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Job & Skill Proposals/Idea Thread

Started by Vanya, November 21, 2009, 11:35:58 am

Vanya

Quote@Vanya: The "Vana'diel" model of Blue Mage is in reference to the "Morpher"/uses "Draw Out" items type Blue Mage, correct?

Not exactly, it refers to the FF11 version of the blue mage. Using a "draw out" style game play for them is just the best fit for them we could come up with.
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The Damned

Quote from: "Vanya"
Quote@Vanya: The "Vana'diel" model of Blue Mage is in reference to the "Morpher"/uses "Draw Out" items type Blue Mage, correct?

Not exactly, it refers to the FF11 version of the blue mage. Using a "draw out" style game play for them is just the best fit for them we could come up with.

Forgive me if this is blunt, but that doesn't really tell me much since I'm utterly unfamilar with FFXI.

Even having looked at the Blue Mage FAQ for FFXI that's on Gamefaqs, I'm not even sure how we would begin to replicate that.

What did you have in mind?
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

Vanya

If I remember correctly the thought was to replace katanas with monster souls and drop the break rate to 0.
Then turn all the souls into accessories.
This would simulate the blue mages having to infuse themselves with the monster spirits and the learned spells giving stat boosts.

If you want more detail about the FF11 Blue Mages look them up at the Final Fantasy Wiki in the "List of Final Fantasy XI Jobs".
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The Damned

Oh accessories. I see.

That's actually an interesting solution. I was thinking of something else. Something that PXTimeforDeath had made me think of. I'll see if I can test it out over the weekend and report back here, double posting if need be (although I would hope that I don't have to).

Do you know of the Draw Out on monsters thing I asked earlier? I'm guessing it wouldn't be a problem if you put the break rate down to 0, but I'm currently unaware how to do that; unless you just mean not using Draw Out's formulas because IIRC using Draw Out formula for anything else does break it 100% or something weird like that.

*goes off to download pSX*
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

Vanya

Not sure. I need to get more info on the bugs with "Draw Out".
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The Damned

I just realized that I've no idea how to make a .pff file (or even a digest) with the new FFTPatcher, so it's currently impossible for me to test things.

I've an order figured out for testing things, though, and like I said in the Battle Log thread, I've already reached the point where I would usually test things. That said, before testing, I've noticed that the Accessory thing might not work...unless the power of the Draw Out is linked to the Second Table, which I still don't think anyone's really tested out.

So I'm ready for phase 1...if I can figure out how to apply my test patch to the image.
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

Skip Sandwich

I thought the general procedure for generating a .ppf file from a FFTPatcher file was to patch the FFTPatcher file to an iso, then use a ppf generating program to compare the patched iso with a vanilla iso in order to generate the ppf? I also think that FFTPatcher digest files are only generated when you actually apply the patch, at least, the only ones I have floating about are from patches i've actually applied.
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The Damned

First and foremost, since I forgot to say this like in the last post, thank you Vanya. pSX works like a dream (even) on this computer.

More related to the this thread, it would appear that my testing of the Van'diel Blue Mage model has hit a stopping point.

Regrettably, it would seem that even reducing the levels of the items to Level 1 availability still doesn't allow monsters to use the Draw Out skills. The Learn on Hit thing works fine as does changing the animation (surprisingly, though more on that later), but they simply cannot attack with it.

I guess this means that unless I'm missing something rather vital, the Van'diel model isn't possible without ASM hacking that's probably severe.

Speaking of things that aren't possible, I'm not sure your accessory idea will work. I noticed when working with Patcher that the accessories and weapons are on separate Second Tables and I think it's the Second Table that controls the Draw Out item use anyway, though I may be wrong. (As I said earlier, does anyone actually know what the Second Table controls now?)

Having not really messed with item graphics (but planning to if things would go well for once), I tried changing Katanas to another weapon type...and they become Picasso-esque abominations both when using Draw Out and regularly attacking. It's rather annoying since I've no idea how to fix this. It just screwed up with Draw Out, then I probably wouldn't really give a damn since I'm pretty sure the weapon appearing at all is part of the newly added animation table and that's just trial in error. However, if you want it to be a normal weapon, then well....

As it stands now, I'll probably do the classic style of Blue Mage, which is regrettable, but I had a back-up idea for using Samurai's obstinate slots anyway. (Bend to my will, damn you!)

On the "bright" side (read: ugh, I hate being optimistic), this means that Blue Mage can actually have more than 10 abilities. (Probably 16 abilities since there's exactly 16 slots for all 16 families of monsters thankfully.)

Since I need to familiarize myself with all types of stat growth (why couldn't it be simpler?), I guess this is welcome practice...that I've already started to put off since now I'm going to mess around with Paladin.

Quote from: "Skip Sandwich"I thought the general procedure for generating a .ppf file from a FFTPatcher file was to patch the FFTPatcher file to an iso, then use a ppf generating program to compare the patched iso with a vanilla iso in order to generate the ppf? I also think that FFTPatcher digest files are only generated when you actually apply the patch, at least, the only ones I have floating about are from patches i've actually applied.

