Augestein

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Everything posted by Augestein

  1. Yeah, I found Cute but Deadly a nice back and forth boss battle. And just when you start thinking you could be tired of it, the boss blows up.
  2. FFT 1.3 Heretic Sword

    You get it from Zalbag zombie. Just make your Ramza have a ton of resistance to status effects and buff him. You 'll get hit by it eventually.
  3. On the nature of modding & game design...

    The only thing I kinda disagree with is the "beat on the first try." I think the key phrase being "beatable," NOT "easily beatable." The issue is that so many games are designed around the notion of you having to lose the first time. This means that something like Final Fantasy X's Yunalesca fight and the infamous "Mega-death" is a bullshit maneuver (this is especially bad, because if someone has zombieproof on all of their characters, the fight is literally unwinnable without excessive grinding). But something like Seymour's "Banish" on Yuna's summons isn't garbage, because it's something the AI does in response to a player ability choice, you can redirect your strategy upon seeing it without it resulting in a death/loss.
  4. Did I think I'd find delita in the ghetto? Of course. Once a farm hand, always a farmhand. Keep it up. I get a nice chuckle from these during lunch.
  5. First brainstorm , then try. What would you do hypothetically?
  6. FFXII Zodiac Age now has a Nexus page

    Oh goodness. You started this topic. Now you have to continue it! Post your crazy ideas.
  7. Not anymore. They used to be in a private list, but now that the channel is gone I didn't think you'll have much luck.
  8. Character Classes

    What if Gau's classes messed with his ai? You could reliability have less "no Gau! Not THAT move!" Moments.
  9. I don't even have the original version, but I might check it out if multiplayer is fun.
  10. To be honest, it took me literally years to beat FFVI Vanilla. Not because it was too hard, but because it got really boring towards the end. WoR was just a disaster in my eyes. I couldn't get over how repetitive everything became after that point, and unlike before, there was no story to really make up for the gameplay at that point. In Brave New World, I feel that this is the opposite. The characters are different enough to where WoB is exciting before you get the Espers, and only continues to get better as you get further. By the time you hit the WoR, you're on a hunt to find new Espers about as you want to find party members because you want to diversify the abilities you can launch at the enemies. Each character having something to offer makes it engrossing in both ends of the spectrum. The first time I went through BNW, I happily finished it. When I beat FFVI: Vanilla, I beat it because I just ended up sharing the misery with a friend.
  11. No random battles?

    I must be insane, because I kind of like random encounters. I just hate them when they are too frequent. Like final fantasy 2 levels of high.
  12. Metal Gear Solid 5: Budget Big Boss

