Final Fantasy Hacktics

Modding => Non-FFT Modding => FFTA/FFTA2 Hacking => Topic started by: dck on February 21, 2016, 09:19:33 am

Title: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on February 21, 2016, 09:19:33 am
FFTA Long Night is after a long time ready to be played! Although the endgame will be developed at a later patch, the current 0.6 allows access to all the new jobs, abilities and 70% of the game's (all new) encounters!

Here is a general changelog so you know what to expect going in:

As of 0.64, all content unlocked up to story mission 15 is available. Since at that point the player gains access to all character abilities and the best shop gear, there was actually room for a bunch of endgame-ish content too.
The remaining part of the game will differ even further from vanilla, so updates from this version will probably take a while as I work on the unique classes and experiment in general.

Known bugs:
Not bugs:


NOTE: None of this would've been possible without the outstanding work by bcrobert, Darthatron and TFergusson. The amount of information unearthed, organized and made readily available helped greatly when getting to understand just how exactly to get things done.

NOTE2: This hack started based off the first one I played called FFTA X, the influence of X is still visible in the Shaman, Cultist and Zealot, whose core concepts are maintained and expanded as they are both simple and ingenious.

Skill list:
Soldier
  • First Aid: 12 MP, self only, single target. Removes debuffs and high healing based on attack.
  • Mightbreak: 12 MP, range 3, single target. Reduces attack and power.
  • Magicbreak: 12 MP, range 3, single target. 1x weapon damage dealt to MP.
  • Speedbreak: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Delay target.
  • Lifebreak: 36 MP, range 3, single target. Deals missing HP as dark damage.
  • Mug: 24 MP, range 3, single target. 1x weapon damage and steal gil.
  • Provoke: 24 MP, hits surrounding enemies. Causes berserk.
  • Revive: 24 MP, range 1, single KO target. Revives unit with 50% HP.
  • Shieldbearer: Enables shield usage regardless of job.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Paladin
  • Kyrie: 0 MP, range 3, single target. Cleanse undead, dazes those that can't be cleansed.
  • Consecrate: 0 MP, range 1, single target. 100% accuracy, removes fallen unit from fight.
  • Nurse: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Removes debuffs and high healing based on attack.
  • Defense: 24 MP, range 3, single humanoid target. Adds defense, protect and shell, decaying over several turns.
  • Cover: 12 MP, range 3, single target. Takes damage in place of target until caster's next turn.
  • Prayer: 36 MP, range 2, single target. Deals high holy damage based on attack and dispels beneficial status.
  • Saint Cross: 48 MP, hits surrounding units. Heals non-undead for a medium amount and adds reraise, damages undead.
  • Holy Blade: 48 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 2x weapon damage with holy element.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Fighter
  • Rush: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy and pushes target back on impact.
  • Blitz: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy and ignores reaction ability.
  • Wild Swing: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals 0.5x weapon damage.
  • Beatdown: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage and disables on impact.
  • Far First: 12 MP, range 4, 5 tiles AoE. Deals light damage based on attack.
  • Backdraft: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals very high fire damage based on attack with 25% recoil damage.
  • Shockwave: 24 MP, 4 tiles cone. Deals medium earth damage based on attack with 50% less accuracy and immobilizes on impact.
  • Air Render: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Deals medium wind damage based on attack to hp and mp.
  • Bonecrusher: Cannot be mastered. Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.
  • Last Berserk: Gain berserk when reaching critical health.
  • Doublehand: Increases damage of normal attack by 20% while holding a one-handed weapon.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Duelist (human and moguri)
  • Draw Weapon: 0 MP, self only. Draws weapon or switches current (weapon needs to be equipped in slot 1).
  • Disarm: 24 MP, range 1, single humanoid target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage and disarms target on impact.
  • Destabilize: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage and reduce target's evasion to 0 on impact.
  • Dirty Fighting: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage and poisons on impact. Ignores reaction skills.
  • Dagger: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Deals light damage based on attack and disables on impact.
  • Throw Sand: 36 MP, 4 tiles cone. Deals light earth damage based attack and blinds target, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% otherwise.
  • Force Guard: 36 MP, range 1, single humanoid target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy, causing expert guard status and delaying target.
  • Lunge: 48 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage and grants the user another turn upon impact, 50% less accuracy.
  • Coup de Grace: 0 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage and get 10 JP on a killing blow.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Ambidexterity: Cannot be mastered. Allows using two weapons.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Shaman
  • Water Veil: 24 MP, full line targeting. Deals medium water damage based on power and silences on impact.
  • Earth Veil: 24 MP, full line targeting. Deals medium earth damage based on power and delays on impact.
  • Fire Veil: 24 MP, full line targeting. Deals medium fire damage based on power and confuses on impact.
  • Frigid Chain: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals light ice damage based on power and stops on impact.
  • Blight: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals medium dark damage based on power and poisons on impact.
  • Oblivion: 48 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals high damage based on power and addles on impact.
  • Mana Vein: 0 MP, self only. Fully recover MP, but become immovilized and dazed, reducing evasion to 0 and delaying next turn.
  • Damage > MP: Incoming damage is directed to MP instead of HP, so long as there is any MP left.
  • Magic Pow+: Increases magical damage by 20%.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
White Mage (human, nu mou and viera)
  • Cure: 12 MP, range 4, 5 tiles AoE. Heals a high amount of hp based on power, deals extreme holy damage undead.
  • Cura: 36 MP, range 5, single target. Heals a very high amount of hp based on power, deals massive holy damage to undead.
  • Esuna: 24 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Cancel debuffs.
  • Life: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Revive target with 50% HP, deals extreme holy damage to undead.
  • Full Life: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Revive target with 100% HP, deals massive holy damage to undead.
  • Auto-Life: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Add reraise to target.
  • Shell: 24 MP, range 4, 13 tiles AoE. Add shell to targets.
  • Protect: 24 MP, range 4, 13 tiles AoE. Add protect to targets.
  • Holy: 36 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium holy damage based on power.
  • Turbo MP: Increases damage of any ability with MP cost by 30%, doubles MP cost.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Black Mage (human, nu mou and moguri)
  • Fire: 12 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium fire damage based on power.
  • Fira: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high fire damage based on power.
  • Thunder: 12 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium lightning damage based on power.
  • Thundara: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high lightning damage based on power.
  • Blizzard: 12 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium ice damage based on power.
  • Blizzara: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high ice damage based on power.
  • Aspir: 0 MP, range 4, single target. Deals medium damage to MP and drains it to caster.
  • Mana Infusion: 1 MP, range 4, single target. Transfers MP from caster to target, up to target's current MP.
  • Matra Magic: 36 MP, range 3, single target. Swap target's MP and HP.
  • Return Magic: Returns offensive magic, spell still costs MP.
  • Half MP: Halves cost of all abilities.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Zealot (human and nu mou)
  • Simmer: 0 MP, range 4, single target and caster. Deals 0.5x weapon fire damage and reduces defense and resistance on impact, caster is struck only by damage component.
  • Sky-Fury: 0 MP, range 4, single target and caster. Deals 0.5x weapon lightning damage and inflicts berserk on impact, caster is struck only by damage component.
  • Hoarfrost: 0 MP, range 4, single target and caster. Deals 0.5x weapon ice damage and inflicts slow on impact, caster is struck only by damage component.
  • Quell: 12 MP, range 4, single target and caster. 100% accuracy, dispels both targets.
  • Maledict: 12 MP, range 4, single target and caster. 100% accuracy, damages both targets equal to the user's HP.
  • Reckoning: 12 MP, range 4, single target and caster. 100% accuracy, damages both targets equal to the user's missing HP.
  • Permanence: 12 MP, self only. Use 25% current HP to gain expert guard and astra.
  • Tenacity: 12 MP, self only. Use 25% current HP to gain haste and regen.
  • Absorb MP: Adds the cost of any offensive ability that hits this unit to its MP pool.
  • Concentrate: Increases accuracy by 20%.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Onion Knight
  • Draw Weapon: 0 MP, self only. Draws weapon or switches current (weapon needs to be equipped in slot 1).
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Archer (human and viera)
  • Burial: 0 MP, weapon range, single target. 100% accuracy, removes fallen unit from fight.
  • Boost: 0 MP, self only. Next weapon attack does 50% more damage.
  • Take Aim: 12 MP, weapon range. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy.
  • Aim: Legs: 12 MP, weapon range. Immobilizes target.
  • Phase Arrow: 24 MP, weapon range. Deals 1x weapon damage, on hit dispels and applies reflect on target.
  • Aim: Arm: 24 MP, weapon range. Disables target.
  • Blackout: 24 MP, weapon range. Blinds target.
  • Cupid: 36 MP, weapon range. Charms target.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Arrow Combo: 4 tile range, adds 10% final damage multiplier if participating.
Hunter
  • Remedy: 0 MP, range 2. Removes debuffs from target.
  • Capture: 0 MP, weapon range. Captures monster. New less ridiculous formula.
  • Advice: 12 MP, range 2. Improves critical rate of target.
  • Addle: 24 MP, weapon range. Addles monster.
  • Sonic Boom: 24 MP, range 6, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium damage based on attack and adds confuse to monsters on impact.
  • Sidewinder: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals very high damage based on attack to monsters, and medium damage to non-monsters.
  • Mark: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Dazes target, reducing evasion to 0 and delaying next turn. Requires a bow.
  • Coup de Grace: 0 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage and get 10 JP on a killing blow.
  • Ultima Shot: 60 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 2x weapon damage.
  • Auto-Regen: Gain auto-regen after taking damage.
  • Concentrate: Increases accuracy by 20%.-
  • Remote Combo: 5 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Warrior
  • First Aid: 0 MP, self only, single target. Removes debuffs and high healing based on attack.
  • Mightbreak: 12 MP, range 3, single target. Reduces attack and power.
  • Magicbreak: 12 MP, range 3, single target. 1x weapon damage dealt to MP.
  • Speedbreak: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Delay target.
  • Lifebreak: 36 MP, range 3, single target. Deals missing HP as dark damage.
  • Body Slam: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals medium damage based on attack and immobilizes target on impact, caster suffers 25% recoil damage.
  • One of Many: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage and boosts caster on impact.
  • Downsize: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Halves target's current HP, 50% normal accuracy.
  • Auto-Regen: Gain auto-regen after taking damage.
  • Shieldbearer: Enables shield usage regardless of job.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Dragoon
  • Wyrmtamer: 0 MP, range 5, single target. 50% chance of taming or enraging dragon, who takes action immediately (regardless of outcome).
  • Wyrmkiller: 0 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 2x weapon damage to dragons and 1x to non-dragons, dragon goes berserk.
  • Jump: 24 MP, range 6, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage. Requires spear.
  • Lancet: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals medium damage based on attack, heals caster for the same amount.
  • Fire Breath: 12 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals medium fire damage based on power.
  • Lightning Breath: 12 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals medium lightning damage based on power.
  • Ice Breath: 12 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals medium ice damage based on power.
  • Bangaa Cry: 24 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals insignificant damage with 100% accuracy, targets go berserk.
  • Dragonheart: Gain reraise upon reaching critical health.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Defender
  • Draw Weapon: 0 MP, self only. Draws weapon or switches current (weapon needs to be equipped in slot 1).
  • Drop Weapon: 0 MP, range 1, single humanoid target. Disarms target.
  • Respite: 12 MP, self only. Unit falls asleep, gaining regen and auto-life.
  • Expert Guard: 12 MP, range 3, single humanoid target. Target takes no damage until its next turn.
  • Reflect: 24 MP, hits self and surrounding units. Reflects basic color magic and nullifies screen-wide ones.
  • Tremor: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy, knocks back on impact.
  • Mow Down: 36 MP, hits 12 surrounding units. Deals 1x weapon damage, but dazes self, reducing own evasion to 0 and delaying next turn.
  • Meltdown: 0 MP, hits surrounding units. Deal damage equal to own hp, then kill self.
  • Last Berserk: Gain berserk when reaching critical health.
  • Concentrate: Increases accuracy by 20%.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Gladiator
  • Rush: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy and pushes target back on impact.
  • Blitz: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy and ignores reaction ability.
  • Wild Swing: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals 0.5x weapon damage.
  • Beatdown: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage and disables on impact.
  • Fire Sword: 12 MP, range 2, single target. Deal medium fire damage based on attack.
  • Bolt Sword: 12 MP, range 2, single target. Deal medium lightning damage based on attack.
  • Ice Sword: 12 MP, range 2, single target. Deal medium ice damage based on attack.
  • Ultima Sword: 60 MP, range 2, single target. Deal massive damage based on attack.
  • Bonecrusher: Cannot be mastered. Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.
  • Doublehand: Increases damage of normal attack by 20% while holding a one-handed weapon.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
White Monk
  • Iron Will: 0 MP, self only. Removes debuffs and heal HP equal to caster's current MP.
  • Whirlwind: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals medium damage based on attack.
  • Pummel: 12 MP, range 2, single target. Deals medium damage based on attack.
  • Chokehold: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals insignificant damage, upon impact removes buffs/debuffs/undead and briefly renders unit unconscious, delaying it.
  • Pressure Point: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Randomly apply one of blind, immobilize, disable, berserk or reduce to 1 hp.
  • Jawbreaker: 36 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage and apply silence on impact.
  • Backbreaker: 36 MP, range 1, single target. Deals massive damage based on attack with 50% of normal accuracy, caster becomes immobilized upon missing.
  • Vital Impact: 48 MP, range 2, single target. Deals damage equal to caster's current hp, caster takes 25% recoil damage.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Ambidexterity: Cannot be mastered. Allows using two weapons.
  • Martial Combo: 2 tiles range, adds 12% final damage multiplier if participating.
Bishop
  • Consecrate: 0 MP, range 1, single target. 100% accuracy, removes fallen unit from fight.
  • Holy Sign: 12 MP, range 3, single target. 100% accuracy, removes buffs, debuffs and the undead taint from target.
