Reiker

IMO, and I mean no disrespect to the mod's creators, but feel free to spoil as much of the game as you want. That's the point of a guide or walkthrough. If someone didn't want to be spoiled, then they wouldn't seek out a guide. But make sure you do it outside of this forum because the admins have censored such discussion here before. I don't even like the password-protected documents that come with the mod, especially considering there's still a lot of stuff they remain secretive about. If someone wants to look up what they can steal from a particular enemy then they should be able to. Shrug.

So, I didn't reply with a long breakdown of your post because I was just spitballing some random gameplay / balance ideas while I was bored at work, and your response was a bit aggressive and I didn't want to turn something that was supposed to be pretty casual into an argument. I felt this was pretty condescending considering you are now the second person to try to explain to me that Chakra is the point of Stam Sabin, despite the fact that I myself mentioned that a few times already. It's especially confusing since I'm one of the few people here who defends and uses Stam Sabin. Once again, I understand that Chakra is the point of Stam Sabin, however my point is that "spam one ability over and over" isn't super interesting, and the build has some potential for some additional support synergies, which I mentioned. I've even said before that I'm okay with "spam Chakra" being Sabin's role because it can be quite powerful, but there's been whole threads about people not liking Stamina Sabin and thinking he was under-powered, so I thought this was a reasonable place to address those concerns. If casually providing some gameplay ideas / suggestions is considered complaining now, then I give up on the internet. Anyways, I didn't say I didn't know what Sabin's role was. I said it had potential to be expanded. I didn't complain that Mantra was bad, I said it was a bit redundant in the type of group you'd run Sabin in. And Sabin's role is one-dimensional, and I mentioned that I'm okay with that, but again there's potential to expand the role. These types of posts are exhausting to make and for others to read (which is why I tried to avoid it), so let's try to keep things constructive.

Why do people keep replying to me as if they didn't read anything I wrote. Oh well.

I'd like to see superbosses someday. Nothing is forcing you to over-level for any fight. And right, I understand that Mantra and Chakra are Sabin's Stamina abilities. I mentioned those. My point is that there's some interesting potential to give him some sort of better-defined protector role since he has anti-synergy with actual tanks like Cyan (doesn't need MP), and has synergy with defensively weak characters (mages who need MP). The problem with Mantra is that the characters that you'll want with Sabin all have their own healing spells, and then you can just use Chakra to restore the MP. It is a slight buff since it gives you more flexibility, ie. you need to heal and Terra is at full MP, you can use Ultima and Mantra instead of Cure and Chakra to get some more damage in. And that's still only if Sabin isn't too low since Mantra doesn't heal him.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like all this update is doing is reducing HP/MP gains past level 30 to make those ELs more important. I can see it being a tough balancing act for those ELs since those stats naturally increase as you level, and other stats don't, so you can essentially get "extra" HP/MP ELs by leveling. The game is balanced to be beatable at level 30, and you still definitely gain power by leveling past 30, so I don't think it's that big of a deal. It's not an actual cap. I think the highest any of my characters ever got was like 34. Overall I think the cover/row changes are pretty good. I always found the row anti-synergies kinda awkward, for example Stamina Cyan's attacks (Dragon/Eclipse) aren't affected by row, so naturally you'd want him in the back row, but you can't cover from the back row; you can do C/C but the counter attacks are based on Vigor and you're in a Stamina build. The new katana changes seem to partially address that (the wind damage proc is affected by row, right?), although we're introducing a new anti-synergy with Aurabolt. But like I mentioned I like the row change. Remember that this whole system only affects physical attacks that respect row, which honestly in the grand scheme of things aren't the worst attacks you'll be facing anyways. I'm still trying to pin down Stamina Sabin's role. Traditionally you just stick him in the back row and spam Chakra in a party with 3 mages. This is a pretty squishy setup, and you usually make up for it with Golem/Zoneseek/Shield. But I wonder if there's a potential to give Sabin something to do in the front row and use him as a coverbot. I guess that's supposed to be Aurabolt now, but meh... maybe if Mantra gave Sabin the Image status or something? Shrug.

I think you're getting lost in the details a bit. Making your character controllable and overhauling the trade system to make using the Colosseum meaningful would already be a massive improvement that's worth making. You don't have to make every fight some super technical mega scripted thing. I think 1v1 fights with end-game monsters would be "interesting enough" already. If you want to go back later at some point and reevaluate the scripts then fine, but the 2 changes I just mentioned would already be a really nice addition to a new update.

