Casting Time and Speed Growth [Now with balancing]

[RandMuadDib]

Alright i know a lot of you guys try to reduce speed growth to zero in your patches. I was wondering why. personally i plan on (once FDC's formula hack is complete) use speed as almost a third damage type, having it grow similarly to MA and PA instead of slower like it does in vanilla. As long as everyone had comparable growths (with some obvious exceptions like lancer, thief, and ninja), what would the problem be?

The only thing i could come up with are skills requiring casting time. Those are based on clockticks and not speed, so in late game even casting a level 1 spell would take forever, making both players and AI greatly favor fast actions. I did find a hack a while back that allowed spells (and other slow abilities) to have their casting times reduced based on speed, though i forget where i found it.

So, what do you think? are there other balance issues with a higher all-around speed growth that i am not seeing?

Also, if anyone knows where that casting time reduced by speed stat ASM hack was, could you point me to it? I tried searching for it again and i couldn't find it.

[The Damned]

I don't recall such an ASM, so I can't point to it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exists, though, since it's very possible I've forgotten (if I ever saw it at all).

As for the other problems with higher speed growth, there's status and, far less important, Jump & Throw functions. The higher speed gets, the "longer" (read: more turns) that status lasts.

You know how in vanilla (and, well, 1.3 since it's not like Speed was modified on any class except for Sage) casting Haste in early game was pretty pointless because you'd only get like one turn out of it? Yet obviously Haste is pretty invaluable late game because you essentially almost double the amount of turns you get before it turns off? Imagine if Haste essentially tripled your turns because you had speed so high for the necessary formulas.

This applies to negative status even more, really. I mean, Don't Act basically becomes another status that's KO. Sleep, Slow and Charm similarly become ridiculous.

Jump and Throw would obviously require different formulas not to become absurd, though it's more of problem with Throw's damage than Jump's landing speed.

There's probably other things I'm forgetting, but giving everyone more or less equal greater speed doesn't fix the above problems at least, even if the late-game charging problem still exists.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Formula Hack V2 will include modular CT to address this issue.

[RandMuadDib]

woohoo! Does that mean that we can set the duration of status effects for each ability, or does that mean casting times are adjustable based on some value such as level or speed?

As to the status things taking longer, i plan on having the item command innate, and IIRC, the AI has an unlimited supply of items. And while remedy still won't heal stop, I thought that RavenOfRazgriz's idea of making people who are stopped ignore attacks was an awesome idea.

Although... now that i think about it... making items innate will probably make using status attacks as the player completely useless.

Edit: lol found it. Its one of FFTMaster's hacks "Ability CT reduced by stat XX"
http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=5658.0

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Ability CT, not Status CT.

You can just change Remedy to not heal a ton of Status and your problem there is solved.

FFMaster's hack affects all CTs universally.  The V2 Formula Hack will allow "standard" CT, Speed based CT, PA/MA based CT, and I think 4 other things I honestly don't remember right now.   I think one of them was Level.

[RandMuadDib]

Wow that's a lot of new options that totally rock.

Edit: It seems i wasnt thinking properly when i first posted this thread. I did want to know why people were against increasing speed, so i guess its okay. But what i plan on actually doing is reducing PA, MA, and WP to more closely resemble SP, thus making SP a viable attack stat. I also want the less damage. In an attempt to balance my patch i want 5 normal attacks to be the equivalent of a KO, with both attacker and target being physical classes. HP growth will also have to be altered to match this.

Class abilities that deal damage to a single target will mostly deal between 1x and 2.5x a normal attack, while abilities with AoE, status, or other additional effects will deal less.

Any thoughts or comments on balancing would be wonderful.

[RandMuadDib]

alright well it looks like i've managed to balance the sp/pa/ma stats. fast/strong/magic classes go from sp/pa/ma of 7 to 14 over the course of 99 levels, where slow/weak/mundane go from 5 to 10. using FFTMaster's hack/new formula hacks the speed difference shouldn't be too big of a problem. Now i'm just stuck on HP. An average damage dealer with a basic attack should deal 144 at level 99. 5 attacks makes 720 hp. trying to decide if i should have HP growth the same among all classes and just have different multipliers, or if i should do both.

[pokeytax]

Well, maybe you already realize it, but let me point something obvious out: SP generates extra turns, while MA and PA do nothing but let you hit harder. If you have a unit with 14 Speed and 10 PA versus a unit with 10 Speed and 14 PA, and they're using 10 WP weapons, the unit with 14 Speed will do 40% more damage over time simply because she gets more turns.

Even if you balance the damage, perhaps by giving speed weapons 70% WP, using fast units is an advantage because of actions that don't depend on PA/MA/Speed. They can sandbag faster with Item, cleanse status faster, Secret Fist faster. They also are more flexible; they have more mobility, can interrupt charging mages, etc.

I don't mean to dissuade you from using Speed as a main statistic, it's a neat road that lets you build classes that feel different. But there are two separate issues: "Exponential Speed growth and constant CT make status more powerful and slow actions less powerful in the endgame" and "Speed is the best stat". Using a hack solves the first but not the second; you need to address it through game design by treating Speed differently from MA/PA.

