Final Fantasy Hacktics

I agree with the way you're thinking about this, which is that FFTA and A2 have a ton of useless abilities that you would never use. I am a little sympathetic to abilities that you could at least use for part of the game before moving onto more advanced versions (e.g. fire->fira->firaga), but there's a ton of trash in there.

I think you only need to worry about certain jobs being overpowered if they're clearly always a better choice compared to another pick. You could solve that by either nerfing the OP job or making the underpowered ones more useful. If you can't come up with a worthwhile ability, cut it.

Reducing the number of abilities is not the only option you have available. Another option is to change the useless abilities to abilities that a player might have a use for. That's what I'm trying to do with the mod I'm working on anyhow (so long, Parley!).

Just one question so far: does anyone know the skill animation hex for Dragonheart? It isn't listed in data spreadsheets.

Otherwise I'm considering changing my Summoner's Bahamut skill animation to Silver Disc and renaming it CD Rom of Doom.

Since the previous post I've accomplished the following:

• Translated the ability proposals I had into a format aligned with the fields in Lennart's Ability Editor
• Tested an animation change

Next steps:

• Change jobs in job editor
• Change abilities in ability editor
• Change ability animations with goldfinger
• Retitle job/abilities in everything editor and make sure enemies have skills
• Edit equipment in Nightmare

Update - since the previous post I've accomplished the following:

• Took a stab at animations for new abilities
• Reassigned several R- and P-abilities
• Assigned abilities to equipment. With only a few exceptions, just about every weapon has at least one ability associated with it
• Tweaked some equipment stats
• Raised prices for just about every piece of equipment

Next step is to start implementing the proposed changes. Wish me luck; I'll post here if I run into problems (most likely with animations).

Update - since the first post I've accomplished the following:

• Came up with some high-level changes to equipment, mostly so mages' weapons will boost magick in a similar way that physical weapons boost attack
• Roughly categorized equipment types into early-, mid- and late-game
  
• Built out a table by job to show stat growths and stats at different levels. I used stats at levels 1, 10, 30, 60 and 99 as reference points
• Added stats including equipment to the table. Applied early-game equipment to levels 1 and 10, mid-game equipment to level 30 and late-game equipment to levels 60 and 99
• Determined stat growths. HP growths range from 5-9. MP growths from 1-6. ATK/DEF/MGK/RES from 5-9, with a handful of 10s (only 10s can hit the 999 base cap in raw stats). Jobs that have high ATK and MGK growth are likely to be glass cannons and have low DEF and RES growths. For example, in vanilla the Parivir has HP/MP/Spd/ATK/DEF/MGK/RES of 7/1/62%/11/7/6/5. The Cursed Blade job has 7/2/58%/10/5/7/5, and that's one of the very few jobs that can hit 999 in base ATK
• Determined monster stat growths to make them more competitive. Playable job stats growths should now underperform monster stat growths by 5%, whereas in vanilla they outperformed by 10-20%. However, when you factor in equipment, playable characters' stats should still roughly be +10% higher than monsters by end-game, which is down from +30% in vanilla
• Revisited monster elemental affinities. Plan of record is for tier 1 monsters (i.e. Sprite) to have weaknesses but for tier 2 monsters (i.e. Banshee) to have no weaknesses and additional resistances/immunities
• Also revisited elemental affinities for playable jobs
• Used MP stats to determine abilities' MP cost, power and accuracy
• Used the above to revisit some AP costs
• Determined range and AoE for abilities
• Also tweaked move, jump, evasion and resilience
• Created and executed a test plan for the "new" things I wanted to try. Results below
• Tweaked some abilities. Moved Mirror Items to Alchemist and decided on revised abilities for that set

Here's the most basic test plan I wanted to try out before locking down abilities. This is the first time I started tweaking things, so please let me know if you've tried these things out before and got different results; chances are I did something wrong.

