SirNewtonFig

He's a wake up call, for sure, but he's not all that bad. Did you happen to defend against the jumps with the non-vanished characters? Big D is the game's first real boss. Think of everything up to that point as an extended intro, because afterward (as you noted) the game's main character building system comes online. Dadaluma is a gate to make sure that the player is paying attention and learning to adapt to enemy behavior. Things like plants responding to melee attacks with Raid counters and Crawlers using Magnitude when they're alone in battle were some other early lessons in adapting to enemy patterns, but it's possible for the player to brute force through these, or miss them by way of luck or intuition. Big D's lessons are to not overextend yourself, and that buffs and debuffs make a big difference. Sounds like you took a beating, thought about it, adjusted your strategy to use advantageous buffs and debuffs, and pulled through in the end. Mission accomplished.

BNW doesn't really try to be a content mod, so there won't be any new scenes or locations. The rework of the script is the closest it comes to new content, and it does bring a new sense of character to a lot of people, but you aren't gonna see any new FF6 fanfic in here. And no bonus dungeons.

Break is Wind. It's a fart joke. Let's not all forget that BNW is all about creating niches for characters. Edgar can Jump for 5 elements (with a mix of physical and magical focus, as noted above), and hit another with his Tools — I think he can afford to leave Wind and Earth for someone else. Another proc sword is not needed in the midgame. The T2 elemental blade procs carry themselves against weakness until late game options open up. If you're more Vigor focused, then you want Falchion and/or Rune Blade instead in the early WoR. I get that sword procs are cool, and there's a tendency to want to make them more of a thing, but BNW isn't in the business of handing out more firepower for the cool factor. There is no current mechanical need (and furthermore, the challenges are balanced around the options currently available), so why throw a wrench into the mix?

I'd do it with an SRAM save rather than a save state, but yeah, you should be able to use a 2.0 save. There's a tiny starting stat change that won't carry over, but that should be about it. There's a new WoR cutscene of sorts that might play out strangely if you're already part way through some WoR stuff, but it won't impact anything negatively.

Shocked not to see Bomb on here!

How about this: you have multiple sword users running magic builds, and the Soul Saber is spoken for. Makes a pretty good stat stick, and the crits help close the damage gap somewhat. If I'm using Locke more as a healer than a fighter, I'll often toss it on him. If you're willing to 2Hand it on a vigor build, it hits like a truck... but I don't really go for that sort of thing with the characters in question. I agree that it's a bit underwhelming given its late placement.

Oh, not too old then! If you do come upon a clean FFIII US 1.0 ROM at some point, there's a version 2.1 about to drop soonish (beta available on Discord) with some new stuff and refinements.

Heh, my first taste of BNW was on a prepatched ROM I found with something like 1.6 or 1.7 applied. What version does it say you're playing at the top of the config menu?

From the Readme: nATB System The short explanation of what this hack does is that it pauses the ATB timer during attack animations and while the player is doing anything (the original game did not pause during "Fight" targeting or while the Bushido meter was charging). This has two effects: one, it makes speed contribute more significantly to how fast and often a character acts in battle as well as preventing it from effectively soft-capping at around 60 or so; two, it removes the exploit of camping in the item menu under the "wait" setting to gain a huge speed advantage. The resulting system is basically a modified version of "wait", which I mention because there is no longer an "active/wait" setting, nor a "battle speed" slider.

To add the the rod thing, front row rod smacks from the starter rods give you a chance at the equivalent of a cheap tier 3 spell, effectively. There is no faster way to dispose of any of the bosses in the end WoB/FC. Punisher procs are effectively a tier 3.5 spell (only Esper summons can compete in terms of spell power). And don't discount what Gogo can do with them with a 3x rage multiplier instead of the 2x from MP Crit. You can mitigate the downsides with things like Rerise, Image, and Golem. One of a differing opinion to yours might instead say that the downsides of rod fighting from the back row aren't worth the increase in safety. Different strokes, and all that. Having multiple viable options to appeal to different players' tastes is a sign of good design.

