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Nikkolas

FFX Punishment Becoming Tedious, Does It Get Better?

44 posts in this topic

1 hour ago, Nesouk said:

When I was playing I realise that if you buff this way :

1 character with Haste and Reflect
1 Character with only Haste
1 Character with only Reflect

And add nothing else he will not use Desperado (or very rarely) you have one character left vulnerable but the others are protected against his spells making them basically unkillable provide you have enough potion to heal but the only attack left that can damage you are Shattering claw, as for damage the aga spells are the best as well as the damage he takes from reflected spells.

 

I didn't even have the Aga spells at the time but I thought Auron did respectable damage with just his normal attacks.

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14 hours ago, Nikkolas said:

So I just learned of the Don Tonberry trick. I tried it out with Tidus and got 13 levels in about a minute or two. So I think I'm gonna be doing this for at least my main trio. I'm sorry dude but I don't see how you could stand to level normally when AP > Overdrive gets you levels this quick and it is gonna take so long to max out even one grid.

It is my understanding you need that to defeat the Dark Aeons and probably also the Weapons since you didn't fight the Dark Aeons.

And I assume the final story bosses are leveled for parties that beat optional content.

Honestly, with Don Tonberry, I don't think grinding will be too bad. This is a No Aeon run so I'm not going to be boosting their stats which seems like it would take FOREVER.

 

I used all my Mimic grinding money so far to get Yojimbo at 3x the prize. I hope the Teleport Spheres are worth it. That's Evade and Counter for two more people. 

 

I got a four empty slot weapon for Tidus from a random fight in the Omega Ruins and I have the Flexible Arm just now from the Fayth Cavern.  Hopefully those will serve me well when I have tons of awesome items and thus abilities to put on them. I don't think it's possible to max out stats in this, is it? So Stat+ is still worth a slot ,s right?

Maxing out stats is not possible because all the stat sphere drops in the Monster Arena were replaced with Wings to Discovery drops.

Honestly, I think it is difficult to beat the Celestial Weapons with a custom weapon due to their inherent damage properties and innately having Break Damage Limit, although if you going towards Magic then a custom weapon probably wins out. (Break Damage Limit, Magic Booster, and Magic +20% are obvious, and the last ability is probably Magic +10%. In my challenge run, the issue is that I would probably have to replace Magic +10% with One MP Cost, but that might make Overdrive Sin possible. Too bad getting 120 Dark Matter is not easy, probably would involve me murdering Chimerageist repeatedly for them, so ~960 fights required given the 1/8 drop rate as it is a rare drop. Probably would just use a save editor at that point.)

If you want Overdrive > AP to be as efficient as possible, you really want Triple Overdrive and Triple AP as well, but that requires items and the time taken to get those items. I was suggesting against it because I thought International capped the AP you could get that way, but it seems I was wrong.

Don Tonberry has a common steal of Candle of Life x3, which should help you out as well.

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2 hours ago, Wrath_of_Pie said:

Maxing out stats is not possible because all the stat sphere drops in the Monster Arena were replaced with Wings to Discovery drops.

Honestly, I think it is difficult to beat the Celestial Weapons with a custom weapon due to their inherent damage properties and innately having Break Damage Limit, although if you going towards Magic then a custom weapon probably wins out. (Break Damage Limit, Magic Booster, and Magic +20% are obvious, and the last ability is probably Magic +10%. In my challenge run, the issue is that I would probably have to replace Magic +10% with One MP Cost, but that might make Overdrive Sin possible. Too bad getting 120 Dark Matter is not easy, probably would involve me murdering Chimerageist repeatedly for them, so ~960 fights required given the 1/8 drop rate as it is a rare drop. Probably would just use a save editor at that point.)

If you want Overdrive > AP to be as efficient as possible, you really want Triple Overdrive and Triple AP as well, but that requires items and the time taken to get those items. I was suggesting against it because I thought International capped the AP you could get that way, but it seems I was wrong.

Don Tonberry has a common steal of Candle of Life x3, which should help you out as well.

 

I appreciate the advice.  I'll see what I can do. As I said, my main party is Tidus, Rikku and Auron. I got Godhand for Rikku and I don't foresee me getting Tidus' full power CW. So that leaves Auron.

Tell me truly though, how screwed am I that I used up all my Fortune and Luck Spheres? You get a couple in Zanarkand and tehGagazet Cave and I used them both for Miracle Drinks against the Keepers. Everyone says Luck is very important, especially against the Dark Aeons, but I have no idea what that is all about. It helps with Evasion or something? I just have Rikku in teh Quick Pockets section right now and am looking sadly at those nodes I can't activate because I used up all my Luck Spheres.....

But right now I figure top priority is filling out the three grids. Then comes Gil grinding then comes item grinding. Then I can start beating stuff, hopefully.

