praetarius5018

You should have access to 2 barriers (consumable that gives magic defense up) and HP increasing earrings, maybe some M.Def increasing armors?
M.Def (and maxHP) is the key here, imo.
In case you didn't know, M.Def is (almost) a straight % reduction, so going from 40 (-60% dmg) to 50 (-50% dmg) is about 20% less damage taken.
How much does Dark Matter outdamage your max HP? You should have more than enough time to get back to full between two casts.
If all else fails stuff it all on Crono and go solo:

some more "issues":

DirtToss Zeninage:
currently the only skill that still permanently destroys ressources.
 

MP steal skills (Psych, Drain Sword, ..):
don't actually do anything. Monster have < 100 MP and no mechanism I know of to get more, neither do they use MP (currently monster cast for free).
So you spent a turn (which equates to 100 MP) to gain < 100 MP, always a loss with no gain. Simply defending would be better.

15 hours ago, BTB said:

I've never been the hugest fan of the random encounter system as a whole.

might I ask what you don't like about them?
maybe it is something that can be addressed in a future patch.

it does the same thing as a certain boss will do to you.

Yeah, it's currently a flaw in the system, not sure how to "fix" that exploit.

WallOfText warning!

The first half of this sounds really interesting, honestly. Lets mages actually do something for trash mobs and keeps bosses from being -aga spam. For reworking magic damage, possibly add a 'magic attack' stat that works like the attack stat that weapons have; Fire can, then, use 1x this 'MAtk', while Fire 2 might use 1.5x and Fire 3 use 2x.

I've realized the same effect by simply using the weapons attack power, or rather a factor of it;
Fire1 uses 85% (0 MP cost), Fire2 uses 110% (6 MP cost) and Fire3 uses 135% (14 MP cost)
with the advantage that I don't have to worry about hidden typos in M.Atk making some weapon useless or utterly overpowered.

Also that opens the way for axe wielding casters... could be worse.

I'm not really following how guarding's supposed to work? Like, I saw in one of your other posts that the MP is consumed if possible in order to get that instant turn, but wouldn't that mean that as soon as you Guard, you gain the 100 MP, then immediately lose it to get a new turn immediately (which removes the Guard)? Based on your comparison to BD, I assume the intent is that Guard skips that check and just forces you to hold the MP and wait? That could work, but it doesn't seem like it'd play well with, say, a White Mage, who probably wants to save their MP for their actual curative spells.

If you defend or guard you get +100 MP and end your current turn.
Otherwise the game checks if you have at least 100 MP, if yes lose 100 MP and take another turn.
Of course you can abuse that with always ending your turn defending..
1st turn: defend
2nd.1 turn: do whatever
2nd.2 turn (consumes the 100 MP from first defend): defend again

White Mage learns !Cure1 that is the same as the spell but free of MP cost and not multitargetable. So if you equip that to your White Mage, (s)he is never unable to heal, it just won't be as good as Cure2/3.

Personally, I think it'd work better if it was its own resource instead of being tied to MP, but I'd have to see it in action first, really.

Originally I wanted to change the game so that MP doesn't exist at all, 10 seconds later I remembered that Fire1/2/3 is a thing and gave up on that idea.
It shouldn't play too different than a system where all skills use a shared cooldown or charge time or whatever.

My first thought is that there's no way you're making 7 abilities each for 21 classes. Excluding abilities that were just higher-tier versions of prior abilities, like the various magic lists (though I did include the different HP/MP+ tiers), there are 73 abilities in vanilla FFV (EDIT: I forgot to take out the "Equip X" skills, so there's even less you've got to fill levels with); that's

barely less than half of the number of ability slots you intend. While you did say you plan on making some abilities redundant to help cover bases, there's no way that can effectively double the number of abilities you have to work with. I do like the concept of making each job have a constant number of levels, though; maybe bring it down to 5 abilities per job? Cut out or condense some of the abilities from Knight, Monk, and Thief which already have more than 5 levels in vanilla (the magic jobs are already handled, of course).