  • Grace: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Increases defense and resistance, adds astra.
  • Zeal: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Increases attack and power, hastes target.
  • Plague: 36 MP, range 2, 5 tiles AoE. Deals high damage based on power, and adds poison on impact.
  • Smite: 36 MP, range 3, single target. Deals high damage based on power with 100% accuracy.
  • Sanctus: 48 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals high holy damage based on power.
  • Martyrdom: 0 MP, range 3, single target. Can only hit when caster is under 10 hp. Deals 90% of target's current hp and dazes him, reducing his evasion to 0 and delaying next turn.
  • Return Magic: Returns offensive magic, spell still costs MP.
  • Half MP: Halves cost of all abilities.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Templar
  • Astra: 12 MP, range 4, 5 tiles AoE. Adds immunity to next status effect.
  • Silence: 12 MP, range 4, 5 tiles AoE. Impedes spellcasting on targets.
  • Haste: 12 MP, range 4, single target. Doubles target's speed.
  • Rasp: 24 MP, range 4, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium damage to MP based on attack.
  • Adversity: 24 MP, range 4, single target. Lowers weapon attack and user gains boost.
  • Intercession: 36 MP, three tiles in front of user. Deals high fire damage based on power, healing user with the last strike.
  • Warcry: 36 MP, hits surrounding units. Hastebreaks targets, slowing normal speed and stopping hasted ones.
  • Damnation: 48 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals high dark damage based on attack with 100% accuracy and lowers defense and resistance.
  • Absorb MP: Adds the cost of any offensive ability that hits this unit to its MP pool.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Psion (nu mou and moguri)
  • Haste: 12 MP, range 4, single target. Doubles target's speed.
  • Slow: 12 MP, range 4, single target. Halves target's speed.
  • Quicken: 36 MP, range 3, single target. Target acts immediately.
  • Stop: 36 MP, range 3, single target. Target cannot act.
  • Shatter Mind: 36 MP, range 2, single target. Lowers target's power, resistance and confuses him.
  • Demi: 48 MP, range 3, single target. Deals 50% of target's current hp, with 50% of normal accuracy.
  • Gift of Life: 0 MP, range 2, single target. Pay 90% current HP to heal target fully and remove debuffs.
  • Mana Storm: 0 MP, hits 12 surrounding enemy units. Deal damage equal to caster's current MP, consume all MP.
  • Last Haste: Gain haste upon reaching critical health.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Alchemist
  • Astra: 12 MP, range 4, 5 tiles AoE. Adds immunity to next status effect.
  • Contagion: 12 MP, range 4, 13 tiles AoE. Poison targets.
  • Drain: 24 MP, range 4, single target. Deals medium dark damage based on power, drain it as health for caster.
  • Aero: 24 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium wind damage based on power.
  • Water: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high water damage.
  • Seal Magick: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high MP damage, silence target on impact.
  • Overchannel: 0 MP, self only. Fully recover MP 50% of the time, lose all of it the other 50%.
  • Damage > MP: Incoming damage is directed to MP instead of HP, so long as there is any MP left.
  • Turbo MP: Increases damage of any ability with MP cost by 30%, doubles MP cost.-
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Forest Ranger
  • Burial: 0 MP, weapon range, single target. 100% accuracy, removes fallen unit from fight.
  • Sylvan Pact: 0 MP, range 1, single target. Addle self in order to tame a monster with 100% accuracy. Monster takes action immediately.
  • Offer Rest: 12 MP, range 4, single target. Immobilize target and self with 100% accuracy.
  • Offer Truce: 12 MP, range 4, single target. Disable target and self with 100% accuracy.
  • Illude: 12 MP, range 4, single monster target. Put target in hibernation and delay him.
  • Conceal: 12 MP, self only. Become invisible until next action.
  • Boldness: 24 MP, range 4. Increase attack and power, next attack does 50% more damage.
  • Regrowth: 48 MP, range 1, single target. Resurrect unit with 100% HP, 100% MP and astra.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
  • Arrow Combo: 4 tile range, adds 10% final damage multiplier if participating.
Dream Strider
  • Alacrity: 0 MP, self only. Silence self, take next action immediately.
  • Mind Fortress: 0 MP, self only. Dispel self, add shell and protect.
  • Trance of Ire: 0 MP, self only. Berserk self, take next action immediately.
  • Overpower: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage, shifts resistances on impact.
  • Stare: 24 MP, line of 3 tiles. Confuses targets, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Devil Gaze: 24 MP, line of 3 tiles. Blinds and silences targets, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Enthrall: 36 MP, line of 3 tiles. Does 1x weapon MP damage and charms targets, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Great Slumber: 36 MP, line of 3 tiles. Puts targets asleep and delays them, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Doublehand: Increases damage of normal attack by 20% while holding a one-handed weapon.-
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Professor
  • Blank Slate: 24 MP, full map. Dazes every unit on the map, reducing evasion to 0, and resetting turn order.
  • Normalize: 24 MP, full map. Cancel buffs, debuffs and undead from every unit.
  • Acuity: 24 MP, full map. Increase power and attack of every unit.
  • Zero Division: 36 MP, full map. Confuse, poison and add random status effects to every unit.
  • Addition: 48 MP, hits 12 surrounding enemy units. Heals caster for 50% of his current HP, then deal it as damage to surrounding enemies.
  • Subtraction: 48 MP, hits 12 surrounding friendly units. Damages caster for 50% of his current HP, then heal allies for the same amount.
  • Mana Conduit: 48 MP, hits 12 surrounding friendly units. Damages caster for 25% of his current HP, recovers the same amount of MP to allies in range.
  • Ultima Blow: 60 MP, range 1, single target. Deals massive damage based on power.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.-
  • Shieldbearer: Enables shield usage regardless of job.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Paragon
  • Draw Weapon: 0 MP, self only. Draws weapon or switches current (weapon needs to be equipped in slot 1).
  • Proper Form: 0 MP, self only. Increases defense.
  • Un, Deux!: 0 MP, range 1, single target. Deals two hits of 0.5x weapon damage, which ignore reaction abilities.
  • Trois...: 24MP, range 1, single target. Daze and reduce target's defense, lowering evasion to 0 and delaying next turn.
  • Quatre!: 36 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 2x weapon damage with 50% of normal accuracy, caster loses form (lowered defense) upon missing.
  • Swallowtail: 24 MP, hit 12 surrounding units. Deals 0.5x weapon damage.
  • Piercethrough: 24 MP, line of two tiles. Deals 1x weapon damage.
  • Nighthawk: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage.
  • Bonecrusher: Cannot be mastered. Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.
  • Shieldbearer: Enables shield usage regardless of job.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Elementalist
  • Earth Heal: 24 MP, range 6, single target. Heals a high amount based on power and adds regen to target, earth elemental.
  • Earth Spike: 0 MP, range 3, single target. Deals high earth damage based on power with 50% of normal accuracy.
  • White Flame: 24 MP, range 6, 5 tiles AoE. Heals a medium amount based on power and cleanses debuffs, fire elemental.
  • Combustion: 0 MP, range 3, single target. Deals high fire damage based on power with 50% of normal accuracy.
  • Shining Air: 24 MP, range 6, single target. Deals light wind damage based on power with 100% accuracy, confuses target.
  • Choking Mist: 0 MP, range 3, single target. Deals high wind damage based on power with 50% of normal accuracy.
  • Sliprain: 24 MP, range 6, single target. Deals light water damage based on power with 100% accuracy, silences target.
  • Tidal Surge: 0 MP, range 3, single target. Deals high water damage based on power with 50% of normal accuracy.
  • Magic Pow+: Increases magical damage by 20%.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Red Mage
  • Firaga: 24 MP, full map. Deals light fire damage based on power to all enemies.
  • Thundaga: 24 MP, full map. Deals light lightning damage based on power to all enemies.
  • Blizzaga: 24 MP, full map. Deals light ice damage based on power to all enemies.
  • Barrier: 24 MP, hits self and surrounding units. Adds Protect and Shell status.
  • Reflect: 24 MP, hits self and surrounding units. Reflects basic color magic and nullifies screen-wide ones.
  • Infatuate: 36 MP, range 1, single humanoid target. Charms and dooms target, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Amnesia: 36 MP, range 1, single target. Addles target, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Double Attack: Casts two of any red spell.
  • Half MP: Halves cost of all abilities.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Summoner (viera and moguri)
  • Ifrit: 24 MP, range 3, 13 tiles AoE. Deals medium fire damage based on power.
  • Ramuh: 24 MP, range 3, 13 tiles AoE. Deals medium lightning damage based on power.
  • Shiva: 24 MP, range 3, 13 tiles AoE. Deals medium ice damage based on power.
  • Searing Rain: 24 MP, range 3, 13 tiles AoE. Lowers defense and resistance of targets.
  • Swarm: 24 MP, range 4, single target. Deals medium dark damage based on power and poisons on impact.
  • Meteorite: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high earth damage based on power.
  • Madeen: 36 MP, hits 12 surrounding units. Deals high holy damage based on power.
  • Chocobo Rush: 36 MP, full line targeting. Deals medium damage based on power.
  • Absorb MP: Adds the cost of any offensive ability that hits this unit to its MP pool.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Black Monk
  • Block Pain: 12 MP, self only. Fully heal and haste self, at the price of doom.
  • Vulnerate: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Lowers defense.
  • Vile Claw: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Deals medium damage based on attack and poisons on impact.
  • Ether Talon: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Deals medium damage based on attack to MP and lowers power and resistance on impact.
  • Spirit Fang: 24 MP, range 2, single target. Deals medium damage based on attack and drains it as MP for the caster.
  • Ensnare: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Stops target.
  • Warp Strike: 36 MP, range 1. Deals 1x weapon damage and slows target.
  • Ultima Fist: 60 MP, range 1. Deals massive damage based on attack.
  • Ambidexterity: Cannot be mastered. Allows using two weapons.
  • Martial Combo: 2 tiles range, adds 12% final damage multiplier if participating.
Sniper
  • Study Prey: 0 MP, self only. Slow self to increase critical and gain 50% extra damage on next attack.
  • Taunt: 12 MP, weapon range, single target. Makes enemy go berserk.
  • Conceal: 12 MP, self only. Become invisible until next action.
  • Beso Toxico: 24 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 1x damage and poisons on impact.
  • Mark: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Dazes target, reducing evasion to 0 and delaying next turn. Requires a bow.
  • Doom Archer: 48 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 2x weapon damage, but fully heals target's MP regardless of contact. Requires a bow.
  • Throw Sand: 36 MP, 4 tiles cone. Deals light earth damage based attack and blinds target, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% otherwise.
  • Overpower: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage, shifts resistances on impact.
  • Concentrate: Increases accuracy by 20%.
  • Remote Combo: 5 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Mog Knight
  • Moon Spirit: 12 MP, self only, single target. Removes debuffs and high healing based on attack.
  • Battle Spirit: 0 MP, self only, single target. Adds defending and astra.
  • Drake Spirit: 0 MP, self only, single target. Morphs into a dragon.
  • Rush: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy and pushes target back on impact.
  • Blitz: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy and ignores reaction ability.
  • Wild Swing: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals 0.5x weapon damage.
  • Mog Lance: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage.
  • Ultima Charge: 60 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 2x weapon damage.
  • Concentrate: Increases accuracy by 20%.
  • Shieldbearer: Enables shield usage regardless of job.
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Gunner
  • Desperado: 0 MP, self only. Swap HP and MP.
  • Gilshot: 12 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 0.5x weapon damage with 100% accuracy.
  • Ethershot: 24 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage to HP and MP.
  • Fireshot: 24 MP, range 4, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium fire damage based on attack.
  • Boltshot: 24 MP, line of 5 tiles. Deals medium lightning damage based on attack.
  • Iceshot: 24 MP, range 3, 13 tiles AoE. Deals medium ice damage based on attack.
  • Gravishot: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 25% of target's current HP with 100% accuracy.
  • Double Attack: Fire twice in one turn!
  • ???: Mystery support ability.
  • Bullet Combo: 3 tiles range, adds 10% final damage multiplier if participating.
Firebreather
  • Enthusiasm!: 24 MP, range 4, single target. Delay ally to take an instant action.
  • Exhaust: 24 MP, 4 tiles cone. Deals medium fire damage based on power and slows on impact.
  • Incandescence: 24 MP, range 1, single target. 100% accuracy, heats target's metal weapon to disarm, disable and deal medium fire damage. Cannot be used if weapon is not metal.
  • Cursed Flame: 36 MP, range 1, single target. Deals medium damage and shifts elemetal resistance on impact.
  • Mana Burn: 48 MP, range 1, single target. Uses power to deal HP damage up to target's current MP, may fall short without enough power.
  • Sunscorch: 48 MP, range 4, single target. Deals very high fire damage based on power.
  • Extinction: 48 MP, range 3, 13 tile AoE. Deals high fire damage based on power.
  • Rekindle: 0 MP, self only. 50% of the time fully heal up and get reraise, die the other 50%!
  • Damage > MP: Incoming damage is directed to MP instead of HP, so long as there is any MP left.
  • Magic Pow+: Increases magical damage by 20%.
  • Magick Combo: 6 tile range, adds 5% final damage multiplier if participating.
Cultist
  • Kyrie: 0 MP, range 3, single target. Cleanse undead, dazes those that can't be cleansed.
  • Undead: 0 MP, range 3, single humanoid target. Turn into undead with 100% accuracy.
  • Dark-Pact: 24 MP, range 3, single humanoid target. Removes target's undeath but charms him.
  • Drain: 24 MP, range 4, single target. Deals medium dark damage based on power and drains it as HP for the caster.
  • Grudge: 24 MP, hits 12 surrounding units. Deals dark damage equal to life lost, heals undead.
  • Ritual: 36 MP, hits 12 surrounding dead units. Resurrects every unit in range as an undead with 50% health and charms the hostiles.
  • Black Ingot: 36 MP, range 3, single humanoid target. Deals 30 damage and dooms on impact.
  • Sever Link: 36 MP, range 3, single humanoid target. Removes undeath from target, petrifying him.
  • Doublehand: Increases damage of normal attack by 20% while holding a one-handed weapon.-
  • Melee Combo: 1 tile range, adds 15% final damage multiplier if participating.
Cardcaptor (Ezel)
  • Fate of One: 0 MP, full map, single target. Selects one unit at random from any team, increases its stats, hastes it and grants an immediate turn.
  • Reversal Slash: 12 MP, line of 2 tiles. Reverses normal weapon damage and applies a random status effect on impact.*
    *Ezel now has his own unique spear, which heals instead of doing damage and has very high base stats.
  • Minor Fortuna: 24 MP, 12 surrounding friendly units. Grants astra and expert guard to self and allies.
  • Gambit: 36 MP, range 3, single target. 50% chance to fully heal or petrify the target.
  • Return Magic: Returns offensive magic, spell still costs MP.
  • Bonecrusher: Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.
Runeseeker (Babus)
  • March Orders: 36 MP, 12 surrounding friendly units. Hastes self and allies.
  • Stillness: 36 MP, 12 surrounding enemy units. Slows enemies with 100% accuracy.
  • Shadowflare: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high dark damage based on power.
  • Demi: 48 MP, range 3, single target. Deals 50% of target's current hp, with 50% of normal accuracy.
  • Return Magic: Returns offensive magic, spell still costs MP.
  • Bonecrusher: Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.

