praetarius5018

9 hours ago, BTB said:

So, one of my "wish list" items for BNW at some point in the future is to bring back the "class" labels. Except rather than simply being a description of the character, it would reflect their esper build. Each character would have a "default" class that would eventually change depending on which esper they predominately use for EL growth (or remain the same for hybrid builds, for the sake of simplicity). If you've ever played Seiken Densetsu 3 or Sword of Mana, it's basically the same thing.

You are doing the reverse of what Seiken Densetsu 3 does.
SD3 asks you to pick a label and by that determines what you can do better than before.
You look at what subset of skills that character does "better than average" and pick a label based on that.

Dunno about Sword of Mana's class system, did it even have one? that game was so easy a Lv1 char can almost oneshot the final boss.

Anyway, back to topic...

9 hours ago, Gamerdude535 said:

Started playing a bit ago with Duran , Kevin, and Angela, just got to Maia and find myself with more input to throw out there

Armor affecting HP is a sweet and interesting feature but some of them should probably be looked at. Not sure that Bezant Mail should be giving Duran less HP than Hard leather :P. The defense compensates for it a bit but it feels weird

And in terms of the story Angela not having Holy Ball in her potential spell list as Magician but getting Fireball and later Ice Smash before even meeting the matching elemental spirits doesn't make sense. 

That being said it's a great rom hack and I'm having a lot of fun so far.

Holy Ball is the same story with Carlie's Heal Light: the dark side class must not have it, so the base can't either because there is no "forget spell" mechanism.
And Fireball felt like a good replacement; it is the classic first spell for RPG mages and enough light can burn too, ask any vampire

Ice Smash from the earth spirit...
I mostly wanted to have Angela with all 4 base spells before she can get her Lv2s in the dark class at Tzenker.
If I kept ice where it was she could have earth at lv3 before ice lv1, that would be even stupider.

8 hours ago, velsper said:

I'm restarting the game after a minute of not dabbling in it. I keep pressing the b button with a full tech bar, but I'm not firing off a tech. I hold it down and I run around just fine though. 

As written above - working as intended.
Knowing the unmodified game is more a curse here than a blessing; control scheme/not running in battle, black market addicition, lv1 tech spam - probably some habits have to be unlearned, sorry.
You might remember the BS this hack was at the beginning? I want(ed) to get away from that, some bridges had to be burned.

7 hours ago, Serafie1999AD said:

Hi Praetarius, nice to see this hack still going.

Hi! Thanks for doing my job

5 hours ago, velsper said:

I reached Maia and all the level one accessories/rings are available for purchase on Kevin. Angela and Charlie can't equip their own accessories, but Kevin can equip all of them.

All accessoires should be equippable on all, you might have to pass them to other characters though via item transfer in the menu (middle top screen).
Buying is a bit weird in this game sometimes.

Someone forgot to tell Shinryuu that this game is 16 bit.

So what I've done:
potential max HP is increased from 65.535 to 524.272 (or up to 16 segments of up to 32767 HP)
Bosses and strong regular monsters can have "HP barriers", any overflow damage when reaching such a barrier is lost.
E.g. a boss with a barrier at 5000 HP is sitting at 5001 HP and hit for 9999 damage, he'll only drop to 5000 HP now and only the next attack continues as normal.
Upon passing a HP barrier the following stats increase slightly: attack, STR, MAG, AGL, evade, m.evade.
Upon passing a HP barrier maxHP decreases accordingly, meaning the enemy can never be brought back above such a barrier.
Successfully inflicting a death, petrify or similar status will not kill a boss/monster with HP barrier directly, only drop it to the next HP barrier.

In FF5 there exists a "nuclear option"; buff the target with Mix/Dragon Power (Dragon Fang + (Hi-)Potion) +20 levels until it has Lv255 and then spam Blue/Lv5 death.
No randomness involved, both parts have hit guarantee, the entire thing bypasses every protection I can give.
The effect of level on damage caps at Lv99 so it doesn't even rise the risk a lot.

