BTB

Nah, I read the post and his numbers are about right. Elf Fire is brutally powerful coming out of Demons, and magic attacks as a whole are very strong early on because the magic formula has a very high floor for that early in the game. I wrote enemies to use a mix of physical and magical damage, but I think I leaned too heavy in the magic direction too early on in the game. It's something that I've addressed... to an extent.

tl;dr - dude here isn't wrong, and once again I'm at that point in development where pretty much everything I have to say about the current version is that it'll be fixed in the next one.

RE: the Soul Train, it uses Elf Fire only when it sees that a character has been Bserked. It's intended as a mercy kill for a character that you've already lost control of. The fight itself is one of the more RNG-based in the game just because of how Evil Toot can swing. I wrote the fight largely assuming the presence of status protection relics (which the Ghost Rings are, by the way), which mitigates that significantly.

Or when I don't read an entire post before I respond.

Actually... I just re-read your first post. What you're describing is actually how BNW works normally. Generally the worst attacks that enemies have (i.e. the Demons using Elf Fire) has a specific trigger and can be avoided. Part of the next version is rewriting enemy AI for these triggers to be much more obvious and for enemy behavior as a whole being easier to identify and exploit. 

Did you use the headered or unheadered patch? And what is the exact file-size of your ROM?

http://ngplus.net/InsaneDifficultyArchive/www.insanedifficulty.com/board/index2ea7.html?/topic/5168-psa-this-is-why-you-should-always-patch-a-clean-rom/
(This sort of thing happens a lot when you patch over a modded ROM. Find a clean ROM and re-patch and you should be good.)

GrayShadow's inventory item count removal

C3/82F1:    200883      JSR $8308      ; Set desc ptrs
C3/82F4:    7B          TDC            ; Clear A
C3/82F5:    A54B        LDA $4B        ; Cursor slot
C3/82F7:    A8          TAY            ; Index it
C3/82F8:    B96918      LDA $1869,Y    ; Item in slot
C3/82FB:    203857      JSR $5738      ; Load description
C3/82FE:    205683      JSR $8356      ; Count items
C3/8301:    A920        LDA #$20       ; Palette 0
C3/8303:    8529        STA $29        ; Color: User's
C3/8305:    4C7A83      JMP $837A      ; Draw item count

HACK: Change the JSR at /82FB to a JMP.

GrayShadow's ATB Toggle

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/160253567012306945/472209535755485205/selswap.asm

Leet Sketcher's "Imp Skimp" hack: properly updates enemy sprites if they cure themselves of the Imp status (or so I'm told; needs testing)

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2845/

Well, I've also spent many versions working to make sure that Phantom wasn't a total waste on either Celes OR Shadow... and that took a lot of doing.

As for a magic bonus on Shadow, I always leaned away from it on the basis that there's really not a whole lot he DOES with that stat - it boosts his scroll damage, and that's it. He does have a freely-available magic-boosting relic for that purpose, and as with Locke I had no desire to stack that "free" relic with a magic boost from espers.

A similar thought has occurred to me, yes.

Same effect, doesn't stack.

Nah, you didn't have a nerve, it's just something that's come up a lot. And Mark Rosewater's first rule of games is "change your game to fit your players, not the other way around".

The Fenrir change is something else I see a lot, though most people target Phantom. It makes the most gameplay sense of any of the suggestions I've seen at the cost of removing a +2 Speed esper from a character I think thematically deserves one.

I gave Relm and Strago a rod that procs a stamina attack out of sheer annoyance for the lack of respect that their stamina builds get, but it's a very gated weapon that requires you to give up something equally cool. Really, the bigger draw with Stamina Strago in 1.10 is going to be better magic defense and ~200 HP regen ticks.

As for Edgar, he doesn't really have a "stamina" build so much as he as a "tank" build that stacks HP and just happens to get some stamina on the side.

Main observation I see here is something I see get suggested to me a lot, which is "give everyone a stamina attack". I've avoided doing this specifically to avoid homogenizing stamina builds across characters - giving everyone a stamina attack just makes stamina a better (or worse, depending on the attack) version of vigor, and I've really only designed a few characters with "stamina as an attack stat" as a truly viable option. Different characters are meant to get different benefits out of stamina, something I hope will become much more apparent with the regen formula rework in 1.10 (among other things).

I've often wondered why characters other than Setzer and Sabin never really attracted the HP-stack builds, especially the ones with +60 HP espers.

That's way off in the future. 2.0 material, for sure.

Glad I could be of assistance

It increases magic damage like the Crystal Orb would. The next update will make this effect more clear.

To your second question, no.

Updated the changerog yet again. This should be the last of any major updates: note the (tentative) updates to status display and the status screen along with finally doing something about how difficult running from fights became following the introduction of nATB. Also, as part of our ongoing efforts to scale back on needlessly-hidden things, Relm will now come equipped with the Memento Ring. Finally, some terminology changes will seek to make things easier to understand: spell points ("magic points" in vanilla) will now be called esper points, while what is currently called esper points will be rebranded as esperXP.

There are a few more additions yet to go into this list, but that should be it for anything particularly noteworthy.

Reflect working on a timer made it entirely pointless as a deliberate defensive effect since you never knew when it was going to wear off and it would often do so before being of much use. Changing it to behave like Image guarantees that it will defend against at least something before going away.

Glad you're enjoying yourself!

Forests on Triangle Island.

Vanilla had an attempted failsafe against this sort of behavior where it basically tacked on another 50% evasion check to everyone hit by it. That... didn't go well in practice.

That or you've got a pit in your basement.