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FWIW, I believe the problem was confirmed to be that 86 * 3 is 258, which has overflowed by 2. The division by 4 only happens after the overflow. A possible solution would be to divide by 4 first then multiply by 3. That has the downside of certain Stamina/Vigor values doing nothing in the formula due to rounding, but that'd be a minor matter compared to the current situation. (And it would only matter in the damage reduction formula, Vigor and Stamina would work as they currently do for all other things.)

Just to add to what Nesouk said, we also tested this with attacks that don't ignore defense with the same results. This seems to be a bug with all damage.

Now for a segue. In Discord, an issue came up because people told me the Kaiser dragon's Ultima shouldn't deal as much damage as I remembered it dealing. My understanding is Stamina is supposed to be the only thing which reduces the damage from Ultima so characters with high Stamina should be able to tank the attack better than others. My experience doesn't fit that, and from the sounds of things, there may be a bug involved. I'm including two screenshots of the damage I took from Ultima with a party of Terra (50 Stamina), Relm (37), Celes (44) and Sabin (103): Sabin took 1,550 damage in both cases, as well as a dozen other test cases I performed. As far as I could tell, the damage never varied on Sabin by even a single point. On the other characters, it could vary by 150 or more. Sometimes the damage on other characters would be slightly higher than the damage on Sabin, but often, Sabin would take the most damage. It seems Stamina may not be working as intended against Ultima (and maybe other attacks).

Well, a number of people said the expected level was ~14, including BTB. If the guy creating the mod says the expected party level is ~3 levels higher than what I have, I'm inclined to think I'm underleveled. I already posted to explain what I was remembering and how it wasn't Firestorm. I'm all for correcting errors like this one by me, but it'd be nice if you'd acknowledge I corrected it before correcting it yourself. I explained exactly why I used that setup during my stream. I even explicitly said I thought it was a bad setup but didn't see what weapons I had that could be better so I went with the Switchblades for the stat boosts. When I found the Thief Glove, I said it seemed redundant, but that the stat boosts made it seem like one of my best choices. Now, perhaps that reasoning is flawed and I had a better option (something you also fail to mention is I eventually switched one of the Switchblades for a shield and the relic for one which offered MDef instead of evasion), but being derisive about a decision without examining the explanation given for that decision is a waste of everyone's time. I can't see what you are talking about. I don't think I executed commands slowly. I spent a lot of time waiting to execute commands, but that was because of things like time being paused so there was no upside to inputting commands rather than waiting (especially since checking for counterattacks is a thing). Sometimes I also didn't act with a person because I was saving their action. But aside from maybe two battles where I had switched to a different character slowly (or ones where I had just given up), I can't see what you're talking about. This doesn't reconcile anything. As I pointed out, I had an easy time with random encounters the way I played before the SC. I had an easy time with every encounter on the SC except for ones with Wyverns. I had an easy time with every random encounter in the 90 minutes after this. Whether or not there is a better way to beat this one random encounter than I discovered doesn't change the fact no other random encounter required such effort in the two hours before or two hours after this one. If you think the difficulty of that enemy is good, that's fine. My question then is, why aren't any other enemies in this part of the game as difficult? Nobody has said a word about that, despite the fact I've repeatedly stressed I"m not saying the mod is too difficult, merely that certain enemies are extremely difficult relative to the things around them. Could I have experimented with various things, finding a solution after five or six game overs? Perhaps. Perhaps it'd have taken a few more. But guess what? There was no incentive for me to put that sort of work into any other random enemy on the SC. Nor in Zozo. Nor in the IMRF. If the player is supposed to do that for enemies, okay. Then why don't they have to for other enemies?

I tried to have Sabin kill enemies there quickly to avoid the issue, it did not work. I didn't try using the Fight command, but that's because I couldn't exploit weaknesses at that point. Summoning espers with Celes is something I hadn't considered, partially because I forgot, partially because the mod doesn't tell you what they do. That definitely could have helped though. As could Muddle, since I think someone in my party had access to it, but I naively thought it was single target like in vanilla so I didn't learn it. The fact I didn't have Full Moons for Locke hurt. I wish I would have bought them, but when I saw them in the store, my comment was I had no idea how good they'd be, and I couldn't afford to spend GP just experimenting with things. (This is one of the big examples where an increased sellback rate for items would have helped as I could have bought the Full Moons to try them out in Zozo with Celes and not felt bad if I had to sell them.) There are definitely options. If I had been willing to sit through a dozen game overs trying to figure things out, I probably would have found them. That's incredibly frustrating though. Not because game overs are unacceptable, but because I was easily beating random encounters just before this. And the random encounters immediately after this didn't give me any problems either. It's not like I was having trouble in the mod overall. It was that I'd run into seemingly random difficulty spikes, often followed by the difficulty seeming to drop back to where it had been before. That's why I didn't focus on the mod being too difficult. It's why I focused on saying things were imbalanced, or inconsistent. I'm not saying, "Waah, the mod is too hard!" I'm saying, "It's frustrating 3% of battles in this mod give me game overs while 97% pose no challenge at all."