So I embrace this in an absurd way:
status immunity is no longer 100% resistance.

Instead I calculate a chance to inflict a status based on

• a base rate depending on the status effect
• status "immunity" towards that status
• attacker's magic power
• target's vitality
• "boss/heavy" flag of the target
• if the target is a player (this reduces success chance)
• target's affinity towards a certain element, e.g. poison status checks against poison weakness and resistance

In short, if a boss is weak to element X you have a chance to use status effect Y on him even if he is supposed to be "immune".
Though if he resists that element and the status - forget it.

I'll have to nerf a few status effects of course..

Ancient Cave isn't affected by Hard Mode. So neither are enemies stronger nor do you get x2 exp.
This is the same effect as Retry in the original, didn't give you x4 exp there either.

Master's original HP was 9980, now he has 19980.
As I'm reading this is still doable

Imo it is brutal enough this way.
~70% more exp than vanilla, more cooperative high rank CMs, more tactical spells.

Also, sorry but the next update will change the AC a bit, making it (at least theoretically) a bit easier.

No idea when it will be done.

1: They are the exact same.
Only one effect even has a duration: Transshape.
Every other spell effect works until dispelled/cured, overwritten (e.g. different saber), battle end, screen transition or death.

2: the percentages are flat, not affected by any stat. Power Up is a 25% increase no matter if the target is a fresh lv1 character or a veteran lv99 final boss slayer.

3: You have always two stats that affect spell damage, a primary/main and a secondary.
The main stat gives the biggest bulk of the damage, this one depends on the spell used, PIE for Lise's summon.
The secondary has a lesser impact (about a third?) and depends on the character, Luck for Lise.

This - along with variable cast speed by stat - was mostly done to avoid having a caster only need one stat and a physical attacker needing everything.
E.g. Duelist Duran needs STR to hit hard, AGL to hit more often (and harder with Lv1 techs), INT to get more damage from Lv2/3 techs and luck for more and harder crits; VIT and PIE for defenses as well.
In comparison Necromancer Charlie needed VIT for defense and PIE for magic defense and all spell damage. Ok, and INT for MP. That's it.
See the problem?
Now she needs AGL as well to cast faster and luck for some bonus damage. So 5/6 stats give her something useful now.

2 hours ago, Gamerdude535 said:

Hi. Recently been looking at this rom hack and It's quite interesting! And the bugfixes are especially attractive!!! The only change I'm not such a fan of is Carlie/Charlotte not having Healing Light in her base class and dark classes, as much early Holy Ball is nice it doesn't make much sense for her healing spell to be missing at all since she's a Cleric.

You're mixing something up. She DOES have a healing spell, just not for HP.
Also, she's a cleric, clerics pray (or bring the world to ruin), healing is for medics.

Any chance you might revert her back to having Healing Light in all her classes???

Yes, the chance is roughly 0.000-1%.

To make it short: no.
Her dark classes are not allowed to ever learn heal light. So her base class can't either - forgetting spells is not a thing in this game.

found the stupid typo... instead of modifying their "Sizzle breath" attack power, I changed its type from spell to "crash game please"

perfectly balanced RNG:

ship bug:
not sure if I caused that disappearance, but afaik warp should always put the ship close to you.

Salamander:
I only edited their damage, but I can take a look at it.

Amon:
he gets healed by fire and non-elemental, try to have everyone not use those elements on their weapon; Anti-Flying and similar count as elemental as well.

Aside from that you should rely on Forcefield IP (+40% defense), Swordsplitter IP (reduces ATP a lot).
The spell Reduce removes Mirror from him; he'll still have his "fake" mirror for when he reflects (fake) Firebird/Thunder off himself onto you.
Resolve should be able to heal you and not be affected by Mirror.
Physical skills should not be affected either.
If you want immunity against confusion, the list is the same as in vanilla:
 

Amon has ONE move that ignores confusion protection though.

Give the spido jewel IP and fake spell a chance and drop his AGL until you outspeed him, that helps a ton.