Is that one of those things that needs T-Edition's "magic" rom expansion or whatever to work? So the situation we're in is that the developers don't want to improve the Colosseum because some streamers fast forward through the auto fights, but it's not possible to give players control of their character. So what's the solution?

Have you ever looked into letting you control your character in the Colosseum?

They are, in BNW Like I said before, it's something I'd like to see implemented if possible. T-Edition has shown that it's possible. And to be clear, I'm not fully defending the vanilla Colosseum. I already admitted that it's a pretty janky system. Remember, this is Final Fantasy VI: EVERYTHING is janky. The point of BNW is to fix that stuff. That said... If this is how the developers of BNW thought, this romhack would never exist. Sketch sucks, no one uses it, so let's not fix it. Cyan sucks, no one uses him, so let's not improve him. That's a terrible attitude to have when conceptualizing updates to a mod whose sole purpose is to take an inherently broken game and improve the shit that's wrong with it. All in all, I like the spirit of the Colosseum: an optional place where you can spend time to gain some extra power. It set a precedent for similar optional side-areas in future Final Fantasy games. It'd be nice to see it preserved and improved upon in standard BNW-fashion.

There's no way you can honestly say that the vanilla Colosseum doesn't require strategy. You have to do very specific things in order to win those fights, which means you have to employ strategy. Want some extra Exp Eggs? Good luck winning a fight like Siegfried's without a guide. Otherwise is takes experimentation and trial and error to determine a method to defeat him, which is literally what developing a strategy is. How do you win fights outside o

There's no way you can honestly say that the vanilla Colosseum doesn't require strategy. You have to do very specific things in order to win those fights, which means you have to employ strategy. Want some extra Exp Eggs? Good luck winning a fight like Siegfried's without a guide. Otherwise is takes experimentation and trial and error to determine a method to defeat him, which is literally what developing a strategy is. How do you win fights outside of the Colosseum? Spam Ultima. Now that's some quality strategy right there. It's not a coin flip. Your percent chance of winning any particular fight is absolutely determinant on the decisions you make before wagering the item. Oh no, a reset. Or you can just hold L & R and run away and try something else. The horror! Learning the trades is part of the fun. You invest time into the Colosseum and you get some pretty powerful items, that's how it's supposed to work. It's meant to take time, otherwise it'd just be a room full of chests for you to open. ?????? Do you realize how insane it'd be if you could keep your wagered item? Anyways, the above is a good example of the 99% of people I mentioned who don't understand/utilize the Colosseum. Those people are going to ignore it anyways so why not give it some improvements for the people who like to benefit from using it?

Did you use the Colosseum in the vanilla game? Because you wouldn't get very far by "mindlessly doing your thing." Even though you can't control your characters, there was absolutely strategy involved in how you equipped your characters. In fact, there was more strategy in a lot of those fights than just mindlessly blasting away groups of enemies with Ultima.

Shadow has it. I think Atma is really well-tuned. Most of the people that complain about it aren't doing the fight as intended, ie. not removing/applying the right status effects. Generally once people figure out the strategy, they have an easy time with the battle. That's why it's called a printme. BTB explained this in the design article, but he said that it's better to include no information as opposed to partial information, and I totally agree. I really like the documentation that comes with the game, and it's reminiscent of old user manuals or strategy guides. I recognize that it's not everyone's cup of tea, though. The Colosseum shouldn't be a "free gear shop" or a trading post. It should offer challenging opponents that require strategy to defeat, and a web of trades that requires a bit of time and effort to explore. The reward should be access to some powerful equipment earlier than normal, or additional copies of items outside of what you can find in the world. In other words, it should work similarly to how the vanilla Colosseum works, just improved.

Did you ever try to do a boss both with and without applying the slow status? I think you'd pretty quickly notice a difference. Remember that the ATB pauses for everyone when an action is being executed, so I'm not sure what sort of abuse you were performing other than pausing the game, which isn't really abuse. It's a much better system than the vanilla system, where you actually wanted to avoid going into menus when an enemy was taking an action since their ATB would be paused but yours' wouldn't be... very clunky! I think Atma is more of a strategy check. Did you slow him? Did you dispel and re-slow him after he powers up and applies haste/safe/shell? BNW's Colosseum needs some work. I brought it up recently in the 1.10 thread. printme. I think your other comments were either minor things, or things that are being addressed in the next update.

