Sardek

On 5/15/2022 at 4:00 PM, MCP said:

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After more than 15 tries, at this point I'm deciding whether I want to pause the game and write down literally every single thing I do, or just stop playing.

I thought I understood: Cover all 9 things, 8 elements + Non Elemental (NE)

Do I cover all 9 things before purge and then wait for it?
That is, if I restart my cycle of covering all 9 before purge, the boss will counter attack, and none of those count to the total of things we need to cast?
Do I have to do anything specific after purge to reset the elemental cycle?
 

Celes, Gogo, Strago, Relm
They all have Auto shell & safe and Strago has auto haste+regen.
Celes, Strago, Relm: lvl 37
Gogo lvl 27 with Blitz and Lore.
Multiguard on all four with as much half to wind/water. Strago and Relm don't have water reduction and it doesn't matter as aqualung counter attack is weaker than 1 or 2 regen cycles.
Float all available from Celes pre-match, hopefully to evade quake.

Start of battle:
Relm: RegenX
Celes: Magic Demi
Dark: Strago: Magic Dark
Holy: Gogo: Blitz Aurabolt
Relm: Tincture Celes or Strago

Water: Strago Lore Aqualung
Fire + Wind: Gogo: Lore Blaze
Earth: Celes: Magic Bolt 2
Non-Elemental Relm: Flare

Ice: Strago Ice/Ice2
Gogo: Chakra magic regen
Celes: Seraph esper
Strago: Tincture or wait
Adapt if got hit with slow, poison, etc.

No counter attacks yet.

I don't see purge or a text window "Kaiser has reset the elements" (don't recall what it says).

I cast some buffs/items trying to wait for purge...

When purge happens, I cast float, and I cycle through all the elements again
I get counter attacked this time.

But I make sure to to do all 8 attacks to cover all 9 things we're supposed to hit with.

This is where I started pausing to write down what I'm doing after each Purge, to make sure I've covered all the things.
Edit: I tried it again after a break. Same problem. I don't understand what's wrong. I wrote down every action I took and nobody died until Ultima. After the 2nd purge I had all nine before Kaiser did their killing attacks.

But I always end up at Bonebreak, Ultima, Meltdown every time.

BNW 2.0, having a lot of trouble after 15 tries on this boss, even with this very helpful thread.
I simply don't understand what I'm supposed to do, because it ends up killing my party sooner or later.

Your main problem is that you're trying to cover all 9 elements. That is not required at all (as that would be really bad design, forcing constraints that tight on your party). Purge is a triggered attack that occurs when you use a nonelemental attack of any sort after certain conditions have been met (NONE of those conditions involve using a certain number of elements). If your nonelemental does not cause purge, you'll have to use a new nonelemental or purge will never occur. Once the conditions are met, a nonelemental will force Kaiser's next turn to be purge. If the conditions are not met, it will not accomplish that, and once that turn passes, Kaiser will forget it was hit with a nonelemental at all. This is probably something you were having trouble with.

The problem that the most people have is that they try to flood Kaiser with elements too quickly. Slow it down and observe how Kaiser reacts to certain elements over longer periods of time and you will probably be closer to solving the fight.

One of the Hidonites casts Shield after the first time they are revived. If you kill it before its turn comes, it doesn't end up casting Shield and you miss it. It was moved to a slightly more durable Hidonite for 2.1, and I think maybe even that one was made untargettable so that you can't kill it before it casts Shield after the revival. That might be 2.1.1 though? I'm not really sure when each of these were put in, and if they were in the official branch and not a fork.

Almost every mod out there started as a dream. There's a lot of hackers hanging around in the discord to bounce questions off of as you learn, if that's something you're interested in doing. BTB has moved on to other projects, so BNW is more or less considered "stable" at this point. That manner of change is outside of the scope of what BNW set out to do in the first place, which, as you noted, is balancing what existed into what the game could have been. But that's not to say that you can't start a mod with BNW as a base. There's already at least one mod (NHT) that does just that.

I personally think that the dualcast life/cure 2 makes Locke the best healer. Relm heals harder but has to stop for osmose because she can't downrank her spells. Setzer is slow and doesn't have a reactive life spell, only rerise. Locke is an emergency healer that is at his best with a team that needs more attention that will have people dying sometimes (Shadow comes to mind). As a teammate with a beefy team like Cyan/Terra/Celes, he's not going to be showing off his best sides, whereas with a squishier group of teammates, he's the only reason you're not getting game overs.

