pogeymanz

11 hours ago, Kyrios said:

There were a few members of the staff who wanted me to do just that.

I'm glad you didn't. Banning over abusing fake internet points seems a bit much, especially for a first offense.

Ah, okay. Well... half thanks?

Yeah, sorry about that. I thought I was doing the right thing by posting them as separate threads, since they were all fairly unrelated questions. My bad.

There are already replies in the other threads, what would you have me do now?

Thanks for the answers.

I feel like Stamina has become a real catch-all stat. It affects some magic damage, it changes how much poison/regen ticks do, your chance to be hit by statuses, it's a kind of magic defense, and now for 1.9 it will apparently influence both cover and counter rates? That seems like a lot, especially when stats like Vigor are just physical damage and defense-kinda, and speed is just speed.

Should cover be determined by speed? After all, you have to get out in front of our ally, right? Counter maybe could be vigor (I could see why stamina also fits, though).

I'm sure I'm not supposed to know, but can someone just put some spoiler tags on and tell me what they do? I can't seem to tell by just equipping them and fighting some randos...

My buddy and I are both playing the mod at the same time and I was lamenting how poorly my Edgar is keeping up in the WoB. He mentioned the drill. I don't have the drill. He said it got it in Zozo from the clock puzzle. I did the clock puzzle and got a switchblade.

Was that because I didn't take Edgar with me to Zozo? I actually got two switchblades in Zozo. ...I'd really like a drill.

18 minutes ago, thzfunnymzn said:

Thing with hybrids is that, IIRC, there's not going to be a way to code the game to understand a hybrid build. Golem + Stray on Sabin? The game will only understand "More Golem levels, so it's a Golem build." So, in this case, we have to select bonuses for the Golem build that not only work for the pure Golem build, but also for a Golem + Stray hybrid.

One positive, one negative, while it sounds like an interesting way to prevent power creep, I'm worried will violate the "don't ruin the free form nature of builds." If a Golem Sabin gets on positive and one negative, that one negative may be fine for a pure Golem Sabin, but it will adversely affect the hybrid build. For your example, you'd be locking Maduin Terra into a "frail mage" set-up, even though Maduin + Phoenix is a real possibility for a more bulky mage set-up.

Interesting. I don't know much about ASM, let alone SNES ASM, but how does it work that you can know that you have more Golem levels without knowing how many of each you have? If you knew how many of each you had, you could certainly come up with a look-up table, at worst.

But, yeah, I agree with you about hurting the free form build system. Honestly, I don't see any way to do this without hurting it, which was part of my gripe before... Having pre-defined classes necessarily does that, IMO.

Today I'll try to be constructive instead of shitting on things.

Here's an idea: What if each class has one positive thing and one negative thing? For example, what if, e.g., a Mag Terra gets a small MP boost, but also takes a hit to Vig or HP? EDIT: Along those lines, you could maybe only do the negative stuff for "straight" builds and give hybrids a break.

Is it possible to modify equip options? What if Mag Terra can't equip heavy armors anymore, or takes an extra hit to speed from them, or something? That's probably adding too much complexity (both in terms of code and in terms of what the player has to deal with).

15 hours ago, BTB said:

Also, in response to @pogeymanz in particular...

You make a good point(s), although I interpret these points to be "don't throw in something halfassed just because I want to see it happen" and "don't destroy the freeform build system that currently defines BNW". I assure you that I never add things to this mod without giving them an approrpiate (and often quite extensive) amount of consideration and that this notion will be kept very firmly in mind throughout.

Thanks for the replies and consideration, @BTB and @thzfunnymzn. I think your interpretation of my word vomit is half-correct. I wouldn't assume that you would put something in that is half-assed. It was clear that these class buffs are a brainstorm, which is why I decided to offer my two cents (before it's "too late" as it were).

