• Welcome to Final Fantasy Hacktics. Please login or sign up.
 
March 29, 2024, 07:44:35 am

News:

Don't be hasty to start your own mod; all our FFT modding projects are greatly understaffed! Find out how you can help in the Recruitment section or our Discord!


help with FFTA damage formula (Solved)

Started by rrs_kai, January 01, 2019, 01:35:12 am

rrs_kai

January 01, 2019, 01:35:12 am Last Edit: January 05, 2019, 07:50:35 am by rrs_kai
I understand the damage formula for FFTA from this guide

Caster's Weapon Att - [Target's Weapon Def / 2]'   for physical attacks
Caster's Magic Pow  - [Target's Magic Res  / 2]'   for magical attacks

This base will then be multiplied by 'Power / 100', usually, where Power is
the strength of the ability.  For weapon-based abilities, this will be the
EqAtt bonus your equipment (minus Secondary Weapon) gives you, while for
other abilities, this will be the Power stat of the ability itself.

According the above formula the damage of skills like body slam are independent of wpn atk, but I find that wpn atk has some influence. Take a look at this image:

Note:
estreledge atk = 77
hanya helm atk = 5
maximillian atk = 5
genji glove atk = 20
  • Here the warrior's body slam and fight damage is changing differently when a weapon is equipped/un-equipped with other equipment and without other equipment

  • From the first two sets of images, the normal attack damage is less than body slam when only weapon is equipped/un-equipped and character has no other attack increasing equipment.

  • From the last two sets of images, the normal attack damage is more than body slam when only weapon is equipped/un-equipped and character has some other attack increasing equipment.

  • I have also tested with different classes as they have different un-armed attack values. The monk has higher un-armed attack value than warrior and this also changed body slam damage by a small amount.
    The monk's damage is, fight = 44 as opposed to the warrior's 31 and body slam = 232 as opposed to the warrior's 228


From this I understand that skill power is influenced by equipment, but not as much as fight damage.
If anyone can clarify this it would be helpful. Also, happy new year :)
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

Leonarth

I did several tests in vanilla and the damage formula for Body Slam is:
(Caster's Weapon Att - [Target's Weapon Def / 2]) * Ability Power / 100

Body Slam's ability power is 45, Fight's ability power is 30.

I followed the routine and saw all that happen, unarmed attack is added if there's no weapon equipped, attack is min 1, I never saw it discriminate between stats that come from weapons vs stats that come from other items, or treat stats any differently in Fight compared to Body Slam.

However, with just this formula the damages you showed make no sense, I assume there is something else going on here, there must be support abilities or debuffs at play, I noticed you are using a two handed sword too, generally if you are going to be doing something like this you would want to remove all those unknown variables. You never even told us what Marche's defense is, or if his equipment and abilities have stayed the same between all tests.

Also, Estreledge gives 5 defense and res in vanilla, it's giving 20 and 10 here, what's up with that?

There's just too many things you didn't tell use here, you also didn't provide a save I could use to test, not really much I can do here.
If this is a modified ROM I have no way to know what you have changed so that certainly doesn't help either.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

rrs_kai

Quote from: Leonarth on January 01, 2019, 09:18:26 am
However, with just this formula the damages you showed make no sense, I assume there is something else going on here, there must be support abilities or debuffs at play, I noticed you are using a two handed sword too, generally if you are going to be doing something like this you would want to remove all those unknown variables. You never even told us what Marche's defense is, or if his equipment and abilities have stayed the same between all tests.

Also, Estreledge gives 5 defense and res in vanilla, it's giving 20 and 10 here, what's up with that?
There's just too many things you didn't tell use here, you also didn't provide a save I could use to test, not really much I can do here.
If this is a modified ROM I have no way to know what you have changed so that certainly doesn't help either.

I apologize. Here are some more images.


I want to know why there is a variation in Body Slam damage from the first two sets of images where the only difference is the bangaa holding a weapon. Also tested in vanilla, had the same observation. Shouldn't Body Slam damage be independent of equipped weapon?


I am using the FFTA_Revisited rom hack. Here Body Slam is 90 pow and Estreledge has 77 atk, 20 def and 10 res.
Attached with this post is the rom hack ups file,a revisited-hack save data file and a vanilla save data file (the one I am using is from gamefaqs).
(Marche has lower hp as his hp growth is from vanilla and Pallanza's hp growth is from the revisited hack.)
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

dck

I've been holding off from commenting since when I run numbers on my own I don't actually end up at the numbers the game is predicting in your screenshots, but I think you misunderstand how abilities like Body Slam that don't use weapon as multiplier work- They just add this ability power to the atk pool and use it as their multiplier instead, they don't ignore the amount of attack the weapon itself is providing while equipped, same as they wouldn't ignore boosts from other gear pieces including other weapons.
So if you try to use body slam without a weapon and with a weapon that adds a large amount of atk over the class' unarmed score, the damage will be higher regardless.

