praetarius5018

47 minutes ago, Larc said:

However, I found that they don't actually change the (de)buffs applied to the character wearing the armor, but rather they change the buff the character casts themselves, which I think might be unintended.

No, that is the intended effect.
The alternative would have not worked with black curse and messed up spell learning.

That's why the effect reads as "change buff effects into debuffs and vice versa" and not just "exchanges buff spells with equivalent debuff spells"

55 minutes ago, Larc said:

Currently, there's no benefit to the current armors that I can see other than allowing you to have one character buff your team while another with the exact same spells debuffs enemies, in case you happened to pick two characters with the same (de)buffs as each other.

The intent was stuff like that, especially to have more options for a "full buff" char that isn't yet again for the billionst time light Lise.

44 minutes ago, Larc said:

Also, Lord's speed down isn't marked as multi-target in the classes.txt but functions as such in game.

And now the big question is which is the typo? in the txt or in the ips?

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

there are a few problems with this game, and i am going to compare it to pokemon because you added types into this game like pokemon.

what types? there are none.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

in SD3 that combat is not currently designed like that, we have to consult a document file outside the game to be performing at our best, and this switching between the game screen to the document screen outside becomes a chore, it slows down the flow of combat and it is an extra step to drain our energy as well as break our game immersion, while in pokemon everything you need to know is given inside the actual game.  in pokemon we have "IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE" or "IT'S NOT VERY EFFECTIVE" or "IT HAD NO EFFECT".  With those simple 3 messages a first time player in that game will eventually memorize the entire type chart simply from knowing the unit's type and attack's type, assuming the player is literate and paying attention.  SD3 is flawed, glitchy and feels rushed, you were patching the vanilla game I am sure you already knew this, it is still an amazing game.

sorry, but this comparison is completely ass-backwards.
how is it harder to learn 100 types over 8 elements than 700 with 18 elements!??
you can/have to look up a type chart in both cases.

in pokemon you have potentially over 700 monster types for which you'd have to either learn or look up their types. and you absolutely MUST follow those types AND learn a type chart.

here you have only about 100 monster types. there is NO type chart you have to learn. every monster has their own "type logic". plus you have several non-elemental options.
"it's not very effective, the opponent still died in one hit because of move power, STAB, EV, genes and other crap" vs "wrong type, you deal 0/1 damage, the end", sorry but the later is more consistent.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

The boss documentation is also incomplete, I am currently reading the file from patch v1042 and Landumber's weakness is listed as "stereotype", which is completely useless information.

How so?
What is the stereotype of a rock-like enemy in gaming? Maybe unreasonable resistant to (physical) attacks? Let's equate that to physical immunity here.
What can you do in the scope of this hack then? Anti-magic?

These hints are not meant as a straight forward cheat sheet. I mean if I gave you every solution to this game there'd be no game left - boring.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

the current equipment document is not set up to be easy to read, for me, knowing what each shop in each city is selling for ALL characters is far more useful to me than knowing what the whole list of equipment for one character is, for example to check the list for Kevin's weapons in Forcena I need to scroll down to the Kevin section, find the city, then to check Lisa's I have to repeat the process, when having a "Forcena" section, the entire stock listed there, weapons armor accessories and all for each character would be far more useful and easier to use.

outside of the seed-only weapons, all items are identical across characters. the weapon in forcena for Duran has the exact same properties as the one for Hawk.
the only difference is the name and who can equip it.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

The second fix I suggest you consider simplifying the type chart to some degree, this might just be years of conditioning from pokemon but I never got why the cockatrice was weak to water but not thunder or earth.

There is no type chart.
Each enemy type has a unique setup of elemental strength/weaknesses, according to what I thought made sense - and a few diviations to make certain elements not universally dominant, I'm looking at you holy and fire.
Cockatrice is not weak to earth because it can petrify others. It is not weak to air because it can evolve into a bird which would be massively unfair when you start casting an air spell while it is a cockatrice but finish casting when it has evolved into its Cockabird form which is immune to air. I had about 5 enemies weak to ice at the time and 12+ weak to fire, and deep frozen beings have a hard time to "evolve" or adapt to life changes.

On 19.1.2018 at 2:59 AM, Caliber70 said:

Also to help with the combat flow, change the damage numbers according to strength and weaknesses.  "super effective" would be red numbers, neutral would be yellow, not effective purple?  healing and magic steal green for both allies and enemies, reflect blue? crits white?  whatever it is, to me the super effective/not effective color split is the most important and useful change that can be done for the player.

The general idea is ok but it can't be done.
The most stupid reason: the game only has 4 colors for such text popups (yellow, green, red, purple). I tried the "5th" color and got a screen full of rainbows spit at me.
The second stupid reason: there's a big disjunction between where the damage is calculated (start of a swing for all enemies that are "currently close enough but might not be anymore when the attack finishes") and where the popup happens. The gap is so big that the game doesn't even know yet if the attack actually hits the target.
It just throws the potential damage number on a per-character pile.
For the current crit/lv1 tech indicator this is a bit different because I still know when the hit happens who is currently attacking (for Lv1 tech) or what "kind" of attack it was (a crit has a bit different routine than regular)

Plus it'd be impossible to show at the same time whether a hit was a crit or effective. And there is no other indicator for crits except higher damage.