Also you CAN'T do what he does and reflect damage spells off yourself to hit him - he cheats

Did you at least beat that Gades deathless?
If not - there's always the rematch to do that.

If this is like it was in MMBN6 the game doesn't actually look for LongSword E but for the 1st/2nd/... code LongSword has.

E.g. if the game orginally had Chip Codes A,B,C,* and wanted the Chip in Code A (1st code) on a check,
if you generate the same chip now with D,E,A,* Chip D (new 1st code) will satisfy the check, and not Chip A (now 3rd code).

Just a guess.

didn't get a notification that you updated, just saw the edits by chance..

- Somehow with 2 ppl i'm taking way more dmg
- So, monsters on the Golden Road are brutal. Not quite enough to wipe out the party, but they'll surely eat through a lot of your heals. Maybe that's because i'm lvl9?
there's a power spike for enemies at lv5 and 10 to compensate a bit for you getting a second and third party member, nothing unusual

- Somehow i have a Demon Statue in my inventory. Boss drop apparently.
sorry, but this game has a big problem that is called rtfm :/

- The bosses are pretty trivial, as long as you don't let them surround you and keep above 70hp so they don't 1-shot you with ability
Golems1 are specifically made to emulate a "defective" product; if you let them you may even see them trip over and fall down

- a short golden road farming session later, everyone is lvl13, got a round in INT (which i understand gives mDef) and is a proud owner of a pair of jewelled rings. Time for jewel eater to eat it
well, PIE gives m.def, not INT

- people are getting spells, but cast speeds are awful. Also definitely too little mana to cast repeatedly
- during the fight, i found out that characters somehow regenerate MP.
 

- the boss would be easy enough (mostly magic dark elemental damage, easily mitigated through gear), if not for his Death Spells. Only have 2 Angel Chalices in my inventory
for those that know what is coming, the solution would have been stacking "Red Moon Horn" to lower the boss level until death spell is ineffective.
I am sometimes often mean in this hack, but I try to keep it so that there is still a solution in some form.

- really missing that petrify protection at this point. Also just can't seem to get a handle on the cocatrice-egg kill timings (so far all of them managed to mature)
they keep their HP on transformation in this hack; so the damage you did isn't lost anymore

- huge problem with slimes. They hit too damn hard and really love their crits
is your luck stat still at the base level? if yes, the general crit rate increases a lot.
though some "crits" may just be special moves (like your lv1 tech) that just look like normal attacks

- Hawk is doing SO much better when controlled by an AI
AI helpers get a bonus to evade if that helps

- Getting way little use out of sabers. They are pretty much a trump card for a long battle now
they'll get more useful for randoms later

- He can't survive an actual barrage of attacks, though. Nobody can in this game, it seems  
depends on the attacks; some are physical, other magical.
def buffs / power debuffs help

- Byzel weapons hit weaker but inflict poison and silence (will need to check if poison works on bosses, silence can be situationally awesome)
this is a JRPG, of course all bosses are immune to every status effect!
 

Is it possible to allow the player to shift the class's focus?

E.g. your white mage has default access to the basic spells cure1, protect, etc.
And the play has then to somehow choose what he wants to primarily advance, e.g. via mutually exclusive items you can get either Cure2/3,Life OR Protectga, Hastega, Shellga.

1 hour ago, Brave New EarlHi said:

is there any in-game foreshadowing of this bosses' gimmick? Maybe a dwarf could give you a heads-up?

no, not really. I didn't modify dialog, at all. Couldn't really, as I wanted to support different translation patches.

Though as for hints:
earth shaking (you don't want to wait for a cave-in, do you?) and gunpowder dwarf whats-his-name telling you that "soon" something bad will happen.

I totally didn't pull that out of thin air right now as a retroactive justification, nope.
 

41 minutes ago, Brave New EarlHi said:

I think this mod is great and have been attempting to play through as Hawk/Angela/Carlie.  However, I have some issues:

* Ninja Masters with Shuriken in Hawk's opener. After several deaths trying to run past one that spawned in the tunnel before the exit you escape through, I ended up just reloading until something safer spawned. This is silly.