Enemy skill list:
Famfrit
  • Breath of God: 24 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals medium damage based on power.
  • Lightspeed: 12 MP, range 1. Halves the unit's current hp with 100% accuracy, ignores reaction skill.
  • Slow: 12 MP, range 4, single target. Halves target's speed.
  • Reveal: Detects hidden units.
  • Bonecrusher: Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.
Ultima
  • Logos 12 MP, range 3, single target. Dazes target with 100% accuracy, reducing evasion to 0 and delaying next turn, also lowers power and attack.*
    *Ultima crystals can only attack in melee and are accompanied by a team of slow but immensely strong humanoid golems.
  • Reveal: Detects hidden units.
Adrammelech
  • Solar Flare: 48 MP, range 4, single target. Deals very high fire damage based on power with 100% accuracy.
  • Soul Sphere: 0 MP, range 3, single target. Deals very high damage to MP with 100% accuracy and drains it to caster.
  • Howl of Rage: 12 MP, hits 12 surrounding units. Hastebreak surrounding units and haste self.*
    *Howl of Rage will never be used unless all of Adrammelech's dragons are dead, out of range or incapacitated in a way he considers them enemies, such as charmed.
  • Reveal: Detects hidden units.
  • Bonecrusher: Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.
Exodus
  • Fruit of Life: 48 MP, range 2, single target. Adds reraise and regen.
  • Mana Infusion: 0 MP, range 2, single target. Transfers MP from caster to target, up to target's current MP.*
    *Exodus supports Babus in this fight by reapplying his reraise and recharging MP, but the fruits can only take two hits before they break.
  • Reveal: Detects hidden units.
Mateus
  • : .
  • : .
  • Reveal: Detects hidden units.
  • Bonecrusher: Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.
Llednar
  • Omega: 0 MP, range 1, single target. Deals overkill damage with 100% accuracy, but user becomes dazed, losing evasion and having the next turn delayed.
  • Damnation: 48 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals high dark damage based on attack with 100% accuracy and lowers defense and resistance.
  • Life Render: 60 MP, range 2, single target. Deals 90% of target's current hp with 100% accuracy and dazes him, reducing evasion to 0 and delaying next turn.
  • Heart Render: 60 MP, range 2, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage to MP with 100% accuracy and dooms target.
  • : .
  • : .
  • Monkey Grip: Hold two-handed weapons with one hand.
  • Strikeback: Stops normal attacks and counter attacks.
-Llednar's ability pool changes depending on the fight, only having his full set in the last story encounter and endgame fights.
Goblins
Goblin
  • Pummel: 12 MP, range 2, single target. Deals medium damage based on attack.
  • One of Many: 36 MP, weapon range, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage and boosts caster on impact.
Red Cap
  • Mutilate: 12 MP, range 3, single target. Deals medium damage based on power and drains it to caster.
  • Dwindle: 12 MP, range 14, 13 tiles AoE. Dispels all units in range.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Flans
Jelly
  • Fire: 12 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium fire damage based on power.
  • Fira: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high fire damage based on power.
  • Sacrifice: 0 MP, range 1, single target. Kill self to remove all debuffs and fully heal target.
Ice Flan
  • Blizzard: 12 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium ice damage based on power.
  • Blizzara: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high ice damage based on power.
  • Water: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high water damage.
Cream
  • Thunder: 12 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium lightning damage based on power.
  • Thundara: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high lightning damage based on power.
  • Acid: 12 MP, range 3, single target. Applies a random debuff to target.
Pudding
  • Auto-Life: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Add reraise to target.
  • Sanctus: 48 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals high holy damage based on power.
  • Absorb MP: Adds the cost of any offensive ability that hits this unit to its MP pool.
  • Damage > MP: Incoming damage is directed to MP instead of HP, so long as there is any MP left.
  • Geomancy: Increases target weakness to any element by one stage.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Bombs
Bomb
  • Flame Attack: 24 MP, range 4, single target. Deals medium fire damage based on power.
  • Blowup: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals very high fire damage based on power, then kill self
Grenade
  • Chill: 24 MP, hits surrounding units and self. Deals medium ice damage based on power.
  • Reflex: Nullifies any basic attack.
  • Block Arrows: Nullifies attacks made with bows.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Dragons
Icedrake
  • Ice Breath: 12 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals medium ice damage based on power.
  • Mighty Guard: 12 MP, range 3, single target. Increases defense and resistance.
Firewyrm
  • Fire Breath: 12 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals medium fire damage based on power.
  • Guard-Off: 12 MP, range 3, single target. Lowers defense and resistance.
Thundrake
  • Lightning Breath: 12 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals medium lightning damage based on power.
  • Dragon Force: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Increases defense, resistance, power and attack.
  • Dragonheart: Gain reraise upon reaching critical health.
  • Reflex: Nullifies any basic attack.
  • Geomancy: Increases target weakness to any element by one stage.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Lamias
Lamia
  • Kiss: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Charms and dooms target.
  • Hand Slap: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage and dazes target, reducing evasion to zero and delaying next turn.
  • Prowl: 36 MP, self only. Gain haste and boost.
Lilith
  • Twister: 24 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Halves the current HP of targets.
  • Water: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high water damage.
  • Seal Magick: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high MP damage, silence target on impact.
Medusa
  • Marble Gaze: 36 MP, line of 6 tiles. Petrifies targets, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Prowl: 36 MP, self only. Gain haste and boost.
  • Return Magic: Returns offensive magic, spell still costs MP.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Spiders
Antlion
  • Sandstorm: 12 MP, hits surrounding units. Deals medium earth damage based on power, blinds on impact.
  • Spit Rock: 24 MP, range 4, single target. Deals medium earth damage based on attack, immobilizes target on impact.
Dune Lion
  • Suffocate: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Dazes target with 100% accuracy, reducing evasion to 0 and delaying next turn.
  • Taint Blood: 36 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 2x weapon damage with 50% accuracy, poisons target on impact.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Turtles
Toughskin
  • Pommel Crash: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals medium damage based on attack and confuses on impact.
  • Matra Magic: 12 MP, range 4, single target. Swap target's MP and HP.
  • Iron Will: 0 MP, self only. Removes debuffs and heal HP equal to caster's current MP.
Blade Biter
  • Seize Weapon: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals 1x weapon damage with 100% accuracy and disarms target.
  • Resonate: 24 MP, hits 12 surrounding enemy units. Disables enemies in range with 100% accuracy.
  • Bonecrusher: Deals 1.5x damage after being hit with a weapon.
  • Block Arrows: Nullifies attacks made with bows.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Tonberry
  • Knife: 12 MP, range 2, single target. Deals 90% of target's current HP with 100% accuracy.
  • Karma: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals damage based on how many units the target has ko'd.
  • Vodoo: 36 MP, range 1, single target. Deals overkill damage with 100% accuracy, but user becomes dazed, losing evasion and having the next turn delayed.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Panthers
Red Panther
  • Rend: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals medium physical damage and lowers defense on impact.
  • Poison Claw: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Deals medium physical damage and poisons on impact.
  • Prowl: 36 MP, self only. Gain haste and boost.
Coeurl
  • Hastebreak: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Slows normal targets and stops hasted ones.
  • Tail Wag: 24 MP, range 1, single target. Charms target.
  • Blaster: 36 MP, range 3, single target. Petrifies target with 50% normal accuracy.
  • Prowl: 36 MP, self only. Gain haste and boost.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Reveal: Detects hidden units.
Malboros
Malboro
  • Bad Breath: 12 MP, range 3, single target. Confuses, poisons and adds a random status effect with 100% accuracy.
  • Un, Deux!: 0 MP, range 1, single target. Deals two hits of 0.5x weapon damage, which ignore reaction abilities.
Big Malboro
  • Worse Breath: 24 MP, 9 tiles cone. Deals medium damage based on power with 100% accuracy and poisons targets.
  • Worst Breath: 36 MP, hits 12 surrounding units. Deals high damage based on power with 100% accuracy and poisons targets
  • Block Arrows: Nullifies attacks made with bows.
  • Last Berserk: Gain berserk when reaching critical health.
129 73 125 1a2
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Ahriman
Floateye
  • Stare: 24 MP, line of 3 tiles. Confuses targets, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Devil Gaze: 24 MP, line of 3 tiles. Blinds and silences targets, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
Ahriman
  • Enthrall: 36 MP, line of 3 tiles. Does 1x weapon MP damage and charms targets, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Great Slumber: 36 MP, line of 3 tiles. Puts targets asleep and delays them, 100% accuracy with eye contact, 0% without.
  • Reflex: Nullifies any basic attack.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Undead
Zombie
  • Drain Touch: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Deals medium dark damage based on attack and drains it to caster.
  • Miasma: 24 MP, range 4, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium dark damage based on power and poisons on impact.
Vampire
  • Zombify: 12 MP, range 1, single target. Kills target with 100% accuracy and turns it undead. Can be prevented with status immunity.
  • Shadowflare: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high dark damage based on power.
  • Black March: 48 MP, full map. Resurrects every dead unit in the map as an undead with 100% health and charms the hostiles.
  • Strikeback: Stops normal attacks and counter attacks.
  • Counter: Counter attacks after being attacked with a weapon.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.
  • Weapon Def+: Reduces physical damage taken by 40%.
Fairies
Sprite
  • Clay Imp: 24 MP, range 6, single target. Deals light earth damage based on power with 100% accuracy, disables target.
  • Meteorite: 36 MP, range 4, single target. Deals high earth damage based on power.
  • White Wind: 24 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Heals targets equal to caster's current HP.
Titania
  • Holy: 36 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Deals medium holy damage based on power.
  • Angel Whisper: 24 MP, range 3, single target. Heals a very high amount of HP based on power and grants reraise, deals massive holy damage to undead.
  • White Wind: 24 MP, range 3, 5 tiles AoE. Heals targets equal to caster's current HP.
  • Auto-Regen: Gain auto-regen after taking damage.
  • Absorb MP: Adds the cost of any offensive ability that hits this unit to its MP pool.
  • Weapon Atk+: Increases physical damage by 20%.