I think I'm fine on abilities.
I've converted the equip X skills into different passives and the lower tier HP/MP boosts have secondary effect to differentiate all of them. So 32 passive abilities currently, I can only add one more because of space.
On active abilities I've sacrificed the tiered color-magics so there are now a total of 65 active abilities by my counting.
Ok a couple are just "cast spell X for free without option to multitarget" it is still something.

I 

really don't think you should separate HP from VIT unless you plan on using VIT for more things. In vanilla, VIT has exactly two purposes: determining your max HP, and modifying the strength of your regen tick. That's it. And regen isn't exactly a powerful status in vanilla FFV.

GilToss was modified to be based mostly on VIT, as well as 2 physical skills from a new "weapon spell menu".
I may also include it in the formula for resisting status effects. Maybe.
VIT also increases the post battle healing a bit.

Erghhhh...I'm really leery of no OOB healing. It could work, though, if all battles were a 

full HP recovery and monsters were adjusted with this expectation in mind. It sounds like you want to move away from long-term resource management anyway, given the non-consumed consumables.

I wanted to keep the gameplay "fluid".
"Fight a 30 sec battle then spent 2 minutes spamming basic potions to get ready for the next fight"
and
"ok I beat the boss back to grinding 30 turtle shells so I can beat the next"
just shouldn't need to be.
If I have a class like chemist with its mix ability I want to be able to "push some buttons" as in use the friggin ability, and not keep it until I forget it exists.
Or when I'm supposedly in a hurry to "save the world" I can hardly take 8h timeouts every two steps to cook a meal and sleep.

And I had a... "situation" on hand.
If I'd be consequent you'd need to get a full heal after every battle if you have at least one (hi)potion in your inventory or an ether and any cure spell. Or a white mage lv1 (learns !Cure1 even if you haven't bought it) or a Chemist with certain other ingredients or bone mail and a death spell or element X absorbing armor and spell of element X... way too much to check if you want to be "correct".
So we have full power every fight; if we don't increase enemy power to be threatening they'll just feel like useless grind since it costs nothing except time.
And "purely strong" enemies imo work better in action RPGs since they have dimensions to work with that are missing here (e.g. movement/placement, obstacles) so that makes some situations just a "grind check" or a "lol, RNG, game over".
I should probably find a better phrasing for that..

Well, it is just a "yes but not all of it" recovery for now. Play poorly and you'll get worn down; then you need to set encounter rate to a minimum and run back to the inn to try again.
Worst case, there's the tried and true FF1 strategy of kill all but one enemy, stun it then spam freely available heals until 100% HP.

Ultimately just a change of name for the most part, so sure.

Could you equip a Flame Ring, Coral Ring and Angel Ring at the same time? that is honestly news to me.
It at least means characters can be a lot more varied.
Bone mail gives undead status but high defense? Ok, we go all the way and equip three copies of it for massive physical defense.

by default, in FFV, resistances override weaknesses.

that change here is mostly out of necessity. If I kept that resistance wins, you'd just equip 3 items of different elements to resist 6 elements total, and a shield that covers a 7th.
Maybe even all 8 elements when you use Flame/Coral rings or other items that cover more elements.
I don't think there would be much game left if you could cover everything so easily.

Maybe I'll change it so they neutralize each other, but resistance on gear overwriting weaknesses is a no go out of fear for godmode setups.

That said, I think it'd work fine as long as any given area only had monsters of two or three elements at most. Try to minimize the chance of someone walking into a dungeon blind and just getting pasted because whoops, this enemy they didn't know to expect hits their weakness, hope they saved recently.

A weakness hit now only halves the defense instead of zeroes it and gets +50% damage for physical or +100% damage for spells.
I wouldn't expect the player team to be THAT fragile.
Plus, as long as you have !Item equipped you can at least switch the shield on the fly.

(As an additional aside, if every class can equip everything, maybe remove the "Eqp:" section of the equip menu entirely., since it serves no purpose now.)

I've written on my todo list that I want to show the current weaknesses of a character there.

I know I'm bad at this, I'm writting a lot based on what I know, knowledge that is unavailable to you...

