Final Fantasy Hacktics

Hi,

I want to test jobs with different sets of initiate skills and I have few questions.

- If I enable "move find item", "defend", "weapon guard", "equip change" in ASM patcher does it use the 4 slots for initiate skills or is it hidden behind and I can add more?


- Can I add reaction abilities as initiate skill? Can I add more than 1? Does the order I put them on the list matter?


Many thanks

Is it this one I need to edit? The one saying "Do not touch"?

Quote from: RavenOfRazgriz on February 27, 2018, 11:33:33 pm
You edit the Raw stats with the tool in my Workbooks compilation.  The Utilities workbook is just a comprehensive stat previewer.

Is the file called: "Job and Charackter workbook compilation"?
I can see: "Pre-Raw  Stats Editor" tab and it says there: "Raw Stats for LvlSim - Do Not Touch". Should I touch it?

Many thanks.

Small necro bump but maybe somebody will use this idea.

I was working on MA scaling and the only solution that worked for me was to apply MA bonus to items. I added MA bonus to weapons only to make it easier. This let me decide at what point of the game more or less I can make mages stronger.
This can be done to any stats however and to control scaling 100%.

So you can start with low stats (the lower the more similar females and males become so you can have male wizards and female monks).
You can go as low as PA1 and MA1 and keep at 1 the whole time.

Then you can apply as much extra PA. MA HP as you wish at certain points on each chapter to whatever items you want.
Each chapter is divided into four sections when new items are available in shops but you can give specific items with specific stat boosts as a battle rewards.

It's a lot of item editing + battle rewards + poaching to make it work but you can make almost grind free game.



The only thing to grind would be jp points but you can play with jp costs and job tree to adjust to your liking. You can even open up the whole job tree from the beginning and control at what point make each class usable by introducing let say katana or books for that job.

So if you make items more powerful relatively to stats then it lowers the need for grinding.

I like how I start with low PA/Ma and my attacks do less damage. I don't know how otherwise to avoid 1HKO and cap endgame damage at about 300.
I only done rough few tests on chapter 1 and 2 and I love it.

I additionally removed all PA+ bonus from all items and left only one Speed +1 bonus on thief hat. To make low level spells scaling work I added MA+ bonuses to weapons for MA oriented jobs.

All growths are flat for all jobs. PA/MA growth is at 50. HP is also improved on some jobs.

I end up with about max PA 10 for males and MA 10 for females.
PA 10 gives about 100-150 damage for Monk depending on brave and zodiac. Knight regular attack with good sword does about the same.
Bolt or fire 1 with late weapon and extra MA does about the same 150 damage what I like. My scaling idea works as intended.

Accumulation is something I haven't work on yet. It's twice as strong as before so I may either: remove it or balance it with heavy MP cost or big enough CT to lose a round.

What I don't like about accumulation is that it makes weapons useless. Knight with PA 4 after accumulation would do more damage bare hands than if holding a broad sword - that is just wrong. Vanilla Ninja with Martial arts and no weapons do more damage than with rare ninja swords. PA boosting is a big balancing problem.



I nearly finished all jobs and need to think how to deal with monsters. Easy approach is to just cut multipliers in half but I don't like how stat growth works on monsters - monster have bigger power boost per level than humans and the difference between lvl1 and lvl99 monster is huge.
I may end up reducing PA growth instead - not sure yet.

I've seen the spreadsheet but how can you apply those stats to the game?
I use it to calculate stats and to balance jobs and monsters but how can you create an xml from it?

I've thought there is such hack already considering how many advanced stuff were created and how many people like flat growth levelling.
I just wanted to have more reason to have more male magic users this time. It also feels that Alicia and Lavian joins with wasted stats as they were levelling at wrong job.

Oh well. It's not a big deal and I don't have skills to edit such stuff myself.

Hi,

Is it possible to change Raw stats? I want to make raw PA and MA for males and females equal. Is there a hack for that?


Thanks.

Hi,

At this point it's a work in progress as I already invested many days of editing and testing.
I do this patch to make the game more challenging but keeping as much of vanilla feel as possible while making it also more fun.


Few main ideas:


- First of all all playable characters have flat grows. I've done it as I was fed up to be stuck in monk/knight/ninja for males all the time for best stats.


- PA/MA multipliers slashed in half. This makes few things - damage is much lower. Difference between males and females is reduced. Items makes bigger impact than levelling. Fights are longer and often harder when facing non human enemy. Monster are relatively stronger and more usable at the same time.

- Magic is scalable when possible. My aproach is to add MA+X to items so bolt 1 will still do damage relatively similar to knights or monk at similar level from lvl1 to lvl 99. Higher tier spells have damage reduced and balancing is achieved by playing with CT, MP, range.

