thzfunnymzn

You put it quite well when you said that stamina's synergy with mg.def & regen ticks simply doesn't work without actual HP backing it (not even for strengthening Holy Wind, in my experience). I'd also add that stamina's improved odds to status evade works best with HP as well. After all, if you're building a tank, you want to survive both direct offense (HP) and indirect offense (status). HP also allows one to safely use the increased Cover chances that stamina affords. I'm certainly not asking for Odin to become an HP/Stam esper, no sirree, not at all, not me. >_>

This is actually why I was thinking that maybe they're the same build. Both Terrati & Stray lead to a more tanky / support oriented Sabin. (In theory. In practice, Stray Sabin lacks bulk, which also hurts its damage potential, seeing as its less safe to be in the front row.) Mishrak even prefers a 10 Stray / 10 Terrato set-up for support Sabin. In some of my character guides, I consolidated various different builds into one archetype: like with Support Celes encompassing Crusader, Siren, and Shiva. Then again, I don't think I was perfectly consistent with that, was I?

So...we're going to have Boomerangs always Throw when Jumping for Mog, right? >_>

...OK, now that I really look at Terrato Sabin, yeah, he should be mentioned in the guide. Thing is, where? I could mention him as his own build (20 Terrato), as a variant on support Sabin (15 Terrato / 5 Stray), or as a variant on vig Sabin (10 Golem / 10 Terrato). Kinda leaning towards mentioning him as a variant on support Sabin; so, support Sabin would be either heavy Stray (pure Chakra), or heavy Terrato. Thoughts, anyone? Especially those like @GamingFiend who have played Terrato Sabin?

That's...kinda what I mean by too niche. Outside of Zozo, it's just a few randoms in certain parts of certain WoR dungeons. Which assumes you even have Locke or bring him along for those two mid-WoR dungeons. It's simply to small of a thing to seriously mention as a main feature of Locke or of one of his builds. At most, I could mention it as a "haha" in one of his strengths, much as I mention one of Sabin's strengths as "He's Sabin." Not sure I will do that or not though.

Welcome Yeah, Morph's a tricky bugger, but great if you can pull it off. Golem & Smoke Bombs/Refract help a lot.

While I haven't played it, I figure that a pure Terrato Sabin still falls under the category of "Master" (vig) Sabin. AFAIK, he's still played the same way, just with less vigor and a lot more HP. Which, I'm betting, makes him straight superior to Golem Sabin for the endgame. Guess I should update the "Master" build to include this. Unless I'm wrong in my analysis of what Terrato Sabin is all about. (@GamingFiend? @Nowea?) While I don't care for a dedicated Chakra set-up (stam Sabin), I do like the hybrid Golem + Stray. On a hybrid build, I do find extra power on Chakra to be quite nice. It's not a huge amount, no, but when you're talking low numbers like 30 vs. 40, it can be somewhat significant. Also, surprisingly, I didn't have too many problems with hyb Sabin's bulk in the endgame (3-4 Terrato ELs helps). So, I would consider hyb Sabin to also be purely superior to a pure Golem build for the endgame. (Stam Sabin can go cry in a corner).

I don't mention the new Steal + Mug b/c I think it's too niche to mention. Zozo aside, it'll rarely come up. For Zozo, sure, strong, but then again, so are Edgar's Blasters.

