SirNewtonFig

Sin of Mana is great, and has a hard mode to satisfy your inner masochist (not that I've tried it, as I find the balance in normal mode to be adequate for my tastes). Two cautionary notes though: 1. Don't play with save states, and try to reset/reload regularly. Otherwise you'll experience unresponsiveness when trying to access the ring menu when there's a lot going on. This is a carry over issue from vanilla, really, but does seem rather exacerbated by the mod. 2. Equipment has all kinds of rider effects with no way to communicate them in-game, so be prepared to refer to the readme constantly for a legend of what does what. I find if you can deal with these two things, it makes for a great time.

Ancient Castle might work as grinding grounds.

Huh, that's a good point — clocks are numbered 1-12, not 1-60 (unless they have both labels, I suppose?). Though it hadn't occurred to me to try answering the puzzle that way, since in vanilla you chose 6, 10, 50 rather than 6, 2, 10.

How's this for a whack idea: what if taking damage slows you down (implemented as a small subtraction from nATB gauge, or small increase in action delay if waiting to act), and Stamina reduces the magnitude and/or likelihood of this penalty?

Sonic Boom is the only Blitz I NEVER use — I couldn't even tell you what the inputs are for it. I fully support any change that makes it (or a replacement for it) worth using. What about a Blitz akin to what Vargas uses to blow away the rest of the party before Sabin wrecks him? Could be a shite wind damage AoE akin to what we have now, with a rider effect of possibly Sneezing a target from the battle. Could something like this be handy for LLG/NHT runs? Edit: I guess that's what Warp is for, on second thought. Carry on.

I thought this wasn't a difficulty hack? Now I have to actually make a mild effort not to die. Literally unplayable.

Just chiming in to +1 the following ideas: - +Stam on spears and/or buff Edgar's base Stam. Building him straight Stam gives him immense HP bulk, but he's just not as good at covering as many of the other good bodyguard candidates due to his lower max Stam. - buff Stam Sabin. Giving Chakra/Mantra more oomph and having his elemental Blitzes use Stam per funnyman's suggestions both appeal to me. - a way to get Interceptor on Relm without killing Shadow. He can barely keep the dog away from her during the Thamasa WoB story sequence, it shouldn't take killing him to have the dog help her out. I support a Relic approach to this rather than something event based, assuming this is simpler — maybe a Memento Ring Colliseum trade? - better status resist growth from Stam investment.

I quite like Praetarius's version, if it's easily implementable. Each element contributes its share of the damage sort of independently this way.

Colliseum morph-lag was an issue in vanilla too. I'm surprised there's no patch out there for this already (though maybe that means it's too tricky to fix?).

Sure. But with proper planning and execution, you can dramatically sway the odds of the RNG screwing you. BNW has a lot more depth than just "everyone cast the element bad guy is weak against" (though that does help, when you have the available action economy). Read some of funnyman's log entries in the Nowea Hard Type thread for some examples of how preparation and approach can be the difference between impossible and possible encounters If you're not willing to agree that strategy has any impact in a turn based RPG, then I'm not sure what to tell you. Unless you mean to say that skill and strategy are different things, which is really just splitting semantic hairs, I think.

Yeah. Most of the cast has something tragic to brood about, really. It's easy to forget about sometimes with the limited amount of script afforded to each character.

The original line is "Power only breeds war... I wish I'd never been born." Pretty emo. I do agree that the FC escape sequence is a bit of a Celes wankfest, but I don't really mind it. Vanilla already forced her to show up to save the day, but does little with it (she's just a party filler to make up for Shadow) — BNW just gives her last minute appearance more relevance.

The Moogle Charm will prove very handy — I'll leave the pleasant discovery of why up to you :D. You'll want just enough Stamina in your build so that you can reliably hit the environment you want — mid-60s isn't bad. Forest Suite is handy for mitigating damage and status pressure, and will probably be a staple in your dancing kit. Earth Blues and Water Rondo are both potent offensive steps. Love Sonata will have some utility in topping up your MP if you find yourself switch-hitting with Magic enough to run out. Outside of this basic overview, dancing relies heavily on knowing enemy weaknesses and resistances — there's a lot of dance steps with a wind or earth (or grounded) component that are common immunities later in the game, for example. Expect lots of trial and error on your first run until you get used to this. I don't remember if the printme has details on enemy resistances and weaknesses or not, but at the very least you should have the tools to minmax dance effectiveness by your second play through.

Or more productively: it's not bad practice to try and maintain Float status on one or more of your party at any given time, especially if you don't know the enemy formations well enough yet to know when Quake might be on the table. This will also shut down other enemy offensive options such as Magnitude, Avalanche and Surge. Half of the cast is eventually capable of casting it (and there's always Red Bull), so it's easy to always have it at your disposal.