I think another way to interpret my ramblings is "don't destroy the freeform build system that currently defines BNW", as you said, and "don't make BNW not-FF6". In my opinion, BNW is the fixed version of FF6. It keeps the flavor and basic mechanics of the game (espers teach magic and give stat bonuses, different characters have unique abilities and equip options), and simply makes them sane and interesting. I think my fear is that if this class thing becomes too significant an aspect of the gameplay (both in terms of impact on battles and on the mental overhead of team-building), that it will take away from BNW being "FF6.1"- rather, it'll become a game that is different from FF6. Which is all fine and a matter of opinion, but it would lose a little appeal with me, personally.

To be facetious and hyperbolic: "Hey, everyone liked the materia system. Let's add that, too!"

Again, if we're talking minor buffs, and only a handful of options to think about, I think I'd be happy with it.

Hi all,

I used to lurk quite a bit at ID- I've posted a handful of times in the FFT 1.3 forum back there and _maybe_ once or twice in the BNW forum. Since a little before Arch came back and blew up ID, I've also been lurking here. I finally got around to making an account just so I could post in this thread (and now it'll give less friction for me to post some of my unrelated BNW questions...).

So, obviously my opinion means basically squat, but I have been following the mod for a while even though I only played part way through one really old version, only got to Atma in 1.8.4-ish (whichever version was right before adding ELs), and just now got to Vector in 1.8.6.

But, frankly, I'm not a fan of these ideas. I love the esper levels; I love that each character only gets some subset of espers; and I basically love everything about the mod. Let me try to articulate what I don't like about the classes discussion so far and you just take whatever points you think might be valid.

First of all, I find hidden mechanics to be annoying. Even when I played Pokemon, I hated having to look up Natures to see what they do to stats. I have very little time for video games, and I'm simply not going to sit with a guidebook (or printme/unlockme/web-page) open to reference constantly to see which spells I can cast quicker, or whether this dude has innate counter/cover, etc. I mean, it's fine if you're an old veteran and have committed this stuff to memory, but for the more casual among us who still enjoy optimizing, it detracts from the actual game.

Second, it's kind of a lot of complexity, relative to this kind of game. FF6 vanilla had very little complexity and you guys added just enough to make it interesting. But the fact that the espers are still the same no matter who equips them is a GOOD thing. I don't want to have to remember what Alex levels do to this character vs. that character.

Third, the classes are assuming/dictating what you are going to use the character for. Granted, in practice, it's probably going to be correct to assume that mag Edgar is going to play a particular role, but I find it annoying that just because I want to gain a certain combination of stats, the game will try to bottleneck me into playing a certain way. I like that "builds" are currently more free-form. I picked this combo of esper levels because *I* had a certain idea I wanted to accomplish, so just let me see if it worked out like I wanted. I could see this being frustrating for hybrid builds- maybe I wanted these stats on my hybrid Edgar, but instead I had to screw up my balance so I could get the mana battery bonus (or whatever). Sometimes trade-offs are cool to think about, but I could see this being frustrating.

Also, some of these characters have way too many classes. Celes has 7 listed in the OP as of my writing, not including the base class. It makes "designing" your teams overwhelming. That also exacerbates the difference in flexibility of the characters: we already know Celes is more flexible than Shadow- why add a multiplier to it? If there is something like a class system, can't it be limited to maybe 2 or 3 per character? Then you have something kind of like Secret of Mana 3, where each character had 2 options at each class upgrade point, making 4 final class outcomes, IIRC. It'll be easier to keep in your head, at least.

So those are my off-the-cuff thoughts on it. I hope I'm not stepping on too many toes with negative feedback as my first post here. I'll end by adding a few pleas to consider for this feature, not all of which are compatible with each other:

1. Keep the number of classes limited per character, even if they can equip many espers.

2. Maybe keep the classes purely cosmetic (you could even see if someone is willing to do custom sprites/portrait changes for the different classes. That would be a lot of work, but pretty neat). This is really what I hope for...

3. Please, please, put some in game documentation for the class bonuses if you have them.

4. Maybe nerf and/or decrease the scope of the bonuses. The quick-casting spells seems bizarre to me, but things like "increased counter rate" or "HP + 12.5%" or "decreased dance failure rate" seem less invasive. Also, limiting the bonus to one per class would be good, too.