So, WoB Tier Lists are a lot simpler than WoR, but I figured I might as well. I'm ignoring any area where a character is forced. This is all 1.8.6. I'll try and mention areas where I think 1.9 might change a rank. Probably a lot of mistakes here. Terra, Narshe Fight - D(amsel in Distress) Vig Terra, Floating Continent - B. Solid fighter with heals, Storm, & Morph. Unicorn Terra, Floating Continent - B(+/-). Bulky healer with Storm & Break. Outclassed by Seraph Celes & Seraph Setzer though. Maduin Terra, Floating Continent - C(+/-). Straight inferior to Unicorn Terra. Not terrible, but not great. Lacks bulk. (I'm presuming the player took few Unicorn ELs). Tritoch Terra Locke, Narshe - Zozo - C. There's some important stealables, but overall, he's a fairly average thief. Not all that impressed with dual Butterflies / Full Moons. Kirin Locke, Late WoB - B+/A-. Solid paladin. Speedy too. Lacks Cyan's Empowerer (& Dragon) though. Still a really nice paladin. Vig/Spd Locke, Late WoB - D. Too frail without Kirin investment, especially when forced to team with Te/St/Re or with Shadow. (Kirin + Ramuh is same as Kirin. Ifrit + Kirin is probably a C or something). Phoenix Locke Edgar, Narshe Fight - IMF - A+. Best character here. Only thing preventing a perfect is weak ST damage & no healing. Still A+ though. Golem Edgar, Late WoB - A-. Bulky, has Golem, has good magics, can sword jump, still has Blasters. Golem is significant - 1.9's Golem nerf will drop this rank. Siren Edgar, Late WoB - B+. Not significantly different from Golem Edgar, really. Lower rank b/c of lower bulk, but early speed is nice. Stam Edgar, Late WoB - B/C? Inferior to Golem build, but it's still Edgar. I don't think 1.9 will change Unicorn Edgar's WoB rank. Hyb Edgar, Late WoB - A-/B+. Golem & Siren builds ain't significantly different, so hyb Edgar is clearly about where they're at. Sabin, Narshe Fight - IMF - A. Second best character here, and solid compliment to his brother (ST damage & AoE control). Early game is Figaro Bros. game. Vig Sabin, Late WoR - A-. Not as powerful as early game, but still has Golem & Suplex (slow) with good HP. Golem is significant - 1.9's Golem nerf will drop this rank (moreso than Edgar's rank too). Stam Sabin, IMF - Floating Continent - C. Straight inferior to vig Sabin, lack of HP really hurts. Still has Suplex & Golem though. (Remember this build being better in earlier versions). Hyb Sabin - Built purely as vig Sabin right now. He hybridizes later in the WoR, when he gets Chakra. Celes, Narshe Fight & Zozo - C. Healbot. Not a bad role, but with Dried Meats, not a necessary role either. 1.9's new flails may improve her rank. Fighter Celes, Floating Continent - C. Not bad, but not great. Strictly inferior to mag Celes. 1.9's new flails should improve her rank. New Cover/Counter should help too. Magic Celes, Floating Continent - B+/A-. Great magic selection for the Floating Continent. Speed is nice too. Best to take mostly Seraph ELs. Hyb Celes, Floating Continent - ??. Never played. Logically, somewhere in the range of her two main builds. May be too early to build a hyb Celes though. Cyan, Narshe Fight - IMF - B(-). Gets significantly better with Kirin ELs, but for most of this time, he's a fairly average fighter. Stam Cyan, Late WoB - A(+). It's stam Cyan. Vig Cyan, Late WoB - C-. Lack of bulk hurts, as does the high defense stats of a lot of FC bosses. Still better than vig+spd Locke though. Shadow, Zozo - B+/A-. Pricey, but high damage + Smoke Bombs is nice. Drops a bit if you forget Smoke Bombs though. Gau, Vs. Dadaluma - A. Conjurer Rage is highly desirable. Gau - C+/B-. Frail, but Brawler & Cephalid are nice. Gets better as the WoB progresses. Spd Gau Mag Mog, Late WoB - B+. Dances are in their heyday. Biggest weakness is lack of HP ELs, but he's naturally bulky enough to be work. Vig Mog Mag Setzer, Late WoB - A-. Seraph is better early on, but it's still Setzer. Why the high rank? Well... The Bank, Late WoB - A+. Bulky healer with spammable Black Omen? Why, yes, he is overpowered. Only a lack of buffs prevent a perfect rank. 1.9 will drop him a little bit. Not being able to use Slots drops him by a lot. Mag Strago, Floating Continent - C(-). Frail, and lacks his fabled support skillset. Still has Holy Wind, Aqua Rake, and Blowfish though. Rod Strago is more of a B- though, b/c of how powerful Rods are at this point. Stam Strago Mag/Spd Relm, Floating Continent - C+. Frail, but Sketch is a good command right now. Also has Rerise (and, soon, Life and Stop). Best to take a mix of Zoneseek & Ifrit for MP & speed. Stam Relm Hyb Relm - Can't hybridize until Starlet (stamina). Gogo Umaro

Soul Fires regain full HP if Wrexsoul respawns. If he doesn't, however, you can kill both and win the battle that way. They will try and prevent it with !Condemned physical, Flare, etc, but not to the degree you seem to be suffering. If one is down, the other one gets a little fiercer, but again, not to the degree you seem to be suffering because of the script error. Sabin's Golem will shut down their !Condemned physical, meaning so long as you keep your HP above one-shot range from Flare/Meteo, the Wrexsouls should go down without too much of a hitch. Mog dances Water Rondo or jumps with Trident, Sabin uses either Bum Rush, Aurabolt, or his Ocean/Spirit claws (Soul Fires ain't undead, so the Drain proc won't hurt Sabin), and I guess Terra does Terra stuff (heals, swings a sword if she's vigor, otherwise casts Storm).