Honestly, Triple AP seems wasted with the Don Tonberry trick. It would make things go a tad faster but so what? It's very simple and easy and fast enough as is. The main problem is, and this is something you maybe didn't notice because you played the North American version with the Standard Sphere Grid, is that apparently the Expert Sphere Grid is full of empty nodes. So I'm gonna be traveling around the Grid getting a lot of nothing a decent bit of the time. But oh well.

 

EDIT:

And I keep meaning to ask, are the final story bosses leveled for people who could beat the Arena and Omega Ruins? I have to max Sphere Grids and have the best equipment to beat the regular story, too?

Edited by Nikkolas

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Honestly filling the Sphere Grid is probably overkill for the final boss, although I have no clue what modifications he made since NTSC v1.7.

I would actually not just AP grind all at once because you will eventually run out of Power/Magic/Speed Spheres and you will need a source for those. I think you can still get Fortune Spheres from the Arena, but you are probably out of luck on the Luck Spheres. There are also some stat spheres in the temples you can't access because of Dark Aeons (until you defeat them, of course), and a few from lightning dodging.

I have the Remaster so I am somewhat familiar with the Expert Sphere Grid, and both sphere grids have a lot of empty spaces.

You could probably beat the next few bosses as-is, although Overdrive Sin requires some preparation because he is a damage and ailment resistance check.

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Well how much of a difference could a few points of Luck have really made then.  He has to have actually weakened the superbosses to account for the fact he removed stat increase farming.

Thanks for the info.

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Also there is an FFX PC gameplay mod somebody elsewhere just told me about:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1413607626

 

I am very interested in this but I don't have the PC version right now. Maybe next month. But incase anyone else is interested.

In fact I might put my playthrough of Punishment on indefinite hold. I just don't know if I have teh patience for LR's mod anymore. Running around the Omega Ruins casting Demi a billion times is giving me hardcore FFVIII Requiem flashbacks. There, Triple-casting Demi was the only way to beat the hyper inflated HP of certain enemies like Chimeras.  Here I have to do much the same, just cast Demi over and over and over and over and over and spend five minutes on each fight.

 

If there is another mod for FFX, I wanna give it a shot. It helps that the description of teh mod sounds very exciting. It isn't just raising their numbers and lowering your numbers. It changes up gameplay a lot it seems.

Edited by Nikkolas

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Honestly, there are a few changes I would make, probably starting with the Bribe formula. (True story - I found the offset for Mimic gil drops in the NTSC version, then was disappointed to find out that the cap was 65,535 before considering Gillionaire.)

The inflated HP in the Omega Ruins is actually manageable even at my low stats because Poison damage still has the same multiplier as the base game, quite a few enemies are vulnerable to Sleep, others can be Provoked, so the only difficult enemies are Master Tonberry, Varuna, and Great Malboro. (Demonolith probably would be but they can be Slowed, and Stoneproof is really the only ailment resistance you need because Pharaoh's Curse is basically countered with a Remedy.)

If you were ever to continue, I would stop at capturing one of each enemy for future Bribing purposes and just finish the game if you can. (60% stat increases are actually rather small compared to what Punishment eventually does, so the hope is that the AI/attacks of the enemies were changed somehow to make it interesting.)

Your best bet is waiting for a Steam sale which happens quite often (watching the game should work, then you get e-mail notifications when it goes on sale). 

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9 hours ago, Nikkolas said:

n fact I might put my playthrough of Punishment on indefinite hold. I just don't know if I have teh patience for LR's mod anymore. Running around the Omega Ruins casting Demi a billion times is giving me hardcore FFVIII Requiem flashbacks. There, Triple-casting Demi was the only way to beat the hyper inflated HP of certain enemies like Chimeras.  Here I have to do much the same, just cast Demi over and over and over and over and over and spend five minutes on each fight.

Well you were doing the wrong then in FFVIII even in Requiem you don't need to kill monsters that much you could just Mug them to get item and then just run away, and even if you need to kill Quistis's Degenerator could kill almost every mobs ^^, and when Island Closest again Quistis's LV? Death could Instant-Kill everything since they are LV100 there LV is a multiple of 4,2 and 1 so 3 out 4 chance to Instant-Kill them AND Degenerator works on every monsters in Island Closest To Hell and the only other mobs you want to farm are Elnoyles which guess what can also be Instant-Kill by Quistis really just keep Quistis low HP all the time and with Initiative use Instant-Death immediatly that take care of all the mob fights you need to fight, to be honnest Requiem Mod was in my opinion less tedious than Punishment cause the grind is actually fairly fast in FFVIII compare to X and isn't require that much to be honnest, while in FFX sadly there is not as much possibility to get stronger than FFVIII and overall outside of Omega Weapon which was complete bullshit in Requiem and Ultimecia which wasn't to hard but quite tedious (took a minimum of 30 minutes to beat) I think FFVIII Requiem was the most enjoyable out of all LandonRay's FF mods.

