Final Fantasy Hacktics

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There are several posts expressing interest in the Blue Mage.  Some ask for help, others... help, I guess... this one is for collaboration, as there are some things I've figured out, and others I haven't (and likely never will).

First and foremost, what is a Blue Mage?
While the Blue Mage has seen several iterations, two things have remained consistent...  monster magic and versatility, albeit after a lot of completionism and vulgarity.  A great number of resources can be found at https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Blue_Mage.  The oldest, and arguably most badass, Blue Mage was made available in FFV, and gained a wide array of magics, including Aqua Breath, Aero 1-3 (also sometimes categorized as White Magic), Parasite, Exploder, ????, White Wind, and many others.  This gave the Blue Mage some of the most powerful non-elemental spells, and access to efficient, potent buffs and curatives.  They also are able to hold their own with physical prowess, so like a Red Mage, but better.

I wanted to show my appreciation to Kagebunji & Mando as early in the post as possible, so it's worth noting that a Blue Mage sprite exists (http://ffhacktics.com/sprites.php?search=blue+mage) and, in addition to my son who loves Blue Mages, served as inspiration.  Thanks, Kagebunji, Mando, and Nightmare Child!

What do they wear?
Blue Mages, in their earliest incarnation, used Knives, Swords, and Rods, and wore Shields, Hats, Robes, and Clothes.  FFT and FFV maintain a pretty strong 1:1 in gear, save bells, boomerangs, and maybe one other.  Later Blue Mages were limited to sabers, drastically reducing coolness.

Does FFT support Blue Mage Mechanics?
Yes, "Learn on hit".

In FF6, Strago started with Aqua Rake (Breath), Revenge, and Stone.  To start with spells in FFT:

• Set JP cost to 0
• Uncheck "Learn with JP (Player)"
• Check "Learn on Hit"

For the spells you want to have your Blue Mage learn through combat:

• Set JP cost to 9999 (or possibly any non-zero value)
• Uncheck "Learn with JP (Player)"
• Check "Learn on Hit"

The rate is up to the modder.  You may want more powerful skills to be lower %, missables to be 100%, or both.

What Blue Magics already exist?
Luckily, Mr. School has provided a table with a ton of Blue Magic/Lores/Enemy Skills to cross reference.  Some spells exist only in name, while others are ready to go out of the box.



Awesome, old school!  I'm going to jump in and make one!
Whoah, slow down.  First off, your enthusiasm is a little off-putting.  Second, here are all the things that have driven me to a life of self-loathing, courtesy of the Blue Mage:

1. The animations are super weird, since humans aren't monsters
When I Mimic Titan a guy's face off, my guy does a weird sword dance.  When I Exploder my best friend mid-battle, my guy does something that takes me back to middle school gym.  There is allegedly a method to reassign animations or have 2 sets of animations.

2. Blue Magic costs MP!
...but monsters' skills don't.  This creates a low degree of complexity but if you start to think "bro, I can't Osmose (FFV throwback, anyone?) a monster normally!" or "dude, Difference doesn't hurt monsters because no MP!" you start to get a feel for the unintended consequences of the re-balancing process.

Additionally, If a skill costs MP, the monsters will not use it if they lack the MP to do so (despite not requiring MP themselves to use them).

Don't care?  Then on to...
3. MP wasn't the beginning!
Human/humanoids have very low stats.  In contrast, their spells are very powerful.  Monsters, on the otherhand, have very high stats and weak skills.  If you are thinking weak human + weak skills = work, you nailed it.  How much work though?  If your second thought was to boost the stats of your Blue Mage, then you would deal tremendous damage with any other skill relying on the MA/PA stat.  Additionally, like with MP consequences, reducing the MA/PA of your monsters drastically increases the effectiveness of PA/MA breaks.  If your attack would have broken say... 6% of a monsters stat, maybe now you can break 18%.  That means weaker monsters that are more susceptible to a slightly larger array of FFT skills totally undermining the game's mechanics! 

In conclusion, to successfully implement the Blue Mage, you would need to
Rebalance all the stats of your monsters, accounting for MP consumption and MA/PA consequences
Get a nice list of versatile monster magics to fill your skill set (and make some of your own!)
Figure out how to
    • do conditional animations
    • animate them all as magics for player and monster, or
    • give up and still feel good about your crappy Macarena looking deal you do before blowing away a foe
Come up with a cool name!


Resources:
Sprite Sheets
Spreadsheet for Rebalancing Assistance

The Blue Mage learns monster skills, which is cool because it doesn't require any additional skill slots.  I feel like this is not the place, though, so I'll make a post somewhere else later this week for anyone interested with links, thoughts, and my own obstacles for others to empathize.

Quote from: Elric on January 20, 2020, 11:04:05 pm
2) Yes, more than a few slots left to overwrite using UWEntries...
2a) Guests aren't in formation in TLW, so you could remap the formations for Delita, Algus, Ovelia, Gafgarion & Alma. So thats 5 Slots right there unless you intend to readd them to formation, which i wouldn't advise
2b) On top of the ones mentioned above, there is still slots you can remap for Olan, Balmafula and weird pigtail chick, so 3 more there.

You should have about 8 slots to work with, when creating a mod using TLW as a base, as long as you use the UWEntries sheet provided in the resources.

I was kinda hoping you'd say "no, you're out of luck."  I have no idea why this kid loves the Blue Mage.  Superhero mask, maybe?

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the monsters stats are super high, but the skills super weak.  For humans it's the opposite.  Weak humans + weak monster spells = the Blue Mage dealing 30-40 damage end game (can't fix by upping stats due to the ability to use other class magics).    Anyway, thanks for the pointers.  I have some work to do.

Hey guys!  I have 2 questions:

1) Is there anything that sets weapon sprites outside of FFTPatcher, like an ASM?  I'm trying to update the Nagrarock to be anything else and the in-battle animation looks like palette 8, graphic D (yellow sword), regardless of selection.  I'm reluctant to use the bug reporting thread without more information (not to mention this is not a TLW bug from my perspective).

2) In the event that I want to spend the rest of my life rebalancing to make the Blue Mage, are there any spriteset slots available to overwrite?  You guys have done so much work and added so much content, all my go-tos are used.

Great mod!  It does change a lot of the things I was used to doing, but makes other much more intuitive!  I'm getting my 7 year old exposed to WotL, and I'm so happy that now I can instead use this.

Thanks for your hard work on this!  It's pretty amazing how pro you guys are.  I check back from time to time as life permits, and it's always cool to see these projects continuing to move forward.

I know this post is for the PSX version, but on WotL, it seems after the first turn, the berserk auto-battle state isn't triggered.  Any suggestions?

Quote from: Zorconomy on April 28, 2015, 12:24:25 pm
A job class that I see could replace or be compared to Geomancer would be:

Name: Elementalist (Or something along those lines)

Attack Base: Using Elemental Strikes to enhance attack power and change element to the attack used.

Say relating this to Geomancer you use a close range version or 'strike' version of Torrent/Water Ball having all the effects of the attack but then leaving that effect on the user's weapon or just their 'Attack'-skill.

Here's a small example:

You are referring to either the FFV Sorceror or the FFXI Red Mage enchant spells.  I am interested in this as well.  Has anyone had success with these?  If so, can you point me to a forum post?

Hi, Krendall.  There hasn't been any activity in this thread for some time, and I was wondering if you ever had any luck implementing your "Turn Undead" ability.  I was hoping to do something similar (old school FF Dia), but I have no idea how to modify formulas, and was hoping for some direction.