Well there's also the problem that Aurabolt respecting row just doesn't make much sense. It could confuse new players, but... that's not a great argument when there's a lot of things in this mod that will confuse new players unless they constantly consult the documentation. It seems like you don't like the idea of Stamina Sabin having an offensive option... which I'm okay with but what should he get instead? Most people seem to agree that the build is underpowered (although I quite like it). Maybe the Mantra changes are "enough" but... I'm kinda meh about it. Mantra's not great, a lot of other characters get better healing options that don't even really require you to dump ELs into a particular stat (Hello, Go Fish). The point of Stamina Sabin is to backrow him and use Chakra, which is fine but a bit one-dimensional. That's why I've been suggesting changes to Aurabolt, Fire Dance, and Sonic Boom in the past. I think I suggested at one point that Aurabolt is decent backrow Stamina damage (but obviously shouldn't compete with Strength Sabin attacks), Fire Dance be okay MT Stamina damage (although that's kinda boring, idk), and Sonic Boom be okay MT Stamina damage with some sort of status like Stop or Slow. The build's getting closer to some sort of hybrid utility/damage class which is cool, but the backrow Aurabolt thing is still weird to me. Ideally Vigor Sabin should be the one-dimensional just hits things hard build while Stamina Sabin is more flexible with your main attraction being Chakra. The question is, what do you give him to make him flexible but not overlap with other characters. The game's kinda limited and there's a very finite amount of abilities/effects to spread around 14 characters. I've never really used Mutsunokami/Kazekiri so that's where my reservations are with this change. If I remember right, those weapons have a high chance to proc but it's not guaranteed right? Having a % chance of wasting your turn is pretty rough, and Cyan's not the speediest guy. But who knows, maybe with the right gear it could be super overpowered. Will have to test when 1.10 is out. I guess it just seems weird to me to give one of the lowest Magic Power characters in the game a Magic based attack. Like, when would you ever choose to use Eclipse? I get that the point is the blind status, but that seems kinda meh. Why blind things when you can just kill them? I understood your intention behind the changes but it just seems like we're dumpstering Eclipse here. I consider Setzer the best character in the game so any buff to his main damage ability is a bit surprising to me. The Colosseum is one thing in BNW that I feel is better in the vanilla game. What I like about the vanilla Colosseum is that with a bit of strategy and experimenting with the trades, you can gain a real gear advantage. In the vanilla game you have several points in which you can go to the Colosseum and trade things around, for example the Elixir -> Rename Card -> Marvel Shoes trade. In BNW, I mostly ignore it. It feels too restrictive. I understand you want to limit players but... what am I supposed to be using the Colosseum for? I basically just use it to turn the Atma Weapon into a Mirage Vest... not because I don't want to use the Atma Weapon, but because if I have to choose between one or the other I'm taking the Mirage Vest. Even if you want to do an Atma Weapon build it's not worth it because it's the only source of the Mirage Vest in the game. I don't like that sort of design. You can't even trade the Illumina and Apocalypse for some reason. The Sage Stone > Nirvana Band > Rogue Cloak loop can be useful, but everything else tends to end up with a downgrade if you win. Lame. 99% of players just ignore the Colosseum (even in Vanilla, where it's useful) because it's a lot of time investment for little payoff even if you know what you're doing. I feel like it's one area where you could give "expert" players a bit more freedom to gain some additional power.

PogChamp I don't understand the Row penalty here. Why do you need to be close to the enemy to shoot a giant beam of light at it? Ew, I don't understand this either. Will Eclipse even be worth using now? Maybe just as a multi-enemy clearer for a very small section of the game. Stamina Cyan keeps getting more and more awkward (I still have some complaints with the Cover/Counter system). Basically a big buff to the character that I already consider the most powerful/useful in the game. Hmm. Good-bye Sabin, hello Cyan. Everything else seems great, although I'm slightly concerned about lowing boss HP. Will have to see how it feels during a playthrough. For the future, I think one of the next things I'd like to see is a Colosseum update. It's mostly skippable and kind of a downgrade from the vanilla game's Colosseum. It'd be nice to be able to get some more rare items without having to give up another rare item in exchange. For example, I'd like to have more than 1 Dragon Helm available. All that really does is get rid of the tedium of having to swap equipment every time you switch between groups. With the Skull Cap change(s) it seems like you're kinda going backwards from this though and making equipment even more restrictive which I'm not a big fan of.

I don't understand how Stamina Sabin is so consistently underrated. I really need to get around to streaming a run of BNW to show off how good it can be. I do agree that Fire Dance / Air Blade should be Stamina-based. They don't make sense to be Magic-based, and they almost never get used because of that.

