Suggestions

[VincentCraven]

Major consequence? I think we need more backfire on skills too.

[Asmo X]

Yeah. It's ridiculous how many skills in this game are just various degrees of "fucking amazing". The entire DO set was like that in the pre-patched FFT I thought and Monk has some bloody good ones too. Earth Slash is wrong wrong wrong. So are Swordskills.

More skills should have a Worker 8-style HP sacrifice. Or dump a bad status effect on you.

[Austin]

Although some skills do need to be limited I don't like the idea of having them backfire on you. The entire point of having using a skill is for it to benefit you. I think making the good skills cost mp would be the best way of going about it.

[Asmo X]

Making moves that have some "backfire" effect doesn't mean they won't benefit you. It just means they become situational.

And MP cost as a way of balancing good skills is a total failure unless you put seriously tight controls on how much MP every character has at every time and even then I tend to think it's too easy to just refill MP. Not to mention there's no variety in having that be the only constraint of good abilities and that kills strategy too.

[Austin]

Now that I think about it, I don't really see why anything else should be changed. Drawout has already been nerfed a bit and sword skills cost mp now, which I think is a good enough solution. Earth slash is the only other move that I can think might need to have its power reduced at the moment.

[Austin]

I think that Rad needs improvement. As it stands now he is just mediocre, despite doing enough melee damage to be a good fighter he barely has enough HP to stand two hits, and his magic skills aren't good enough to just sit back and cast. Most melee characters can equip armor which now provides a lot more HP than clothing, so when put up against them he's totally outclassed. Basically, I think this can be fixed by just letting him equip armor. That way he makes for a good physical fighter who can throw out a spell when the opportunity presents itself. Since he only gets armor and not helmets he won't be quite as tough as other units so I think this could balance him out and make him a better unit.

Monks also suffer from similar problems now, so I think letting them equip hats wouldn't be a bad idea. Or as another option you could reduce the HP gap between hats and clothes and helmets and armor a little, its gotten to be quite large. So much so I usually find myself giving my mages equip armor instead of magic abilities because it provides such a big advantage.

[VincentCraven]

Well, some people have recommended Short Charge innate for Rad, so you may want to try that.  (His class is 14 Cleric in the patcher.)
Rad should be useful, but not really above mediocre to start out with considering you already have special units in your party.

I think armor should be, all in all, better equipment than clothes. Maybe I over did it though? Monks may just need an HPM/HPC boost.

[huthutchuck]

I dont believe many changes are needed right now.  Earth slash seems at times very powerful but how often are enemy characters gonna line up in a straight line for you to hit.  What complaints can be made about the samurai class, as if you have it in chapter 1.  I feel that  the draw out skill along with other high tiered skills are the reward for training your character.  Whats the point of unlocking classes if the abilities didn't get any better, you might as well stay a squire and a chemist.  Besides these are also skills that the computer has access to.  I like the thought of running into a group of samurai with draw out, just like about 13 monks that have earth slash and are wearing earth clothes.  I believe the current classes are pretty good.  I think the focus needs to be on sprite creation and adding any new classes.  

I like the armor idea for Rad.  A red mage should be able to wear some armor.  Does he have access to gauntlets and should he?

[Austin]

Rad does have access to gauntlets, and I think he should. Red mages are both magically and physically oriented so it makes sense for him to wear them, and I'm with you on not changing draw out and earth slash.

Also the hpm/c boost sounds good for monks as long as its not overdone. Now that everything except hats have had an hp boost, monks are kind of lagging behind even with chakra and revive.

[Xifanie]

I do believe Earth slash has excessive range though (8, wow that's like gun range)... it's awfully easy to align with the enemy within a 2 vertical range.

Did the range get reduced? If so the skill should be fine.

[Austin]

I still don't think its that bad. Like Chuck said you'd be lucky to hit more than  2 guys at the same time. Reducing the vertical range any further would just make earth slash useless half of the time. The most I'd want to do is reduce the horizontal range from 5 to 4, this is the monk's ultimate skill after all. Plus it doesn't do as much damage as other ranged skills so letting it hit from far off is fine to me.

Edit: Wait it was 8?! Could of sworn it was 5... I really need to finish playing through this again. Anyways, yeah reduce horizontally to 4 or 5. I think 4's a good number. No wonder people were complaining about it, 8's like half the map.

[Asmo X]

I dont believe many changes are needed right now.  Earth slash seems at times very powerful but how often are enemy characters gonna line up in a straight line for you to hit.  What complaints can be made about the samurai class, as if you have it in chapter 1.  I feel that  the draw out skill along with other high tiered skills are the reward for training your character.  Whats the point of unlocking classes if the abilities didn't get any better, you might as well stay a squire and a chemist.  Besides these are also skills that the computer has access to.  I like the thought of running into a group of samurai with draw out, just like about 13 monks that have earth slash and are wearing earth clothes.  I believe the current classes are pretty good.  I think the focus needs to be on sprite creation and adding any new classes.  

I like the armor idea for Rad.  A red mage should be able to wear some armor.  Does he have access to gauntlets and should he?

Some reward. Perhaps it can be like FF3 for the NES where you have a stupid 2-class endgame. No thanks. The "reward" for training characters should be more options, not more redundancy.

And Earth Slash is mad damage, comes out instantly and this idea that enemies won't line up for you is silly. If it hits one it's powerful enough and I don't know how you guys play but I hit 2 or 3 enemies regularly. I think the vertical tolerance should be taken down.

[VincentCraven]

How about 5v2?

If that's too much, we can reduce it later.

[Xifanie]

That's what I wanted to propose. With 4 range you're almost better off with Wave Fist and 1 vertical the skill would loose almost all effectiveness.

It's damage kind of sucks early on, and later 5 range shouldn't be too much of a treat for later enemies.

I have to say myself that it was quite the opposite for myself. It actually rarely ever happened that I couldn't strike 2 enemies with Earth Slash (unless there weren't enough left alive). A FFT map isn't really big and it's easy for enemies to stack in line.

[Austin]

5v2 works for me. Also, couldn't you go ahead and switch the blaze gun with the glacier gun to prevent some confusion? And the stone gun is still useless right? So maybe something could be done with that. I assume it was meant to shoot petrifying bullets, but that sounds kind of cheap unless the success rate is low.

[VincentCraven]

Since when was a weapon that does 225 damage from 8 squares away with 100% accuracy useless?
All you need is someone to use a Soft or Esuna.

[Austin]

225? I thought it was just a regular gun that petrified you immediately for no apparent reason, guess not though.

[Xifanie]

Actually, it's 256 (16*16)

That rises to 341 with Attack Up

[Austin]

It may be a good idea to make it so katanas can't be 2 sworded now that they all have 40% weapon evade. 2 katanas + weapon guard + a decent mantle= pwnage.

[VincentCraven]

Ah yes, that's not supposed to be possible.

Stupid Ninjaz and their 2 swords...