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FFT: Complete Main Info thread

Started by Cheetah, April 07, 2009, 11:52:40 pm

Sephirot24

April 09, 2009, 09:07:20 pm #40 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Sephirot24
I vote for:

-Leaving guests as it is. What's the problem with guests? You can't train them, but you can choose their Gear and Job. Seems fair.

-Leaving crystal learning thing as it is. Think about it, you don't learn all abilities. You HAVE A CHANCE of learning abilities. Read the BMG. It's a different % per ability. You don't have 100% chance of learning Hamedo or Damage Split. You'll never get all the abilities you want to learn.

-Oil actually making you weak to fire is an obvious fix. And float making you weak to wind is actually a standard thing in FFs. It's a doble edged sword: you are immune to earth but weak to wind. I think it'd be nice to put it in.

Smitson

April 09, 2009, 09:07:27 pm #41 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Smitson
I dont know about the leveling thing. This was just putting all the PSP stuff on the PSX with some minor fixes. Changes like that have a huge impact on the game...

Kourama

April 09, 2009, 09:28:37 pm #42 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Kourama
Quote from: "Cheetah"Discussion Topics:
1) In your opinion, what are the top 10 most broken things about FFT PSX US? Just personal opinions from everyone to see what people think.

2) This is going to be a tough decision for me and plays into the previous topic. I want to be making few changes to the core game, but what do people think about making all enemies for story battles party level or slightly higher at later levels? Not something I really want to do, but I think it would make the difficulty of the game a bit more consistent.

1)

- Calculator Skillset
- Incredibly powerful Knight Swords that can be dual-wielded
- Innate Haste items
- Innate Reraise items
- Holy Sword Skillsets 100% accuracy, no charge/mp, and good damage
- Throwing items
- Br/Fa modification effect on gameplay
- Dual Wield Monks / Martial Arts Ninja

There's more but I don't feel like thinking.

2) I think changing there levels is a good idea. Overleveling can be easily done by anyone who wants to grind a bit to learn some moves or change to a more ideal job, which in turn makes the game a lot easier.


My biggest issue in terms of gameplay with the PSX version is how some things are so much better to use than others.

Monk, Samurai, Summoner probably have the most useful skillsets in the game due to the diversity of their abilities.

Some sets of weapons are crappy compared to others. For example, knives are pretty much worthless for any job that has an alternative. Most of the staves in the game are rather useless. Crossbows are outclassed by a gun + shield. Axes, bags and flails have random damage although flails at least can have high damage.

I guess I just wish the game gave you more incentive to use a more diverse group of jobs without making the game artificially harder for yourself. I think there are many solutions for this but I wanted to know what other people thought about this.

FFMaster

April 09, 2009, 09:51:26 pm #43 Last Edit: April 09, 2009, 10:17:14 pm by FFMaster
Thanks for adding me to the list. I hope someone who knows the PSP script very well joins as well, since all I can pick up are large and obvious bugs.

My specialty - abusing overpowered skills =) Beware as this may become very long as I type this!

Number 1 - MP Switch
Yes, that's right, not Blade Grasp. MP Switch has a lot of uses. On a non-mage unit, its takes a free hit. With Move-MP Up or even worse, Angel Song, you effectively have a unit that is close to immortal.
Suggestion - If it is feasible (ie. not really hard), only let MP Switch reduce damage by the current MP. Very bad wording so I'll give an example. Say my Time Mage has 50 current MP and is about to take 70 damage. MP Switch would take 50 damage, and the Time Mage would lose 50 MP and 20 HP.

Number 2 - Brave/Faith modifications
This was what truly made Blade Grasp ridiculous. With the 97/03 setup, you are immune to almost all forms of attack. A few things that can break through are Elemental and Draw Outs.
Suggestion - Make all Brave/Faith mods temporary.

Number 3 - Blade Grasp
What most people would put at Number 1. This ability stops almost every physical attack. It just stops too much.
Suggestion - Not too sure, maybe just reduce the things it can stop to Swords/Katanas/Ninja Swords? It might still be too powerful though. I need to think on this.

Number 4 - Calculators
This class is just stupid. There is really not much I can say about it. Everyone should know how powerful this class is.
Suggestion - The whole core of this class is flawed. Change it completely.

Number 5 - Degenerator Traps
Max stats in everything is crazy. Works well with Calculator.
Suggestion - Either remove the traps or remove different stat growths.