+1. Not to mention that boosting one's HP leads to massive regen ticks just as / faster than stamina does (no HP booster / HP booster). +1.

Aaaaaaaaaaand......someone opened the can of worms that is tier lists in this mod. Sigh. I've certainly given such an idea thought in the past, but refrained myself from talking about it. Guess I've got something to keep my busy for the next week or so. Looking over it quickly, in terms purely of endgame, I can't say I wholly disagree. I do disagree with only factoring in the endgame into a tier list. Really undersells the value of Kirin Cyan, vig Sabin, etc. Still, need to sit down with this one.

Glad to see Cure taken off of the Shiv. Holy damage & anti-undead, huh? Sounds brutal.

Are we going to see Cover & Counter on monsters? >_>

With 1.9's new (& useful, finally) Cover, Unicorn Edgar now boasts something unique over other Edgar builds. Whether or not it's really a great build in the grand scheme of things is questionable (Edgar's stamina is low), but I think it's a mechanically unique enough style to be worth mentioning. If anything else, it's better than relying on really weird Omega damage formulas as a unique gimmick, like some old stamina builds used to. BTB seems to like going all-in with Edgar's defenses with spear & shield. I'm guessing that two-handing a spear, assuming you equip a counterattack relic (Black Belt), is more worthwhile in the end. Especially once you get Gungnir, with it's ridiculous HP+50%.

The route split mod & BNW both modify the events in the route split. That's more than enough for a conflict to occur in programming and for stuff to happen. I fully expected that to be the case. Was putting out a fool's hope that it wouldn't. Oh well. I really do like the idea from a story-telling perspective. As hilarious as it is to show off how awesome Sabin is compared to everyone else, it's bad form from a serious perspective to give Sabin so much whilst the other two scenarios are so thin in comparison. Locke's scenario isn't too bad. It's mostly how thin the Terra/Edgar scenario is compared to how meaty Sabin's scenario is. I do like how they cut off the Sabin (now Figaro) scenario after Doma. It makes the Figaro scenario nice and neat; it's the story of Cyan & Doma, that's it. I echo artemi's sentiments on losing the trio of Sabin, Cyan, and Gau. Kind of a shame. Though this alternative does mean that Terra has a pre-established connection with Mobliz before the WoR.

I like what I see.

The only justification I can see for making Doom Gaze harder is to prevent Relm from getting Flare & Meteor too early so that Sketch can shine for a little bit longer. I'm betting most people would rather not rely on Sketch for a chunk of the WoR, let alone the fact it's hard to predict where or where not Sketch would be useful.

If it doesn't break BNW, I might actually do so as well. Looks very interesting. Having Terra pick up Gau is actually interesting. Ties into her looking to the orphans of that town on the Veldt whose name eludes me.

Saw an interesting re-arrangement of the three scenarios on romhacking .net. https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3717/ Not at all saying that this should be done in BNW. I merely thought it was interesting enough to post here.

I support adding this into to BNW.

Shadow can, in fact, get some beastly evasion. Him and Locke can break 110, IIRC. That's near perfect evasions. And, ultimately, these realistic arguments are there b/c of what was deemed needed for balance via playtesting. Something else to consider is that 1.9's major change isn't making Cover stamina-based. It's making Cover cover even when not in Wounded status. So, even if a character only has a +1 stamina esper - or even if they don't have a stamina esper - all characters now suddenly have access to a Cover that's actually useful.