Due to character limit constraints, the stat dump has been moved to the next post!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on February 23, 2016, 07:20:01 pm
Detailed stat growth of each job for those interested:
Soldier       (Human)
Equipment:    Sword, Great Sword, Shield, Helmet, Hat, Armor, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 5.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 4.0
DEF: 100 / 5.0
POW:  75 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Paladin       (Human)
Equipment:    Knight Sword, Great Sword, Shield, Helmet, Armor, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 6.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 3.0
DEF: 100 / 6.0
POW:  75 / 2.0
RES: 100 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Fighter       (Human)
Equipment:    Blade, Great Sword, Helmet, Hat, Armor, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 4.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 5.0
DEF: 100 / 4.0
POW:  75 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 2.0
---------------------------------
Duelist       (Human)
Equipment:    Knife, Rapier, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 5.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 4.0
DEF: 100 / 4.0
POW:  75 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Shaman        (Human)
Equipment:    Katana, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 2.0
MP:  36 / 2.0
ATK:  75 / 4.0
DEF: 100 / 2.0
POW:  75 / 4.0
RES: 100 / 5.0
---------------------------------
White Mage    (Human)
Equipment:    Staff, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 3.0
MP:  36 / 3.0
ATK:  75 / 2.0
DEF: 100 / 4.0
POW:  75 / 3.0
RES: 100 / 6.0
---------------------------------
Black Mage    (Human)
Equipment:    Rod, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 2.0
MP:  36 / 5.0
ATK:  75 / 2.0
DEF: 100 / 2.0
POW:  75 / 5.0
RES: 100 / 5.0
---------------------------------
Zealot        (Human)
Equipment:    Spear, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 7.0
MP:  36 / 0.0
ATK:  75 / 4.0
DEF: 100 / 3.0
POW:  75 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 2.0
---------------------------------
Onion Knight  (Human)
Equipment:    Sword, Blade, Saber, Knight Sword, Great Sword, Broad Sword, Knife, Rapier, Katana, Staff, Rod, Mace, Spear, Instrument, Knuckles, Soul, Shield, Helmet, Hat, Armor, Clothing, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 4.0
MP:  36 / 2.0
ATK:  75 / 3.0
DEF: 100 / 4.0
POW:  75 / 3.0
RES: 100 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Archer        (Human)
Equipment:    Bow, Gun, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 4.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 4.0
DEF: 100 / 4.0
POW:  75 / 2.0
RES: 100 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Hunter        (Human)
Equipment:    Great Bow, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 4.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 3.0
DEF: 100 / 4.0
POW:  75 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Warrior       (Bangaa)
Equipment:    Sword, Broad Sword, Shield, Helmet, Hat, Armor, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  60 / 5.0
MP:  24 / 1.0
ATK:  90 / 4.0
DEF: 100 / 5.0
POW:  60 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Dragoon       (Bangaa)
Equipment:    Sword, Spear, Helmet, Armor, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   6
Evade:  0


HP:  60 / 5.0
MP:  24 / 1.0
ATK:  90 / 3.0
DEF: 100 / 4.0
POW:  60 / 3.0
RES: 100 / 5.0
---------------------------------
Defender      (Bangaa)
Equipment:    Knight Sword, Broad Sword, Helmet, Armor, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  60 / 6.0
MP:  24 / 1.0
ATK:  90 / 3.0
DEF: 100 / 6.0
POW:  60 / 2.0
RES: 100 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Gladiator     (Bangaa)
Equipment:    Blade, Broad Sword, Helmet, Hat, Armor, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  60 / 4.0
MP:  24 / 1.0
ATK:  90 / 5.0
DEF: 100 / 4.0
POW:  60 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 2.0
---------------------------------
White Monk    (Bangaa)
Equipment:    Knuckles, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  60 / 4.0
MP:  24 / 3.0
ATK:  90 / 3.0
DEF: 100 / 3.0
POW:  60 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Bishop        (Bangaa)
Equipment:    Staff, Rod, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  60 / 3.0
MP:  24 / 4.0
ATK:  90 / 2.0
DEF: 100 / 2.0
POW:  60 / 5.0
RES: 100 / 5.0
---------------------------------
Templar       (Bangaa)
Equipment:    Knight Sword, Spear, Helmet, Hat, Armor, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  60 / 5.0
MP:  24 / 2.0
ATK:  90 / 3.0
DEF: 100 / 3.0
POW:  60 / 2.0
RES: 100 / 3.0
---------------------------------
White Mage    (Nu Mou)
Equipment:    Staff, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 3.0
MP:  48 / 3.0
ATK:  60 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 4.0
POW:  90 / 3.0
RES: 130 / 6.0
---------------------------------
Black Mage    (Nu Mou)
Equipment:    Rod, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 2.0
MP:  48 / 5.0
ATK:  60 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 2.0
POW:  90 / 5.0
RES: 130 / 5.0
---------------------------------
Psion         (Nu Mou)
Equipment:    Rod, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 3.0
MP:  48 / 5.0
ATK:  60 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 3.0
POW:  90 / 3.0
RES: 130 / 2.0
---------------------------------
Zealot        (Nu Mou)
Equipment:    Spear, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 7.0
MP:  48 / 0.0
ATK:  60 / 4.0
DEF:  70 / 3.0
POW:  90 / 1.0
RES: 130 / 2.0
---------------------------------
Alchemist     (Nu Mou)
Equipment:    Mace, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 3.0
MP:  48 / 3.0
ATK:  60 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 2.0
POW:  90 / 5.0
RES: 130 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Forest Guard  (Nu Mou)
Equipment:    Bow, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 4.0
MP:  48 / 1.0
ATK:  60 / 4.0
DEF:  70 / 4.0
POW:  90 / 2.0
RES: 130 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Dream Walker  (Nu Mou)
Equipment:    Soul, Shield, Helmet, Armor, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 5.0
MP:  48 / 2.0
ATK:  60 / 4.0
DEF:  70 / 3.0
POW:  90 / 1.0
RES: 130 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Professor     (Nu Mou)
Equipment:    Mace, Shield, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 6.0
MP:  48 / 4.0
ATK:  60 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 2.0
POW:  90 / 2.0
RES: 130 / 5.0
---------------------------------
Paragon       (Viera)
Equipment:    Great Sword, Rapier, Shield, Helmet, Hat, Armor, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 5.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  90 / 4.0
DEF:  70 / 5.0
POW:  90 / 1.0
RES:  70 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Elementalist  (Viera)
Equipment:    Katana, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 2.0
MP:  36 / 2.0
ATK:  90 / 4.0
DEF:  70 / 2.0
POW:  90 / 4.0
RES:  70 / 5.0
---------------------------------
Red Mage      (Viera)
Equipment:    Rapier, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 3.0
MP:  36 / 3.0
ATK:  90 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 3.0
POW:  90 / 3.0
RES:  70 / 4.0
---------------------------------
White Mage    (Viera)
Equipment:    Staff, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 3.0
MP:  36 / 3.0
ATK:  90 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 4.0
POW:  90 / 3.0
RES:  70 / 6.0
---------------------------------
Summoner      (Viera)
Equipment:    Instrument, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 4.0
MP:  36 / 2.0
ATK:  90 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 2.0
POW:  90 / 4.0
RES:  70 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Archer        (Viera)
Equipment:    Bow, Gun, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 4.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  90 / 4.0
DEF:  70 / 4.0
POW:  90 / 2.0
RES:  70 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Black Monk    (Viera)
Equipment:    Knuckles, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 4.0
MP:  36 / 3.0
ATK:  90 / 3.0
DEF:  70 / 4.0
POW:  90 / 1.0
RES:  70 / 2.0
---------------------------------
Sniper        (Viera)
Equipment:    Great Bow, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  45 / 4.0
MP:  36 / 1.0
ATK:  90 / 3.0
DEF:  70 / 4.0
POW:  90 / 1.0
RES:  70 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Summoner      (Moogle)
Equipment:    Instrument, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 4.0
MP:  48 / 2.0
ATK:  75 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 2.0
POW:  90 / 4.0
RES: 100 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Mog Knight    (Moogle)
Equipment:    Blade, Broad Sword, Shield, Helmet, Hat, Armor, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 6.0
MP:  48 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 3.0
DEF:  70 / 6.0
POW:  90 / 2.0
RES: 100 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Gunner        (Moogle)
Equipment:    Gun, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 4.0
MP:  48 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 4.0
DEF:  70 / 4.0
POW:  90 / 2.0
RES: 100 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Duelist       (Moogle)
Equipment:    Knife, Rapier, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 5.0
MP:  48 / 1.0
ATK:  75 / 4.0
DEF:  70 / 4.0
POW:  90 / 1.0
RES: 100 / 4.0
---------------------------------
Firebreather  (Moogle)
Equipment:    Mace, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   4
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 4.0
MP:  48 / 3.0
ATK:  75 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 3.0
POW:  90 / 4.0
RES: 100 / 2.0
---------------------------------
Cultist       (Moogle)
Equipment:    Soul, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 4.0
MP:  48 / 2.0
ATK:  75 / 3.0
DEF:  70 / 3.0
POW:  90 / 3.0
RES: 100 / 3.0
---------------------------------
Black Mage    (Moogle)
Equipment:    Rod, Hat, Robe, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   4     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 2.0
MP:  48 / 5.0
ATK:  75 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 2.0
POW:  90 / 5.0
RES: 100 / 5.0
---------------------------------
Psion         (Moogle)
Equipment:    Rod, Hat, Clothing, Shoes, Armlets, Accessory
Requirements: None