    This is hilarious. Also, I had no idea that this was one the PC.
  13. I agree that Lunatic+ had that problem. I'd honestly blame the stat distribution. But even then, enemy stats in Fire Emblem are random. The enemies have growths as well, and sometimes that can be pretty important, IE, 1 point of speed can be the difference between enemies doubling and not, which can be a huge problem at moments. Yeah. That's more so where I'm going with that. It's a shame the Tactics Ogre remake fudged this up really badly. I don't know if it's feasible or not for splitting JP after battle though. I do wonder... Yeah, but here's a question I've always wondered, does the enemy really need to gain and advantage? I mean, the game is about providing the player different challenges. Not necessarily making the opponent able to kill the player. While I understand that a part of that is providing enemies that can fight back, the question still remains relevant. Perhaps. I'd honestly blame the issue of Br/Fa values on the shitty reaction system. As it stands, you never want low brave outside of the equally horrible Move-Find Item. However, if the Brave System had abilities that worked better when you were a coward or brave, there might actually be some strategic use, or value in having middling brave units. IE, say Auto-potion / Defensive reactions work better for cowards, while aggressive ones work better for heroic units. It has its place, it's just not utilized as effectively as possible. Faith works decently as is, because having lower faith has a benefit, and the same goes for high faith. The only problem I really have with it, is that casters tend to be weak to themselves, which is actually strange and kind of dumb.
  14. Yeah, I think Death may be a bit too good, but the general idea of Death here is actually really good. It's damage is a little too high I think, but it's certainly not useless-- which in my eyes, is a bigger sin than it being a bit too good. There are still other viable ways of getting around bosses without needing to rely on a death proc. Even without Death Procs, you could go with things like SEN/COM/MED or SEN/SEN/COM to do chip damage provided there weren't doom counters on plenty of bosses. And more pressingly, I think that means that they should have put enemy stats as a buffer against Death Procs as well. That would have helped with this notion. For FFT, I still don't think Br/Fa are quite the same thing, all the zodiac signs encourage is having a more well rounded team to not have a "weakness." While it can seem kinda unfair, I think the "outside of your control" bit is happening because you can't see the enemies before you deploy your units. If you could see the enemy units before you deployed, I'd say this problem was mostly handled. Especially if units that you didn't use still could get EXP-- IE, FFTA and FFTA2 where you can send them on deployment missions to get JP while they weren't fighting and still get relatively decent AP. It's honestly not that bad-- it's the same way for Fire Emblem Lunatic+ mode, you always prepare for the worst possible scenario for your units. IE, if you *don't* want the enemy to run away, you prepare for the scenario for when it does. I stand by that the biggest issue here is not the random nature of brave and faith, but rather, the fact that you can't see them before you deploy. But I do like Void's idea of having the zodiacs have strengths and weaknesses to elements / statuses based on their sign.
  15. It's really NOT out of the topic of 1.3 development, as this is actually a bona-fide problem in 1.3. There are several moves that I'd say aren't worth having in 1.3. Jump for instance, still has this problem, there's no reason not to get Horizontal MAX and then the highest vertical Jump you can get. The rest of the moves are useless. Even having the skillset altered to Range +1 and having 6 copies of Range + 1 would be better than what it has now. Squire moves are still general bad, and having Throw Stone now is even more pointless with Squires having the ability to shoot with Crossbows-- which does tie into balance of classes. That said, if you believe the question is outside of the scope of the topic, the response is to send him a PM about it and discuss from there, NOT say "I said in my opinion." If it's a post on a forum, it's clearly understood that everything said is an opinion. So saying that just seems really dickish and dismissive. I'd rather someone just not respond than say "I said in my opinion," because it comes with the assumption that the person you're addressing is too stupid to comprehend that. It does though. Because everyone sees it as it is : a flimsy excuse to have a retort, but not actually answering the question. It's a legitimate question that you hand wave away. An ability able to be abused isn't a bad thing-- quite the contrary, that's a good thing. It's only a problem with said ability is the *only* skill worth using because the rest are bad. IE, going with your example with Nameless/Forbidden dance, this is a problem because the only other dance really worth using is Last Dance. Regular dances take too long and without enough potency to really take out a threat quickly enough to allow someone to survive longer. Your response actually brings up a point that many modders / devs actually fall for. "We can't make the move too good." YES. YOU. CAN. Just make sure that everything else is also good or has enough use, and you're golden. Take something like moves that interrupt charges, this move ranges from completely and utterly useless, to being able to save your party's bacon from oblivion. Good move, because it's a godsend when it's useful, and pointless when it's not. Is it worse than Reraise? Maybe, but considering that reraise and an interrupting move aren't on the same turf, there's no problem here. THAT, is why you got downvoted.