Yeah, 1xAvalanche < 2xQuake. Avalanche only really made an appearance because I misremembered the odds on the Earth Blues steps and thought I was getting a 7/16 Sun Bath with a 5/16 Avalanche backup rather than the other way around. Quake was the offensive spell of choice, generally speaking. Bio was mostly for knocking off solo surviving human trash mobs (in groups, Quake is better), or targets that are Wind/Earth immune (like dinosaurs and bears, though I think Doom also works on the latter?). Break made an occasional appearance when something wasn't affected by Quake and wasn't weak against poison, but I still wanted to try for some dependable damage – pretty situational (can't think of specific examples where I pulled this out), but good for some damage when it worked. Quake saw the most frequent use of all of these for sure, being quite effective against: Cave to the Ancient Castle randoms some Phoenix Cave randoms* (also Red Dragon, though weakness sniping with Snowman Jazz might still be better) Magimaster's Earth Wallchange, and the Lv. 4-6 Mage formations some randoms in Kefka's Tower (*just don't get hit by a G-Force from a Weedula while waiting for your dualcast to execute... probably safer to Float+Quake in these formations, since one Quake should do the trick anyway) I didn't bring him along for Cyan's Nightmare, but I'd guess Quake would be effective against many of the randoms there, as well as the Soulfires at the end. In a nutshell, if it's not flying or Earth immune, X-Quake eats it for dinner. Sure, counters sometimes eat Mog in return; but if that's the price of ~7k+ AoE damage, I'll take it. But before you eat that pie – while the Sage Stone was a tool that I enjoyed having in Mog's kit, I'm undecided if it's actually objectively better than playing without it. I think if you're someone with the Printme committed to memory (or if you like checking it frequently to optimize your strategy, or if you simply Scan* every monster you come across), then you can probably do comparable damage output by elemental Dance sniping (and a more Dance-centric Mog would be happy to use something like a Crystal Orb over the Sage Stone, once available). (*Speaking of Scan, that's another spell Mog would be happy to have in his kit. X-Mog would be especially well suited to identifying everybody's weaknesses prior to summoning the most optimal natural disaster to exploit it.) Funny, I was originally thinking a non-Elemental Break (like a baby Flare of sorts) would help give Mog a reliable, but not overpowered, fallback option. Then I decided to look through enemy data in the Printme, and I'm finding that many targets that are Wind or Earth immune are wrecked by Water Rondo or Snowman Jazz (or both), so maybe he's fine. Dinosaurs are really the only enemies I've found Mog feels sort of helpless against, since their dual Wind/Earth immunity shuts down so many of his options. I want this so bad on Gau's Tumbleweed>Suck attack so that it doesn't do virtually nothing

Does Blaze, or any other attack in that segment, have a chance of setting the Blind status? That'd do it.

On my last run, my endgame Mog looked something like this: (None of this was planned out, just kinda ended up here) Punisher Crystal Shield Circlet Light Robe Moogle Charm Sage Stone Shoat Maduin 17/Shoat 6/Terrato 2 Stam: 70 Mag: 85 Honestly, most of his turns, he ran damage control gambling on Forest Suite for Harvester to top up HP and deal with AoE debuffs. Dualcasting Quake, whenever mobs weren't immune to it, was pretty awesome (he was rather underlevelled when I took him to the Ancient Castle, and he was MVP for the caves portion). He was also a bit of a badass against undead mobs thanks to Rasp spam (though I frequently forgot about this option). He was awesome to have along for boss fights in the WoR - Harvester, dual-Haste, and the occasional bit of offensive pressure with Avalanche/dual-Bio/Break/Quake gave him plenty of options. Quartrstaff/Doomstick procs for trash mobs wasn't too bad, and opening with a SlowX+SleepX/Muddle also ensured quick and painless cleanup. I tended to team him with support Sabin, so between Chakra and Spectre-fishing with Love Sonata, he was never at a loss for MP. I think he would have been fine even without Sabin's help. This was my first time using the Sage Stone with anyone (I tend to let Locke be a fighter for some reason, maybe I'll respec him to a healer and play around with him a bit). I usually find Mog to be a little underwhelming; but on this playthrough, I was actually relatively satisfied with him. I do still feel like he could use a little something to make him shine just a tiny bit more, but I can never seem to figure out what would be appropriate. His whole shtick seems to be based around risk/reward (rods, dances, instant death, potent debuffs), so it's hard to give him more without breaking theme. Another buff like Safe, Shell, Regen (drool) or maybe even Reflect (this one fits the theme of risk/reward best, I guess) would certainly give him another support option to make his Sage Stone sparkle. There doesn't seem to be a graceful way of doing this though, short of breaking Esper form by adding a third user or a fourth spell somewhere. And is a +5 Magic on the Sage Stone too much to ask for? I agree the +3/+3 it currently provides is a little lacklustre, and I know Locke wouldn't hate a couple extra points of Magic. Strago certainly doesn't care either way.