You are correct. I realized my mistake about 30 minutes after I posted that, at which I could no longer delete that post and I was resolved not to post in here again until I finished Blue Mage testing.

My apologies for the confusion.
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

Vanya

No problem. Thanks for doing all this research. ^_^
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BahamutWing

One thing with the Blue Mage I was thinking. What if you use a more traditional item system for most of their monster spells. For example killing a yellow chocobo gives you the item choco cure, which can be adjusted to have roughly the same effects as the monsters. The advantage would be making the skills equal to the monsters (CT and all). The disadvantage would be that for the monster spells you would have to kill the creatures and stock up their "souls". Then you can set the blue mage however you want considering MA and Mp won't be as large a factor.

I like the samurai idea, I just also thought that this would be a good compromise and remove a lot of would be issues when it comes to tweaking monster skills. You could take it a step further and have all monsters innately equipped with there "soul" so when they get booted from your party they leave it behind. Kinda messed up then cause it's like you're farming souls.

The Damned

March 19, 2010, 12:23:04 am #210 Last Edit: March 19, 2010, 01:35:30 am by The Damned
Your proposal won't work I'm afraid, at least if want you something that looks even remotely close to other Blue Mages from FF past.

Items are pretty much locked to being single-target only, have either a range of 1 or 4 with Throw Item which greatly restricts range even if you give everyone Throw Item innately), heavily restricted in both what formulas they can take & what variables they take and thus are pretty much limited only to status induction and bizarre amounts of damage.

On top of that, Item is even more of a pain because we currently can't do anything else with. Even trying to replace it just makes that slot bug out.
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

formerdeathcorps

All we can do is make offensive potions using damage formulas.  Item slots are also constrained so we can't change the ratio of existing headgear, clothes/armor, accessories (unless you want to be wearing a fire robe on your head because you replaced cachusha).
The destruction of the will is the rape of the mind.
The dogmas of every era are nothing but the fantasies of those in power; their dreams are our waking nightmares.

The Damned

March 19, 2010, 06:53:23 am #212 Last Edit: March 19, 2010, 09:57:06 pm by The Damned
Sigh. After a little experiment, it would appear that the Second Table doesn't have anything to do with Draw Out like I thought it would.

Damned Samurai. Why can't you just die gracefully?

Besides that, with regards to Blue Mage about six hours ago, I realized something that the Battle Mechanics Guide doesn't seem to provide answer for: For things that can be Learned on Hit, does anyone know for certain what, if any, statuses might prevent the learning from triggering?

I'm guessing Petrify, Blood Suck and Dead would (which is rather annoying for the former two considering the amount of Petrify I have, though that will change), but I also began to realize that things like Berserk possibly could too.

(With regards to monsters, I'm curious, formerdeathcrops. What attack did you end up giving 12 of your monsters to kill redundancies? Personally, I want the most neutral looking attack possible.)

Finally, Vanya, have you any ideas about how to get potentially get monsters to use the items necessary for Draw Out?
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

formerdeathcorps

The monsters will perform the correct animation and the effect files (of making contact with the target) are similar enough (so I just used chocobo attack, which still looks reasonable).  It's just that such a compression will never have the correct sound file (so all the attacks will sound like choco attack), which is hardly ideal.  I didn't experiment too much with this, but I suspect wing attack might be better as a generic attack in terms of sound and effect.
The destruction of the will is the rape of the mind.
The dogmas of every era are nothing but the fantasies of those in power; their dreams are our waking nightmares.

The Damned

So noted. I shall test it out while finalizing Blue Mage tonight. At the moment, I had used Tentacle (Morbol) as a the placeholder attack since I was going to at least consolidate it with Squid's version of Tentacle. However, the animation effect lines are annoying me and look out of place even if it the animation itself is not glitchy.

@Vanya: I've another question upon looking back in the thread. Earlier you had said that you had wanted to give the equipment breaking skills to Paladin. What did you intend to give to Knight if you took that away from them? (Or did you just intend to replace Knight with Paladin?)

Blue EDIT: Also, I've thought about it, and I'm not sure. Do we know how enemy Blue Mages act if all their skills are Learn on Hit only? Will they have any skills? All of them? Or are we going to have set their skills in the ENTD? Because the few things I've tried to do with ENTD haven't worked out.
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

Dormin Jake

Quote from: "The Damned"Blue EDIT: Also, I've thought about it, and I'm not sure. Do we know how enemy Blue Mages act if all their skills are Learn on Hit only? Will they have any skills? All of them? Or are we going to have set their skills in the ENTD? Because the few things I've tried to do with ENTD haven't worked out.
I've done some testing of this. Even if all Blue Magic abilities are flagged Learn on Hit only, the AI still learns abilities for enemy Blue Mages based on JP and Job Level.  Though if you're setting the Learn chances of blue spells to 100%, the AI will thus attempt to learn every spell in the book.  