Move:   3     Jump:   2
Evade:  0


HP:  30 / 3.0
MP:  48 / 5.0
ATK:  75 / 2.0
DEF:  70 / 3.0
POW:  90 / 3.0
RES: 100 / 2.0
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: Jumza on February 23, 2016, 07:28:46 pm
I'm looking forward to this! The system you've worked out for abilities is actually a very interesting idea! I'm excited to see it in action :)
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: Eternal on February 23, 2016, 08:02:52 pm
I'm glad to see that more people are getting interesting in modding FFTA! It looks like you're doing a great job, keep it up!

Some thoughts:

-I (being the debuff fetishist around here) love how you've redone debuffs to make them more useful. My only concern is that they sound like they'll be -too- accurate now and that they'll cripple fights. Mind you, this is just in theory and not practice, since the mod's not out yet, but I'd be interested in hearing about how your tests go.

-Quite frankly, No AP is what scares me the most out of your changes. No AP means that, at most, if I'm understanding correctly, a unit can learn one active ability at a time. That seems -extremely- limiting and, frankly, unfun. Am I just misunderstanding this? If so, let me know!

-I like your Combo rework, and honestly, it's how Vanilla should have done Combos to begin with.

Now, onto your job ability reworks:

SOLDIER:
-Why do the Breaks and Mug cost so much MP? Mug, especially, never seems particularly useful. Do the Breaks also deal damage in your mod?

PALADIN:
-What is Drop Weapon's accuracy? Is it buffed like all other debuffs have been? If so, that sounds like it could be pretty broken, especially since it's 0 MP. I could see a Paladin just running around disarming everything and causing fights to become a breeze. Also, why do Defense and Cover consume so much MP? They're fairly niche skills (Cover less so), but an MP cost only serves to make them -less- useful, IMO. Further, as much as I want to love Saint Cross, AoE Reraise sounds like it could become problematic.

FIGHTER:
-Has 2 tile knockback been tested? When I tried doing that in A2 (which I know is a different game, but they share many mechanics), it simply wouldn't work. Also, you may wish to make Backdraft deal non-elemental damage to make the player unable to heal from the recoil effect with Fire absorption gear. I know you mentioned making that kind of gear less accessible, but it's still something to consider.

DUELIST:
-I like Disarm and Draw Weapon, but I'd probably take them away from Paladin if you intend to keep them. By removing them from Paladin, you'd remove the overlap on having both Paladin and Duelist having two of the same abilities. Otherwise, I really like the concept of this job and it reminds me a lot of FFTA2 GG Fencer. :)

SHAMAN:
-Fire Veil sounds very, very broken. Linear Confusion is really good, as it can easily cripple enemies and enemies in FFTA line up more than you'd think.

WHITE MAGE:
-I feel that Reraise needs a buff if Saint Cross will remain as it is. I could see myself just using Saint Cross on the first few turns in battle to Reraise my entire party while they're close instead of using the Reraise spell. I know the Reraise spell is in a good skillset, but this is just something to consider.

BLACK MAGE:
-I really like the Black Mage's MP-based theme. Fun stuff!

ZEALOT:
-A very interesting job concept, but I'm concerned that the enemy AI won't use it properly. It reminds me a lot of Dark Knight though, which I really enjoy. I'm excited to see what you come up with to improve the job!

ARCHER:
-Burial is a very "Why didn't I think of that?" idea. I really like it. So much so that I may ask if I can use it in FFTA GG, heh. Very good idea!

DRAGOON:
-I'd be very interested in learning how you increased the cone size. That'd be quite a useful change for other mods to make as well.

DEFENDER:
-Are there meant to be two Mow Downs?

WHITE MONK:
-Monk sounds like a badass job now. Lots of fun moves, though Chokehold sounds rather broken to me. Again, though, it's tough to say without any testing.

TEMPLAR:
-AoE Haste is pretty broken. Trust me, I've been there, haha.

FOREST RANGER:
-Interesting concept. I really like its variety of skills and its ability to tame fey.

DREAM STRIDER:
-Glad to see someone else enjoys the concept of a job that uses eyesight as a means to attack, though I never figured out how to make it enjoyable. Your version looks very fun, though. Just be careful with Sleep, as it's a very dangerous debuff in the FFTA series.

PROFESSOR:
-Interesting theme. Like FFTA2 Scholar, but not. Addition sounds fun, as does Normalize.

RED MAGE:
-Sounds interesting, but kinda broken. Full-map skills get broken no matter how you balance them, simply because of how they are. If things like Geomancy still exist, that alone will make them ridiculously good. Their ability to just stay in one spot (thereby decreasing their wait time, and thus, their Speed), and blast things with magick is really potent. I recently had a problem with that for a job I made in FFTA2 GG. Just a word of friendly caution, is all.

SNIPER:
-Fair warning that the Elementalshift effect is bugged. It makes any elemental changes -permanent- and they can't be changed unless the Elementalshift effect is used on a target again.

MOG KNIGHT:
-Drake Spirit is kickass. I'm glad someone else liked the transform-into-a-dragon concept. Especially with Moogles, that's pretty awesome.

CULTIST:
-Always a fan of Necromancer jobs. Sounds like it'll be fun!

Ultimately, everything sounds pretty fun, and I look forward to seeing your work. If you need any help or want to bounce around ideas, I'm always around. Let me know if you need anything, and welcome to FFH! :D
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on February 24, 2016, 11:34:39 am
Thanks Jumza, I can say I'm pretty hyped to see it released myself as well.

Lots of interesting stuff in Eternal's post, too. I'll try to address most of it.

@debuff accuracy:
This is more of an equalizing measure than anything else. I found the way the AI uses debuffs generally good, but they will very often go for shots that a player would never consider.
Since I know nothing about how to address this at at the AI level itself, the better way I found is to keep the incentive for positioning the player has and play with which status effects are available/ the mp drain on sustaining them or spamming them. The AI already deals well with this, but now they have a much lower chance of wasting their action.
Many status effects in LN are quite strong, but can't really be sustained without multi-character cooperation or are very conditional. And the odds of the AI landing a status that changes the way the battle plays out are much higher, which didn't happen much in vanilla.

As a tl;dr, the main goal is to have the player's characters interact with each others and the enemy at a more organic level, as opposed to having hard lockdown options where the player wins by default.


@no AP:
Ha, that should've probably been explained better yes. You master abilities once you touch an item that teaches it, and some cannot be mastered at all and need to keep the source if you want them (combos, double weapon, secret abilities etc).
It sounds a bit extreme but I think the reasoning is solid and hopefully it'll play fine.


@soldier:
Well breaks are range 3 and although the power and mind can be changed, MP damage and delaying enemies isn't a joke. Mug is a "ranged" melee attack on a job that can use greatswords, so I think it's alright.


@paladin:
Drop weapon has melee attack accuracy yeah. There are sources of draw weapon on every race, four of them without the item command, and characters can be very competent without a weapon in some circumstances. It's a strong melee debuff, but I think others like the evasion negators can be a lot more devastating.
A fun thing I learned when making decisions about drop weapon is that in vanilla you can use it with a greatbow :D.

Def and cover cost a bunch of MP because they can be used to protect a friend in a pinch. Although to be fair I was considering the permadeath version when I set those up. In general though, costs are set up so that the big skills aren't something you default into but something you choose over having other less costly skills available.
And yes, Saint Cross can be a bit silly, but damn if the AI doesn't use it just beautifully.


@fighter:
Yeah multi-knockback does work, you can even have three tiles kb but there is no animation that calls for the repositioning without dealing damage, so you get a 0 damage displayed and that's ugly :P.
It does have a problem though, knocking past solid objects or from one tile away of the map's limit freezes the game. I'm keeping it to see if I may fix that, though if I can't it may have to go.


@duelist:
Glad to hear so. DUE is the only source of disarm and drawing for moogles though, so it'll probably stay even if I don't love the same-race overlap myself.


@shaman:
The thing I like about confusion is that first you apply it, then it has to roll to see if it works every turn. Sure it's strong and veils are strong in general, but I'm more worried about earth veil chain-delaying than confusing enemies with ease.
Thanks to your comment I noticed the damage power was way off for veils though!


@white mage:
To be fair I feel white mages will be too dominant as they are. Mass healing is quite scarce and other sources of the effects they have, like resurrection and buffs, are far more restrictive. True that it leaves reraise in a weird place though.


@black mage:
One of my favorites as well! Took embarrassingly long to figure out how to set up mana infusion though.


@zealot:
Haven't really dedicated design of new skills much time since I started polishing descs and such, but from what I've seen they do use the basic ones well enough. The buffs are a bit too complex for the AI but restricting them to certain scenarios should do.


@archer:
Ha, it is one of the things I've wanted changed for a long time, initially it was meant to exorcise resurrecting undead but blocking resurrection of anything seemed a lot more interesting.
A word of caution though, the eliminated unit is gone. This is of no relevance used on the enemy, but using it on your own units destroys as if they died on a Jagd. I tried a combination of different targeting filters (KO'd and if KO'd check friendliness) and it doesn't work. So do watch out for that.


@dragoon:
Sure, it's just a matter of setting up parameters for a normal cone ability, then set the horizontal AoE to either 3 for a 9 tiles area, or 5, 6 ,7 etc for an increasingly large cone effect.


@defender:
Nah one was meltdown :P.


@monk:
I love monk classes so there's so favoritism here for sure. I think chokehold will be alright though, being basically a melee Mark that stops further status effects.


@templar:
Eh, still willing to give it a shot. It costs a bit and sure it doubles your speed, but doubling your speed now is comparatively a lot less ridiculous than it was in vanilla.


@dream strider:
I have doubts, but I hope the melee focus and high range on skills keeps it enjoyable. I think Slumber is the only source of player sleep though, because yeah sleep was pretty silly.


@red mage:
Geomancy is no longer a thing humanoids have access to (a bunch of passives that cheated the AI are unavailable) and sure enough I'm certain full map attacks will be a bit of a headache to set up in ways that don't either dominate the fight or become the most unfun thing to fight ever. I have some ideas for this however.


@elementalshift:
Huh, thanks for the heads up! It can be safely removed from the AI arsenal then, since it was never meant for them. Need to redo targeting so it only hits enemies.


Thanks for the kind words and the in-depth look at the changes thus far, hopefully in a couple weeks the entire thing can be put to the test to see how it holds up!
Also new picture!