• Space Mage - Gravity: can Yowie Draw In target more than one unit? Result: No. Recommendation: Keep as-is with a single target
• Space Mage - Repel: can Knockback target more than one unit at range? Result: No. Can Knockback knock back targets multiple spaces at once? Result: Kind of, but it's wonky and unpredictable. Can Knockback be used at range? Result: Sometimes, but not reliable. Recommendation: Set radius around user and increase AoE
• Raptor - Air Blast: can teleport target more than one unit? Result: No. Recommendation: Move teleport effect onto Whirlwind, move confuse effect to Air Blast
• Sorcerer - Last Stand: can Quicken target multiple units? Result: Yes. Recommendation: Keep as-is
• Alchemist - Wind Up: can Buckshot increase an attack's AoE (or range?) several times? Result: No. Recommendation: Remove

Next steps before I start implementing changes:

• Determine animations for new abilities
• Revisit which abilities are assigned to which equipment
• Review equipment stats and tweak as necessary (mostly the non-primary stats)

Last, I have some general questions about testing. How do you test your changes? What emulators do you use? What's the quickest way to test?

I've been using DeSmuME on my PC and it's really slow (Drastic on my Android phone is much faster). Is there another emulator you recommend, or if you use DeSmuME, a way to speed it up? (Edit: tried using this thing called Google. It's onto something. Problems solved.)

I also found that if I made a save state in DeSmuME, made some edits to the rom using Lennart's tools and then loaded the save state, the changes wouldn't be reflected (didn't test this super extensively). Instead, I needed to close the rom, reload it and work my way back into a battle again, which, combined with the slowness, was fairly time consuming.

Quote from: Chronovore on July 06, 2020, 01:51:18 pmHeavily restricted movement isn't fun. It's even worse on a melee character. It just makes them hard to use

Why is it not fun? I'd say that the vanilla game is too biased in favor of physical and against magick. Restricting heavy armor-wearing jobs' move and making light armor-wearing jobs into glass cannons seems like a good way to introduce more balance.

Quote from: Chronovore on July 06, 2020, 01:51:18 pm2. Forgive me for forgetting who it was but someone else tried assigning MP costs to everything. An important result was that Turbo MP became ridiculously powerful.

I can't remember the mod either, but I played it and had the same feedback. I think I said that all I needed to do was use it with Blitz, which dealt full damage in that mod, and it outperformed even a Geomancy-boosted Hoarfrost Blade. A couple points about how I'm designing this mod that might mitigate this:

• I'm trying to balance MP growth with costs in a way that would make this not feasible beyond a couple turns. If I recall correctly that mod had the vanilla FFTA2 MP regen every turn. I'm going with full MP from the start, no MP regen. I'm planning to set MP growth for pure physical jobs to 1, which will leave their MP at level 99 somewhere around 115. Jobs like Paladin and Ninja have an MP growth of 2, which would put their MP at level 99 around 210. Strict mages have a growth of 5 and the more utility-style mages have a growth of 3, which at level 99 will leave them with ~500-600 and ~300 MP, respectively. To use Blitz as an example, which tentatively will cost 8 MP, a level 30 Fighter (assuming no other class changes) will have 41 MP, which means that they'll only be able to use it 5x over the course of a battle. If they use it with MP Turbo, then it's down to 2x. The stat rework will make it difficult for any job to hit the 999 cap (I think there are 11 jobs that can max one stat among ATK/DEF/MGK/RES), so if you level the character as a mage for a few levels to gain MP, you're won't be able to make up your primary stat by the time you hit 99.
• If, after testing, MP Turbo still turns out to be game-breaking, then I'll yank it (I'll probably give it to Montblanc just for giggles).

Quote from: rrs_kai on July 03, 2020, 01:19:39 pmI was just comparing tanks to fast-moving offensive classes.

I agree with you. The remedy I'm going to try and pursue is to turn those classes into glass cannons

Quote from: Zeke_Aileron on July 03, 2020, 03:12:25 amAOE Cover actually breaks the game, i've tried this with my Mod before, lol.

You're missing some other stuff here as well...

I've attached the spreadsheets and an updated GF table, so hopefully these help....

Thanks, Zeke. The excel sheets make more sense now, but I'm not sure how to use the GF table. How is it different from the regular rom's hex?

Quote from: Zeke_Aileron on July 02, 2020, 04:06:47 amEternal's post of the attached notes.

Unfortunately the file is no longer available at that Sendspace location.