  16. Yeah, the difference with those is that in a perfect world though, it still balances out and actually does add some strategic depth. IE, is say, 70% is the base for accuracy of spells on a unit with decent faith and the enemy with decent faith, sometimes with compat, this can make it bump up to 90% or go down as low as 50% (just spitballing numbers, don't take that too literally). The difference here is that the 50% itself may be "unreliable," but it's unreliable on that specific enemy, it's not unreliable always, and even then, this still works in at least MT, because you can use buffs like say Faith on you or the enemy to make yourself more accurate despite the compat issues. Combine that with Brave and Faith abilities being decently accurate, and it does become strategic because you can weigh the option if you're in a good enough position to go for a lower accuracy, or take the time to buff you or the enemy with faith or faith raising skills to make it 100%, or at least close enough to be reasonably accurate. Invite is a perfect example to also demonstrate how you can make RNG still work and not necessarily lock it behind low RNG. FFT Invite just sucks tbh. Tactics Ogre has a much better invite system. The invite chance of success is based on the remaining hp of the unit and the loyalty of the unit to the commander, meaning that you can reliably recruit units that are at low health in it. This means that Invite is still reliable while not being the stupidly broken Hail Mary skill that it is in FFT. You know, the useful-useless move? If you beat everyone else down but that one ninja, what's the point from a design perspective of having the player box the units in for 5+ turns attempting to nab that sweet Invite at 23%? Tactics Ogre does it better, because Invite has idiotically low chances at base (like 4% I believe), but can scoot to as high as 90% at moments. On a side note, the GBA version of Tactics Ogre expanded on this by making it to where classes actually mattered as well. Using FFT classes for a moment, it was where classes that were in the same job paths were easier to recruit with one another, and higher tiered units had an easier time Inviting lower tier. IE, a Knight has an easier time with invite on a Squire than a Knight trying to recruit a Chemist. It's stuff like this for the reason that Death in FFXIII was actually so good. It was a skill that did damage even if the Death effect missed, and the more status effects you put on the enemy, the more accurate Death was. Stuff like the above are good mechanics with RNG, where the player has some control of it and can fudge the numbers. Otherwise, it ends up falling into a "don't use" or "use this, it's really good." I kinda agree with Void on this one. Low RNG moves are really annoying and generally serve almost no purpose outside of either 1) Wasting the player's time 2) Screwing the player over.
  17. Not much. Hail Mary's are pretty pointless, and bad moves are even worse. And I DO like that Charm + Slow ability. It's interesting.
  18. It doesn't call for flexibility. That's the issue. Fire 1, 2, and 3 are essentially the same attack. Fire 1 is too weak to use once you have Fire 2 and if you get Fire 2 when Fire 1 still has good damage, Fire 2 probably costs too much MP to be worth using. Instead, it's better to literally have a Fire spell that's always relevant and a big fire spell that hits a larger panel. The spells in this game scale like complete garbage. Both damage wise and speed wise. Without slowing the progression of either the growths, or physical scaling, spells will always have this problem in the game. Yes. They do. It's not that I appreciate a "fresh" set of ideas with different patterns, it's that the spells actually *do* different things. Explosion in 1.3 is a low damage fast spell that can proc oil which enables damage spikes. 2 wizards can pack more damage than many things in the early game with it especially if they get lucky with oil procs. Mjonir is a good spell that is fairly strong, and has the ability to proc stops on people if you cannot kill them. Blizzard is a huge sweeping AoE that has a chance of stopping someone. Meltdown is basically explosion and actually gives you a reason to use Black Magic as a secondary if you're a physical user-- as in Vanilla it's just useless. With just these spells I mentioned right now, 1.3 Wizard is already superior to Vanilla Wizard. The biggest problem with 1.3 Wizard is that spells scale poorly in comparison to physical , and that's a problem that was present in Vanilla. Which is that they need better scaling. However, fixing the scaling problem is what causes them to not really be necessary to have all of them. Take a look at something like say Knight (Vanilla or 1.3 are fine). Knight only has 8 moves in the game. However, its 8 moves are better than the Wizard's on the account that the Wizard has 16 moves total, but won't be using the other abilities later on in the game, while the Knight's skills are always going to be applicable to use at any given point. Knocking someone's speed down 2 points is always useful. Knocking someone's PA down 2 points or MA down to points may become *less* effective later on, but it's still useful because of the way stats scale in FFT. Compare that to the wizard where there is no real applicable difference between Fire, Ice and Electricity because there generally aren't enough dynamic weaknesses / strengths in gear to make them any different outside of cosmetic differences. Realistically, a person playing this game is better off grabbing for instance, Bolt 1-4 , Flare, and being basically done with the wizard skillset. But we'll be nice and grab Toad and Poison and Death as well. And considering that Bolt 1 and 2 do such lackluster damage, you'll be using Bolt 3 or 4 (haha, no, you won't use 4, it's too slow without Short Charge honestly). It's not the same as say, Final Fantasy 1, where Spells per day were a thing, so you can realistically run out of "Bolt 3" spells that you can cast, but you're still permitted to bolt 1 and 2. Yes. It does. For a first time player, it most certainly does. Chocobos are incredibly nasty foes to be a basic enemy to fight in randoms-- sporting an AoE heal that doesn't cost MP, more move than any of your characters, Counter, a better reaction ability than any reasonable player would have-- where they probably have NOTHING, and enemies often outnumber you. If a person doesn't immediately gun for Gain JP Up, or a caster class, the game can be fairly difficult. After you beat Dorter, the difficulty just kind of disappears for awhile until you reach Wiegraf, and then disappears again. Chapter 2 is just flat out easier than Chapter 1. Not only are Gafgarion and Agrias able to take care of themselves better than Delita and Algus by being in naturally sturdier classes, but neither of them can miss their attacks, one of them can drain MP of casters should he choose to, and more pressingly, his single target attack that he has heals himself. So yes. Yes FFT Vanilla starts out too hard. By Chapter 3, enemies are still rocking