Myria is definitely harder than the other 2, but I think this is the first time I saw the suggestion as "buff the other two" and not "nerf myria". Though I think I agree.

Kefka casts meteor as a counter under certain specific circumstances and also casts it when transitioning from phase 1 to 2 and 2 to 3, so it is only possible for him to double meteor twice over the entire battle since it requires you to get a meteor counter with the attack that pushes him to the next phase, which causes his next turn-attack to be meteor. It's avoidable, but most people don't know how to. Fallen One is in his script, but only during phase 4, so you probably just burned him down quickly enough to not see it come up.

As to the Kaiser script, hop on the discord if you want to discuss the specifics of that. We try to avoid spoiling major things like that in places where google can find it.

I really hope nobody believes you.

What teams do you have in place for each one?  That'll inform the answers.  Also, how each team member is built is relevant information.  (character levels as well)

EDIT:  Also, this might be faster if you hop onto the discord.  There's always a bunch of people around to help out in real time there.

Well, thanks for trying either way.  Don't worry about it too much.  If I had to guess, there's 2 versions of FFT out there, like a 1.0 and a 1.1 or there's a difference between PAL and US versions and we just have different ones.  I was using a bin/cue whereas you were using an iso, and it appears there is a difference there in some way.  It is still puzzling to me that your first patch worked cleanly without the sprite changes but after that it all went wrong.  Oh well, it was an adventure either way.  Don't let this stop you from sharing other stuff in the future!

Yeah, Mednafen is free.  RetroArch is a container that can run the core to emulate pretty much anything.  RetroArch's PSX emulation is built on Mednafen's core, and is what I'm using. 

Mednafen is very stripped down.  It doesn't even have a GUI, you either run it from the console or drag an iso/cue file onto the exe.  The minimalism of it is why I went with RetroArch, due to wanting to have more customizability.

From what I can see, communities tend to form around patches round here (join the Discord if you haven't already), so if you're looking to go deep on a mod, this is a great place to get feedback, support, and testing.  My first glance at this is that it's a "let's do the cool thing" mod at it's heart (to be clear, not a complaint).  I don't know how much attention was put into balancing everything yet as I'm not deep enough, but I'm also not certain if that's a goal of the mod or not or how deep you want to go with it (if any deeper than this so far).  I do know that some of the people here (Hart from above and Ludovician immediately spring to mind) know about the game balance and design to an absurd amount of depth if you want to take a deeper dive on this. 

I guess what I'm asking is, what's your ultimate goal with modding, and this mod in particular?

EDIT:  Fresh patch is giving me "Bad sector? - 1093" when I pass the opening FMV.  The previous patch worked cleanly without the spritework.  Using RetroArch with Mednafen's core.

I'm not sure how retroarch decides what the name of a game is, but it's showing up in my catalog as "Final Fantasy Tactics" instead of Dissidia013, which sucks since I have basic FFT in the same catalog.  Dunno if that's an easy fix or not (how does the CD know the name of the game on it?).  Regardless, gonna dive in now.

EDIT:  I appear to be having sprite issues.  I thought it was just related to the intro battle (where I had Ramza, 2 gafgarion sprites for some odd reason, plus the usual agrias and apparently a malak), but going into the first battle I'm still not getting edited sprites at all.  I have Wakka, Lulu, and Squall by name with the appropriate abilities and the game hasn't crashed, so it seems to have patched.  The sprites it's using are Ramza's, Olan's, and ...I don't remember.  She has a ponytail and a cape.  The patch I used was the one in the previous post, not the one in the initial post.

One of the main weaknesses (or so I think) of vanilla FFT is that enemy formations get almost no JP from which to select their abilities, which leads to enemy units having one or two abilities at most, which makes them kinda weak and repetitive compared to your squad.  From what I understand, the way an enemy unit decides what skills it has access to is by taking its JP allocation and spending it among the different classes it has access to.  The vanilla game gave very low JP totals, leading to the aforementioned problem.  Playing FFT1.3 in the past, the game's AI engine takes to increased options surprisingly well and makes the game significantly more interesting.  A pass through the ENTD is probably a pretty high ROI with respect to how much better the game feels to play and might be something you want to look into for future versions if you wanna expand on what you've already made.

Either way, pretty excited to play with what's already done here.  Always looking for another good FFT experience.