Ah, right you are – I just found the special routine used for Empowerer (I assume the others are doing something similar), and it does reduce the power to 1/4 for the second "hit". Wouldn't be hard then.

I definitely sympathize with this, though there's two issues here that I can think of. One is that these effects all use the same branch of the damage formula currently, so differentiating between OG Drain and the others would require implementing a secondary one (it's not as easy as unchecking a "cap damage to current HP/MP" flag on each effect, sadly). This would not be an issue if removing this constraint across the board, however, as a single subroutine could simply be skipped. However, the larger issue is that there's no differentiation between spell power for the HP side vs the MP side for the effects that concern both (e.g. Empowerer, Bedevil, Raid). As such, something that is balanced to restore up to 1000HP would also mill the enemy of 1000MP, which intrudes heavily on the value of Rasp and pretty well renders Mindblow utterly obsolete not long after you get it. I'm not actually sure how complicated it would be to have separate calculations for the HP and MP portions, using a reduced (maybe 1/4 or 1/8) spell power for the MP portion. Probably more effort than it's worth for the sake of 4 Rages and 1 Dance The general rule of thumb with Reflect is that it protects against anything magical that is single- or free-targeted, whether it is a "dot" spell or not. There are some exceptions to this, such as Lifeshaver, Barrier, Discord, Blow Fish, Refract, and Atomic Ray (there are probably more, just pulled these few from where they were mentioned in the Readme/Printme specifically). Conversely, if an effect is not capable of hitting a single target, it is unreflectable as a general rule. As such, I think Float should already ignore reflect? If it doesn't, it may just be a vestigial holdover from when it was a free-targeting spell. Safe can be set on reflected targets using the Shield lore or Monet Brush, and Shell can be set on reflected targets using the Zoneseek summon or Dali Brush. Rerise can be set on reflected targets with Seraph, for Regen there's Stray or RegenX, and for Haste there's HasteX. The limitations imposed by the Reflect status are deliberate: it is an inconvenience to both you and your enemy. This isn't FF9 where you can just Reflect your whole party with no drawbacks. As I've highlighted, though, there are ways to work around these limitations, and having to rely on those is the cost of having a very reliable safeguard against some very dangerous effects. As we touched on with Reflect above, limitations are not necessarily a bad thing. Water Rondo and Snowman Jazz are both very good, and Water and Ice weaknesses are quite common. The grounded nature of Surge reigns them in a little. In terms of boss battles, this really only impacts Gold-D, who is water-weak but flying (so 3 of 4 Rondo steps are still applicable, 3/16 chance of a whiff – not terrible); Red and Brown can both be affected by grounded attacks. My concern with this would be for the player. So many fractional damage enemy attacks would have to be rescripted to avoid easy wipes. I think they're fine as is.

I think the battle engine can only show one non-aura (safe, shell, reflect) overlay effect at a time, so it prioritizes between things like poison, blind, mute, etc. The "fizz" that indicates Rage status is one of these. You'll notice a similar thing when you get hit by Bad Breath and are Muted, Blind and Poisoned at the same time, and can only see the Poison. In short: not ideal, but also not a bug.

Boost enemy stats, yes. Reset progress, no. That is the domain of SRAM, which is separate from the ROM. You'd need to run some sort of save editor script on your save file if you want to take an external approach.

What spells would they proc? Haste used to be on the Ross Brush, but it was deliberately changed to Reflect by BTB. Not sure if that was just for the symmetry of the three main defensive buffs being on brushes, or to keep her from overlapping with the characters with Haste (of which there are already very many), but I doubt you'll see it back. What else is left? Curatives would be redundant, as the brushes already heal, and she can just cast Remedy, RegenX, or Rerise. Something to set Image would be the strongest case. It would establish the Thamasa trio as the go to Image setters, each with their own unique way of doing it. Plus it fits into the theme of light and optics that goes along with her artistry kit. There's no "spell" to set just Image outside of Smoke Bomb though, so what would the proc use? I think the only buff left is Float, which wouldn't be the worst, I guess. But is there any point adding a brush for it? I want brush casting to be cool, I really do, but without altering Relm's standby kit or gutting a spell to make room for an Image brush proc, I can't think of how to go about it. You can bet BTB won't buy in to anything that involves a significant rework of character options — he wants to call BNW a finished product.