Number 6 - Sword Skills
Sword Skills take over the game once you get Agrias. The skills are much too powerful in every way.
Suggestion - Make them evadable and reduce their damage at least.

Number 7 - Equipment
Some need to be weakened massively. Chantage, Robe of Lords, Chaos Blade, Excalibur among others.
Suggestion - Do what 1.3 did. Change Always Haste/Reraise to become Initial Haste/Reraise. Nerf the powerful equipment.

Number 8 - Level 99 Speed
Around this time, mages have trouble getting spells off. Short Charge is basically a must on any caster at this point.
suggestion - No idea

Number 9 - Gained JP UP
Just remove this

That would be about everything that would be too powerful in my opinion.
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LastingDawn

April 09, 2009, 10:08:17 pm #44 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by LastingDawn
For Number 08,  Zodiac made a CT Hack, which balances the Mage's loss of speed with their level gain, in their attacks.
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Sephirot24

April 09, 2009, 10:10:57 pm #45 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Sephirot24
To have a balanced FFT Base Patch you'd pretty much have to make it 1.3 but without the difficulty level...

Also Blade Grasp didn't protect you from arrows, so it didn't make it worthless; specially for mages and in early chapters.

SentinalBlade

April 09, 2009, 10:14:35 pm #46 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by SentinalBlade
Quote from: "LastingDawn"For Number 08,  Zodiac made a CT Hack, which balances the Mage's loss of speed with their level gain, in their attacks.

Why is that not posted yet? O.o

Aquilae

April 09, 2009, 10:20:33 pm #47 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Aquilae
1)

- Calculator Spells - This essentially wipes out the whole map, only using the MP Cost of one spell and not requiring a charging time.

- Br / Fa modification - These make Br% reaction abilities too good, such as Blade Grasp or Hamedo. Low Faith also means enemy mages do piddly damage. Maybe cap them at a certain level, or remove almost all Br/Fa mods like 1.3 did.

- Swordskills - Nerf them, 100% accuracy, good range with no drawback instantly makes them broken.

- Specific equipment - Excalibur and Chantage are the first things that come to mind, these items provide Always : Haste or Always : Reraise, essentially making your units superpowered. They could be nerfed, like in 1.3 when some of the statuses were made Initial instead of Always.

- Blade Grasp - Having it essentially makes all physical attacks useless, with 03 Faith the only things that would harm you are Draw Outs, Elemental and Dance (not sure if I missed out anything).

- MP Switch + Move MP-Up - It is pretty obvious, it makes you nigh invincible against fights with only one enemy

- Transparent units & Trans block - It isn't viable or necessary in most maps, but Transparency allows you to block a tile that would stop the enemy from approaching your other units, and let them boost their stats to insane levels. With Transparent on your units you could take your time to move to any place in the map. Transparency should be nerfed or limited to a few items.

- Degenerator traps - Abusing these traps to max out stats is quite broken, although not really necessary. Just remove these traps from the game.

Thats all I can think of.

2) If you want to keep to the original way of doing things then keep the levels of the enemies set. If not then you should make them scale with the party.
:gay:

beawulfx

April 09, 2009, 10:25:27 pm #48 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by beawulfx
I definitely support removing gained jp up. One of my least favourite aspects of vanilla. I love the way 1.3 handled that by lowering jp costs across the board and just eliminating that damn skill.
My FFT 1.3030 videos can be found at; http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p ... 18EFFEA0AD
My FFT: Mercenaries videos can be found at; http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p ... 174F169EE5
My FFV Random Class Challenge videos can be found at; http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p ... C9F3BD69BF

Dominic NY18

April 09, 2009, 10:50:35 pm #49 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Dominic NY18
FFMaster, I know the PSP script pretty well. I just don't have a PSX game save I can use to make sure everything is correct. Any ideas? I'm thinking about finding some game saves with hacked characters so I can check things quickly.

IMO, if Gained JP Up is eliminated, then JP costs need to be reduced all around. And by significantly more than they were in 1.3, if folks are thinking in that direction. Or make it an innate ability.

The ideas in this thread seem to sound more and more ambitious.

Finally, this isn't a big issue, but it should be mentioned anyway. Two of the perfume accessories have been renamed:

Setiemson is now Septième
Salty Rage is now Sortilége

The thing is the PSX version doesn't recognize characters with diacritics. Not a huge deal, but it's something that I noticed when doing the edits.