Yes, that's right.
It is not advisable to have one fixed stat across characters for this (e.g. all use AGL) because then one character would have an all-in-one package for spell casting.
So if it was AGL for all characters, dark-Hawk would rise that for both spell damage and cast speed (and Lv1 tech damage and evade and accuracy = way too much).

So I had to declare a different stat for each character, one that they don't use too much otherwise.

Feature: all armors influence HP
Bug: noone reads the armor sheet

The ingame indication is simple:
you can run in battle and take more than 2 damage from a hit

As for adding a text somewhere - this would be insanely difficult to get working, you know across untranslated version and several different translation patches, etc.
Help on that would be welcome.

I'd say getting a game over or three in the prolog is a good indication the patch worked.

100% chest means you play on the only good difficulty.

If you want to just make a difficulty patch based on "numbers", FF5SNES has the aptly named "FFV editor" for that which can edit stats of items, spells, jobs (base stats and learned abilities), shops, monster and their formations, HP/MP curve. The GBA port has some editors too, though afaik not that extensive.

If you want to go further than just those numbers, only THEN do you have to get dirty with the code.

Hello Lurker with similar interests!

Lately I've been following the development of a FF5 mod, though god knows what'll come of it.

I'd guess PC would be the hardest to mod as we've nothing on that one (plus I find the art way worse than the original)
I'd say the SNES one is the easiest to mod with the GBA port behind.
The former has a huge collection of info here plus their wiki. They also have a bit info on the GBA game, but not nearly as much.
Plus I find SNES asm way easier, but that is just personal opinion.

Every class is setup like the vanilla mime:
class ability + 3 abilities of player choice
!Fight, !Observe and !Item are always available to be equipped but not forced.
And yes you can screw yourself over by choosing e.g. 4 mages with 3x !Item and not even knowing any attack spells, so no way to win,
which is a scenario I tolerate as you really have to try.

!Gaia should be ok as it is, maybe some number changes. It mostly does what it should; if you take it you know it will hurt the enemies in some way;
a lot of aoe damage (similar power to !summon), slow, blind, poison, confusion, HP-to-1 effects, even direct death is under the possible effects.
It is kinda like !Dance, you use it, don't know what exactly will happen, only that it will hurt the enemy in some way.
It more or less works when you look for a way to kill stuff.
 

!Animal has a mixed bag, it can deal status effects, deal damage, heal, cure status.
So sorta like FF6 !Slots without a way for the player to influence it and without a insta-win jackpot.
You take it and have absolutely no idea what will happen; do you get the single target attack? does it heal the party no matter if HP is full?
It is unreliable in that sense. If you need healing, you usually need it now and not maybe now, maybe in 5 turns.
That way it fills no niche. It has no high power reward like dance, it doesn't even have a reliable "direction" (keep party alive longer vs kill enemy faster), it is just there...?

What can be done with !Animal?
One way would be to give it a fixed 3 pet list based on level in Ranger/Bard/Beastmaster (all three teach this skill) and the character that uses is (i.e. Bartz doesn't get the high tier healing one, Lenna refuses the Skunk).
Each use you would rotate through this list, so pet A -> pet B -> pet C -> pet A -> ...
And the starting point for each battle would not be fixed "pet A" but based on, let's say VIT, specifically VIT mod 3; that stat wants some more love too.

Example:
Butz has Ranger 1 so he gets his lowest list of: Squirrel, Squirrel, Mysidian Rabbit (changed from do nothing to minor party heal)
He has 24 VIT (or any other values cleanly dividable by 3), so his first and 2nd !Animal will be the squirrel, only every thrid will be the healing rabbit.
Lenna in the same situation might get: Mysidian Rabbit -> Squirrel -> Nightingale

What does that achieve?
We can know what we get, so it has become a reliable tactic.
It is not a "every turn full heal" spam fest.
Since it is based on VIT, the player has some agency in manipulating it. Find a good value and start the fight with the pet of your choice.
The "bad" pets will no longer drag the power of the skill down after you've achieved a few levels in the relevant classes.