Apparently, I missed this entire conversation happening in chat. Something major I wish to add to the discussion is that I didn't conceive of this idea purely as swapping the two bonuses. Even after looking through the chat discussion, there are two major corollaries missing: Tritoch, as Terra's magic esper, would be Mag+1 / MP+15 Mog's Dances could be shifted over to keying more off stamina than magic. (In ??? way) The former gives Terra an actual reason to build her magic, outside of an endgame respec for Ultima spam. Terra not having a magic build for the WoB, mechanically, is trivial - to my limited knowledge, mag Terra really isn't all that great in the WoB anyways. That early on, the benefits from HP+30 and MP+25 heavily outweigh the minor extra damage that Maduin will give to Break. Mag+1 / MP+15 is still low magic growth, but with MP growth attached to it, mag Terra has a bit more to her name besides "Ultima-slinging with lots of stamina." Also, its aesthetically more pleasing for Tritoch to give Magic and for Maduin to give Stamina to Terra. Stamina Tritoch doesn't work quite as well aesthetically. (Stamina +2 is pretty pointless early on, I grant.) The latter...is another can of worms. Without opening that can, stam+2 mostly means that vig Mog can get some slight improvement to any Song / Suite Dance that he attempts. Oh, I guess it also gives Punisher vig Mog some extra counterattacks too. So, counter Punisher Mog can be either vig or mag.

Against a single target with nothing special (no weakness, the normal 150 mg.def), Black Omen is the equivalent of a 120 BPow defense-respecting attack. X-Dark is 144 BPow. So, Black Omen is about a 5 to X-Dark's 6. As for total turn around time for casting (turn to turn), X-Dark's is an 11 to Black Omen's 10. That's assuming that Black Omen Strago ain't using a speed relic where X-Dark Strago has to use the Sage Stone. It's a damage difference, certainly, but not one I've found significant enough to be worthwhile. Especially since Strago's not exactly the hardest hitting glass cannon, barring weaknesses. Damage output, at the average level you posted (34), without a Crystal Orb, X-Dark ain't hitting 8k - 12k; not without a Poison weakness or low mg.def. With the values you posted, it should be more around 6k, unless you have significant higher than 100 magic on Strago? (Even 120 magic caps at 7.3k). For Kefka's Tower, it's really just Asura & some sporadic randoms where you can hit the 8k - 12k mark without an Orb. In the final battle, !Left Arm, !Right Arm, and !Face will also take heavy damage, but then X-Dark is competing with Black Omen's AoE. Also, Black Omen can hurt !Girl, X-Dark cannot. That 6k "normal" figure is why I'm not a fan of X-Dark. Black Omen's only doing 5k, sure, but since Strago isn't really a dps monster without a weakness, I'd rather have the extra speed for extra turns to run support. Also, without a Crystal Orb, Punisher's dps suddenly becomes another contender in the game. That's a good point for X-Shell. It's not significant enough to convince me of Sage Stone Strago, but it is a solid point. (There's definitely a playstyle difference between us here: if I'm getting KO'd a lot in a boss fight, I'm either going to reset and figure out a better strategy, or I'm going to ignore positive statuses except for Rerise & HasteX. In both cases, Zoneseek is sufficient.)

I might as well chime in, saying that I don't dislike the script changes. (Partly b/c, at this point, I've played BNW so much that I forgot the original script >_> ). It's hardly perfect, but aside from the meme jokes & Relm's foul mouth, I just don't see the validity of the complaints beyond "nostalgia." No version of FFVI is going to be winning any award for fantastic writing, nor is FFVI a game I would recommend to non-gamers as an example of a video game with a good story. BNW, Woolsey, FFVIadvance, japanese fan translations, I've seen multiple translations. They all get the same basic point across. There's little tidbits here & there, possibly some stylistic differences, but at the end of the day, there's nothing really objectively better about one translation over the other. BNW is not a bad translation; you want to see bad stories, go actually look on fanfiction.net. Since BNW is not a bad translation, any complaints about the script simply are subjective. Mostly boiling down to either the player being nostalgic for Woolsey, or being a japanophile who wants a hyper-literal translation of the japanese script. Perhaps I'm too old school for this new generation, but to me, a game is a game. You play games, you don't read them. Yes, there are games whose stories I really enjoy (Chrono Trigger, Majora's Mask), but they are also games that I really enjoy. Meanwhile, a game like FFIX, even though I'm somewhat fond of the story, is not a game I would replay, because as a game, it wasn't enjoyable. BNW's story is fine, and it's a very enjoyable game. Why complain about the script? Also, gonna have to back up Synchysi on listening to complaints. BTB & Synchysi most certainly accept feedback & criticism. The fat changelog & constant discussion should be a clue to that.