I downloaded the FFTA2 updated table.tbl file in one of the subsequent posts and opened it with Goldfinger, but all it seemed to do was to fill in some of the #s with characters. I wasn't sure what to make of it or how to use it.

Quote from: rrs_kai on July 02, 2020, 12:42:20 pmHere is my reasoning:
The AI generally targets units with lowest defense/resistance. If your heavy unit needs to draw fire, he needs to be the only one in range.
FFTA/A2 do not have any draw-attention or zone-of-control skills. So, defensive units are mostly the least preferred.

This is part of my reasoning behind lowering heavy armor equip jobs' move to 3 and making 4 the minimum range for spells. It should help keep mages at a distance while you march up your tanky characters. If tanks are the only ones in range, then the AI won't have a choice. The really "hard" fights are ones where the enemy targets all of your units, so a more defensive-oriented unit could be helpful.

I think my proposal for the Defender should give it more utility than before. Ideally Cover would apply to all units within an AoE, or the game would have a decoy-like skill.

Quote from: Zeke_Aileron on July 01, 2020, 03:48:18 pmStart with Max MP
BD180: B8 03 C4 E1
BD18C: 00 10 A0 E3
BEC44: BA 03 D5 E1

Bear with me because I'm really clueless when it comes to hex editing.

The first part of that line, the "BD180" - does that refer to the offset? And then the 4 hex codes after, "B8 03 C4 E1", does that imply that I should change the code I find starting at BD180 to those characters?

Similarly, for the MP channeling offset? 00321E30, when you say change it to 00 are you referring to the hex code that's found at that offset?

Quote from: Zeke_Aileron on July 01, 2020, 03:48:18 pmIt's easier to use the Nightmare Module.... if it works properly...;

I tried to use Nightmare to open the FFTA2 rom but I get an error message saying "an unnamed file was not found." Have you run into this before and do you know of a way to solve it? I seem to be able to load the modules in Nightmare just fine, and I can play the rom just fine. (EDIT: I solved this by... changing the name of the rom. Wat.)

Quote from: Zeke_Aileron on July 01, 2020, 03:48:18 pmYou look through the Animation table from Lennart's Notes and find the Hex index of the Ability you want to Change up

Where can I find the table and notes?

Quote from: rrs_kai on June 30, 2020, 01:36:19 pmMelee units with 3 move are not very useful

Can you help explain why this is the case? Heavy armor-wearing units are usually quite tanky, you can put them in the range of enemy melee units to draw fire and they get very strong beat sticks. Plus, even if their primary skill set doesn't have any ranged abilities you can usually give them ranged skills as a secondary (e.g. paladin/fighter, any bangaa melee/white monk). Since most mages have move 3, it's probably a matter of time before you can walk up to them and smash. The only potential weak spot would be against a ranged unit using light armor (4 move), assuming they can hit hard enough with physical weapons, or if there was a job that focused on weapon-range magick damage that you could put as a secondary skill set on a ranged physical unit. That could make for an interesting job.

Maybe there's a rock/paper/scissors to explore among heavy/light/magick armor, or tank/ranged/mage?

Quote from: Zeke_Aileron on June 29, 2020, 02:03:54 pmThis is doable in Hex Editing...

Thanks for the responses! I have a few follow up questions for you, thanks again in advance:

• How do I make the units start at max MP change in a hex editor?
• If it's difficult to disable the MP channeling/regen clan privileges, is it possible to instead set MP regen to 0, or remove the clan trial?
• How can I set MP regen to 0 (apart from the clan privilege - I think it's okay to ask players on this forum to avoid the clan privilege if it's too hard to implement)
• How do I reassign how Mirror Items works?
• How do I reassign abilities from one job to another? I was looking at Lennart's editor and for example, "Defend" has a race/index of hume/AD and bangaa/78, but then I looked at "Cover" and it has a race/index of hume/4E, so that index doesn't refer to the job. Should I use the FFta2TextEditor.jar that was included in the modding package?
• How do I edit equipment for FFTA2? I tried opening the rom file with Nightmare 2 that was included in the hacking suite and it didn't seem to work.
• How do I bind animations to abilities if I want to switch them up?

