vonriel

Hm, I remember only Edgar, Sabin, and Cyan being able to reliably survive a jump while defending. Locke and Shadow just didn't have the options for bulk that they'd need to survive the hit, Gau is always doing Gau things and so gets one-shot regardless, and I always geared Celes for Magic, which meant very low Def. And of the three who can reliably survive, I remember Edgar being too slow to get a Defend command in before Big Daddy D came falling out of the sky, although Cyan's bulky enough to just eat the damned thing and shrug it off. Sabin required a defend, but his huge health and good speed easily let him get one in before eating The People's Elbow. Of course, my memory is probably bad since I haven't done the fight in a while. I'll try to take notes the next time I do it in order to keep track of things, but I suppose this'll be a non-issue by then.

Nowea, I can't tell if that's a jab at my lack of skill, or my lack of interaction that has you calling me a new player. Either way, I've had a fair few runs through BNW at this point, although I don't know that I'd ever run a hard mode patch for the game. Shame that they're so spread out. I did find the encounter patch and another one that's supposed to fix the visual glitch with jump. I guess there's not much that needs patching in 1.9, though, which is hopefully awesome and not just indicative of bugs going unpatched. Looking through my downloads, I still have 4 separate patches for 1.8.5 laying around.

Is there a single place to find them? Looking to start up a new run, but I'd like to browse some of the optional patches, and I'm not sure if there are any current bug-fixes floating around other than the one in the first post of Seibaby's Bug Report thread. I'm about to go digging through threads anyway just to see if there are any others, but it'd be great if I didn't have to. If there isn't a single place, while I know there's already a few stickies, it would be lovely if there was another one dedicated to keeping these patches centered in one location.

I agree that either Spoon or Jump does just a touch too much damage. The ability to one-shot nearly everyone on two abilities is rough, especially this early, since it's hard to stack defense freely, and especially because there's nothing really obvious telling you why he's hitting you with these hard-hitting attacks back-to-back. If it were up to me, Jump would instead auto-set you to 1 hp instead of insta-gibbing 2/3 the roster. Obviously, once you know the script, or know what you need to do to crush his damage in that race, you can cheese the fight, but it's a rude awakening to how hard this mod can be when you first get to it. I actually don't believe about half of you who claim to have beat it first try the first time you played this mod, and I don't believe any of you who say you did it with no issues: The sheer amount of damage he throws out in a supposed rebalance, instead of hard mode hack, is off-putting at best. That said, coming in here and talking the way you did about a fight that so many people have managed to beat is disrespectful as hell. We all managed to beat it, we've all managed to find ways around it, and now that we have, we all can get past it without more than a single wipe, if that. And yet you completely talk down our experience and our ability, disrespecting everything we've done - and the truly impressive amount of work some of the crazier players here have put in to figuring out the fight. It's why you got such a terrible response to your thread. Personally, my favorite strategy for him is to bring Shadow and funnel all post-Narshe money into a stack of Butterflies. Power Gloving Thrown Butterflies is hilarious amounts of damage.

I like to think it's more a result of overly aggressive training: The dogs were trained to viciously attack anyone who uses magic on them. They just forgot to tell the soldiers that they trained the dogs to do that.

I'm looking at suggestions for builds that haven't been talked about yet, although I suppose I should be doing this in the Discord chat if I really wanted to make headway. Anyway, I'm feeling one of two ways about Gau. The first is a symmetrical set of bonuses, while the second is more unique. For the symmetrical set, Beastmaster would gain a bonus to monster-specific abilities, any 'Special' attack as well as any other attack that isn't shared by any other character. Berserker would gain a similar bonus to any ability not covered by this. The goal is for roughly half his abilities to be boosted by each set, although it probably would use some more fine-tuning. But in this case, you'd basically be opting for one set of Rages over another, and this would probably lead to, well, Berserker being the better healer, actually, which is weird. Anyway, I suppose the ultimate goal would be for Beastmaster to be good at utility/support with monster skills, while Berserker trucks things dead, but both are kind of lazy bonuses and don't feel fun to me. Alternately, Beastmaster alters the chances from 66/33 to 60/40, or maybe even 55/45, although I feel like approaching 50/50 is too strong. And then Berserker grants some other kind of flat bonus. Perhaps something for just all "Special" attacks, maybe just a straight damage boost, I'm not sure exactly. If he didn't already have the lowest penalty and fastest command input, I'd say Berserker could reduce those in some fashion, but some kind of just straight power boost would make more sense to me. Your choice would then be between better utility, through normally rare secondary actions being made more common, or simply better trucking ability, through hitting even more really hard than he already does. Both of these offer a generic "X% boost" that otherwise feels bland, but it's hard to come up with a non-gamebreaking but thematic idea for him given his unique set. For Shadow, the one listed build already seems to favor attacking, so make his second one focus on throwing. As fast as he already is, I don't think he needs any kind of delay buffs, so perhaps simply a chance to not use the thrown item? Giving a throwing/supporting build better longevity and helping to alleviate the gp drain committing to this build could otherwise lead to. Other than that, it's hard to think of what a throwing build would want that it doesn't already have. Oh, I know, just turn Throw into Mix!

I don't like the idea of buffing DoomGaze, because I don't like the idea of getting obliterated by a random encounter while using a mode of transportation that normally isn't supposed to have random encounters at all. That said, the idea of making one of the legendary demons sealed away long ago into a powerful enemy does appeal to me. Maybe for a future content release, DoomGaze and Phunbaba could be made to simply run away to gather their strength when defeated, instead of outright slain? Perhaps they fled because they weren't taking it seriously enough, and were far more wounded than they expected to be and so retreated to temporarily heal up. Then you can either go to a new dungeon, or a new part of an old dungeon, where they retreated to in order to recover and prepare for the next battle. But right now, I see no reason for DoomGaze or Phunbaba to be anything other than what they are, since they're gates to actual content at present.

I didn't see this mentioned earlier, will this update break saves from 1.8.5? I can never tell with these based on change log alone.

You don't need Locke to steal from Zozo, unless you no longer get the Switchblade in/before it. It's random proc, but it can get the job done if you're just looking to steal opportunity things on your way through. I'm not sure where this Celes hate in Zozo comes from. She's your only healer at this stage. She's bulkier than most of your other options, beating Cyan by virtue of knowing how to hold a shield, and Sabin by virtue of evasion. I think, and don't quote me on this, but I think she and Edgar can both survive either spoon or jump, whichever does less damage, if you take the Safety Glove at the Returner's Hideout and get the safe proc from it in this fight. I agree that throwing Butterflies is expensive, but it's well worth the price. It is hands-down the single fastest way to take Dadaluma out, reducing the number of spoons and jumps he can throw your way. Also, I find the shop options largely irrelevant prior to Thamasa anyway. I'd suggest everyone try it at least once. And honestly, it was only like 5k for the 10 butterflies last time I tried this, which definitely feels more feasible now that cash flow has been increased. I don't always throw gil at my problems, but when I do, I use Shadow to do it.

Last time I played through Zozo, my thrown Butterflies were hitting Dadaluma for around 1k I believe. I also may not have had as much vigor as yours did, so my experience may be off. I don't recommend the strategy, though, because it basically required all my funds upon hiring Shadow to get the 10 Butterflies I ended up throwing at Big Daddy D. Still, Shadow and his roving band of buffoons is the best way to murderate Zozo, hands-down.