Both have the same two problems:
1) very limited elements, Animal has only earth/ground type attacks (earth being the actual element and ground meaning it is helpless against float status, i.e. all birds) and a fraction move
2) what spell you get is purely random, in case of !Animal it subjectively even gets worse with higher level.
!Gaia is edited to choose its 4 spells per area evenly, 25% chance each - in vanilla that was based on level, good luck getting level 60 in the noob cave to have a chance at the best effect for that.
the spells are based on the area you are in, so you can get a super powerful tidal wave on the sea - which helps little if that area is obviously flooded with water resistant types.
I think that problem can be "solved" by making those spells very strong under the assumption that you'll 90% of the time have those resisted?
Fire2 has 110 power, split for multitarget, double on weakness; so a typical gaia move could have 150 power with multitarget no split damage?
or more dynamic 120+5x Geomancer level? no idea.

!Animal is a different beast of a problem.
you unlock new better spells but the obsolete old ones still clutter the list the result is chosen from.
so at level < 10 you only good the mysidian rabbit that now functions as a cure1
at level 50 when that is not so good anymore you still have a good chance to get that rabbit when you'd rather get the cure3 tier unicorn.

the list includes party wide healing, earth/ground single target attacks, a percentage attack, status effects (poison, paralyze, blind).
the list isn't bad but again random. with gaia you're at least 90% sure it will hurt the enemy, here... thx for the heal on fully healed party?

Available classes can still be changed.
How much lower would you go? I had already trouble deciding on 6 classes to ban for each character.
Certain things just don't work when you remove too much, imo.
The game kind of requires that everyone can deal physical damage (guaranteed with !Fight and no gear restriction) and has at least access to one form of magic damage; and that's where trouble starts.
It's hard to count !Gaia and !Animal as they are almost exclusively one element, the later has it even worse with all the damage ones being also ground type (i.e. useless to flying).
Some support abilities would also be nice and so on.

I don't know where the 15 originally came from.
I just needed a number for a start. A loss of 30% is already a lot for me, I want some player choice in this and not a preset path.
And we need enough jobs per character after the first crystal obviously.

I mean I could have made all wind crystal jobs available for all and only restrict the rest and end up with 12 jobs each or something.

Disclaimer: the following values are for my dev version, not what I have posted above, differences will happen.

For me the amount of classes counts less than to block "critical" abilities.
A "rapid fire" setup requires:
1) Ninja for dual wield (2x 13/16 attack)
or the "inferior" 2handed (1x 125% attack) from Knight or Berserker
2) Ranger for X-Fight (rapid fire, 4 hits at half power)
or the inferior TwinCut (2 hits at normal attack power but doubled defense, mostly meant for axes as they ignore huge chunks of defense) from Berserker
or try to be cute with Knight's Stomp (1 hit against halved defense)
3) Magic Knight for spellblade (only for swords and knives)
or Thief for Crit Up (axes, katana, bows)
or Monk for Brawl (unarmed)
lances go with (S-)Jump instead, the rest are defensive backrow weapon types
4) Dragoon or Time Mage for Pierce (passive, not innate, bypass immunities; kinda required if you want to stick to your weapon of choice for spellblade)

E.g. Lenna currently has no access to any of 1), Faris has no spellblade and Galuf has to take the slightly worse choice on 2).
Originally I wanted to hard cap class levels at 20 total, so even though all 4 could entertain a form of a rapid fire build at that level, all would have to be a different flavor.
Or a bit more than flavor, those restrictions indirectly affect which elemental damage you can throw around (e.g. Sword = fire, bad without rapid fire)

Eh, no, totally not; quick cast helm is available at the cats (~lv55), so more or less exactly in the middle of the game.
Levels are more or less parallel to how far you are in the game; last class change is Lv38 so roughly a third into the game.
Either way that is a far cry from 80%.
If I had proposed a "healer Fenrir Knight" THAT would be 80% into as she needs her final/class specific weapon.