PS: Note that attacks with fixed power do ignore other weapon properties, like elements and drain.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown
  • Discord username: adri#1824

Leonarth

I'll check more of this when I have the time but why would Body Slam damage be independent of weapon?

Looking at the vanilla data for it, it seems to me that it is a regular attack with a higher Power and the recoil damage, I don't see anything special about it that would make it not take the weapon into account.

Just because the animation doesn't display a weapon it doesn't mean the weapon isn't adding damage, I even found the routine for the formula by setting a break on the weapon's attack stat.
I can confirm that in vanilla the formula is what I listed in my previous post.

However, changing the Weapon byte in AIO does change the damage so there's something going on there, I changed it from (according to AIO) 0 (not used) to 1 (used) and the damage dropped from the formula in my previous post to the same damage as Fight, so that's something. I didn't check if it was using the same formula or the damage just happens to be the same, though.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

dck

Tbh its rather misleading to think about it as abilities "ignoring the weapon". The norm in FFTA is every single magical ability and many physical ones don't treat the damage added by weapons specially in any way, they take the number from the character's stats and run it through the calculations. They all also take element and range/aoe stats from the ability information.

In this sense, Fight and the other physical abilities that behave like it are the odd ones out, since they ignore the ability power bonus the ability may have and any other ability-related statistics like the ones mentioned above. On top of this they have the ignoring off-hand weapon attack bonus behavior, but that is well understood by now I think.

@Leonarth: Its only apparent after you've spent a really long time messing with animations, but it turns out the vanilla animations are almost perfectly accurate with whether they involve the weapon being rendered and having Fight-like behavior. The only exceptions I remember are Wild Swing and Swallowtail.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown
  • Discord username: adri#1824

rrs_kai

January 03, 2019, 08:51:39 pm #6 Last Edit: June 17, 2020, 02:25:36 pm by rrs_kai
Quote from: dck on January 03, 2019, 02:20:14 pmI've been holding off from commenting since when I run numbers on my own I don't actually end up at the numbers the game is predicting in your screenshots, but I think you misunderstand how abilities like Body Slam that don't use weapon as multiplier work- They just add this ability power to the atk pool and use it as their multiplier instead, they don't ignore the amount of attack the weapon itself is providing while equipped, same as they wouldn't ignore boosts from other gear pieces including other weapons.
So if you try to use body slam without a weapon and with a weapon that adds a large amount of atk over the class' unarmed score, the damage will be higher regardless.

PS: Note that attacks with fixed power do ignore other weapon properties, like elements and drain.
You are correct, I did misunderstand.
its the % bonus in the damage formula that I miscalculated.
Damage = Caster's Weapon Att - [Target's Weapon Def / 2] * EqAtt bonus your equipment/100

With only Estreledge:
When holding only Estreledge (77 atk), the output is multiplied by 77%.
Body Slam is 95 pow,  the output is multiplied by 95%.

Fully Equipped:
Estreledge (77) + Hanya helm (5) + Maximillian (5) + Genji gloves (20)
EqAtt bonus your equipment = 107 atk being added to the stat total.
For normal attack, the output will be multiplied by 107% (EqAtt)
where as body slam is still at a 95% multiplication factor.

This is how normal attack was doing more damage than Body Slam.
The idea to add atk bonuses to other pieces of equipment gives most benifit to normal damage rather than skill damage.

Final Test:
I changed the power of Body Slam to 107 in the AIO and this is the result.

Quote from: dck on January 03, 2019, 03:08:12 pm@Leonarth: Its only apparent after you've spent a really long time messing with animations, but it turns out the vanilla animations are almost perfectly accurate with whether they involve the weapon being rendered and having Fight-like behavior. The only exceptions I remember are Wild Swing and Swallowtail.
Wild swing and Swallowtail use weapon, so they will always do the same damage as a normal attack would have done.
I have changed swallowtail to not use weapon and use 30pow, the animation showed the expected variation between skill damage and normal attack.
Is this what you mean? (all the fencer skills use weapon damage)

The one skill that will always do weapon damage regardless of the changes in the AIO is Doubleshot (the reason maybe that its animation is zero).
I tried giving an MP cost to doubleshot and to boost damage with Turbo MP.
The damage did not get boosted and out of two attacks the second animation did not happen.
The best use for doubleshot that I have seen is to combine it with doublecast. I don't know who to credit this to; I added doubeshot to red magic in the revisited mod.
dck combined doubleshot with doublesword in his Long Night mod
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

Leonarth

I did some more checks and you guys are right, I was too quick to assume Fight had 30 Power, it just so happened that both item setups I tried added up to 30 attack...