(https://i.imgur.com/FoPpBLw.png)
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on February 26, 2016, 11:07:43 am
Hope there's no problem doubleposting the updates, it's easier to keep track of that than huge edited posts:

Finished rewriting all the new tooltips for new skills, it's just over a hundred of them so I'm currently cleaning them up and making sure they make sense. New jobs are already fully set up with the exception of the job "dogtag" pictures, which I'm leaving for a bit later.

Hopefully over the weekend I can finish job growths and focus on setting items appropriately, really looking forward to the formations and new monsters development.

Not to break the tradition here's a picture, too :P!

(https://u.pomf.is/bqofna.png)
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: bcrobert on March 02, 2016, 12:47:55 pm
I'm interested in this "instantly mastered or never mastered" mechanic. How exactly did you get it to work that way?

EDIT. I'm also impressed with the general feel of your classes. I can see that a lot of thought went into these concepts and I'm looking forward to seeing the release.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on March 03, 2016, 05:58:27 pm
Glad to hear the classes seem sound, here's hoping they'll live up to it when the release hits. Which come to think about it, should be next weekend (I hope).

Regarding the skill learning changes, I'd noticed the lowest amount of AP the game hands out is 10, and that paired with the limits on values would make it really hard to keep certain skills actually unlearnable. Instead I fiddled with how the game handles different AP costs and got lucky with how it handles 0 cost; as it turns out, skills that cost 0 are added permanently to the character's pool once he's come in contact with any item that teaches them.

After that I got lucky again and it turned out Darthatron had already unearthed the one source of AP I did not know how to modify, random battles :P.

There are probably problems with this. Main ones that you may not be able to steal those skills as they do not get a *Mastered sign, or that if all the skills of a given job cost 0, said job always has the mastered job star on the selection screen. None of this was of relevance to me though, as there is no way to steal skills and the combo rework that this change allowed added a minimum of one skill that can't be mastered to every job.

Regarding development this week, most of the time I've had for FFTA was spent on throwing together the new stat distribution and the new values/gimmicks on gear. While not terribly interesting, it certainly is necessary, but luckily I'm already getting some pretty good ideas for formations and how far I can push things with a couple new tricks. There's a lot more room for variation in enemy power levels with the rescaled humanoid stats, too, which oughta come in handy for the new monsters, bosses etc.

Thus as a slight deviation from tradition, here's a moving picture!
https://u.pomf.is/xtsqjn.mp4 (https://u.pomf.is/xtsqjn.mp4)
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: bcrobert on March 04, 2016, 01:31:33 am
Ah, so I assume the unlearnable skills are the result of every mission and random battle handing out zero AP? That's dirty, but I love the creative manipulation of the system. Little ideas like that can add up to make for a fun hack. :)

EDIT. On a completely unrelated note, will you be avoiding missables? I'm a perfectionist. :P
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on March 04, 2016, 06:30:19 am
Haha, yes, since I don't know much about proper editing yet I tend to make do with relatively ugly tricks so long as they are not noticeable from the user's side :P.
For example all the new tooltips are actually just uncompressed tooltips that had been made redundant or obsolete by skill changes. Currently I'm trying to decide what to do with item descriptions however, as I'd like to keep the unused ones for general enemy-related use (monster descs, skills etc) and there's so many changes that single entries for each don't seem feasible.
Considering to make a few "generic" ones for certain items that share some characteristics but I like the silly flavorful descs so I'm not sold on that idea yet.

And yes, I haven't set up the mission rewards yet but I don't intend to leave missable items since that wasn't very fun in the base game.

EDIT: Can't record a new one at the moment, so here's the first black monk skill that came to be https://u.pomf.is/cfyyxs.mp4

EDIT2: As it turns out the item restructuration is being a right jerk and although the numbers are in a place I like, there's still some work involved in getting the tooltips up.
I'll still probably get to start working on formations later this upcoming week, but it seems like a pretty bad idea to rush something as important as that, so it might well push release back to the 20th or something close to that.

The silver lining, I would say, is that so far the game doesn't require information other than what is readily available while playing to know what things do. This is a thing that I personally value a lot since I tend to forget and re-check things all the time, so hopefully I can play my cards right and have it stay like that.

EDIT3: Dear diary today as I had literally finished up the new generic tooltips for items I couldn't afford single entries for, a way to sidestep it altogether occurred to me.
Didn't want to sleep anyway.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: bcrobert on March 09, 2016, 07:00:08 am
Quote from: dck on March 04, 2016, 06:30:19 am
EDIT3: Dear diary today as I had literally finished up the new generic tooltips for items I couldn't afford single entries for, a way to sidestep it altogether occurred to me.
Didn't want to sleep anyway.


Diary wants details. What was the sidestep you missed out on? Does it involve pointers? Because...pointers. :P
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on March 09, 2016, 08:29:26 am
Ha, well the good news is I do know how to use pointers now, even if I'm rather clumsy with it still!
The even better news is I disregarded this knowledge completely when it came to this particular problem! :P What I realized was that I can just extend entries that demand extra size by cannibalizing the immediately adjacent ones.

One might think this would be unsustainable at any large scale, but given the raw amount of unused entries I have due to mechanical changes it certainly is holding up very well.
Or at least the ~110 items with changed properties were fitted quite nicely within the entries used for laws and law cards.

And among those 100+ items there's of course room for fun! https://u.pomf.is/geeapj.mp4
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on March 12, 2016, 10:55:37 am
Figured I'd drop a small update. Although it took forever the items are now ready, and stat-wise etc I think the overall feel of everything is good- still open to changes but I think it's good enough for a first stab.

No progress has been done yet on formations because although items were finished a couple of days ago, when implementing the bases for new bosses and monsters I realized the way statuses were being applied (checking EV instead of res) made it impossible to have actual immunities, neither gear nor job resistance based.
That doesn't matter much for the player, since there's no sources of immunity on his side (and an overwhelming majority of humanoid/monster enemies will be the same) but it's important when making units that need to be dealt with in different ways, so as to let variety shine.

Luckily I found a system to have any skill effect check against resistance and immunities AFTER going through the EV check, which effectively allows me to have any effect be resistible, if need be. So I spent the dead hours I had for FFTA last couple of days fixing most skills for the new standard and all of that.

Hopefully the stuff surrounding missions and formations goes smoothly this upcoming week so the tentative release date can be maintained.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: bcrobert on March 13, 2016, 01:31:06 am
UNDEAD RING! INFINITE HAPPY FACES!!!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on March 19, 2016, 02:00:47 pm
Well, as it turns out the changes needed for the types of quest chains I had in mind were far trickier than expected, particularly in terms of restrictions.
Somewhat annoyed by having to postpone release again, but at least it lets me consolidate decisions so updating doesn't break saves later. Content plan for the "demo" would be the first 15 story missions with the ~40 extra encounters you'd have available by then; if I can confirm that changes to make new chains are functional there shouldn't be a lot of new problems arising since so such a great portion of work has been taken care of already.

With easter just around the corner I can't really guess at any release date though.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on March 31, 2016, 04:13:43 pm
Today figured I needed to get comfortable with tile molester to fix some item setups since I have no clue where their sprites are called -this was quickly followed by confusion when attempting to get said tiles to even get close to align, mild desperation when I saw what the job dogtags look like and then joy when noticing the title screen was within the grasp of mortal men.

It was a bit annoying to throw together and space since the title doesn't load certain tiles, and the secondary/tertiary sets of shadows are literally embedded on the background image (and are compressed so they look like this (https://u.pomf.is/rdrwtt.png)), but overall I'm happy enough with the end result: https://u.pomf.is/wkesto.png

You can still see the "Final Fantasy Tactics" on the background but the huge beige ADVANCE was what annoyed me the most, so at least by now I won't try to remove it since it'd further distort the background image and I rather like it. Also don't mind the lack of colors and green square, I need to get used to the palette and the other is a marker for the version number.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: Jumza on March 31, 2016, 04:52:39 pm
That looks great! Nice job dude :o
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on April 01, 2016, 08:27:13 am
And then I was coloring it and loaded the rom I thought "boy, this does look pretty good but I don't remember the palette being this desaturated" then I noticed I had somehow switched to TV mode, went back to LCDa and it became ffta: tropical edition.
TV (https://u.pomf.is/ubwxtc.png) - LCDa (https://u.pomf.is/drcwtv.png)


Also thought I'd give the dogtags a shot now that I'm more familiar with TM; it takes goddamn forever but I guess it is doable (https://u.pomf.is/olhljw.png), not sure if all 16 new jobs will have them on the initial release though, because 16 is a huuuge number.

EDIT: well scratch that, it's not doable at all. Some parts of the letters on the dogtags are based on the background sprite they use. Maybe I can eventually make it look for the changed tags somewhere else, but modifying the image already there isn't an option as far as I can tell.

EDIT2: aand then I had to roll back to before I touched them at all. Apparently somewhere along the road the transparencies for certain animations broke and were crashing the game, here's a picture of getting TM to paste the title screen between roms https://u.pomf.is/ddveey.png
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: bcrobert on April 01, 2016, 04:58:30 pm
Aw...sucks that dogtags aren't cooperating. That would be a specifically nice touch.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on April 18, 2016, 01:44:07 pm
It's funny looking back how I actually believed formations would be the fastest thing to get done. Even when I'm not doing anything particularly fancy to them they still take a lot of checking to make sure they work as intended and sort of fit the power curve.

A positive side result of this is I there's not a lot of rushing and I think particularly story missions like totema fights are pretty cool. Story-wise development is done up to exodus, though given the ridiculous amount of side missions up to that point (with their rewards and battles to set up) I'll probably end the first release after ultima's battle which is when the shop first updates.
When that'll happen is anyone's guess!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: bcrobert on April 30, 2016, 02:31:20 am
Yeah rebalancing formations is specifically time consuming, especially since some missions are intentionally harder than others at the same point in time. But less than half of the 300 numbered missions are actual battles so it could be worse. :P
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on May 15, 2016, 11:14:24 am
Welp, been a while since the last post. I had to take a break from this due to some unexpected stuff coming up, and in truth mission rewards adjusted for the new items were annoying and killed most drive I had to get things done.
However I recently set up the missions up to exodus and did a test run through the main ones; even though I may be biased as hell I had a great time, particularly because I didn't even remember most changes I had done to formations and was surprised by most nasty stuff. Anyhow, point is I felt it was good fun and I want it done (so I can play it :P), so first release should be imminent now, as I just have to finish side missions available from 8 to 15 (and these are a lot less than 1 to 8) and then bite the bullet and set up the damn rewards once and for all.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: rrs_kai on June 04, 2016, 11:13:01 pm
Quote from: dck on March 03, 2016, 05:58:27 pm
Thus as a slight deviation from tradition, here's a moving picture!
https://u.pomf.is/xtsqjn.mp4 (https://u.pomf.is/xtsqjn.mp4)

How did you get this animation to work? Normally it only works for Llednar's sprite.

Quote from: dck on March 03, 2016, 05:58:27 pm
@dragoon:
Sure, it's just a matter of setting up parameters for a normal cone ability, then set the horizontal AoE to either 3 for a 9 tiles area, or 5, 6 ,7 etc for an increasingly large cone effect.

nice
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: trukxlig123 on June 05, 2016, 12:09:43 am
Quote from: rrs_kai on June 04, 2016, 11:13:01 pm
How did you get this animation to work? Normally it only works for Llednar's sprite.
nice

I think he added a pointer to "52" below "shrug backward" using bcrobert's modules, but I don't know which animation though. The animation also works with dragoons and templars, life render's animation is similar to jump.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on June 10, 2016, 08:36:26 am
trukxlig123 is indeed correct, life render is a palette swap of jump, and works just fine on bangaa units so long as the 52 in the module is actually using an animation. In this case it was just shake head to fit the theme.
It also works for any race doing the same process, however during the last frames of impact the sprite glitches out and is split in multiple pieces until it calls for the landing one. I wasn't very interested in using the jump animation for anyone else though, so I didn't look for a solution.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night progression thread.
Post by: dck on June 16, 2016, 05:34:22 pm
"Imminent" turned out to be a bit of an overstatement, but at last I finally got some time to finish up the mission rewards and the game is good to go!