[RandMuadDib]

I see. That "speed is the best stat" is a good point. I was also thinking about how Robes, given to magical classes, could grand MagicDefUp, and Heavy Armor, given to physical classes, would grant Defense Up. Then light armor, given to speed classes, wouldn't grant a special ability. That would help to even it out but not necessarily enough. Might have to give MA and PA a 17% boost to account for the turn difference as well. Doesnt help that RSP starts higher than both RPA and RMA.

[formerdeathcorps]

Except the first half of Pokeytax's argument is invalid.

If Guy A has a sword of 10 WP and 10 PA and 14 SP, and Guy B has a sword of 10 WP and 14 PA and 10 SP, and all they could do is attack, then their average damage output is the same.  Guy A will average 40% more hits, and Guy B hits 40% harder than Guy A every time he gets a hit.  It's just that at 100% accuracy, their lethality ranges are different.
If both guys have HP < 100, then Guy A wins.
If both guys have 100 < HP < 140, then Guy B wins.
If both guys have 140 < HP < 200, then Guy A wins.
If both guys have 200 < HP < 280, then Guy B wins.
If both guys have 280 < HP < 420, then Guy A wins (this accounts for the double turn).
...

The reason why SP > PA >> MA in FFT is actually this:

1) The AI is an idiot and always moves and acts, when possible.  This, on top of higher player SP on ninjas and other classes, leads to double turning very easily.
2) SPD granting gear is often some of the best in the game for their tier.  Most SPD classes tend to be mobile (ninja, thief) or PA-heavy (mime, ninja)  1.3 didn't really help with fixing this.

3)

using fast units is an advantage because of actions that don't depend on PA/MA/Speed. They can sandbag faster with Item, cleanse status faster, Secret Fist faster. They also are more flexible; they have more mobility, can interrupt charging mages, etc.

Essentially...+/- status are a lot more dependent on the Y value than your PA/MA/SP stat.  This is even more true for potions.  Hence, the faster unit can run, heal, or use other tricks to outlast the slower unit with heavier damage, which is why the simulation (even when adjusted for higher PA) that Pokeytax made means nothing; the faster unit doesn't just have to attack on his extra turn.

4) PA >> MA because PA dependent weapons exceed MA dependent weapons in WP (with sticks being the only exception), MA classes have bad move, HP, and evasion, while knights have only the movement penalties.  Furthermore, most PA dependent damage skills are either PA * (PA + Y) / 2 or PA * (WP + Y), meaning that they scale quadratically to PA or deal extra damage if PA or WP is increased (which until Chapter 4 is essentially quadratic as you upgrade your gear and level up); while most magic is MA * Y * FAith, which means that the increases in magical damage is linear as you level up.  Moreover, the massive AoE on magic rarely hits as many targets as the panels indicate (while more instant variants like GEOMANCY or HOLY SWORD can deal more damage late game, inflict status, and not miss in FFT).  Magical status, however, isn't the sole property of mages because (MA + Y) * Faith means that Faith and the Y value predominate over MA...hence why ninjas and knights can also effectively use haste and golem.  This causes status to become super powerful by late game (when physical units gain enough MP from level ups to cast such spells and when such statii start lasting longer due to increased SP).  Lastly, mages must charge (which independent of their SP) and use MP (limiting their total use of magic per battle without MP healing, which either wastes a movement ability or a turn), at the risk of 0% evasion and 2x mid-charge, a penalty physical units do not need to incur (whose turns are dependent on SP and can spam sword attacks indefinitely).  Thus, by late-game, the powerful spells never hit without short-charge (meaning no MATKUP), and the weaker spells even with MATKUP don't do enough (while physicals can spam haste [the physical equivalent of short charge] and attack up or two swords/hands).  However, magic literally can rip apart the early game, so it's not entirely weak.

This being said, I personally see no reason to remove SP growth.  It, like overly high WP (40 on Chaos Blade and 50 on Onion Sword) and PA, can be balanced without removal.

[pokeytax]

Well, I was specifically addressing Rand's patch, which I read as featuring Speed as a "prime attribute" for attacks, with damage comparable to MA and PA based attacks. If attacks are still based on MA and PA then there's no DPS problem (although as noted fast units are still better).

I wholeheartedly agree that Speed is not "broken" and can be balanced, even using it as a determinant of damage, if you address the constant CT issue with slow actions and statuses via a hack. You just can't do what vanilla FFT does and treat 1 SP as more or less equal to 1 MA. (Two Swords innate on the fastest class... this is the way!).

[RandMuadDib]

To solve the charge/magic weapons suck problem, I'm using xifs 'everyone gets skillset A9' hack and adding Ruin from ffxiii, a short range radius zero nonelemental magic attack that uses no mp or ct. It will have to be properly balanced of course and I haven't quite gotten that far, but there it is. And poketax is right I do plan on having a variety of sp-based attacks