Doing this I also discovered that Marche's unarmed attack won't change when he changes jobs, it stays at 10, there's a byte that's like the "display" job which is pretty useless from what I can tell, most units just have it be the same as their job but Marche has it as 0x50 (one of the placeholder jobs next to runeseeker and hermetic), since it's mostly empty it doesn't make his job name stay the same when he changes jobs, but it does affect his unarmed damage which is kinda stupid if you ask me.

I always assumed this was a placeholder for a special job but maybe this was just a way they had before they programmed character IDs to have Marche and other special characters look different to the other units, we don't have much use for it anymore though so I'll "remove" this byte (by making it be set to the same as job for all party characters) and see how that goes.

As for Doubleshot I haven't checked but it's likely that it just makes the unit use Fight twice.

I'm glad this topic came up, now I understand the damage formulas, although I find them pretty weird, I would expect Weapon Atk to translate directly into damage and not to be multiplied by the "Extra" Weapon Atk... Mostly because there's no way that I know of to check specifically your extra attack.
This probably makes attack too strong of an option on the late game, I haven't checked how it works for Double Sword but we all know how good that is.

If it were up to me I would change how the Fight formula works, changing the Power to always be the same, maybe it would depend on weapon type (or job), this way stronger weapons wouldn't escalate damage so much, it would also make the attack stat less of a lie. Different damage formulas for different weapons/abilities could also be an option, and it would probably be way more interesting.
What would you guys think about something like that? What damage formulas do you think would work best?
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

ExL

Can't help with suggesting good formula there. Reminds me of hell that TO:LUCT is in that regard, I don't know how somebody managed to wrap his head around it: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1T7TupkvrKhnH0HtmU2O_-csqQuYQrjHf
There is interesting ones in ToME https://te4.org/wiki/Combat_Damage And I like how there are str, dex and mag weapons and mixed ones taking percent of one stat and percent of other, that's some variety.
Maybe that'll help a bit or will be at least interesting...
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

dck

Okay wow, this thread has been useful even to me although I thought I understood the vanilla damage formula. Fight-like abilities ignore only extra weapons equipped when it comes to assigning their multipliers, and indeed will factor in every single other piece of equipment. In retrospect this should have been obvious in my playthroughs since I consistently saw melee units overperforming in damage output for seemingly no reason.

Regardless, I think the idea of having a set of abilities that use the mainhand weapon's attack score as their a. power multiplier has a lot of merit to it. It allows those abilities to scale in ways drastically different than others, and I've always thought being able to control something like that is what sets both damage types (magic and physical) apart. Without a strong distinction like that they both are mechanically identical, barring variable elements and ranges.

Now, what is ridiculous is letting other attack boosts from gear that aren't weapons also add into this multiplier. Personally I think what would work best is modifying the fight damage formula, so that it only adds the used weapon to the multiplier while still taking the full attack score minus other equipped weapon (if any) like it currently does.
Other ideas could be interesting though, albeit keep in mind homogenizing the damage formulas further can cause a lot more ability design overlap:

As an example, imagine a class built around physical dual wielding. Currently you can have normal attack (two weapon-scaled attacks), weapon-based abilities (severe damage reduction from normal attack, since boost from second weapon is negated altogether) and ability power-based abilities (use full attack score in a single hit, plus have a fixed multiplier).
This allows to have several very different amounts of base damage available for ability design, so as for example to give the player the option of greatly lowering his attack to apply a certain type of status, or to use a riskier single hit ability that is better suited to overcome the target's defense.

Sure damage can be altered at a lot of different steps, but I think that part of what the game offers right now is pretty useful.

@rss_kai: The thing about animations was just a quick mention about how vanilla animations were designed. It's surprising they would put effort in something as inconsequential as making sure weapons were displayed for every single ability that behaves like fight, but as far as I know they did for all of them except wild swing/swallowtail. There's no system to display them or anything, and this doesn't mean modded abilities have to follow this pattern; but they just made sure the weapons would show up whenever they were used. Pretty cute if you ask me :D.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown
  • Discord username: adri#1824