Mishrak

There’s a lot of new stuff coming in. A lot. Trying to use a 1.9 save will likely softlock or generate all kinds of weird item combinations. It won’t be playable.

2.0 will not be compatible with save files from older versions.

Soon (tm)

Changing a name just to change it is pretty unusual for BNW. There’s almost always a compelling reason for really anything that has been changed. It’s also not as simple as just changing it in the game. There’s a ton of documentation that has to be updated as well. As far as aesthetics go, there’s nothing to gain except confusion when changing just the name from Stamina to Spirit.

Cranes is one of those fights that’s a little unfair if you’re not prepared for it ahead of time. Which a blind player won’t be obviously. It is fairly easy to mitigate the damage if you are prepared but the back attack damage bonus going away will help a lot.

“Invincible enemies” Everything has a weakness. There aren’t any invincible enemies outside of scripted events. “Completely unpreventable” I have a hard time believing that to be the case. I don’t know your playstyle but almost everything can be mitigated even if only a little bit. “Party wipes and death by RNG” I’m not sure what you mean by death by rng. If you mean occasionally enemies doing a different attack you didn’t expect (condors are a nice culprit), then observe the enemy and see if you can do something to stop it. In the case of condors you need to kill them quickly. True party wipes are pretty rare. One big potential is Flare Star but only Atma uses this. Make sure you’re paying attention to what row characters are in. A lot of this is changing for 2.0 but a lot of what you’re listing as criticism I think is actually just you misunderstanding what’s actually happening in the game.

The problem is: how do you make stuff harder in a jrpg? More damage? This means more ohko stuff and party wipes that are entirely rng and unmitigateable. Or if they are mitigateanle, it forces the player into a “do this or you can’t proceed” situation. More hp? As has been mentioned, more hp doesn’t necessarily make harder. It also wastes the players time once they figure out the gimmick. More speed is at least a little interesting as it punishes bad decisions without completely upending the balance. It’s not perfect though. The best way is probably via dynamic AI scripting, but it’s a fine line to toe.

Yep. Correct. It affects a ton of defensive things.

Even if we put a single defensive stat for it, variance is probably the wrong target for a purely defensive stat anyway. Variance only makes up for a small part of the damage formula. The biggest contributors to defense are mdef/pdef, safe/shell for reduction and mev/pev and image/reflect for avoidance. At most you only affect 25% of incoming damage (at 90+) when you just target variance. For most of the game it’ll be a lot less than 25%.

The whole point is that stamina is useful. If it’s only now a defensive variance stat (on top of regen ticks/sap/etc), that’s a lot less useful than before. You also lose all the customization of stamina builds and weapons, vigor characters get a substantial nerf from the loss of physical variance mitigation and pure stamina builds are way less interesting or relevant. There is a huge evasion penalty when covering btw. I always take the animations with a grain of salt and wouldn’t worry a ton about their realism when balancing how things work. So my question ultimately is: why would you do this? Sure it makes it simpler to understand what Stamina does - but is that really that important? Is it that complex as it is now? It affects a line of heals, it affects regen ticks/sap/morph, status mitigation, and is a damage stat for some abilities/weapons. That’s not that hard to figure out.

Using your first post to necro a year and a half old thread.

Mover forest near Jidoor

A large majority of this information is available after you’ve learned the password to the unlockme after completing the game. At least hidden info and all the little details. As of 1.10 a large portion of what would have been written would be mostly obsolete as far as an actual walkthrough goes.

You mean an undead enemy? Doom will full heal undead enemies iirc.