This is not something I've changed, they can do the same in vanilla.

41 minutes ago, Brave New EarlHi said:

* Carlie's Tinkle Rain doesn't work in or out of combat. The heal animation plays, but there is no recovered Hp or even numbers signifying a heal.

skills_consumable_traps.xls said:

Tinkle Rain - remove status ailments and grant 85% chance to resist status ailments from physical attacks

Heal Light - restore HP based on PIE, hurts undead

Tinkle Rain isn't Heal Light.

41 minutes ago, Brave New EarlHi said:

* Randoms tend to shred my group; consequently I spend a lot of time running avoiding fights. This doesn't really bother me but having to chew through consumables after almost every engagement makes me wonder if I am doing something wrong.

Wait until anyone in your party learns Heal Light. That gives automatic full heal on battle victory.
Otherwise: get a friend or two to help, the AI helpers are plain crap.
Hit-n-run is the name of the game.

41 minutes ago, Brave New EarlHi said:

* Bosses, lets talk about them. Early bosses comboing powerful abilities just feels wrong, and I have found myself feeling like I spend more time item spamming than fighting. I hit a wall with my party at Jewel-Eater; even with my party sitting at an average of 16 he decimates me. Double-Jewel immediately followed by Power Punch - who can survive that? Not to mention melee attacks that can one-shot characters. What is a character like Hawk supposed to do in a fight like that?

Did you increase VIT and/or PIE?
Tried with some defensive accessoires?
Oh wait, double jewel + power punch means you took too long in that fight. This gets actually followed by 1-2 more spells. You are not supposed to let him live that long.
Full Metal Hagger was an exercise in endurance, Jewel Eater is a time bomb.

Did you get some coins or Siren's Claws from treasure chests? Or any other (de)buff item?

41 minutes ago, Brave New EarlHi said:

I really like the idea behind this mod but the early game is, suffice to say, brutal and discouraging since you have so few options to defend yourself or attack your opponent. I do enjoy it despite the gripes and look forward to future editions. I will read the armor and item listing which may give me more ideas for survival but god damn this is hard.

I have a suspicion you let the mod sit at the default hard difficulty; there's a whole folder for lower difficulties (have to be applied after the main patch, ofc.).

There really isn't much I can do to give the player options for early game. A shop can at most hold 12 items, among some other restrictions.
Players can only have a total of 12 spells at the end, and most classes diverge so hard there's no common basis for any spells in the base classes; so it wouldn't be wise to give some characters like Hawk e.g. Arrow at the start while e.g. Lise can't cast shit.

Otherwise you have a few armor options at that point, and gameplay wise you have a few more variations than just attack, attack, attack.

• regular attacks (just shortly tap attack button or also hold a direction)
• strong attacks (hold attack button but not direction), for greatly increased accuracy/damage but longer cooldown
• Lv1 tech
• counterattack (hit with Lv1 tech directly after the enemy casts a spell or during their physical swing), deals increased damage and resets enemy's "aggro", i.e. they don't use their "special" any time soon; always fun to see a double Dive Attack from FMH because people trigger his special at the right time in his AI cycle

What "theme" or "idea" are you going for?

simple rebalance? making the game finally good? total conversion? BNW 9.0? meme overload?

was it considered to make between Cover% (Healthy Ally)  and Cover% (Near-Fatal Ally)  a gradual transition instead of a simple binary check?

e.g.: cover% = 100 - ( (100 - (Stam/192) ) * ally HP %)
so at full health he takes the full "penalty" to the cover chance, at 50% only half the penalty and at 1 HP you get 100% cover

Maybe a little every now and then.
I still have to modify some IPs and maybe tweak AC a bit.

I mean the AC does give you spells and you get the bonus stats on them but spells are quite rare, especially now that there are 100+ valid spells instead of about 30.
I'm not sure how possible the AC even is in this version unless you already have a good amount of blue chest items.

That bug is indeed a byproduct of the exp/lvl sync.
At least that is better than the infinite level up message loop I had at the beginning with this feature..