That's just the way spellcast procs are implemented. Imagine you're making a game, and you come up with a system for weapons to cast spells, and you decide 25% chance is the sweet spot, with a booster for 50% chance on certain gear — would you then spend additional space in your game accommodating further additional exceptions to the probability that you don't intend to use? Likely not in the SNES era. Fast forward to today, if you want something other than the standard proc rates or behaviour, you need to write custom hard-coded proc routines to do it. The wind blades, Kagenui (I think?), and Zantetsuken are pre-existing examples of this. Or you could probably relocate/rewrite the routine that determines the proc success and add new exceptions to it on the basis of item type or other equipped things or whatever. There's just nothing within the system as it is defined right now to do what you propose.

You are correct, the Tarot does appear to be missing the Holy elemental flag, which is in contradiction to the item's description. Good catch!

I wonder if there's enough free space in the neighborhood of the nATB speed calculations to rework Nowea's Hard Type speed tweaks into something that gets applied conditionally based on a flag value... A NG+ where you go back, keep all your swag but have your levels reset to base WoR, and then have another go at the WoR with faster enemies? And then NG++ that is the same thing but the player speed handicap also gets applied for even faster enemies? This is starting to sound like something I could get behind.

Possible? Yes. It would look something like this: Write a new event that unequips all characters, removes everyone from the party except Celes (or however the solitary island sequence starts), sets all event flags back to their expected WoR-start state, and then jumps to the event location that begins the solitary island scene. This event would be accessible via <NPC X>, but would only become available after the event flags for killing each of the goddesses are set. The pain in the ass part would be isolating the correct event bits. The event itself probably wouldn't be all that hard to write. The value would be questionable. Most of the WoR will be a cakewalk with endgame levels and gear. Making things harder on ng+ would not be doable, and there'd be no alternate endings or content to explore (like what Chrono Trigger offers for ng+ despite the cakewalk). I think I'd get pretty bored of it, personally.

What even is the forgotten forest?

To add to what Nowea said, it's also a matter of taste. Making Leo available would require no small amount of narrative acrobatics (not to mention dialog/event space, and the effort to craft it) to incorporate him in a way that's not just "surprise, Leo's here!" And BNW tries to steer pretty clear of FF6 Fanfic territory. And, as you can see, BTB isn't so fond of Leo, so that pretty much seals the deal. There are tons of other mods that mess around with playable Leo though. Have you checked out Divergent Paths? I can't speak to the mod author's treatment of Leo's story, but I played the 3 scenarios patch a couple years back and liked what they did with that.

If you're taking Ultima hits, then you're not playing Kaiser's game. You need to use elemental magic to kite his AI, or he will obliterate you.

MP damage is an anti-undead measure in general in BNW, so a player who picked up on this may have thought to try a strategy around it. But yes, a little obscure, which feels appropriate for something like this.

Okay, so. First up, a lot of things have been relocated in the BNW ROM, meaning making changes in an editor is... not very practical. The alternative would be to make the edits in ASM/hex directly, but that's even less practical without an extremely detailed map of where everything is located now. Which isn't exactly available. So what you're looking to do is technically possible, just like it was possible to make things the way they are now in the first place; but it's not a task that you're going to accomplish without a lot of help from the devs. And after going through so much effort to make things the way they are now, the devs aren't likely to put in yet more effort just to help undo their deliberate changes. Every mechanical decision in the making of BNW was either about making it as perfectly balanced as possible, or improving the quality of life for the player. Gau has just enough rages now that he has a couple of good tools for every situation; any more would be redundant. Unless they bring options to the table that are even more optimal, in which case the finely crafted balance becomes impacted. Additionally, more rages means more rage hunting, more menuing, less likelihood of memorizing what things do (which means more referencing the printme), etc, all of which which impacts the quality of life. In short, probably not happening.