I read it as "there's no gap just items you don't feel useful to you" - that's per se ok.
As long as someone finds a good use for it those aren't a waste in my book.

How about you use the resist armors to have your entire team resist one specific element and then cast a saber of that element on all enemies, thought about that option?
On that front, has anyone even tried to make some use out of Y button shenanigans (cast spell on wrong target group)?
My list of those strategies wants some more entries. Currently stuck at 10 entries.

Another thing you feel lacking already exists -> Sage Stone, buffs cast almost instantly, available same time as you get your 2nd class change.

Enemy layouts have been changed and actually change themselves to a degree, specifically so they are not trivialized with a single item.
I wanted this hack to be more about execution/skill than "just get the right equip/stats and gg".
The general idea was more along the lines of "if in area x the most dangerous thing is petrification throw some petrify resist gear on" and not "wear petrify resist gear, max p.def and then hold A".

Ok, I'll change "death resistance" to "protection against instant death spells" to make it more clear.

Honestly, I've the same problem; half the time it does the same damage, has the same animation but for square reason it counts as something other than a regular attack so evasion is skipped.

Give him some INT (also strengthens his Lv3 tech so no real loss) and/or the Rising Moon Helm. And avoid Rune Earrings.
I'd be honestly surprised if there's any situation - that isn't absurdly unrealistic - for which exists no useful gear at this point.

Care to elaborate what gap you mean?

Death Spell -> Wishbone

HP/def: I never said that those 100 HP are the be-all-end-all, I just said that you can't ignore those HP. That one was a comparison between an armor that is strictly for physical defense versus an armor that has a non-defensive use, OF COURSE the later will be worse defensively, but it also has some HP more to make it not that bad as you made it out to be.

Evasion: there's a lot of things that outright ignore evasion. techs, criticals, looks-like-a-regular-attack-but-is-actually-a-spell

Duran needs no MP?  - tell that to people that use him as a main healer.

for random status weapon try upping your luck, it gives you up to 40% chance to hit those status ailments.
poison is just a ton of free dps; like dead in 10-15 seconds even if you do nothing to them

Deathless weapons are your proof if you succeeded a "no death" playstyle; die once (normal or higher) or hit a trap (tough or higher) and it is gone for this playthrough.
Whats the problem with Zable and Koren specifically?

Evade is hard capped at 127; more AGL will give you the other bonuses still: more accuracy (less misses), bons to Lv1 tech damage, etc.
I think the highest accuracy any enemy has is 38, so you're at the effective evasion cap of 90 anyway (127 - 38 = 89, ok you miss 1%, cast speed up asap!!!).

weapons and armor are meant to be usable most of the entire game, some in general, other with more niche use, and all of course depending on playstyle.
theoretically the wendel weapon and armor should last you the whole game, so money shouldn't be much of a problem.

does it even matter much if an armor is light, light-medium or medium? sure the damage number changes, but on higher difficulty does it change the number of hits you can survive?
if the damage gets reduced from 700 to 500 that looks good but you still die in 2 hits.
That's where the resist gear should come in, resistance cuts damage in half; you have a bit lower defense but now the 700 gets down to let's say 400, oh hey that means you can now take to hits at 801 HP instead of almost getting one shot there.
Or for the OCD people that need everyone to take similar damage; you know some classes have natural resistance to a given element, others don't, so they can even it out that way.

Also don't only look at the pure defense; HP factor, evade, crit resistance also play a huge role on how much it lets you survive.
Bazant Mail (93% HP, heavy p.def) vs Dragon's Mail (103% HP, light def) is almost 100 HP difference at Lv90+. Dragon takes more damage per hit, yes, but it still takes 100 more damage before you hit 0.

I'd actually say, undead armor becomes more useful later; you get a few options to recover HP outside of now harmful healing (moon saber/hp steal weapon/ring, HP regen ring, bishop weapon or plain post battle healing) and status effects become more diverse. of course there's only one boss where it is safe to use at all.
someone made use of it in dragon hole even.