Edited by Nesouk

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2 hours ago, Nesouk said:

Well you were doing the wrong then in FFVIII even in Requiem you don't need to kill monsters that much you could just Mug them to get item and then just run away, and even if you need to kill Quistis's Degenerator could kill almost every mobs ^^, and when Island Closest again Quistis's LV? Death could Instant-Kill everything since they are LV100 there LV is a multiple of 4,2 and 1 so 3 out 4 chance to Instant-Kill them AND Degenerator works on every monsters in Island Closest To Hell and the only other mobs you want to farm are Elnoyles which guess what can also be Instant-Kill by Quistis really just keep Quistis low HP all the time and with Initiative use Instant-Death immediatly that take care of all the mob fights you need to fight, to be honnest Requiem Mod was in my opinion less tedious than Punishment cause the grind is actually fairly fast in FFVIII compare to X and isn't require that much to be honnest, while in FFX sadly there is not as much possibility to get stronger than FFVIII and overall outside of Omega Weapon which was complete bullshit in Requiem and Ultimecia which wasn't to hard but quite tedious (took a minimum of 30 minutes to beat) I think FFVIII Requiem was the most enjoyable out of all LandonRay's FF mods.

Really? You would say it's better than  FFIX Unleashed? To me, he clearly peaked with Unleashed. There he made significant changes to gameplay, altering Freya's, Steiner's, Amarant's and Quina's skills. He also gave the bosses lots of new moves and stuff. He didn't just make enemy numbers go up and your numbers go down. 

I still consider it by far his best mod, especially when combined with No AP. I beat normal Unleashed years ago and I got to the end of Disk 1 of Unleashed/No AP with no problem and quite enjoyed myself.

Although I still have to say Alternate Fantasy is the best FFIX mod at present, IMO.

 

5 hours ago, Wrath_of_Pie said:

Honestly, there are a few changes I would make, probably starting with the Bribe formula. (True story - I found the offset for Mimic gil drops in the NTSC version, then was disappointed to find out that the cap was 65,535 before considering Gillionaire.)

The inflated HP in the Omega Ruins is actually manageable even at my low stats because Poison damage still has the same multiplier as the base game, quite a few enemies are vulnerable to Sleep, others can be Provoked, so the only difficult enemies are Master Tonberry, Varuna, and Great Malboro. (Demonolith probably would be but they can be Slowed, and Stoneproof is really the only ailment resistance you need because Pharaoh's Curse is basically countered with a Remedy.)

If you were ever to continue, I would stop at capturing one of each enemy for future Bribing purposes and just finish the game if you can. (60% stat increases are actually rather small compared to what Punishment eventually does, so the hope is that the AI/attacks of the enemies were changed somehow to make it interesting.)

Your best bet is waiting for a Steam sale which happens quite often (watching the game should work, then you get e-mail notifications when it goes on sale). 

 

Yeah that was my thinking. Steam has an Autumn sale apparently that kicks off around Black Friday so I'll just wait a week and hopefully get FFX and even X-2 for like $15 or something.

Thanks for all your help through this thread. I really appreciate it. If I didn't have this other mod to test out I would probably finish Punishment. But I just don't want to totally burn myself out, ya know? I might still finish it, we'll see.

Edited by Nikkolas

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12 minutes ago, Nikkolas said:

Really? You would say it's better than  FFIX Unleashed? To me, he clearly peaked with Unleashed. There he made significant changes to gameplay, altering Freya's, Steiner's, Amarant's and Quina's skills. He also gave the bosses lots of new moves and stuff. He didn't just make enemy numbers go up and your numbers go down. 

 

I still consider it by far his best mod, especially when combined with No AP. I beat normal Unleashed years ago and I got to the end of Disk 1 of Unleashed/No APwith no problem and quite enjoyed myself.

Although I still have to say Alternate Fantasy is teh best FFIX mod at present, IMo.

I didn't enjoy Unleashed personnaly especially toward the end I didn't like the idea of giving Auto-Protect and Auto-Shell at the same time on bosses combine with the removal of stat increase given by equipment and the nerf of weapon's attack power in general it makes the fight more tedious than anything else, and then you have some fights that in my opinion were just straight up bullshit like Lich who can randomely cast All Death in a game where you can't protect against Instant-Death what a great idea -_- or Necron who put Regen and Haste at the same time recovering like 4000HP every 2 seconds when you barely does 3000 damage whch is a stupid way to make a boss longer than it should IMO. 
I do give him credit for the work he puts in Unleashed but I didn't enjoy it, granted it was some years ago so maybe I should give it a new shot.