Except I beat Zozo with ease despite having ridden a chocobo like that. I considered the possibility riding the chocobo would cause me problems with being underleveled, thinking I might have to leave Zozo to fight battles because of it. Not only did that not happen, I had very little difficulty with Zozo. People had warned me Dadaluma would be hard, yet I beat him on my first try without even meaning to (I planned to fight him once to see what the battle was like so I could prepare, yet I found the battle easy). I even brought this issue up during my stream, saying if I were underleveled because of riding the chocobo, why was Zozo easy? If the mod wanted me to be a higher level at that point, that's fine. It did nothing to suggest that prior to that point though. If the mod wants me to rely heavily on status ailments to deal with random encounters, that's fine too. But again, the mod did nothing to suggest that prior to that point. And it doesn't do anything to suggest that after that point either. This is what I talked about in my summary, calling the mod imbalanced. No matter how much one may think the way I played was bad, I had an easy time of the mod up until Ultros/SC. After that, my only difficulties in the WoB were Shiva/Ifrit because of not knowing how to time Runic to catch Ice 3/Fire 3, the mine cart ride (not the boss, just the randoms) and one enemy on the Floating Continent (Behemoths, because of not knowing how to play around their Meteor). I find it difficult to swallow the idea it was entirely because I play dumb that things were easy 95% of the time yet soul-crushingly difficult the other 5%. If battles in BNW are supposed to be like this, where you can get a game over for failing to neutralize/kill an enemy extremely quickly, that'd be one thing. They aren't though. That doesn't happen in ~98% of random encounters. The only other enemy I can think of like that was the Pterodactyls on Lete River (I can't remember if that was changed for 2.0). I don't understand how one could reconcile, "This is normal and how the mod is designed, you're just playing wrong" with, "This doesn't happen anywhere else in the mod." Side note, I don't know why you compare this to vanilla in terms of grinding. The only time I grinded in the entire mod was at the SC, where you say my levels were low because I rode that chocobo. In other words, the only time I grinded was to get back to the point I was supposed to be. My mentality the entire playthrough, except this point where you say I was very underleveled, was to find options that'd let me overcome obstacles without having to grind. Given that, talking about a mentality that encourages grinding confuses me. (The fact I beat things while underleveled only seems to further suggest grinding wasn't a go-to strategy for me.) I saw someone else question this, and a person in Discord suggested something that made sense. I checked, and they were right. I conflated Firestorm and Fireball because I remembered dying before taking an action and I remembered dying in one attack to Firestorm. What I was actually remembering being able to kill me before taking a single action was 2x Fireball or Fireball + Acid Rain.

Knowing to equip Siren to Celes and summon it first action would definitely help, but that's the exact sort of knowledge gate I was referring to. It's one specific option with nothing to suggest it to you in advance (or even anything in game telling you what it does). If you know to use it, that's great, but in a "blind" playthrough it'd be difficult to expect a player to discover. It's not like a person can try several different things in the battle to see what works. Dying after one action doesn't allow for that, and using Siren requires being equipped with something before the battle even begins. I died to the battle several times while trying to find a solution, but the deaths came too quick for me to figure anything out. And while knowing how to beat the battle may make it easy enough (assuming I don't tie before taking an action, which happened a couple times during my stream), a small amount of knowledge should not take a battle from "Game over" to "Easy win." Or at least, that's how I feel. If people think I'm just playing bad because I don't like insta-wiping first round of combat, so be it. The reality is outside of seven or eight battles, I had an easy time with the mod. As for being underleveled, I still don't know how I was. I never ran from battles, and I picked up almost every piece of loot there was. I did ride a Chocobo from Kohligen to Zozo (with a pit stop in Jidoor), but I don't see how that could have gotten me 3-4 extra levels. If I was underleveled, I think the reason is the XP curve needs some work in that part of the game. There's no way riding a chocobo for that sequence should have set me that far behind.