- Most skills have max hit rate to reduce rng. Stealing, breaking weapon, charm, all have max hit rate what is only reduced by shields and enemy evasion. To balance some skills like poison and charm I played with CT, MP, range and how long that status lasts. So for example poison spell is instant last long and affects big area when charm lasts only 20CT what should be 1 turn. Haste lasts only 24CT instead of 32. Dead and frog will work only at minimum distance.

- Jobs and skills are rebalanced so less popular ones are accessible earlier and are way more powerful. No more monks/ninja + holy knights all the time. Now oracle, orator, chemist, archer, thief, geomancer are very powerful. It's not perfectly balanced but it should encourage different approach and different gaming experience. Thieves will be accessible very early on and will be much better at fighting - this makes sense as you get knives earlier than bowes and you see first thief before archers.

- Haven't tested it yet but I consider making all jobs strong and weak at some elementals. So for example priest is strong at holy magic and has high defense at it but take double dark elemental magic.


- I want to leave many OP items and techniques but to make it available for enemies as well. So group of female fighters with chantage + blade grasp + 97 brave and with items/white magic is possible.


- Smaller things: Remedy is more rare and very expensive. Mustadio get 2 new skills: missile and head shot. Initial move find items for all and with only rare items to find. Better basic items from poaching so no more potion or phoenix down. Shields greatly improved. Axes way stronger now. Dash has 2 square range.

- JP cost greatly reduced especially for the core skills like potion, phoenix down, bolt 1 etc.

- Last boss from deep dungeon  joins after fight.

- All enemy levels are increased by 2 when possible - this means nearly all the game apart of DD where last boss had lvl70. Random encounters shouldn't be 4x harder than story fights any more

I decided to go with adding MA to weapons, robes, hoods and accessories. It's seems like a bug that magic weapons don't boost spells.
I also made high level spells making smaller damage comparing to bolt 1 for example but all spells are viable options end game - at least on paper.

I also played with range a bit so spell 1,2,3,4 aren't just stronger versions of each other.

It's impossible to do a perfect balance. I cut damage first as a base to make battles last longer and to avoid 1HKO. No matter what I do it will be fake difficulty increase.

- I want monsters to be stronger so I'm fine they will do lot of damage. They are also limited in skills, gear and status immunity so it should be fine.

- I'm working on Magic damage scaling and I'm close to make it work. 1 option is to simply make MAG very high so you end up with MA at about 40-60 at lvl 99. The damage scales very nicely but the difference between males and females becomes huge - way too big for my liking.
The second option is to add MA to items so scaling will be strongly attached to items. It's much less smooth but males and females are almost the same at the end. The challenge is to have limited number of items attribute slots. I don't understand why magical weapons don't boost magic powers. I feel like I'm fixing the game here.


- I flatline speed growth to 100 and slightly adjust speed multiplier by very little to give small speed bonus to some jobs. Speed is broken.

- I plan to use the best combinations of classes I'm aware of for more fun gameplay.

- cutting MA and especially PA really works great so far. It fixes some really weird problems like Ninja with martial arts doing more damage than with swords. In vanilla even knights at the beginning of the game do more damage without swords than with weapons. PA is simply higher than WP so PA*PA > PA*WP - that shouldn't happen.

- I keep working on it for many, many hours already even for such simple vanilla mod as I also want to make less popular classes to shine this time.

Necrobump but related.


What if MA growth will be significantly increased for all playable jobs like by a factor of 3?
Starting stats wouldn't change but with endgame MA at 60 or 80 it would scale at similar rate as physical attacks, wouldn't it?
Otherwise PA growth could be reduced and damage could be more WP based. Can be a combination of all of this.


I'm not sure about this one but what if magical items would have MA+ bonuses as big as WP attack bonuses? Can you make a staff with MA+25?



EDIT:
Just tested all this out and:
You can add MA+ with any value to items attributes. This means you can create rods and staffs with magic boost similar to weapon attack boost.
The only challenge is limited number of slots and high number of items that would benefit from MA bonuses.

I went another route and cut PAM and MAM by half to 50 and then increased MAC from 50 to 10. It gave me very decent results so far. Looks good on paper but I need to test in game to be sure. I also increased MA bonuses on all items that give such bonus by a factor of 3.

My wizard on paper should have 37MA at lvl 99 while PA across the board is much lower at about 10 for males.
I may tweak the MAC further to keep Fire1/Bolt1 at damage level similar to standard attack powers of knights and monks.

My apologies for language mistakes - I'm not a native speaker. Multiplier then Thanks for correcting.

I understand it may not be a new concept but I'm impressed so far. I didn't expect such good results by doing just that. I may need to tweak spell damage calculation but so far so good.

1.3 was too frustrating for me and I started to abuse a tactic with magic casters (priests mostly) around a monk who were spamming chakra.
Excellent mod but I wanted something more fun too play (for me) with less rng.


I'm planning to slowly build the patch further with much more tweaks.

