Xifanie

On 2017-05-12 at 11:14 PM, Yuyu said:

I can explain more but I won't unless asked.
As stated, can explain more, but won't unless asked.

...so much cringe

Hello FF6 guy, I'm FFT girl.

That just made me think about a trick that I reaaaaally doubt any spambot would support:
 

<style>
.anti-spambot:before {
    content:"Type NG+";
}
</style>

<span class="anti-spambot"></span>

Of course, this might not be an ideal solution given the forum engine, but it's pretty to look at, at least.

I can't say I've noticed that in most boss fights, but tbh I always thought FF7 didn't have AI and instead just had random skill selection until I found out about it a few years ago on qhimm. It's definitely not been enough for me to have to change my strategy mid-fight except for one boss or two. One really awesome boss fight was the Red Dragon in the Temple of the Ancients, but it looks like you more or less doubled the length of that fight because of that major change mid-fight, so I still express the same battle length concern as with the other bosses.

IIRC There was a stilva-like boss that went berserk mid-fight, and was insanely hard... I found it very interesting for it to behave that way; the AI change was very obvious in that case, and I barely managed to beat the goddamn thing.

I also remember the Turks not liking to be poisoned, and I never figured out what prevented them from using Turks Heal anymore... running out of MP? So that was interesting, and annoying (more like of a "You bitch" rather than "AUUUUUUGGHHH!! ").

11 minutes ago, Sega Chief said:

The balancing for a lot of the later game is off; most of that comes from gradual changes made over time to the underlying systems like character stats, the change to how sources are dished out, equipment changes, that sort of thing. The overhaul I'm doing should correct it. As for boss HP and the duration of battles, that's up in the air; it's difficult to gauge duration.

The vids I had were run at 20fps instead of the native 15fps but the 1.5 balancing run I've done was played at normal speed so I could try and get more into the player's head. I was juggling the idea of having a 'Fast mode' where enemy HP will be decremented by a certain amount so people can opt for faster battles, but instead I tried to spec fights to be around 6-8mins. It's just tricky to gauge it for blind attempts; I try to have elemental weaknesses be consistent with the physical characteristics of a boss like Earth for large enemies (most bosses are quite big) but I messed that up for human enemies (too many hard Poison counters) and it doesn't help for surprise encounters.

As far as Disc 3 goes, I've been fine-tuning the bosses there and overhauling them. Some were very overbearing, others didn't really have much in the way of interesting mechanics due to quickfixes to get rid of bugs, etc. Lv.4 Limit bosses should have been specced as 'stepping stones' rather than full out superbosses so I've taken that into account with them. I've reinstated Emerald and Ruby as the game's superbosses instead, and made the rest more manageable for different parties. Defence and front row physical damage is proving problematic but I'll get there.

Well, there are some major problems with balancing, I admit. Early game, all the bosses that are vulnerable to poison will have 75%+ of the total damage that you deal dealt in poison damage from Dirty Bombs. If you don't have one (and they're cheap as hell), you're in for a VERY long fight. I'm all for status/elemental weaknesses, but this makes poison infliction practically essential for these bosses. Just about every storyline boss also lacks immunity to slow; I'm not complaining, but slow just helps so much with boss fights that it brings me to my next point:

The boss fights drag on for long enough that I have restarted most battles after analyzing the bosses because it was faster to let the boss kill me/kill myself, reload the save, adjust my materia/equipment, and beat the boss way faster than if I had stuck with my original setup. Of course, in the original version, bosses are so squishy that it's practically never beneficial to do this unless it's Emerald, Ruby or one of the final bosses. I'm definitely not asking to be able to finish off bosses in a single limit, because, let's admit, it is a bit ridiculous.

I think 6-8 minutes per boss fight is very reasonable. To me that's just about an ideal, in fact. I am, however, worried about all the people who disagreed with me and thought lengthier fights were ideal. I'm not saying their opinion don't count, but as hard as I try to understand, I haven't heard any compelling reason for me to believe that longer boss fights made anything better. I don't think I'm that much smarter than the average player and figure out enemy patterns way faster than others. I really appreciate the initiative you've been putting into this though.

Yeah, the lvl4 limit bosses were far too strong for me to bother with them. I wanted to keep playing in Disc 3, but every optional boss was too hard except for the Kitty Tank at the Battle Square and all the Junior Leagues (Laser abuse and stuff).