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20 minutes ago, Nesouk said:

I didn't enjoy Unleashed personnaly especially toward the end I didn't like the idea of giving Auto-Protect and Auto-Shell at the same time on bosses combine with the removal of stat increase given by equipment and the nerf of weapon's attack power in general it makes the fight more tedious than anything else, and then you have some fights that in my opinion were just straight up bullshit like Lich who can randomely cast All Death in a game where you can't protect against Instant-Death what a great idea -_- or Necron who put Regen and Haste at the same time recovering like 4000HP every 2 seconds when you barely does 3000 damage whch is a stupid way to make a boss longer than it should IMO. 
I do give him credit for the work he puts in Unleashed but I didn't enjoy it, granted it was some years ago so maybe I should give it a new shot.

I do agree Necron was a nightmare. I only beat him with luck and I certainly could never beat Ozma.

And Zidane is kinda useless until he gets his Trance skills because without the stat bonuses from weapons magic is the only efficient way o do damage.

It's just, after having played several LR mods at this point, it seemed to me like he put in the most effort into Unleashed. I'm still gonna try his Xenosaga mods because I love Xenosaga and finally have a halfway decent PC that can emulate PS2 and beyond.

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Unleashed was at least more interesting, even though Regen is broken in FFIX because it is based on time rather than an actual duration which makes Necron really annoying.

I think the intent of Lich was to max out Magic Evasion and try to survive that way, Auto-Life is also a thing as well.

IIRC Xenosaga I has a save point bug with PCSX2 in that some save points just reset the game so you probably want to save state before using a save point.

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The problem for Lich IMO is that he also reduce effectivness of equipment so Magic Evasion isn't as high as it can in Vanilla and regardless it's still random if your character dodge it or not, and yes Auto-Life is a thing.... that only 2 characters out of 8 have access to and also since Boss's speed is increase, all death random and Auto-Life reset your ATB at 0 he might very well cast a second All Death, in my opinion this is just a cheap way to make a boss hard and Alternate Fantasy handle Lich better he has all death to in Alternate Fantasy but before using it he uses attack that inflict Zombie giving you actually a chance to survive without it being either complete RNG or force you to play a specific character.

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Sorry for the necro and I probably should have asked this before.

Does anybody here have the older version of Punishment?  v1.7 seems so much more reasonable and it's what I'd probably like to use in any future replays.

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8 hours ago, Wrath_of_Pie said:

Wayback Machine has it here (it is included despite the title).

Fucking awesome. It even has the older version of International which I think must mean it was before he buffed the Keepers to insane levels.

That was what I really wanted to be honest. But I got both!

Thank you so much. I think I might actually try to finish FFX this time. I'll be frank, I gave up last time out of boredom.  I'm weird, I always have the most fun before these games open up and it's grind time, ya know? My favorite parts of replaying FFVII are never everything before you get the Highwind, at least mostly.

Thank you again now and for your helpful advice all those months ago.

Edited by Nikkolas

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You will still need Demi a bunch in the later random encounters, and the final boss is still difficult, so the late-game tedium will still be there. Luckily, most of the random battles are not that hard if you know what you are doing. (Sanctie in particular is going to be a lot less miserable, which is nice.)

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16 hours ago, Wrath_of_Pie said:

You will still need Demi a bunch in the later random encounters, and the final boss is still difficult, so the late-game tedium will still be there. Luckily, most of the random battles are not that hard if you know what you are doing. (Sanctie in particular is going to be a lot less miserable, which is nice.)

Well the final boss being hard is not a problem at all. I welcome that. But yeah I think he just straight inflated HP on everybody, including the dumb Defender robots. God those fights are boring, especially the two of them in Omega Ruins.

Still, I did try that Sin Unleashed mod for Steam FFX. All that guy did was add HP to every enemy, something like 60% more HP. That wasn't a challenge at all and actually gave me some appreciation for LR reworking the Sphere Grid in addition to increasing enemy stats.

I guess I never asked, did you like the mod? You played through multiple versions right?

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I think v1.7 was definitely better (I did enjoy v1.5 and finished the Arena, although the last boss there is incredibly boring), although the ultimate rebalance would probably require more than just changing stats for obvious reasons.

Considering the Defender enemies are vulnerable to Provoke, there really isn't much strategy past that, although they are somewhat vulnerable to Mental Break so that helps in defeating them faster.

60% more HP for every enemy is easy mode compared to Punishment, which goes up to 400% more HP (well, 500% in v2.6) and increases stats as well. Of course, increasing HP only does so much when you can just cast Demi, which hits everything except most bosses and Adamantoise for some reason.

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