably that I ended moving something like a half pixel which throws the collision detection of.
And then we get this:

FF5_void_divergence031.png

I could then leave the map through an unintended exit on the south and then enter the first town as a ship.
Most fitting was that the NPC color palette was ever so slightly thrown off that everyone fittingly had pale faces.

 

As for running itself - you should be able to run anywhere that isn't the world map, even with vehicles.
I guess for the later that is only the canal.

 

59 minutes ago, Magpie said:

I'd say the poison bushes or Lenna getting poisoned are indeed kinda redundant. Poison on the field is a bit of a relic of the past where it was actually the most lethal status to obtain at a game's start, nowadays it's just limited to battle, which might just be the best solution. I'd opt for just healing all status after battle, because even wounded can be easily fixed once you have your first phoenix down, which kinda makes it redundant to revive.

I don't auto clear status after battle as it can be used to set up certain strategies.
Maybe you want to keep one char dead so they get behind in levels because of Lv5 death,
maybe you want to start a certain boss battle under a ton of status effects to transfer them via Arcanist,
or maybe you're crazy enough to do a solo char run here.

Don't ask me - there are minds out there that have created strategies upon hearing which I could only think "wtf - how??"

 

1 hour ago, Magpie said:

I didn't try NG+ yet. I'm interested but also internally groaning at having to do the part without the wind crystal again. I kinda wish one could just start there every time with the first batch of classes already unlocked and the most important/missable loot. This time it was fun because I was playing with completely new and fun mechanics, but the next time it's gonna be a pain. That's kind of my major issue with rpgs, I guess that's why I love the concept of ancient cave so much, lets you replay things but you don't have to wait 2 hours to unlock <some feature or game mechanic that's locked by the plot>.

In this NG+ you keep all you have except plot items and the party members (and names); so job change etc. stays enabled from the start.
In fact the job cap rises from 30 levels to 70.

It was mostly my solution to the problem "I've beaten Shinryu and gotten the strongest weapon - but there's nothing to use it on..."

 

1 hour ago, Magpie said:

I got a save nearby if you need, kept going a bit further on another slot, will go back if it's a fixable thing.

Ok, please send again.

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1 hour ago, praetarius5018 said:

Eh, if I let this argument count 10 out of Arcanist's spells wouldn't exist or Brave, half the Tinker's arsenal, Blue/Crusher, Time/Shift, some more I'm forgetting.

I just had to draw the line somewhere (the number of active and passive abilities has a similar restriction as items) - and at least 2 of those spells may appear on a different job at one point.

Oh I see. Well, that's the spirit then!

 

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

I'm not entirely sure on the internal workings, but the issue with 3x was probably that I ended moving something like a half pixel which throws the collision detection of.

And then we get this:

FF5_void_divergence031.png

I could then leave the map through an unintended exit on the south and then enter the first town as a ship.
Most fitting was that the NPC color palette was ever so slightly thrown off that everyone fittingly had pale faces.

 

As for running itself - you should be able to run anywhere that isn't the world map, even with vehicles.
I guess for the later that is only the canal.

 

Hah, I guess they were in awe of your naval skills. And yeah, gotcha, I was thinking of the whole world map. Well it's no big deal anyway.

 

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

I don't auto clear status after battle as it can be used to set up certain strategies.

Maybe you want to keep one char dead so they get behind in levels because of Lv5 death,
maybe you want to start a certain boss battle under a ton of status effects to transfer them via Arcanist,
or maybe you're crazy enough to do a solo char run here.

Don't ask me - there are minds out there that have created strategies upon hearing which I could only think "wtf - how??"

Oh you are right on that. I usually don't try those strategies so I kinda forget they are a thing, my bad.

 

2 hours ago, praetarius5018 said:

In this NG+ you keep all you have except plot items and the party members (and names); so job change etc. stays enabled from the start.

In fact the job cap rises from 30 levels to 70.

It was mostly my solution to the problem "I've beaten Shinryu and gotten the strongest weapon - but there's nothing to use it on..."

I see, well it sure is worth a shot then. And yeah getting the best gear from a superboss when there's nothing else left to provide a challenge is a surprisingly common RPG trope, sadly.

Anyway here's the save: https://my.mixtape.moe/hcrisj.srm I believe the one near Casa Exdeath is the first slot.

 

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Hello, first thing first is that so far loving the mod.

Here to report a few things that i think are not intended so far in the mod.

1) Bartz HP drop to 0 once a new battle begin
a) I'm at the part where you save the moogle from the undead T-rex enemy and during that dungeon everytime i would enter a battle Bartz HP would just drop to 0. I thought it was a Hero slot problem so i swapped him around and it would repeat for whatever slot he is (I think Exdeath really wants Bartz dead)

2) The Undead T-rex Boss
a) Speaking of the Boss in that dungeon, during our fight he decided to smack 3 party members for 7k damage just out of nowhere, is that intended? Still managed to beat said boss

Concluding my post i decided to continue playing despite Bartz HP dropping to 0 and it kept persisting throughout the game.

Thank you.

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0.780, didn't notice there was a 0.782 since i downloaded it at the previous patch.

New one will fix that hopefully.

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About DoomClaw, been testing a little more but even stripped of all gear it still doesn't want to land on my characters. I'll (patiently) wait until next version if it's an actual thing, kinda bugs me to not have it learned by this point.

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Math, just... math >.<
Base chance for the spell is 70% to hit. With your VIT and their MAG that is reduced to 55% chance to hit at all.

Then they need to succeed the status chance which ... ended up in the single digits (high VIT compared to MAG, element resist, unfavorable field)

This could theoretically succeed (something like 0.1%) but in reality it doesn't seem like the possible RNG states can reflect that.

You should try a higher difficulty setting (increases enemy MAG), fill the field with poison element or even give yourself a weakness to poison.

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I finally managed after an absurd amount of attempts with difficulty 1, full poison field and poison weakness. That was kind of weird, but it's finally done, I can finally continue with a clear conscience, haha.

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I've had a bug where occasionally it becomes impossible to open the menu. Had it happen once in Tule shortly after going through the beginner house, and then once in the ship graveyard. I haven't played through much, but this bug seems pretty crippling when it happens. Fighting battles, and other things don't restore the ability to open menu, nor does changing areas or anything else that I've seen.

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Need more info.

v0.782?
Changed controls in game?
Does the menu button show up when pressed if you allow the option "show input display" (may be very well hidden, e.g. in SNES9X I've to toggle it via hotkey with ",")?
Anyone else has that problem?

Edited by praetarius5018

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If you're asking if I tried changing controls after it happened, I did. No matter where I bound the menu button I couldn't seem to open it. I didn't check show input display, but if I get the issue again I'll check that. I'm playing on zSNES if that matters.

I was playing it online with two players, and we even tried swapping which was 1st player to see if they could open the menu after it occurred and they couldn't either. All other functions seem to work as intended, it seems like the menu calling is the only issue to me, but I'll test more if I get it again.

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