basic gear and the same basic classes they were in Chapter 1. The only difference? You have 2 specials and a bucket load of JP under your belt that if you grabbed Gained JP Up, the difference between you and the enemy progression only continues to widen. By Chapter 4, the game just starts thrusting special weapons and special characters in your arsenal like Beowulf or Reis, and its no wonder people joke about FFT's difficulty. Honestly, the enemies generally don't have better stuff than you in terms of equips. Most of the stuff they have, you can get, whether through a sidequest, secret hunt, or simply recruiting a character. However, the issue is that the enemy setups tend to be "sweeping AoEs from fast units" and they have Item as their secondary, and get 4x passives with a 5th one being their natural one. All of these things alone are not a problem. It's the fact that in 1.3, they tend to be the EXACT. SAME. THING. Over and over and over again with the generic enemies being the ones that generally mix things up, but not enough to stop the main problem. Or... You could just change Orlandu and have him be a unit. There's nothing wrong with the decision most people make to make Orlandu fix. If you're doing a rebalance mod, you may as well fix him. And the problem with Orlandu, is why give you an "easy mode" unit at the later half of the game? That's a really lousy idea. Calculator skills are actually broken plain and simple. Orlandu is just a bit too strong. The consideration was "it'll be harder to win if enemies don't have counters." We've actually seen Archael say this. People had literally asked this before. We got answers. As for the rest of this, I'm not even sure where you're going with this. Who said I was trying to force you to do anything? This topic isn't about you. It's about 1.3 and to a certain extent, the actual creator of the topic. Okay? I'm not even sure what you're even prattling on about here. Yes. But it's not the speed manipulation abilities that are at fault so much as speed scaling of everything else. Spells in this game-- and largely 1.3 have problems because: 1) In order to use a spell, you have to deal with mechanics that other things do not: like physical. Like charge times. 2) It ends up doing less damage than a physical attack. 3) It has a resource that you have to manage that physical does not outside of sword skills. And unlike Samurai, unless it breaks, you can use it infinitely. 4) Movement makes the advantage that spells would have, a pointless endeavor. 5) Charge is basically a must for 1.3 by endgame. Vanilla has this problem to a certain extent. However, people still liked spells because while their damage was worse, it wasn't so bad that spells because just flat out bad. They just weren't as good.
  19. No. It isn't charming. It only made sense in the earlier ones because there was a clear progression. Under normal circumstances, you couldn't have Fire 1 and Fire 3, but not 2. In the world of FFT, you can, so it causes a bit of a problem. Fire 1, 2, 3, and 4 can basically be condensed into 2 spells. "Normal Fire Spell" and "Big AoE Fire Spell." The issue in FFT land is that you can grab Fire 1, and Fire 3 and basically say "Screw off" to Fire 2 and never get it. That means that there isn't a progression here. 1.3 definitely made the right call by mixing up all of the spells. Even in the original games aside from one, this was kinda dumb. Once you get Fire 2, you pretty much never use fire. The Wizard in FFT has an artificially inflated moveset. Compare that to say, Oracle, where it doesn't really have redundant moves and the picture is made perfectly clear what's wrong with the Wizard in Vanilla. I'd already stand that 1.3 is worse than Vanilla, as the biggest problem with Vanilla is that it starts out too hard, and the enemies just don't have any real sort of progression with their abilities or jobs and are definitely hurt by the sprite limitation-- not sure if that is a thing in the PSP version, but it's without a doubt, a problem in Vanilla. Especially if you try to mod it, as it's the first annoying problem you'll run into. 1.3 on the other hand, immediately starts the characters with better progression than any sane player could ever possibly have, and around Chapter 4, when you reach the same tier of strength as the enemy, Arch made the AI cheat through obscure tooltips, garbage multipliers (like Knight tier characters that can move as fast or faster than a ninja and have better than thief speed growth), impossible equipment combinations, and impossible faith combinations that you'd never see under normal circumstances. Orlandu is overpowered. Broken is the Calculator class. The Calculator class takes a dump on 1) MP 2) Range 3) Charge Times 4) Vertical 5) Move 6) Jump It doesn't give a crap about any of that. Orlandu has nothing on the Calculator class. Fixing Orlandu is a good idea because he's so strong that there's no reason not to use him. In a mod that attempts to fix things, that's absolutely important. Removing immortal is a good thing actually. The AI actually behaves better when immortal is removed. It forces the AI to be more aggressive to pursue revivals and the like. And a lot of highlight statuses are removed when you have the immortal flag. And while you could simply remove those status immunity, all people would probably end up doing is hitting them with petrify instead of confuse / sleep and dealing with the annoying person. It also mixes up fights considerably more. 1.3 actually isn't entirely designed with status infliction. The best strategy for 90% of the battles in 1.3 is not actually status effects, but rather 1) Going faster than the enemy 2) Annihilating it before it can do much. In the event that you cannot do both, the response is essentially to slap Damage Split / Hamedo / Meatbone Slash on and survive the initial wave and then mop up afterward. There's a reason that most victory runs on videos are pretty quick. It's not because the people are just good, it's because the first two turns pretty much determine everything else. The biggest issues with 1.3 that need to be done away with is the Power Source fest that is Chapter 4. Chapters 1-3 have some slight problems but aren't where most of the problems even start to crop up. I didn't even notice until I started playing, but Chapter 4 is just a chore, and it's longer than any other chapter in the game. It's literally almost as long as 1, 2, and 3.
  20. Final Fantasy Tactics: Omega WIP