There are a lot of things I like about FFTA2: the variety, the sheer amount of content, the plot - I kid, I kid - but there are a number of things that strike me as less than ideal that I'd like to remedy. These include:

• The MP system punishes magick jobs and rewards physical ones
• Some of the jobs are too unbalanced
• Many of the jobs have a muddle of abilities, out of which you only need to use one or two; the rest are wasted
• While I'm no fan of hardtype mods, I find this game is too easy, even on Hard mode

At a global level, here are the changes I made:

• MP starts at max
• No MP regen (MP Channeling does nothing)
• All skills cost MP
• Magick spells have a range of no less than 4
• Debuff abilities' accuracy and damage vary by the severity and MP cost of the debuff
• Ultima is mostly gone
• Heavy armor-wearing jobs have 3 move
• Rebalanced job stat growths to remove clear-cut winners and losers
• Increased monster stat growths to roughly net out to characters stats + equipment and buff elemental resistances
• Rebalanced equipment so that mages' weapons give higher magick, not attack (unless this turns out to be too broken; I don't know what the damage formulas are)
• Equipment is more expensive than before
• Playable characters have inherent elemental resistances and weaknesses
• I don't know how to remove the halve MP clan privilege, but I tried te balance MP growths around not using it. All I can ask is scout's honor that you don't use the clan privilege

Outside of the global changes mentioned above, this is mostly a vanilla+ mod. I preferred to tweak, unless, in my opinion, a job or ability was untenable or undifferentiated enough. I nerfed some abilities and buffed others. I also did a lot more musical chairs - moving abilities one from job to another - than creating new jobs and abilities. There are physical jobs that specialize in every element (similar to the Raptor for wind). A changelog for jobs and abilities is below. If an ability isn't mentioned, it is unchanged. Nothing is final and I welcome your feedback.I'm looking for feedback on the following:

• Is there anything that's broken or freezes the game (I'll *try* to fix these ASAP)
• What jobs and abilities are OP to the point that you would never use anything else? On the flip side, what jobs and abilities are so bad that you'd never touch them (e.g. vanilla tinker)?
• How is the balance on the stat growths? Are jobs that can OHKO, like the Assassin, fragile enough? Do mages have too much MP growth that it's too easy to take a physical character and spend a couple levels as a mage to get enough MP?
• Where could the mod use additional polish (i.e. how apt are the skill animations)?

Here's what I'm dissatisfied with:

• Archer - unclear whether this job will be useful
• Space Mage - I wanted this job to manipulate ranges and AoEs. Would love to increase the AoE of Gravity and Repulse and have Repulse knock back several tiles
• Alchemist - couldn't get this skill set working properly as abilities to learn
• Idol - I wanted to focus this job around smash gauge mechanics, but couldn't figure out a way to manipulate them beyond what's in the ability editor (steal smash gauge)
• Psychic - I wanted to make this job like the Psychic in FFX-2, but I don't think there's a way to manipulate elemental resistances
• Green Mage - the skill set makes sense, but putting it on the vanilla Geomancer means by the time you unlock it you'll be up to the -ga spells so the others will be useless
• Couldn't remove the half MP clan privilege
• Not sure how to change the bazaar offerings - would like to remove the high-level equipment

You might want to check out Eternal's FFTA2 mod for pointers. I think he gave the Fighter a skill called Grapple that had the same draw in effect.

Congrats on the mod!

Could you maybe post a summary or more detailed log of the changes you made? I see different skills/jobs, and it looks like you increased the max number of units from 6 to 8 - did you similarly increase the number of units in enemy formations so the game isn't completely easy mode?

Sidewinder looks like it deals the same damage in the pre-attack estimate, but it follows up with a second hit not shown in the estimate. I had the same initial reaction as you.

Not sure about Doublehand, never used it.

I finally finished up a 300-quest run of this mod.

Overall you've done a great job and on the whole I preferred playing your mod to pure vanilla. Since your mod is close enough to vanilla I'm not going to comment on every little thing; here are the things that stood out to me:

• Luso/Keeper: Great overall class; the MP costs are high enough to stop you from spamming the strongest abilities. However, early in the game Free Energy is really powerful compared to the competition. Did you intend for Luso to have Elusion as a starting passive ability? It's really OP, especially against the Illua battles where she can take out half your party before you can move. It still leaves you vulnerable to Time Blade (although you can fix that with an accessory), but not much else. The one thing I kept wondering was what to pair this class with. I think I probably should have just stuck to Items since it does so much. Does anyone think otherwise?