Also it'd be yet another chart you'd have to study: "what did purple numbers with green border and white dots mean again?"

7 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

I have two questions about this counter mechanic:

1) can you counter enemy spells and techs too, not just physical attacks?
2) can you counter non-sprite bosses too (e.g. Full Metal Hagger, GBs, final bosses)?

yes to both

There are even two "counter" mechanics.

1) The retaliation spell enemies/bosses had; from vanilla: usually when you hit an enemy's weakness via spell or any Lv2/3 tech at all they'd "counter" with a strong attack of their own.
This has been changed to an incremental built up (let's call it aggro) instead of a 1:1 trade but now also includes normal hits and Lv1 techs; "weaker" types (normal hit, lv1 tech) take longer until they trigger a reaction than stronger types (lv2/3 tech, spells).

2) Completely new, a counter attack by the player;
if you hit an enemy with a lv1 tech during their attack animation or shortly after (I think up to 3 secs after), you deal increased damage (how much more depends largely on weapon and to a minor degree on enemy type) and reset the aggro of enemy's counter.
Certain weapons or accessoires give additional benefits to this, like permanently reducing defense (stackable even) or healing the party.

More or less the same as before.
Only major change that you should be able to get some from enemies' rare drops (e.g. from Boulder, Evil Shaman).
On most physical resistant regular enemies you should be able to just ignore them, for everything else there's damage spells.

just for damage:

other effects:

often mistaken for physical immune but aren't:

Is counted only once.

Depends what kind of trouble they give specifically.
Each godbeast is numerically weaker than most regular bosses of their level would be.
Though each has a trick (or fifty) to them that more than makes up for that.

2 hours ago, mugenbb6 said:

So I've been doing it wrong. Didn't realize mp regenerates, but with the low mp cap and slow mp regen, that means I'm throttled.

There's leaf saber - which recovers 1+ MP per hit - , a weapon has that as innate effect or an accessoire for the same.
Or an accessoire that allows to pay in HP instead.

2 hours ago, mugenbb6 said:

I also get into an endless gigaburn loop.

Care to elaborate?
If it is an animation that doesn't end, there's an unfixable bug with the game if it has been relatively long since you re-loaded your save file (savestates do NOT count!!!!) which has all kinds of weird effects....
I repeat this line like every page in this thread....

Depends, as a continous effect or a buff or one cast = less cooldown left?

Also not without removing any other song.
I'm sorta already at the limit of what can be added.

You get full MP on victory, and regenerating MP during battle - trust me, you can use it a lot more than it seems to.

And pre class change noone is not really supposed to have much in the way of spell casting. You're mainly supposed to "learn" regular combat.

As for who is and isn't a support class - that depends on you; basically everyone learns spells that fit that criteria.

This.

More in depth, you don't use any item up in this version, instead you get a cooldown for ALL items on that character, this includes !Item, !Mix, !Throw and !Drink.
A few items have fixed length cooldowns but get stronger with higher stacks, e.g. a 1-stack potion heals 50, 99 potions 1250 but cooldown is static; compare with elixir which always recovers all HP but gets cooldown reduction from "try again next battle" at 1 copy down to about 10 turns at a 99 stack; ok MP recovered increases also (15 -> 100).

Cooldown can be speed up with defending and the time spell "Renew".

Breaking rods does not give a cooldown but is one of two categories that still use up items at all.
The other being tents.

I'd not be surprised if this change dropped Chemist from most-powerful-job-if-you-know-what-you-do to second worst.

hmm... ok, a few do have rare drops.
but if you have 0 copies of that yet you should get it 100%, and I don't think you'll miss not getting a turtle shell from carbunkle.

Sorry, but I won't even contemplate real party advise until I'm "95% done".
You can turn single mode off any time you want, only activating it is limited to the start.
Of course, you can get a penalty for "illegal" classes then (same as if you'd use the 10 gold Sage Stone from the first shop for that purpose).

Last I checked all bosses had guaranteed drops.
Or do you mean steals? Those haven't been changed.
So whether that is worth bothering is more or less the same answer as it was in vanilla.

one thing I might have not meantioned;
if an enemy has a rare drop (1/16 chance) and you have no copy of that yet (inventory, equipped or already in battle wards), you get it 100%.

this should happen as soon as the "tutorial" fight with two goblins, they have a rare drop of a ruby relic

Download

If someone wants to try it:
At this point I'm mostly looking for feedback on mechanics, less on numbers. Don't expect the later to be merciful.

Also, please change the names of all party members (hold L or R when opening the menu, opens name change for lead character)
and tell me dialogs where they still display the vanilla names, I might have forgotten a text box or fifty.