    As usual, when I get back some time on my hands and all caught up with my friends on MMOs, I'm going to be back in the game. FFT: MT first, and then I'd be happy to play your stuff too.
  21. Final Fantasy 5: the brainstorming

    Do you think that you could also make a song that reduces cooldowns? Seems weird, but that could be an interesting combo.
  22. Sharing some notes on a dead project I had

    Yeah, I do remember you talking about this. Honestly, it looks more like a development tree for the original Tactics Ogre. I'm tempted to actually do a playthrough for people so they can see what that one was like. It was such a strange beast in comparison.
  23. 1.3 Easytype plus Complete - anyone have this?

    It would without a doubt, be easier to bring 1.3.0.8 into a Content version, as the Content version still has older stuff in there. In terms of things that need to stand out to refine 1.3.0.8 into a Content type: 1) Reduce level of enemies to be either set, or consistently party level rather than this stupid party level +. It's fine for an occasional boss, but constantly doing that is just a way to artificially make the player gain levels faster than they have any business doing. Which really doesn't help anyone, as once your characters reach the 50ish area, you may as well hit 99. And by the endgame, you should be 99 if you're anything near level 75. IIRC, in content, they were set levels so this could be removed entirely? It'll take awhile, but certainly less time than updating Fire 1, Ice 1 and Bolt 1 to the Wizard set as it is. 2) Certain goofs like Meliadoul would need to be fixed-- as she has Mime unlocked, which results in her having almost NOTHING unlocked when you get her making her nothing more than a glorified Javelin 2 user for the most part. This was a goof as Meliadoul was supposed to have a lot of stuff unlocked, and Mime requirements used to be higher and were subsequently changed which screwed people over.
  24. Never seen anything like this. It looks interesting.
  25. Difficulty Scope and Difficulty Curve

    Fair enough. I might be forgetting because it's been awhile since I've gone through SOR3 (I usually just play BK3 nowadays or SORR). And yes, I love that remake. It's so good. With mods, it can be even better. I prefer the 5.0 over the 5.1 version though... Maybe I should make a middle ground of those two.