To counteract this, you have to be very specific about assigning JP costs to abilities (since your Blue Mages are learning on hit, it only matters to the enemy).  What I mean by that is, if you've got an enemy Blue Mage with job level 3 (with a default 350 JP), you probably don't want to assign any super-powerful spells JP costs that would be remotely purchasable by such an intermediate mage.  You'd want things like (incredibly roughish estimates here, tailor to own needs) Goblin Punch at 50 JP, Aero at 100 JP, maybe Self-Destruct at 200 JP, and that would be all the mage could learn before running out of JP.  Spells like Dark Matter (say...900 JP?) could be made available to job level 6 or higher Blue Mage (1150+ JP), so they could learn one big spell and have a little left over for smaller spells like Aero, or they could choose from a large selection of more moderately-priced spells like Flamethrower (200 JP), Blaster (~400 JP), and Mimic Titan (~300 JP).

Since all spells are set to 100% learn rate, from the testing I've done it seems like skill selection is totally random, as the AI essentiallly attempts to learn all the spells at the same time.  So the only limiting factor is JP cost.  It's best to keep in mind then what spells you want enemy Blue Mages to have access to at each job level up, and match JP costs of those abilities accordingly, in tiers.

If you set no JP cost at all, enemy Blue Mages will (if I remember right) have every single spell, and thus be way too powerful and make it way too easy for you to learn every Blue Magic spell for your characters early on.

EDIT: General question: Has anyone figured out any way to successfully edit Ninja? Tried to make a Hunter class, with new skillset (one of Mustadio's Snipes), and it was fairly glitchy. Throw is such a bland, boring skillset that has suffered horribly since I normalized speed and weapon power in my personal patch (max speed is 15 instead of 20, highest WP is 20 instead of 40 -- makes for much lower Throw damage), and I'm just wondering if there is Anything That Can Be Done.  Thank you, thank you.
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The Damned

It would seem that formerdeathcrops has taken the time to greatly update the Wiki with regards to FFTPatcher and abilities. Everyone be sure to thank him/her.

Quote from: "Dormin Jake"I've done some testing of this. Even if all Blue Magic abilities are flagged Learn on Hit only, the AI still learns abilities for enemy Blue Mages based on JP and Job Level.  Though if you're setting the Learn chances of blue spells to 100%, the AI will thus attempt to learn every spell in the book.

So noted. Thank you very much for the information.

Well, despite having been mostly unconscious the last two days, it would appear that I've a working prototype of my own Blue Mage.

As such, I've been testing Learn on Hit to support various theories of mine, mostly with regards to status. I just finished another test that didn't reveal as much as I wanted because I made two skills unable to target allies. However, I did at least a couple of very useful things:

  • Learn on Hit will not activate if the user is inflicted with Sleep, Don't Act or Blood Suck. In addition to Dead (and Crystal and Treasure of course), this thus confirms that Learn on Hit will not be able to activate in the face of at least four statuses. I would suspect that this "problem" also comes for at least four more statuses: Berserk, Confusion, Stop and Petrify. I will have to wait a couple of hours to test these out, though, as my computer and I need a rest.
  • It would appear that Learn on Hit will not activate if you guard all statuses of an attack that inflicts only status. That said, if the attack does damage in addition to having a chance to add status that you happen to guard, such as with Blood Suck, even if that 100% chance if blocked Learn on Hit will still act as normal.

Somewhat related is that fact that apparently mixing and matching with Learn on Hit-only moves and Learn with JP moves in a list cause the list to not show the any of Learn on Hit-only moves until someone learns one. And then everything shows up for everyone (as long as their class is open, of course).

I'm currently unsure what happens if the entire list is full of Learn on Hit-only moves, though.
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

Dormin Jake

Quote from: "The Damned"I'm currently unsure what happens if the entire list is full of Learn on Hit-only moves, though.
Lots of beautiful, beautiful "-------------------" marks. An empty slate. Tabula rasa. It is glorious.
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We are Dormin. Thou art to bring us a tasty beverage.
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The Damned

Quote from: "Dormin Jake"It is glorious.

Quote from: "Dormin Jake"It is glorious.

Quote from: "Dormin Jake"It is glorious.

No...not that phrase!

Nooooooooooooooo!

*presses button frantically*

So...I finished confirming that Learn on Hit gets disabled by Confusion, Berserk, Stop and Petrify. Just something to keep in mind with regards to Blue Mage--it means no Mind Blast and no Blaster for one thing (at least without some changes).

Since I've shored that up on my end (sans on skill), my prototype lives! Ahahahaha!
"Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try." - FFX's Yunalesca

"Good and evil are relative, but being a dick cannot be allowed." - Oglaf's Thaumaturge in "The Abyss"

"Well, see, the real magic isn't believing in yourself. The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."  - Oglaf's Vanka in "Conviction"

Vanya

Good work guys! Lots of progress makes me happy! ^_^
As for your inquiries, Damned...

QuoteFinally, Vanya, have you any ideas about how to get potentially get monsters to use the items necessary for Draw Out?
Nope.

Quote@Vanya: I've another question upon looking back in the thread. Earlier you had said that you had wanted to give the equipment breaking skills to Paladin. What did you intend to give to Knight if you took that away from them? (Or did you just intend to replace Knight with Paladin?)
I'm pretty sure that was in conjunction with other changes, but I'll have to have a closer look at the thread.
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