I can take a look at general attack and defense value of weapons and armors, but for that I need a bit more concrete feedback;
why should weapon/armor X be increased one attack/defense stage and how does it make X not strictly better than similar options.
Resistance gear requires knowing what the enemies use for elements, but at least for the godbeasts that's dead obvious (minus one troll).

Admittedly, I've designed myself into a corner there; the medium power wendel stuff was supposed to be the baseline, the stuff to compare to, and then it doesn't have anything special and only medium power.
And there's only so much hitrate/critrate/evade/whatever that I can reduce otherwise...

"...Lv1 tech hits an enemy shortly after they start their attack or cast a spell..."

hit them in the 3~4s after the spell animation finishes.
hold direction away from the enemy in case the spell sends you flying to get knocked closer to them.

Darkshine Knight is the best enemy to test regular counters against as he takes at least 200 damage extra from it, so it is easily visible when you get it.

• Spoiler

   

  • You'd need 7, can't be done. For deathspell purposes he should be 105, -1 level (real and otherwise) per horn.
  • Dunno, for my the AI often stops when I'm in his face and have him literally cornered. The AI is absolutely unable to handle certain angles. This can be seen on heath as well.
  • He doesn't counter. The required "hate" for him is beyond the maximum. Instead he deals more damage the more hate he has stored. Same solution as with DkS - throw some counters at him.
  • Also the barrier change is unchanged, so what worked there in vanilla still works here.

   

   

Only the cryptic nonsense in the monster_bosses.xls where even I half the time don't know wtf I meant...

What special conditions do you mean exactly? Or could you give me an explicit example of what you'd like to have here?

In so many words: both.

Every monster HAS to be labelled with 1-3 element icons because that is what my function reads: the monster name (and those icons are part of it).
Whether you know which monster name belongs to which sprite/target is another story sometimes...

Every character has a minimum ability knowledge of !Fight, !Item and !Observe. The later tells HP and weaknesses but costs a turn.
And you have to equip and use it of course.

I'll maybe change it so that !Observe and its big brother give you a free turn afterwards.

proof of concept

No idea how far mostly unchanged enemy stats will let you get.

Btw. if an enemy doesn't have any symbol in front of his name, he'll have unchanged resistances/weaknesses from vanilla.
Otherwise it overwrites those values.

How you know !item is on cooldown:

The evils of math:

 

2) I don't know of any new summons there, Leviathan is definitly in SNES version.
X-Fight, dual wield and Spellblade are currently crying in a corner from the nerf hammers;
X-Fight no longer ignores def or evasion.
Dual wield takes a 3/16 penalty to attack power. 2handed took a dive from x2 damage to +25% attack power.
Spellblade is no more x2/3/4 with def=0 imba nonsense:
tier1 just doubles damage, keeps def intact. Tier2 increases attack slightly and 0s def. Tier3 is somewhere inbetween.

Apart from that, I HAVE to add a few items. Otherwise certain elements are just criminally underrepresented over long game stretches.

You still can switch on the fly and be somewhat competent at it. Even at the bare minimum you have about 28~30 in a relevant STR/MAG stat.
Add a bit gear with stat bonuses and you should be able to hit 40 without too much trouble.
A specialist will be stronger, yes, I estimate about a 60~70 stat without min-max and overgrinding.
(my math is based around the assumption that a player can finish with moderate levels of 30 char and 20ish class)
Since STR/MAG is a linear factor in the damage formula he'll be 50~75% stronger.
A bit much, sure, but those missing 20~30 points must be somewhere else; AGL? VIT? Nothing that hurts to have more.
Maybe STR, but I planned to make that reduce weight a bit which means slightly faster ATB.
MAG gives more max MP which can at least be useful if you plan to store a lot of turns at once for a big attack rush.

Or just ask a bard to sing, that can increase strength and magic to 99.

Does it even matter? The damage potential is absurdly high.
Not in the damage cap sense but orders of magnitudes beyond that.
At one point a thought experiment ended at 240k theoretical damage, not even sure how.

4) Not sure I know any of those games.
At the end of the day "relics" are just equipment, hopefully with more "not just defense" variants.