Cheetah

April 09, 2009, 10:54:06 pm #50 Last Edit: April 09, 2009, 11:05:06 pm by Cheetah
Keep them coming. For now I am not into making any big decisions about this stuff because I am still trying to figure out how FFT: Complete will be put together. But I want to hear what people opinions so that I at least know what to think about. It will be hard though because my natural instinct will be to do "more more more", but this project is meant to be a base that others can work off of.

Skill Crystals: Wait is that true about the percentage to learn, just because a skill is listed doesn't mean you automatically get it? Or is it that the skill will only show up in the list a certain percent of the time? Also do you only learn all the skills if you choose the last one, or do you always learn all the skills on the list?
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FFMaster

April 09, 2009, 10:56:43 pm #51 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by FFMaster
The skills only show up a certain percent of the time. If you save state abuse, you can get different skills. You learn everything on the list, no matter what skill you choose.

EDIT: I'll make a save file with super strong units for people to use. Something like Non-charge Astrologists or something.
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Cheetah

April 09, 2009, 11:04:36 pm #52 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Cheetah
Skill Crystals: Hmm well then I guess that doesn't sound like a glitch. I'm not sure where I got that theory. Well I will keep thinking on this but it is sounding less likely.

Oh and for all testers I would recommend this site as a resource for game saves, it basically has a save before every story battle:
http://www.fantasyanime.com/finalfantas ... _saves.htm
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FFMaster

April 09, 2009, 11:08:33 pm #53 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by FFMaster
Oh excellent. That will help me dramatically for a lot of things. *bookmarks*
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Dominic NY18

April 09, 2009, 11:10:00 pm #54 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Dominic NY18
That's exactly what I needed. Thanks.

SilvasRuin

April 09, 2009, 11:36:14 pm #55 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by SilvasRuin
1.  Not in any particular order.
Move-MP Up:  MP switch or whatever it is called isn't the broken ability.  This is.  One of two abilities that mages seem to need to be formidable late game, but if they're made into better glass cannons, I don't believe this would be an issue.

Charge Times:  Particularly for spells, the faster units get, the more useless abilities with decent charge times get.  Making them increase at least a little bit with speed will help somewhat, but then you run the risk of making a unit too powerful with extremely quick charge times.  Maybe there's a happy medium or an alternative?  Another huge point with this is that often not enough power is delivered to justify the charge time, and using instant attacks almost always wind up preferable eventually.  Magic is the big culprit there for the most part, and needs to have more bang for its charge so to speak, especially to be desirable in the late-game.

Weapons with 20 or higher WP:  This should be self explanatory.  There is very little reason to use any other weapon.  Really, most weapons need adjusting, but I don't think any that use character stats should go over 20 in any way.  The magic guns might be an exception, but I don't recall their WP.

Permanent Reraise:  Really as others have said, most permanent effects are too potent.  Initial will still give the boost, but it can be dispelled at least.

Calculators

Blade Grasp:  Remove its ability to block ranged attacks and it will be fine.  Alternatives will be able to compete at that point.  Hamedo, first strike, or whatever it is called might wind up replacing it as king of counters though, in that case.

Permanent changes to Faith and Brave:  Hey, if slowly buffing attack while hanging back is balanced, so is slowly buffing Brave and Faith.  Make it so it has to be done over every battle and it won't be such an issue.  You'll want to limit how much abilities can raise or lower them, however.  The talk skill that lowers faith is really potent.

Sword Skills:  I have no idea how to balance the crush skills against normal Knight break attacks, but the rest could use some tweaks.  Limiting it to the power a normal weapon strike would have would be the first step.  If you don't want any of them to become obsolete, you could justify giving each skill a different element but the same range and AoE.  This will destroy the line attack though.  Could balance that as a special case.  Limiting them all to only one AoE (other than the line attack) will also keep the skills from dominating everything, and spells will at least have an AoE advantage if nothing else.

Knight's Swords:  If they really must be more powerful than everything else, make them two-handed.  Additionally, make sure two-handed weapons are worth sacrificing a shield or dual-wielding for.

Invisibility:  Will not work any way like what Vanilla has it as.  My suggestion is to turn it into a Blink effect.  Turn it into what Defend normally does for evasion, and then make Defend a damage reduction.  Doubling evasion will still make them able to "sneak around," but they won't be invincible anymore.  In my opinion, it is close enough to the original intent that it would not be that drastic a change.

2.  Do it.  Look at it this way, while Ramza trains his ass off, would his enemies sit on their butts and atrophy?  I really don't think so.  As your characters grow stronger, let all Ivalice grow with them.