Right now all content unlocked up to story mission 15 is available, and this roughly accounts for 70% of the game's base battles. Since at that point the player gains access to all character abilities and the best shop gear, there was actually room for a bunch of endgame-ish content too. I'd like for the remaining part of the game to be quite different from vanilla, so updates from this version will probably take a while as I work on the unique classes and attempt to set up all-new encounters.

Hope you like it!

EDIT: the first post has the updated information now, as well as the updated link.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.62.4 release!
Post by: bcrobert on June 20, 2016, 02:12:54 am
I NEED MORE FREE TIME.

The ability changes are very thought out and I love the feel of the unique classes. I need to just stop going to work so I can actually play this through. >_<
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.62.5 release!
Post by: dck on June 20, 2016, 07:42:47 pm
Ha, funnily enough I haven't been able to start a playthrough myself either.
Well I'm sure becoming an FFTA playing hermit will have its perks!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.62.5 release!
Post by: bcrobert on June 21, 2016, 03:31:29 am
Wait how did you get the 50/50 effect on Rekindle? I don't remember there being any accuracy formulas like that in the game.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.62.5 release!
Post by: dck on June 21, 2016, 04:31:35 am
Smoke and mirrors!
It uses the gadget targeting for the 50% part, since there's only one unit it could affect and so it resolves as a coinflip. So the skill is basically 100% heal > gadget targeting instakill > auto-raise.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.62.6 release!
Post by: bcrobert on June 21, 2016, 06:22:46 am
Aha! That's clever. It never occurred to me that gadget formula without AoE is ultimately just a 50/50 hit or miss either way. I always got hung up on the friend or foe aspect of the formula.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.62.6 release!
Post by: dck on June 21, 2016, 06:34:37 am
Yeah, it's really useful once you notice it, even if restricted in use since hitrate display is wrong unless it's a secondary effect.
There is a lot you can do with custom effects honestly, I didn't expect it to be this open to possibilities starting out.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.63.2 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on June 28, 2016, 12:24:26 am
How did you edit text in your mod. The item names and descriptions, ability names and descriptions?

I like many abilities in your mod. Paragon is pretty nice, Un, Deux! with Ambidexterity...4 hits.
Is it intentional that Flans don't have max def by LV.50?
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.63.3 release!
Post by: dck on June 28, 2016, 06:54:11 am
General names is just repointing, the descriptions are mostly the old ones rewritten since I don't really need them for anything. Nothing fancy but it works and isn't noticeable from the player side, so I'm okay with it.

Yeah, iirc toughskins have the highest def now, although flans' is so high it's going to be shaving off ~300 damage so in practice they're still extremely resistant to it without debuffing.

EDIT: Since a few people have messaged me regarding the changelog before. There isn't one because at this point most of the changes were about formation problems, with a few other bugs that needed to be fixed (like shoes being broken).
Some balance changes have also been made as well, like fairies losing some speed and particular quests being changed around since unit placement made them silly.

Basically I'd rather keep the changelogs as changes between main versions rather than documenting every little thing.

EDIT2: Oh yeah and totemas no longer have a speed growth, so they don't become exponentially more difficult as you level up. That was an old change I forgot about before I learned to make new monsters, since I wanted them for endgame missions.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on July 09, 2016, 09:01:59 pm
Alright, I actually had time to try this out myself and I think it's going the right way. The only things I felt needed change were the foreign fiends gaining a few immunities to the and a detail about Exodus.

Had to deal with a real head-scratcher for a few days where AIO seemingly was not writing to the rom properly anymore, until I realized it was actually the testing savestate I did most work on that was corrupted.
I think by now most obvious broken things are ironed out though, so I'll be starting work on the endgame patch a few people have messaged about- and speaking of PMs, I'd like to thank everyone for their feedback and overwhelmingly positive reactions. This hack is something I made for myself and a group of friends, but it's definitely great to hear other people are enjoying it too.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: ChimpMaster on August 08, 2016, 12:21:37 am
Hey, you probably don't know who I am, but, I said I'd take a look at your mod about a week or two ago. I'm going to do a quick write up about my thoughts and experiences going through the first few battles. I wouldn't take too much to heart since I haven't played this game as much as FFT, but, I don't mind helping you out since you seemed like a pretty cool dude. Anyway, I'm playing this on .64 on mGBA 4.1.

Tutorial Fight:
Montblanc is going full retard consistently here. He's running into enemies and prioritizing whacking them with his staff over actually casting magic. It doesn't make the battle impossible or anything but it is a much tighter fight than I think you're aiming for. I'd take a look into that or just give control to the player if possible. He's going full kupo out there.

I spent a while messing around with my team and noticed that speed drops to 1 on job swap. This isn't really an issue since it reverts once I equip items but it was still something of note. As of the moment I'm feeling quite overwhelmed with as many options there are but I figured you'd want everybody to at least have the option to try anything they'd want. I have a team in mind, usually one that makes Eternal mad, that I'm probably going to use for a while.

Something else I'm worried about at the moment is MP cost vs Growths. At initial glance it seems like they're too high. I know in the original game there were too many abilities that were free and were too influential to the tide of battle, I'm looking at you Smile, but, it feels too crippling at first glance. I'd probably suggest lowering MP costs to half of what they are for most classes with low MP growth. Then maybe take off a quarter with classes with much higher MP growth. Mind you I haven't really played too much yet, so, I'm going to see how it works in battle before commenting on this further.

Flower Picking:
This battle went a lot poorer than I expected. The equipment speed bug I mentioned above does really give them 1 speed unless you equip them with some armor. So guess who forgot to equip their Marche with any armor to reset this. That aside I was only one man down for the fight. It was still winnable, but, it wasn't pleasant. Pummel surprised me and ko'd montblanc turn 3 through a bush. That aside it was just watching the Dragoon clean house with his ice spear since he hits like a truck while the not Time Mage I'm using cast haste on him. That was basically the whole battle.

I really don't think the AI knows how to use incandescence though. The one time it did use it, it was on the Dragoon's ice spear and it failed. Then he never used it again. This is probably due to the fact of the high Mp costs, but, it would be annoying to have him do that every turn. I notice there's a lot of draw weapon skills to counteract this, but, it feels like it's just a bit too frequent when I look at the skill list.

Thesis Hunt
Summon Montblanc made a much more impressive showing here by setting up two kills on the archers here. The archers that preceded to target the tankiest unit on my team and miss both times. I know you can't do anything about FFTA AI, at least last I checked, but, it's just tragic watching things like that. That aside, despite being under-equipped it was a cake walk to out position them and just run them through. Nothing of importance to say here but it does feel like Dragoon's breath attacks are remarkably weak. I know it's only the second battle of the game, but, 3 damage? That feels extremely low.

Cheetahs:
Well that was the first time I've ever seen Ritz or Shara KO'd before. The moogle with time magic, are they suppose to get this in this hack I'd need to read the job changes at the front again, was annoying. The beast also turned out to be quite a threat too, doing 50+ damage to my units. Mind you I haven't really been doing side missions, only story ones at the moment, to get an idea of how the hack works for this little write up. It kind of boiled down to the fact that my Dragoon does a ton of damage. Kind of leaving me to believe I should start shifting everyone into heavy melee focused jobs instead of trying to play around with the high MP costs. Sniper's toxic ability help wear the beast down enough for Marche to finish it off though, so there is that. Turns out poison is good, who would of thought?

Sprhomknights:
Just a random clan fight I decided to do for no reason. Hilariously my magic users died after their first turn for the again reconfirming that belief. It's kind of a funny cycle. I also noticed a bug where the AI is apparently able to use their spells at half the cost? I noticed the Mog Knight in this map doing that and he didn't have a half-mp ability from what I could tell. That was frustrating watching him speed up everything on the screen. That being said this was a tight one due to bad RNG on my end and them having much stronger equipment than myself. Also are bishops suppose to have such high natural evade? They're rocking 60 evade right now for some reason and I'd just noticed. Dragoon came out on top though and barely won by using the first balm of my play through.

Village Hunt:
More monsters. It feels like they hit remarkably harder than anything but the bishop in Sprhomknights. Nothing else has begun to even get as close as them in damage. With that being said it seems the MP bug, I don't know if it's a glitch or not just weird, doesn't affect them. Since I'm not getting bombarded by the one blue ant-lion with the earth move that does 50 damage a pop to my tankier characters. I swapped everyone to melee heavy focus jobs to improve usefulness around the team. It's been a big step up since now everyone is actually doing something before dropping dead. That being said, the lack of magic was an issue with the rock turtles, but by having poison on everything in my party it wasn't an issue. I used the time between them dropping dead from it to level up on them with the one damage across the board.

That being said that's where I stopped for the moment. I'd been playing for about three hours at this point and I kind of wanna give my initial thoughts on things.

I really like the uniqueness of the jobs that I did try. While I feel like there's some redundant skills across the jobs, see draw weapon and disarm, it's not bad at all. The class I think I liked the most out of trying them out were the Zealots. Blood knights have always been cool and they take it a step further I feel. That being said a lot of jobs don't really feel all that good to use despite being unique.

The magic classes suffer the most here, getting only a few castings before running out of juice. It seems to heavily focus a melee style of combat, at least towards the beginning. Without the tiers of spells slowly ramping the cost up there's very little reason to use any magic early game. This could get better the more I play but it makes it very painful at the start. That and throw in the fact that the range for spells seems to have been shorten, you have many dead squishy mages very fast. Basically making them blitz fodder for my style of play.

Speaking of MP, they seem way too high across the board. The cost/reward of each ability feels too heavily skewed to the cost side. It makes melee a much stronger option, particularly lances with double hand, than magic could hope to be at the moment. Skills are basically nonexistent, and when they are seen it's usually done by the enemy. Which is nasty with the half MP thing some units seem to get. While it does offer AOE in comparison the damage is not good enough to make up for it. To be honest I think your mod would benefit more from MP regen with costs this high, but, I'll let you decide if it's an issue or not.

I know the mod is nowhere near done at this point but it feels really chaotic at the moment. Mind you that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but, I would need a lot more experimentation before I could give my thoughts much more than that. This is just from a few hours of me playing while being exhausted so take everything with a grain of salt. I hope the feedback gives you some help though with what to do with this mod. I'm really excited to see where it goes though. It feels rough around the edges at this point, but, any mod this early in usually does.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 08, 2016, 02:11:32 pm
Hey there, yeah I do remember you from the thread. That's definitely a lot of feedback so I'll address it best I can.

Tutorial fight:
The first thing I did when I started changing formations was removing guest units since they're often extremely stupid and dumb allies isn't a fun type of difficulty, but unfortunately it led to problems with their items (and possibly team slot) lingering unavailable in the inventory afterwards. That fight has been revised for next version though, as it's annoying to have him get killed like that and the player's input is too limited.


*Gear and speed:
That's part of the stats change. I didn't want to encourage fiddling with growths for speed gains, so speed has been changed to make it direct who goes first instead of who acts more often. Basically, natural evade and speed are modified by body armor type, with heavy armor having very low evade (10) and the lowest speed (80), and robes having high evade (50) and the highest speed out of humanoid units (90).

When they do get hit, robe users generally get demolished by physical attacks before they start getting some levels and passives in, but their higher mobility lets them stay out of range of most of these relatively effectively. Most buffs/debuffs and support can be used from safety almost always. Attacks demand exposing yourself sometimes, but with the added utility I found the damage to be worth positioning for plenty of enemies.
Regardless, they do start the weakest for sure. This is a side effect of the current implementation of level scaling not allowing me to specify higher levels for the starting members, but as they level up and get more abilities I found even basic mages like black ones were very strong.