I've not touched any IP moves yet, so that kind of overpoweredness is to be expected/still present like in vanilla.
Bats were always this troll-y. I lowered their stats in V6 now.

The update makes old saves invalid - again.
Transfer should be done via savestate.

If the game detects an "invalid" save it tries to repair it, that takes about a minute in a black screen, so no panic please.
The result always has a Lv1 party though, so overwrite it, don't even bother loading.

v6 update:

• fixed bug in save mechanism which made dungeons reset upon loading
• nerfed power of Blaze's special attacks
• reduced stats and increased gold drop of enemies that appear during the time Maxim is alone in the early game

I half expect the saves to still have a hidden bug somewhere; I had to basically rewire 70% of the save file structure and cram 252 bytes of data into a space intended for 230 bytes.

It seems like it doesn't save dungeon data at all..
in vanilla that works at least.

Though it wouldn't have surprised me too much if that was a vanilla bug - I mean all you need to do there to summon the apocalypse is press left on the stereo option.

It should be ok.
The game is pretty "normal" for any kind of gimmicks. No complex skill systems to learn or anything.

The most outlandish "feature" is probably that defend only counts if you get to act before the enemy.
Which becomes even better when the slowest capsule monster is the most likely to use defend in the first place.

Of course, like most games of the era, it doesn't tell you which pieces of armor protect against status effects or elements.
When I played the vanilla version ages ago, I didn't even know that armors could have those effects, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

There's one boss battle in the entire game that you're supposed to lose; but if you win it gives you a unique weapon that is basically endgame power from the midgame.

Despite ID being gone, the running gag of people getting my name wrong continues, great.

Sage Stone:
I should've seen this coming, "techs" are mechanically the same as spells..
And yes, I've already tried to have Angela cast Fireball as her Lv2 tech; it worked, except it didn't use TP up.

Pedan Armor:
ok, I'll wait for the info; guessing is a bit difficult when there are 4 of those per character..

Animations:
I've not really looked into that, only how to assign them to a spell.
At most I could add a bonus patch that just switches animations off for buffs, so it skips that completely.

Thanks for the feedback!

3 hours ago, Limstokes said:

Here are some mods from ID that I gathered not too long ago. I hope this helps!

Lufia 2 - Age of the Sinistrals v5

I've added that as a proper download here now >.>

Somehow I always forget that it still exists...

Major features:

• added around 70 new spells, including some physical-like techs that even Guy can learn
• learning new spells gives slight increases to stats
• modified base stats and growth of characters
• stat potions can no longer drop from enemies; those drop now fruits for capsule mosnter (CM) evolving
• added a true final boss fight with "Guard Daos" after Daos
• major overhaul of AI for final Sinistral fights
• Retry and Gift Mode are now always available
• Retry Mode is now Hard Mode, 2x exp/gold gain and enemies are stronger (less grind, more action)
• rings and rocks are now the same equip type and can occupy either of their two slots, e.g. you can wear 2 rings, 2 rocks or 1 each
• modified defense influence; starts with 1:1 until def = 50% raw damage then degenerates
• CM level is now tied to Maxim's exp/level
• modified CM attacks and AI slightly, e.g. Darbi can now even flee in class 5 and class 4 Flash is more likely to heal when injured
• class 4 and 5 CM are much less likely to use regular attacks
• CM can freely switch between all 5(!) classes once unlocked instead of being locked to class 1-4 OR 5
• (S) Witch Ring now increases MP as advertised
• 25% of ATP bonuses from equipment get also added to INT
• 25% of DFP bonuses from equipment get also added to MGR

note: NOT compatible with vanilla savegames!

How about limiting how much magic can be junctioned based on character level?
Bam, no more max stats at Lv1 and an incentive to level up further.

Maybe limit how many copies of each spell can "exist" and casting the spell does not consume it.
E.g. you can only have 3x Fire1 in total, either for high stat boost on one char, medium stat boost on 3 chars or as a castable variant.

P.S.: I know nothing of this game.