My ideas for the patch. I understand most or all of them were implemented before in various patches.

- To keep vanilla feel but rebalanced so less popular skills and classes would be much more useful or even more powerful than Monk, priest, ninja and holy knights. My emphasis is on Knight, Archer, Orator, Oracle, Geomancer, Samurai) as a class and not just skills), mime, bard/dancer. Also hell and heaven knight will be much stronger. Mustadio will get missile and head shot to be much more useful and fun now.

- PA/MA reduced by 50% as a starting point.
- Enemy lvl multiplied by 2 when possible.
- less rng - more 100% hit rate skills with adjusted mp, CT or range to balance it.
- Heavy gear HP bonus improved by 50%.
- Shields effectiveness improved by 1.5-2x
- stat growth flatlined and multipliers adjusted. This is a big one for me as I won't be stuck in knight/monk for males and wizard/summoner for females to get best stats at the end. It also keep the difference in stats more consistent from low lvl to 99lvl.
- enemies will have better skillsets. This includes a lot more healing and strong reaction and support skills including some of the most powerful combinations with 97 brave and 3 faith. That should give a feel of how most powerful setups work on enemies.
- A lot more initiate skills to make classes more unique from each other.



I wonder what problems I will encounter with that. Also how people balance magic to be useful end game as well? Adjusting MA growth?

I've tested so far by cutting multiplayers job by job. After few random battles I'm very impressed by the results.

Few things that I've noticed:


Geomencer is way more powerful now as status from elementals seems to be way more useful. Also axes seems to be more useful but it can be my imagination. Also 100% hit rate is now more important as other caster miss more often.
Knights seems to be much stronger without changing anything else. Boosting HP further makes them very powerful.
Destroying weapon makes a huge difference. Destroying armour takes a lot of HP comparing to attacks. Reducing PA or MA makes about twice as much as before. I really like how it changes Knights.

Archer charging is more powerful and should remain strong for longer as base PA won't be increasing as much. Seems like a better class now.
Wizard seems much weaker early on but also should not lose much power due to more stable base MA growth.
Chemist is way more useful now. Potions and status heal is very strong.
Square is also way more useful. Accumulate is amazing. Also Wish is stronger comparing to chakra or white magic.
They also can use powerful weapons like swords and axes what gives them big boost in damage comparing to other classes. Very nice rebalancing.

Priest healing is not so strong and may need adjustment (or not).
Weapons makes a bigger difference now. Monk attacks and healing aren't as strong what I like - I was overusing this class way too much.

Monsters are way more dangerous/useful without changing anything about them.

I really like how an enemy can take 5 hits now. Knights may need a whole team to attach and he may survive.
I almost feel like the game was intended to have base MA and PA so low. I'm very happy with the results and I recommend to test it out.

It's not tested yet but I have an idea how to very simply rebalance the game: by cutting PA and MA multiplayer in half for playable jobs.

Why?
- to make battles less luck oriented and to last longer
- making poison, regen and all status skills way more powerful.
- Swords skills would be much weaker relatively to just attack
- Destroy equipment skills would be way more useful (I also plane to give equipments 50% more hp bonus)
- Defending and healing would be much more useful.
- Orator and Oracle would be way more useful.
- Monsters would be usable without changing them.
- Ninja throw skill would be way more powerful.
- Drain and gravi would be  much more useful.



In addition I plan to double lvl for all enemies in the game where possible and flatline stat growth.


What do you think? What problems I may encounter by doing this?

I've tested with DD last boss and it works perfectly fine. Very, very cool team member and I recommend to tick "join after battle".

I really like what you did.
I also wanted to change the game to what I think some small things should be.

I like how you swapped abilities so for example Knight is a short range heavy hitter with armour. I also like how some jobs have only 1 weapon option. This make all kind of weapons valuable.

Some cool ideas I may use for my own patch.

I couldn't find the problem so I edited an unnamed skill. I did the same copy/paste and it works just fine now. I may be blind but can't see what the problem was - all flags look fine.

Still learning how to use the tool.

OK. I know the problem but don't know the solution.

I wanted to make Knight something like Holy Knights but using Bolt 3, Ice3 etc at close range only. This would replace all break skills.

If I create the custom skills by modifying Holy Knight skills then all is good - just new animation appears.
When I do the same by modifying brake weapon skill for example the damage in shown twice - once on sword hit and once after full spell animation.

I've seen similar issue on 1.3 patch as well so I'm not the only one.

I've checked animation tab and both break and holy sword skill have 07. 00. 00. I have no idea what makes them different and how to have more  new Sword skills without the problem.

I'm changing Knight job so it can strike magic at close range.
I try to make it Bolt at range 1. The game displays damage at the beginning when Knight strikes his sword and then again after end of bolt animation. Looks like double damage and no idea what I'm doing wrong.