Beginner house has not yet changed dialog, I want to touch that once I'm certain mechanics work, and not just in the non-buggy sense.

And of course as is typical for me the package includes too much documentation nobody will read.
I hope this will not be as necessary at the end as with SD3, at most the element table will be...

All chest traps and Dragon Emperor - though the later doesn't matter unless you go above 99 which is not possible without cheating.

Ok, then its normal - those two skills deal more damage for every level you are above the "caster".

Depends, what's your level compared to theirs (random mob of same area +2)?

Are the level 1 stats random as well or are they fixed?

Can I expect the "jack of all trades" to always have 25 in all stats or could (s)he have sometimes 25/26/24/25 or 23/24/27/26 as well?
I don't know your character-to-role idea, so I use a general term, sorry.

*looks at thread title*
yes

eh, not that hard.
would just need a free byte in RAM (this is the hardest part, seriously) for the counter
and then when it is reached replace the active cast of "meteo" with a "out of space rocks" spell that does nothing, same effect as I already do with the echo spell.

But I'll still say no to this one (unless Meteo turns out to be super-broken OP), it feels arbitrary and unclear for the player.
Fire weak to water and other weaknesses - nothing outside the norm, maybe a few weird interactions in the chart but overall it makes sense.
But running out of space rocks for meteo but having enough for infinite comet casts (same sprite) and enemies still having some left - why?

For regular enemies you can ignore this mechanic since those come usually in packs of 2-8, hitting 4 of those is not much different from a regular aoe spell.

That'd be... not that hard to do actually?
Flipside ofc. being that certain bosses "depend" on casting Meteo (desperation mode neo x-death), so if those count too...
and otherwise it gets weird... the player has no Meteo left but the boss can pull more stones from outerspace out of his ass...

Everytime I write balance just imagine huge air quotes around it.
I just throw numbers at each other until shit stops working.

I sorta have such a split by necessity, I guess.

general rule:
Swords - fire
Knives - poison
Axes - earth
Katana - lightning
Lances - ice
Staves - holy
Bows - wind
Whips - wind but not many items
Rods - all over the place
Harps - technically no type since they use fraction spells
Bell - 3 water, 1 earth, yay?
unarmed - water (you know: blood, sweat, tears)
BraveBlade/ChickenKnife - water (fluid attack power)
Ragnarok - ONLY non-elemental weapon

considering which skills work with what weapon type and which not or which stats they use, each element is quite different.
and (current) max attack power varies as well:
fire tops out at 83, wind at 91, water at 100 (max braveblade)

then you have status effects that also belong to elements:
fire - berserk, HP leak
ice - stop, death
lightning - paralyse, old
water - toad, mini, doom
wind - confuse, slow
earth - sleep, petrify
poison - poison, zombie, HP to 1
holy - blind, mute, destroy

with that black may have access to all 8 elements but not equally;
e.g. its only holy type is a blind inflicting spell
for wind HP drain (better not try against undead)
and for ice well ice and death, etc.

white has fury/berserk for fire, nothing for ice, storm and charm for wind, etc.

Theoretically you just need fire, ice, lightning and wind to hit every single type weakness currently.
Most late game bosses have two elements, some regular enemies do too; those may have depending on combination 1-4 weaknesses (I extra checked that no combination results in 0 weaknesses).

If it was a fixed exchange like ice <-> water, poison <-> fire, etc. this would still be too much imo;
a too strong move would go from potentially being very good 25% of the time to 50%, have the right 2 and you're "done".
sorry, don't want that.

e.g. meteo is very problematic; it deals 4 hits to a random target though those may hit the same target, even for all 4 times if no other target is present, like in many boss fights.
it is insanely powerful if you can give it ideal circumstances - one target weak to earth, earth amp gear, mp to keep the spam going.
but that is also its drawback: if the boss resists earth it only/still deals above neutral damage in total - remember: 4 full power hits
I really didn't pay too much attention to what boss is weak to what elements and what that would mean, I just looked that I have something that fits and a good variance of types/weaknesses (e.g. the final boss's final form has unique weaknesses for each targetable part).
Meteo isn't alone, there are other insanely powerful moves - goblin punch, aqua rake, flare(s), echo, a dozen variants of "death", etc.
While they have a fixed type they are (almost) guaranteed to get their time to shine but (hopefully) not "solve" the game alone.
I'm not even sure how an element change on aqua rake could work, would it also change the anti-desert type? ouch..

3 hours ago, pfanne said:

Am I likely to encounter any problems with the safe files or other issues if I switch the difficulty mid playthrough?

That is no problem, but you may have problems as a player since the patch has to change a few controls and expands what you can do in battle, e.g. run.
When you start in the middle you basically skip all the "tutorial" time (this game has no explicit tutorial) you would have to get used to those changes.

That would be certainly possible to code.
Though at this point I'm not sure how usable or OP this would be.

Stuff like Meteo, GoblinPunch and BraveBlade/ChickenKnife are "balanced" around the idea that it can only be one fixed damage type.
Will have to think about this one, not sure.