They can't Firestorm first action, but they can Firestorm before you take an action. As for status ailments, with the right characters in your party, it's easy to shut those guys down. It's easy not to have such a party though. And even if you do, the design of, "Use a status ailment first action or die" is not good. It doesn't reward you for playing differently than in vanilla. It says play one way or lose. For the record, it was said repeatedly in the Discord server that it wasn't intended to be like this. There was a near universal consensus that Firestorm is too powerful/my levels were too low, and that's why I was dying. If my characters had been level 14 like BTB said was expected for the area, I wouldn't have needed to rely solely on a first-round status ailment to survive those battles. Given that, I'd say this wasn't an example of me playing wrong.

By the way, I am sure my experience with BNW would have been different if I played through it several more times. However, I've beaten two previous versions of the mod, and I talked to people as I did this playthrough. I still felt horribly knowledge-gated. There were plenty of battles which became easy once I understood how they worked that wiped my party the first time I encountered them. I don't find that to be an enjoyable experience. I like knowledge being rewarded, but being rewarded doesn't require changing a battle from, "Game over" to "Trivially easy." Similarly, I don't feel it is "difficult" to have enemies one-shot a character, or even the entire party, before you get an action. That normally happened mid-battle, like when I used a single Sonic Boom at the start of a battle on my way to the Ancient Castle, only to watch enemies do 3x AoEs in a row and wipe my party (that formation then proceeded to never be a threat again as I learned not to leave the one type of enemy alive but damaged). Not always though. There were many times battles would start and a character would die before I got a single action. Sometimes I'd lose 2 or 3 before my first action of the battle. My impression is if I played through the mod enough times to become truly knowledgeable about it, there'd be nothing in it that was remotely difficult. I think that's unfortunate. To me, that makes it feel like the player is not being rewarded for knowing things, but rather, is being punished for not knowing things. Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. It's difficult to summarize 20+ hours of thoughts from streaming succinctly.