For me the answer to this question is always going to be Setzer. Yes, he's not the most powerful character by the end game. But that's okay. He's still the most valuable character. He's the workhorse that gets you there. When I played vanilla FF6 I always thought to myself, "Man, I wish Banon was a permanent character. Health is so powerful!" Well, Setzer is vanilla Banon and more. All you've gotta do is throw this guy in your party and at the very least you have powerful MP-free healing every single turn. That's more than worth it even if you can't learn the other Slots. I see so many streamers complain that the game is too difficult, or that they die too often, yet they refuse to use Setzer. I don't get it! If you have a turn where you don't need the healing of Go Fish, then Setzer also has Solitaire and Blackjack as very respectable MT damage options which I tend to refer to as "mini Ultima." All you really need to do is learn the timing of one of these attacks, but both are easy to learn and learning both gives you the extra edge of being able to squeeze the most damage out of Setzer (as long as you know the defense properties of the enemy(s) that you're facing). If you want to be a real Setzer pro then you can learn Chocobop for MT Stop, Bars for random esper support, and Jackpot for a full party revive (which usually isn't useful enough to be worth learning the timing to be honest). A lot of people roll their eyes when I talk about learning the Slots inputs, but it's not that difficult. For Solitaire you wait about a second after selecting slots for the first input, then about half a second for the 2nd input, and then about half a second for the 3rd input. For Blackjack you press A almost immediately after selecting slots, then about half a second for the 2nd input, and then a little under half a second for the 3rd input. With that rough guide you should be able to create a save state just before you select slots, practice for a couple minutes, and learn both inputs pretty easily. Now you have a single character with the two most powerful and useful RPG abilities: 1) Clearing away groups of enemies, and 2) Fully restoring your entire party's HP. And he doesn't even need to expend resources to do these things. You would think a character with such powerful abilities would be frail as hell, but nope... Setzer is one of the more tanky characters in BNW. And you can hide him away in the back row. Since these abilities never change from the time you recruit him until the end of the game, of course they start to fall off in power by the end. But honestly by then he just starts to feel balanced rather than weak. Because for the first half of the game he sure doesn't feel balanced. It actually reminds me a lot of vanilla Sabin: very strong through most of the game, but falls off at the end due to poor equipment selection and when Blitz/Fight is outshined by Ultima spam. And despite this, most people would probably consider Sabin their vanilla MVP. And yet for some reason people don't give Setzer proper credit for how powerful he is. Not only is he the most valuable character, he's maybe also the most consistently underrated character.

Skills/abilities aren't randomized with a standard Beyond Chaos Gaiden randomization.

It's a lot of fun, especially the Fanatix mode. Might start streaming it.

I like the 1 HP nerf. Items in Final Fantasy games are always stupidly overpowered anyways.

It's an awkward mechanic because A) Almost every characters has a build that's better in the WoB and a build that's better in the WoR, so you're essentially forced into switching builds or ignoring entire characters (if you even can), and B) The 100,000 gp pricetag doesn't prevent the player from swapping builds, it just adds an annoying grinding requirement. Older games did stuff like this, sure, but most of the examples I can think of are pretty much recognized as bad mechanics that more modern games try to avoid. In fact this mod even goes out of its way to remove this type of stuff, ie. the 256 battle requirement to uncurse the Paladin Shield, having to skip chests to get better treasure later on, etc. Attaching a huge grind to spec swapping feels really inconsistent to me.

Some sort of end-game optional super dungeon is something I'd love to see in BNW, to test players' abilities to properly build their characters. Multi-party floating continent would be a great change too.

^ Confirm, at the Narshe cave section after Whelk with solo Terra, when I choose Cure and cast it on her outside battle I get a similar graphic glitch.

Yeah I agree that none of the "realism" arguments hold any water. Rows inherently aren't realistic and it's just a gameplay mechanic to give some extra defense to characters who don't have to rely on the Fight command. Still don't see the big deal about Shadow tanking, but didn't really want to comment without playing with the changes. I just don't see Shadow becoming OP without the evade nerf. He only has a +1 Stamina EL, so his cover isn't anywhere near guaranteed. He can't get his Evade high enough to block literally everything. When he does get hit he will get hurt, if not killed. And you have to sacrifice offensive power to set him up as an Evade tank. It hurts the entire system just to "fix" something that doesn't seem to need fixing in the first place. I'll see how it actually plays out when 1.9 is out though.