I expect there'll probably be a blurb in the readme (along with all the other significant changes from vanilla) when 1.9 formally ships.

I think you're misunderstanding what the relationship is between Counter/Cover and Stamina. 1.9 changes the mechanics of Counter/Cover as follows: In addition to its previous behaviour, Cover now also has a chance of blocking an incoming attack against an ally who is not near-fatal The chance of covering an ally who is not near-fatal is determined by the Stamina score of the character who possesses the Cover ability If a character is capable of Countering, the probability of executing a counterattack is determined by their Stamina score instead of being a flat % Stamina doesn't inherently grant Counter or Cover. You still need a piece of equipment (Knight's Cape, Hero Ring, Black Belt, Ninja Mask, spear, katana, ???) to grant you that capability. Once you have that capability, you'll want lots of Stamina if you want to make the most use of it. So no, there's no redundancy. Phantom Celes loves her ??? Relic. She loves it so much.

I just noticed in the Fidor/Trooper formations in the battle at Narshe that when the Trooper casts HasteX, Fidor might counterattack with Pounce. Comically, the Trooper might then respond with Bayonet.

I'm pretty okay with KOs being more challenging to deal with in combat. The Phoenix Down/Life changes place more emphasis on the healers and field medics and rewards thoughtful party composition, which I feel is very in-line with the spirit of BNW's changes from vanilla. I had only one point in my early 1.9RC run so far where I was in a tight spot with respect to revival and action economy — I think it was while fighting Telstar in the imperial camp with Sabin and Shadow, and Shadow went down. Saving Shadow was too big a gamble, so Sabin had to just power through it solo. I felt like this added bit of challenge made it more exciting. That said, I don't feel like the 65hp suggestion tips the scale too far in the other direction either — it preserves much of what the 1hp change is trying to accomplish later on, while making dealing with KOs in the pre-Zozo game (where your only choice is items) hypothetically less crippling. I guess I just didn't find it to be too big a deal.

Is it possible that it's just the one Cerberus counterattacking twice? They're double hitters, if I recall, just can't recall if they double hit as a spell counter. I noticed a couple of really minor hiccups yesterday when playing through Locke's scenario that I didn't recall noticing before. Both were in the rich family's house — the first was a brief pause (maybe 0.5-0.75 of a second?) as I entered the drafty bedroom, and the next was right after that when I got downstairs. They almost seemed like they could have been music-related, as I think they coincided with the BG music transitions to and from the wind track. Playing on snes9x for Mac, if it matters. Not likely worth fussing over, but thought I'd put it out there anyway.

Could that make throwables proc on other characters when jumping via Palidor, or does that use a different routine for jumping?

Well, DP claims to make all its modifications within the same space as the sequence of events from the Returners' hideout through to regrouping in Narshe in vanilla. But BNW seems to do some serious reorganizing of spells/monster specials and enemy AI, so all DP would have to do is change an enemy's behavior (for example, making the Barren Falls piranha frenzy less likely to steamroll an underlevelled Terra/Banon) to maybe introduce weirdness after both patches are applied.

Since I haven't seen anyone else post on here about having tried Divergent Paths with BNW, just thought I'd chime in and point out they don't mesh. If you apply BNW first, the Whelk fight is either unwinnable, or at least unreasonably lengthy. I seem to recall seeing BTB mention somewhere that many bosses don't actually die at 0 HP, but are scripted to terminate when their HP reaches a certain threshold – I'm curious if this could have something to do with why Whelk just keeps on tanking hits (seemingly) forever. Whelk also announces "BAD TOUCH! I NEED AN ADULT!" before each time it hides in its shell... If you apply BNW second, Whelk is no problem, but then the boss fight in the "defend Terra" sequence is super weird – he countered Locke's steal attempt with a coupe of Esper summons (that he didn't have enough MP to cast), and then countered any other attacks with a double Tentacle (sometimes MT Tentacle for a party wipe). Only way to get past this is to fluke out on a good Dance with Mog, or maybe get a couple of lucky crits in a row. Even if you get past this, the game eventually locks up when you talk to the guard at the entrance to Figaro Cave after Kefka's attack on Figaro Castle. Regardless, it seems like Divergent Paths is less self-contained than the developer alleges in its readme, and definitely not BNW-compatible. EDIT: it occurred to me that the breadth of BNW's modification may actually be the reason for these incompatibilities. For example, if BNW's Whelk/Marshal boss scripts now utilize any locations in memory that used to be utilized by something in the 3-scenario portion of the game in vanilla, and DP starts changing things in those locations in memory, then yeah, obviously things aren't gonna go as expected.