I thought that was the point of making summons only useable once per battle? Also summon animations are lengthy; that's why I never used them in FFVIII, and that's why speedrunners don't use them. Crappy DPS.

1 minute ago, Kjata said:

The HP pool makes it so you have to actually figure out the attack pattern

...But I figured out the attack pattern 2 minutes in, 12 minutes before the end of the battle.

When I confronted the mod creator about it, he linked me a video of a sped-up boss battle, which personally took me just as long... his solution? Speedhacking.

I stand by my point I stated earlier:

2 hours ago, Xifanie said:

"Rinse and Repeat until the boss is dead"

The outcome has always been extremely clear every storyline boss fight after I figured out the boss' attack pattern. There is only one boss I lost against through the game.

Maybe 10-13 min per boss (at normal speed) isn't too slow for you, but I just don't see the point. I don't see how it adds to the experience. It doesn't make bosses harder. It doesn't even make them more tedious.

8 minutes ago, RavenOfRazgriz said:

It's like after all these years you've forgotten who I am.

You wish. Actually, I wish.

5 minutes ago, Elric said:

I mean, it's Raven, how can you not expect that

I expect the same from you. >_>

Raven going out of his fucking way to ruin everyone day.

THANKS!

Sweetie, you're the worst character.

Don't listen to this guy, he's got sugar gliders!

And cats, and dogs...

He's a really cool guy, don't be an ass to him. He's my big brother and the best guy I know.

7 minutes ago, Hordequester said:

This one was solved by a spambot on my site (was one of the default questions that came with a question pack.. which the botters have access to as well). But, it would still slow down 90% of them..because they're not very bright generally and don't keep their crap up to date.

Interpretation questions can be done if their answers are limited enough.. if your question plugin allows multiple answers. Though those can be easier to figure out.

I have no idea what this forum runs on, but I know SMF2 didn't allow multiple answers (which sucks).

You're correct that this can be solved by some bots; I just assumed wrong, but it doesn't really surprise me either way. Basically, if you work hard enough on a bot, it can solve almost anything, but I just didn't think they were at this level yet. I was actually thinking of a question that could have "NG+" as the answer (since this would definitely block any spambot), but couldn't figure out a clear-cut question for it. IDEALLY the question should be "What is this website about", but I'm not really sure of this myself yet.

This mod adds so many Quality of Life modifications, it's really refreshing. Love the fort condor teleport, the early game Enemy Away and the ability to Skip huge portions of dialogue!

It overall edits a lot of things, adds quite a few unexpected bosses, changes items, materias, and equipment fairly drastically, and even grants you a way to easily grind materia levels late game!

But then there are the bosses... they take a long time to kill for virtually no reason in my opinion; an opinion that doesn't seem to be shared by many, yet no one can deny that the outcome of storyline bosses' battles is already determined 1/4th of the way into the battle. It just becomes a process of "Rinse and Repeat until the boss is dead". Of course, there is the possibility that the fight will drag on long enough for you to run out of items, but you get easily used to the bosses' huge HP that you just instinctively gather quite a few items before each boss fight.

Then there are the optional bosses. 100x harder than the storyline bosses. I don't enjoy difficulty and I thought the storyline bosses were well balanced and never really had anything close to a problem with any of them, but the optional bosses in this mod just reminds me so much of 1.3 where you just end up needing a way too specific setup to be able to win the fight. It just destroys any kind of build creativity since you have to abuse absolutely everything you can to beat those bosses.

I really loved the game otherwise, but I am unable to finish it at this point because I don't find Disc 3 fun at all. As I said, I don't like difficulty; especially extreme level of difficulty, so this wasn't for me. Even saying that, Disc 1-2 were really awesome.

As a side note: Death will bring happiness to everyone in the slums. --My wife playing FF7 and renaming Aeris to "Death".

It can sometimes be extremely simple, like, "What's the name of this website". This will still block essentially all spambots.

FFH being related specifically to FFT, I added a few very simple questions, but I still added links to wiki articles just in case... such as Ramza's sister's name, What final fantasy rideable big birds are called and what's the name of the Princess who gets kidnapped.

3 minutes ago, BTB said:

See, if it was me, the question would be "if I was a spammer, I would..." and the correct answer would be "kill myself".

You really can't leave any room to interpretations though... I get that you're joking, but it's still something important to consider.