I recently played the 2.0 version of BNW on stream to show what my thoughts were as I played it, and since I'm done with it (didn't finish, will explain later), I thought it'd be good to reflect on and summarize my experience/impressions of the mod. For a one line summary, I think what I'd have to say is, "It's terribly imbalanced." I don't mean "imbalanced" as in "overpowered." I mean there's a fundamental lack of balance. This shows up in everything, including the game's script. I am not a fan of filling a mod with references as I find it distracting and not entertaining, but I understand different things appeal to different people. Similarly, I don't find vulgarity interesting or entertaining, but I get some people may. My problem with the changes to game's script is not that the changes made to it were necessarily bad. What bothers me is the changes usually feel out of place. While playing, I'd feel like I was playing FFVI at some points, playing a cheesy fourth wall breaking satire in others, and playing a preteen fanfic filled with vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity in others. Any one of these might work on its own, but the constant shift between them is jarring. The same can be seen with the substance, rather than style, of some of the changes. Most notably, Celes's emo sequence feels entirely out of place (though not as bad as I seem to recall in previous version of hte mod). Celes's character in the mod seemed basically the same as in vanilla up until the FC, at which point she suddenly became very, very different. The change seemed to last for 20 minutes and never mattered again. On top of this, there was a random boss with cheesy Dark Side dialogue added into the FC sequence... for reasons? Changes like this made the mod constantly feel tonally dissonant. During my playthrough, I often referred to the mod as seeming "schizophrenic." A better term might have been "bipolar." Like with the dialogue, I felt like the game's difficulty had huge swings in variance. Time and time again, I found things like enemies dealing 25 damage to one character with a single-target attack then dealing 100 damage to all four characters. Similarly, it was not uncommon to have a character one-shotted by one attack and barely even hurt by another. I don't want to bog this post down with numerous examples, but I do want to give an example that shows how this goes beyond single units/battles. When I got to Zozo in 1.9, I ragequit because of the counterattacks. 2.0 made the dungeon much more pleasant, and I managed to beat it with some challenge but nothing too great. Even Dadaluma, who people warned me about, didn't feel too difficult. (My only true struggles in it were due to my own mistakes.) After that, I went and fought Ultros who initially didn't seem too bad. Then he used Acid Rain and killed one character immediately then killed another character after the first Sap tick happened. My Ultros was immortal though due to Stamina + Auto-Regen so I still won. I then wound up at the SC, and I almost immediately party wiped to Firestorm. I then had to spend ~30 minutes grinding just so my party's levels would be high enough for my characters to have enough HP to survive a single round of combat. (I was told the expected level for the SC was ~14 yet I got there at ~10.5.) I don't want to bog this down by focusing on that issue too much, but I want to stress it was the schizophrenic nature of the difficulty of hte mod was the single largest factor for me not enjoying things. It got to the point where 95% of the "difficulty" of the mod felt like it was either, "You got super punished by something you couldn't have known about in advance" or, "You got one-shotted by something because you didn't have enoguh HP." And when things weren't difficult, they often felt tedious. Countless boss battles found me finding a pattern of actions I could repeat to stay alive without risk of death then sitting there repeating them for 5, 10 or even 15 minutes. A final example was in character power. I don't mean that as one character being inherently stronger than another. What I mean is the lack of level reaveraging meant I almost always felt a few characters were stronger than the rest, by a large margin. I actively tried to swap other characters into my party to get weaker characters trained up, but I always felt I was too gimped if I didn't bring along at least two of my strongest characters. This is a shame because the best part of the mod (for me) was the differences between the characters. I liked that using one character instead of a different character felt far more impactful than it did in vanilla. The raw differences you get in stats/abilities/equipment before getting espers is nice, and after you get access to ELs, things get even better. Even characters like Gau, who have limited equipment/esper options (one esper for all of WoB is sad), still manage to have a lot of options to explore due to things like a Rage list with lots of varied options. I like the increased variety, and I wanted to explore it more. The problem was I felt like I couldn't. Trying to rotate characters in and out of the party often just didn't seem like an option. In the WoR, I always felt like if I wasn't bringing at least a couple of my strongest characters with me, I'd lose. In the WoB, I felt like I couldn't afford to experiment as I never had the GP for the equipment for four characters, much less GP I could spend testing out other characters/builds. (An idea was floated in the Discord server which would help this problem, increasing the sellback rate of items. I really hope that is implemented as it would make WoB experimentation feel not-terrible.) Tied to this, I get why level reaveraging in vanilla could cause problems (I don't think that many people LLG to min/max, but rewarding that playstyle is odd), but I don't get why it's removed from BNW. When I recruited Umaro, he joined my party at level 26, and I immediately found use for him. But other characters joined at 18 (Gogo and 19) which made me feel like I couldn't use them as they had too little HP to survive anything. I get level reaveraging rewards the player for waiting to recruit characters. I'm not sure that's necessarily bad (as there is a real cost in not having access to them), but it would be better than having characters join in the WoR at level 18, possibly with no ELs. Some other solution might be better. i don't know. I just know I constantly felt punished, heavily, for trying to switch which characters I used. That's especially true since so many enemies have attacks that feel like HP checks, saying, "If you have X HP, I'm easy, otherwise you're screwed." The worst part is the game creates a vicious cycle where not using characters because they'll die means they'll likely die when you use them, making it harder to get them XP to level up, meaning they'll keep dying. Before I move on, I want to state something explicitly. This summary has much more text discussing negatives than positives. This should not be taken as me thinking there aren't good things about the mod. There are. The reason I don't discuss them in much depth is I felt like other things constantly prevented me from experiencing things which were good. For instance, I like the new Rage system (and being able to leap anywhere) a lot more than Vanilla's, but I didn't get to delve into it as I didn't use Gau in the WoR at all because I was afraid he'd die constantly with his low level and small HP pool. Part of why I bring this up is I didn't finish BNW. I wanted. I really did. The problem is I killed all 8 dragons. That meant I was forced to fight the new Kaiser Dragon before I could fight the last few bosses. I couldn't beat him. I know he has some sort of gimmick. I was even given a couple hints about it. I couldn't figure out how things worked though. I figured out it had something to do with him attacking based on the elements you used (and killing you with Meteor -> Ultima if you messed up), but... yeah. I couldn't get passed him so I had to quit. Not only was banging my head against him trying to figure out the gimmick not enjoyable, without using savestate, you'd have to go through multiple rooms and several random encounters after every death to get back to him. (Why is there a save point right after him rather than right before?!) If the fight were entirely optional, I could maybe forgive the gimmicky nature of it. It's not though. The only way to skip it is to intentionally ignore content by not killing one of the eight dragons. That's a strange cost to pay, and it has to be paid before the user even knows what the battle against the Kaiser dragon is like. Had I known in advance the battle would be gimmicky and non-skippable like that, I'd have skipped one of the dragons. I didn't though, and as a result, I couldn't finish the playthrough. The point is the limited amount I talk about the good aspects of the mod shouldn't be taken as representative of how much/little there is good about it. Instead, it should be taken as a reflection of how limited my ability to experience those good options seemed.