• Adelle/Heritor: Thanks for buffing the Heritor's stats; I actually had a reason to level up and play as one for a change. The Heritor skillset still isn't too OP; I mostly stuck to dual wielding and used Lennart or Hilo when I couldn't get close enough. Similar to the Keeper, I wasn't sure what to pair this job with. Small nit: Lennart (and Scathe) have a 100% accuracy rate. Is that intentional?


• Bard: I wonder whether Angelsong at 12mp is still too cheap; as soon as you get MP Channeling that's almost always my opening move.


• MP costs: While I get the reasons for adding MP costs to most things, MP Turbo sort of blows everything up because it's usually more effective to use a tier-1 ability that's under 20mp with MP Turbo than it is to use a tier-2 ability that's under 20mp without MP Turbo, and there are a lot of tier-1 abilities under 20mp, if not 10mp, even when using MP Turbo. Is there a flag that could prevent MP Turbo from affecting some abilities? Outside of one character I avoided it because it seemed cheap, but it's definitely an easy way to breeze through the game.


• Parivir: I think the fire/ice/lightning blades when hitting an elemental weakness (or using Geomancy to do the same) edge out dual wielding, but just barely to the point that it might not be worth it anymore (probably not if you also consider potential Counter damage).


• Doublecast: I think you should revisit which spells are able to be doublecast. I planned on a Blue Mage / Seer to doublecast blue magick, but when I finally learned everything and tried it out, I could only doublecast Quake. I get why that made sense for Magick Frenzy, but I think you should be able to doublecast almost all, if not all, of the Blue skillset. In vanilla Red Mages could doublecast Protect, Shell and Silence, which are similar to the buffs and debuffs in the Blue skillset.


• Trickster: can't learn Arise from the Cheer Staff even though it's listed as a Bishop skill on the item. This was the biggest bug I found in my playthrough.


• Alchemist: probably more of a niche job now that relies on Bio for damage and Toad for status. I briefly tried pairing it with a Sage to make use of Hi-Ethers, but it didn't seem necessary with Halve MP. If I really wanted an item user, I'd probably slap Items on Luso or Adelle, as mentioned above.


• Sage: very glad that Ultima now has range


• Magick Frenzy: I struggled with how to build a unit with this skill. I ended up leveling as an Assassin because it looked like they had the highest combined ATK + MGK growths, but I never got my character up to level 99 to try it out with what I think would deal the highest damage, which is to pair Red Magick with a Summoner and wield a high-attack staff. The tier-1 red spells just aren't strong enough to be worthwhile (unlike the tier-2 spells on the Seer combined with dual wielding in vanilla).


• Moogles: I feel bad about asking for more, but this race is still pretty useless, with the exception of the awesome Juggler and Bard skills. Its stat growths are meh, and more importantly, it doesn't have any good passives. These guys could really use a couple worthwhile passives, or a skill like Doublecast.


• Mog Knight: Hidden Mog is pretty underpowered, especially with its MP costs. Seemed like a downgrade from Ultima Charge.


• Raptor: This class became a one-trick pony for me with Thunder Flare, which, when combined with Unscarred, does obscene amounts of damage. However, without MP Channeling or that skill, the job is pretty underwhelming. I intended to level up my Raptor to 99 before flipping it into a Hunter with Devastation as a secondary, but never got there. The loss of the Raptor's other ranged options hurt it a decent amount (unless you primary with a ranged weapon).

That's all I have for now. Thanks again!

@Leonarth: I know you're focused on FFTA, but do you foresee eventually getting around to FFTA2? The bazaar could really use a randomizer.

One question about Megido: does it divide the unit's HP damage over the enemy units, or does it deal full HP damage to each enemy unit? If the latter, if you assume that the unit's HP is similar to the enemies', then wouldn't the skill be really overpowered?

Thanks for your continued work on this!