Kaijyuu

April 10, 2009, 12:24:01 am #56 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Kaijyuu
I agree with most of the stuff here. A few things I don't:

Brave/Faith modifications. I think they should stay in. What's stupid, is how ridiculously high/low you can make them. Cap both at 30/70, if possible.
I really, really, really don't like the idea of sitting at the soldiers office for hours getting the "perfect" generic unit. Having to find the right zodiac signs is bad enough.

Math Skill. I like the idea. I don't like the lack of charge times/MP costs. Give each math skill'd spell their charge time and double the MP cost.

Sword Skills. I don't think they should be evadable. Their biggest benefit is reliability. Nerf the damage. No multi-hit ability with 0 charge time/mp cost should hit harder than a regular attack, especially if it's unevadable.

MP Switch. I don't think it's inherently overpowered. Combine it with MP gaining stuff (move mp up, singing, chakra), though, and it then gets ludicrous.
A single free hit on a physical fighter isn't overpowered for a reaction ability. Weapon guard with a defender or nagrarock can deflect more damage.
Get rid of move mp up, and take the mp gain off of chakra. With the previously mentioned limit on brave, it's still a powerful reaction ability with Angel Song, but it doesn't make you invunerable. I'd also give Life/Angel song, and Wiznabus/witch hunt a chance to miss, with a slight boost to healing/damage/mp gain/mp loss to compensate.




Things I agree with:

Blade Grasp. Limit it to blades, and with the previously mentioned cap on brave, it'll be fine.

Inherent item buffs. Make them initial.

Knight Swords. Lower the attack power. Rest is fine, what with only initial status buffs.

Charge Times are a severe limitation at 99 without short charge. A reduction to charge times across the board would be a good enough fix, I think.

Gained JP/Exp up are stupid abilities. Make JP up inherent to everyone, and get rid of exp up.

Invisibility. Simply put, broken. I say just give it a 1 turn max duration and it's good, but there's lots of other viable alternatives.


Few things of my own:

Orlandu. I don't know what to do with him, but if his strength is going to be versatility, he better be damn weak in power. I removed holy explosion/icewolf bite from his skillset in my hack; gives him versatility but lacks the better swordskills. Probably should take lightning stab away from him too.

Chapter 4 Difficulty curve. It's pathetic. I had a challenge going through it in the high 20s on my last playthrough, but anyone properly leveled will steamroll every single battle that doesn't have a gimmick (stealing from elmdor, and learning zodiac).

Charge (archer skillset) has some flat out useless charges. I honestly don't know what to do with this. Take away the higher ones and you will have neutered the skillset; even though you only took out worthless abilities. Give them something else in addition.

Having to raise uribos for ribbons/FS bags. Put a wild boar somewhere in a random battle.

Infinite Yoichi bows/magical guns. Take them out of random battles.

Silver Javelin/Golden Escutcheon. Replace them with interesting, non-overpowered items. They're boring and stupid currently.

Catching rare items. No, just no.
  • Modding version: PSX

Cheetah

April 10, 2009, 12:29:37 am #57 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Cheetah
Dominic: Sorry for not responding to this earlier. Have you looked through the font file to ensure that characters with diacritics don't exist anywhere? Also how many cases are there were they are needed, or is it just the perfumes? Frankly if it is just the perfumes I don't give a shit. If there are more cases of this I think either I or Melonhead should be able to find a pretty easy fix. For now just keep track of which characters with diacritics you need and for what. Also Dominic is there anything I can do to help supply you with more of the PSP text information? I don't know what you are using as a resource right now.
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Dominic NY18

April 10, 2009, 12:52:56 am #58 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Dominic NY18
I haven't looked in the font file, but I didn't think I needed to because whenever I tried to make the change to the PSX text, the editor won't let me move on until I change that character. IIRC, a similar thing happened with the original text editor.

And it's just the perfumes that have diacritics. So it's no biggie if you don't bother with them.

As for the PSP text, I'm just going off of what I remember off of the top of my head. For what I don't remember or I'm not sure about, I just take a look at a clean WOTL ISO in the editor. I'm doing okay for the moment.

Cheetah

April 10, 2009, 01:04:40 am #59 Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 pm by Cheetah
Well it is a relief that it is just the perfumes, so I wont worry about it. Though I'm sure if we brought it to Melonhead's attention he might add it to the next release.

Well that seems like as good a method as any Dominic, tell me if you can think of anything that would speed things up for you.
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