Final Fantasy Hacktics

Why are we using maps like Hospital in the Slums?  Those maps were weeded out last season.

Quote from: formerdeathcorps on June 01, 2011, 11:03:30 pm
Tornadoes?  I hope you're all right.
Pierce, to be honest, the loser's bracket shouldn't be posted until all of the winner's bracket is done.  This way, there's less confusion.

I'm willing to upload my matches as soon as I get them (time permitting) to speed things along.  The loser's and winner's brackets were uploaded in parallel last season, and that season took long enough.

As another minor change, the ninja skillset "ninjitsu" should be written "ninjutsu."

I have another suggestion that's slightly more benign.  Can the JP cost on stat recovery items be lowered to, say, 80 apiece?  This will allow item users to be on status duty without feeling the JP crunch.  Expanding recovery options will help once monsters hit the field.

Quote from: "PX_Timefordeath"If the success rate is 30% at 70/40 faith, that says just how high the actually % to land is. If it were 70/70, I'm sure it'd hit every time. Do you want Paralyze/Sleep/Petrifies hitting 40 faith units at a 60% rate? That's just retarded, as it'll ruin the metagame.

See my table above.  A 70 Fa target with MEv will take a chunk out of the success rate.  The success rate of Paralyze on a 70 Fa 0 MEv target for a 11 Ma 70 Fa oracle is roughly 90%.  Sleep is just above 80%.  Petrify is 65%.  They're not going to hit every time.  Against a 40 Fa target, by the way, the success rates are 51%, 41%, and 37%.  The spells are currently so unreliable against 40 Fa targets as to be useless.    When they do hit, the enemy can cure the ailment in one turn (and free of charge with items or Stigma Magic).  How is this any more imbalanced than one-shot Flare or Secret Fist?  A 70 Fa target is going to kiss the floor every time from a high-powered 100% accuracy Flare spell and force its team into sandbag mode, and all targets without death protection, no matter how powerful, will fall to the high-accuracy Secret Fist.

Of course 70 Fa targets will be vulnerable to Yin Yang magic; they're vulnerable to all other forms of magic as well.  There are so many lovely pieces of equipment that provide status protection: Gold Helmet, Gold Armor, Green Beret, Golden Hairpin, and so on.  Stop building status protection into the poor success rate and give players a reason to use them, or they'll default to stat boosting gear as they are now.

Quote from: "FFMaster"Also, if you are planning to use MA gear and MAUP for Oracle, you need to rethink it.

I was using max Ma and MagicAtkUP to demarcate the extreme.  Of course full Ma gear is silly.

Quote from: "FFMaster"At least 50% to cripple at least 1 unit for 2 turns, 4 range, and a small cast time(might use Short Charge here to speed things up, or maybe Defense UP), while having great HP(maybe some status protection instead, but whatever floats your boat) for a mage since you don't need the MA gear that much.

I agree.  In deference to the effect of other forms of magic against 40 Fa targets, a 50% chance to inflict a 40 Fa target with Don't Act is decent.  That is the best case, however.  Give the 40 Fa target a shield and the success rate goes south.  Hence, I suggest that Yin Yang magic ignores MEv.  Also, there's no reason to assume that the enemy will be afflicted with the status for two turns.  The AI is keen on curing status ailments.  A well built team should be able to cure status ailments on the fly, anyway.

This is how I break it down.  In the ideal case, the oracle spends one turn inflicting the status ailment and an enemy spends one turn curing it.  The net gain is zero.  Currently, the oracle has a 50% chance of failing (sticking with the 40 Fa target here).  The oracle initiates the offense, yet the oracle has a 50% chance of putting its own team down a turn right from the start, and that's before considering MEv and status protection!  In the real case, the success rate is less than 50%.  The oracle is now a liability.  By ignoring MEv, the oracle's chance to succeed does not dip below 50% for even the worst of targets (unless it's Petrify or Sleep, and rightly so, since those status effects are more dangerous).  Initiative now favours the oracle, as it rightly should, because luck is on its side.  In addition, Ma now possesses greater efficacy in increasing success rate on average.

Quote from: "CT5Holy"I'll also admit that 40 Faith teams can use element absorb as another way to heal, but that requires a lot of specialization, and mages are quite useful in that regard (better DO damage/healing, Black Magic)

Draw Out is an effective way to heal 40 Fa teams.  All it requires is one piece of equipment that absorbs an element on all characters.  This immunizes your team from your enemy's use of the element as a bonus.  Admittedly, options are limited to fire and wind absorption.

Quote from: "CT5Holy"Not many ways to have AoE damage - Draw Out, Elemental, that's basically it.

And both Draw Out and Elemental are two of the most potent forms of offense.  These abilities ignore Brave and Faith modifiers, which, in my opinion, breaks the system for everything else (unless the abilities are made incredibly weak or "unbuffable"), but this is all going off on a tangent.

Sorry for picking apart your posts, everyone.  Quoting simply helps me keep my rebuttals from being too wordy, which they evidently already are.

By 25%, I was referring to the Y value.  1.3's formulas are Hit_F(Ma+185%) and Hit_F(Ma+170%) for Paralyze and Sleep, respectively.  FFTA's formulas are Hit_F(Ma*2+160%) and Hit_F(Ma*2+145%), respectively.  The point I am trying to make is that nerfs to Yin Yang magic make a weak skill set only weaker.  The calculations I proceeded to write (which I was haplessly retrofitting as you posted) show that any contribution Ma has to the success rate is dwarfed by the target's Fa and MEv, so changing Ma to Ma*2 is inconsequential.  The target's parameters decide the oracle's effectiveness, and not the oracle's own as it were, so a bad success rate stays bad.  Setting the standard using 70 Fa targets is flawed when nothing keeps the player from making 40 Fa teams.

The mainstays, Paralyze and Sleep, are reduced by 25%.  MA*2 recoups 1% per point of MA, so an oracle would need 25 MA to be back to where it was before.  The female Oracle has 11 Ma, so Paralyze and Sleep are at negative 14% prior to equipment bonuses.  Recouping the remaining 14% would require a full set of Ma equipment and MagicAtkUP, which would leave the oracle very fragile.  Again, this is at 70 Fa, so the oracle is susceptible to magic damage, unlike the geomancer.

The weakness is compounded with the lack of a minimum Fa requirement.  Removal of the requirement incidentally buffs physical-based teams that can afford to keep all members' Fa at 40.  These teams can forfeit status protection with no fear for the oracle.  Case in point: Pride's double draw out team has no status protection (aside from slow) and sticks together to take advantage of full-party healing.  One would think oracles threaten that arrangement.  However, an oracle with full Ma gear and MagicAtkUp (which, by the way, leaves the Oracle paper thin) has only a ~50% chance of inflicting the samurai with Don't Act.  The Oracle cannot do its own job at exploiting Pride's team's weakness.

What I might suggest, at the very least, is making Yin Yang spells ignore MEv.  I say this after considering the numbers:

Oracle with 70 Fa
24 Ma attained with MagicAtkUP

40 Fa target
Ma (oracle)  MEv (target)    Paralyze %     Sleep %
     18           0              55           51
     24           0              58           54
     18          25              41           38
     24          25              44           41

70 Fa target
Ma (oracle)  MEv (target)    Paralyze %     Sleep %
     18           0              96           89
     24           0             100           95
     18          25              72           67
     24          25              76           71

I didn't truncate values mid-calculation, so I might be off by a percent or two.  Evidently, the target's MEv affects the success rate more than the oracle's Ma ever will, and the change is only greater for higher Fa targets.  Keep in mind that Oracles must sacrifice all forms of defensive gear to attain 18 Ma.

Could somebody justify the nerfs to Yin Yang Magic?  The Oracle has always been an unreliable class due to the hit-or-miss nature of its spells.  Lowering the success rate of Yin Yang spells only makes the Oracle weaker.  What's more, Yin Yang spells are magic evadeable.  A 70 faith Oracle has a 50% chance of afflicting a 40 faith target with Don't Act prior to applying magic evasion.  At best, the Oracle has a 50% chance of making its opponent spend a turn casting Esuna and a 50% chance of wasting its own turn entirely (along with a juicy chunk of MP).  You may as well stack magic evasion and make yourself "immune" to all of an Oracle's spells (and all other spells, to boot) than fiddle around with status-resistant equipment.  Compare this to the Geomancer, who has an invariable 25% chance of afflicting ailments (including the nasty ones, like stop and sleep) at no MP cost nor charge time, and who at least deals damage if the proc fails, and you quickly see that the Geomancer beats the Oracle at its own job.

The one thing to fear from higher proc rates, I believe, would be crippling three or four target afflictions.  To that I say: "make your status manager status-resistant."  If that's still not enough, you can simply make all Yin Yang spells 0 AoE.

The most interesting fights in RPGs involve ailment management.  With Yin Yang magic as it is now, I feel that the Oracle class is wholly unnecessary.