MP consumption and leveling:
MP is definitely tight. The idea is that skills are to be helpful but used sparingly early on, although magic units have a harsher time than they should due to level 1 stats (again a reason why I'd rather have a way to set everyone in the starting party to 5 or so). It soon stops being such a pressing issue though, unlike in vanilla, every class gets a substantial amount of extra MP (but zealots).
As an example, when my game was over Marche had been trained as a fighter the entire time, and could use skills with surprising abandon despite the 1MP/level growth even without Half MP or support. Montblanc as a black mage never had MP shortage again the moment he learned aspir, and later on he could share it with just as little care.

On the subject of leveling up, the way the current scaling works is taking the highest clan unit and scaling to that for main quests. Side quests and random encounters, however, give everyone a +3 modifier (+5 for some particular enemies). Although it's a disadvantage, I didn't find it too noticeable and it speeds up the leveling more than a little bit.

Way before the first release I made a tentative playthrough doing only the main missions and I reached the end with Marche barely breaking double digits, so I'd definitely recommend taking on the odd side quest. I noticed characters felt a lot more well-rounded as they reached mid teens.


Herb Picking:
Ha, "not Time Mage, not Sage" etc is what the new classes were named on the version I set up for a bunch of buddies that played the initial release.
And yeah, there's skills the AI can't use yet, although AI tweaks and adaptations are something I'm postponing at the moment.


*Dragoon's breaths:
They use power instead of attack. Although the player abilities may change in the future, I wanted to keep it consistent with the dragon skills that also check resistance instead of def.
Due to bangaa's racial power, the damage is trash early. In terms of power, dragoons are to bishops what white mages are to black ones, so although niche, the breaths can be of use in some situations. Dragoons have a lot of utility already, so it's not a terrible deal.


Cheetahs:
Broadly speaking, monsters are stronger than the average humanoid, although the player almost always have the numbers advantage when the enemy team includes them.
I can't really remember what the other guys were doing with their magic users early on right now, but in my case it was montblanc and the nu mou were basically applying buffs and slowing from safety, then staying at range maintaining action speed until either the damage burst or healing was needed.


*Sprohmknights and gear progression:
Although most encounters have enemies only using items that are available in shops at the time, there some variation every now and then and they can have gear from the next tier (although not often more than a few pieces). That bishop and the gladiator are some of those exceptions!
Incidentally, I'm not sure how this could be missing on your end, but as you can see here (https://u.pomf.is/xpwnae.png) that mog knight does have Half MP equipped.

Also, bishops have 50 from their robes and an extra 10 from the staves (which are 2-handed now).


Village Hunt:
The biggest tweak I'd want to do to monsters would be setting their speed to a certain amount without the level variance it gets. At the moment it's hard to set up some of the higher speed monsters so they won't create scenarios that are too unfair, and although it's been addressed somewhat, it needs a more definite solution.

There's nothing wrong with changing to what you find most useful, one of my friends beat it without ever using white magic in fact, but I can say dealing with dragons for example without shell looked like a lot of trouble. Even berserked and slowed they can be a problem, in certain circumstances.
Regardless, one of the pretty good things about the level scaling is it also affects new recruits, so when they come in they can make quite a difference very fast. Makes it less of a problem if you find you neglected something in particular later on.


I think that covers most of it. Chaotic is probably a fair description since the early game is more off than I would like and there's a lot of things that play different than vanilla- I do think it falls into place as you go, though. Definitely curious to see how you find the progression.


PS: Sections marked with a * cover stuff that will be added to the game's rumors next version. I can't cover everything in-game, but since the interface is there I'd rather have most basic things. Other subjects like when shops update should make it in as well.


PPS: Since it's been like a month since last update I might as well add some silly thing I was working on a few days ago https://u.pomf.is/yyyvgn.mp4
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: ChimpMaster on August 08, 2016, 04:30:52 pm
Ah thanks for the response. I'll probably tinker around with it a bit more later today. That really depends on if things go my way today or not. With that being said I did that write up while about to pass out at my computer, so I'll need to probably examine it again when I have time.

I doubled checked some of the things and you were right. The Mog Knight in that battle does have half MP, I don't know what the hell I was seeing last night. I blame the fact I was exhausted.

Also I understand the logic behind what you wanna do with speed, I'm just curious to why it would drop to 1? Wouldn't it be better to place it higher than even having armor in the first place? I assume that just encourages to use it though I suppose.

Yeah, I assume most of the issues I'm having right now is just having everyone really low level. I'm usually use to having stats to pad what my expectations are for what I was assuming was 'higher' tier job classes. I'm trying to judge everything on it being useful "now" instead of taking account of it down the line. It's hard to take into account the whole thing at the start, but, that's why I'll definitely be playing more either today or tomorrow. The most difficult thing I really see for the mod though is making things usable at the start? I know I felt very overwhelmed at the start since I wasn't really sure what everything was or how I would even use it. Money is a limiting factor in that case and it can be hard to evaluate what they'd want at the start.

In a way, I almost think your mod would work better in FFTA2 in some ways. Since you can lock off progression to different jobs through the missions. Not that you can't make this work, but, just my two cents on the matter.  Anyway, I'll post here again later, I'm looking forward to continuing my playthrough. Any ETA on the next version?
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 08, 2016, 05:27:29 pm
Hah, well "Long Night" was named in somewhat similar circumstances and I wouldn't recommend taking the name as a suggestion.

About speed, it basically boils down to how the game handles base stats on unit generation. Stats can vary from 95% to 115% of the specified number regardless of the unit having literally zero growth. I need to look more into a way to keep this from happening, as it's the main reason enemies are such a pain to place in a given speed bracket.

FFTA2 never clicked with me the way the first one did, so I never felt the drive to work on it at all.

Oh, and regarding the next version, it'll be months so I wouldn't hold my breath. The main reason the current version covers such a large amount of content is that I wanted to be able to properly experiment on endgame stuff without feeling pressed for time, and there's a ton of experimenting yet to do.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Visage on April 09, 2017, 09:28:23 pm
I've been playing this hack recently, and I think it's pretty cool. My criticism does get somewhat harsh here, but it's only because I'd like to see the hack be better. If you disagree with my opinions and/or want me to stop, I'll stop bothering you  :)

Before I start complaining, I'd like to point out just how much I enjoy the fact that Thieves and Stealing don't exist. Having them in the game adds a lot of really weird issues, not least of which is the fact that money is utterly irrelevant to a sufficiently-opportunistic thief.
Having to manage my money was a welcome change.

The Paragon's "Un, Deux" skill does not ignore Damage>MP. The R-skill is greyed out in the combat preview, but it still activates and works.

I dunno how much you can do about the AI, but a Moogle Gunner in the mission to free Koringwood softlocked the game by using Double Attack and attempting to attack something outside his range with the second attack.

The effectiveness of healing seems to be significantly reduced by resistance. This makes it very hard for White Mages to keep themselves alive, especially early game.

The Paladin's "Prayer" skill is pretty great, but it only prevents auto-revival if you don't kill the victim with it, since apparently the buff-purging happens after the damage.
I don't know if that's intended or not, but I was certainly a little put out when I killed Babus with it and he got back up  :P

I have to say the way the level scaling works is... perhaps a little off-putting to me? Making it so the enemies are always higher level than you certainly does make the combat more interesting, but it can also feel a little cheap just how strong they are compared to you.
A good example of this is the S.O.S. mission; it's quite possible for Ritz and Shara to be dead or incapacitated before they even get to act.

Perhaps I'm just not very good at the game, but I found myself having to do some battles over multiple times, or progress a little and come back later (The ice-making wizard dude in particular sticks out to me.)
...I'm actually becoming kinda convinced Adrammalech is unbeatable without 3 Bengaa abusing Wyrmtamer and some dudes reviving people. All of the enemies are ridiculously tanky, and anything but a breath attack will just oneshot most units.
When Giza Plains was attacked, the strategy I ended up using was poisoning everything, draining the Titania's MP before it gave anyone Auto-Life, and having my Sniper use Conceal so that I would have one unit still living when the monsters died to the poison. Even with this strategy, there was a rather low probability of success and I eventually resorted to savestates because I was getting sick of replaying the mission.
It's also worth noting that the enemies always being very strong makes it much harder to catch monsters than I think is entirely reasonable, but that's quite possibly intended.
If you're balancing the difficulty with savestates in mind, I think you should reconsider; the RNG in FFTA is not predetermined at all so, so you could just savestate-abuse until literally no enemy hit you and you never missed. In which case there would be no difficulty high enough unless the enemies all got guaranteed-damage attacks.

Having all new recruits be the same as your highest level character is cool, and makes sure they're relevant, but a lot of the attachment to units that happens in the base game just kind of evaporates as a result.
If you have a character who has learned a whole bunch of abilities, generally the preferred strategy is to level them back up to usefulness, rather than just kicking him. In this hack, there's a decent chance that you'll receive a replacement who's liable to be higher level after any given mission, and all it takes to bring the new guy up to snuff is piddling around in menus for a bit.

I think the scaled enemies should just be the same level as your highest, probably a little less, with recruits joining you at the average of your clanmates' levels to give the older units a fighting chance at being kept.
The only one of my starter units I still have at this point is the human, since Duelists are awesome and therefore he's almost never not useful.

However, I've got a possibly-better solution... It seems to me that the enemies in every encounter scale to you, so the main difference as you go through the game is only two things: number of times you can use abilities, and the number/quality of abilities (and their associated gear items) you have available.
Why not just remove leveling up entirely?
The gear-based progression will be there anyway, and ability use at low levels is already a bit of a balance issue/concern.

With the removal of leveling, you could balance all classes' base stats such that they have a good amount but never too much MP to use.
The only issue I can see with this is that you lose the ability to multiclass level your units and average their stats, but the base classes have varied enough stat focuses that you can generally find your preferred balance of stats anyway.

Particularly if you went with the removal of leveling, I think I might be willing to try and help you find/adjust the stat generation code so that you control what the stat variances are.

PS: Sorry for the wall of text, and thanks for making the hack!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on April 13, 2017, 07:21:52 pm
Lots of feedback! I'll try to address things individually then explain a bit why some things work the way they do.


Alright, so I figure it'd be a good idea to clear up what this hack's initially set out to do and how it relates to how it currently is.
I've always felt the base game is too bogged down by tedious tasks that didn't add much in the way of fun but did enable a great deal of benefits; such as walking aimlessly around the map as your units did deployment missions, stealing everything of value, grinding classes to unlock advanced ones or rechecking laws before fights and walking a few extra times if they happened to be inconvenient.

Another problem I had with vanilla is that its variety in skills is questionable, but could probably be good enough, if only many of them weren't rendered completely useless by others being straight upgrades. That, and the fact you have completely overkill damage from infinite sources that outclass skill usage outright.
There's nothing inherently wrong with OP, but I think the best type of OP is the one that can be used from both sides without the game becoming unplayable- which would be the case if you were to redo melee enemy units to be dual wielding chocobo armor clad monstrosities and gunners that ultima charge you from nine tiles away.

So with those two main things to overcome, you end up with a game that would benefit from having enemy scaling so new encounters are guaranteed to maintain a set threat level; this, I think, still keeps a sense of progression as the gear updates are very significant but lets random encounters stay engaging since the skillset is still somewhat viable even if their gear is no longer up to par.

Here is when technical limitations come in. Due to the implementation of the level scaling hack (necessary to not overlevel story missions and not to get level 25 enemies with a clan of 6 level 50s and a ton of level 1 recruits), it's no longer possible to specify a level on unit generation. This includes the starting party and given the way the stat restructuration works, makes them basically really bad at their specific jobs since they have no bonus from them.

To make matters worse, I found several ways to stop xp gain, yet couldn't find any way to multiply the gained exp at all. This is a pretty big deal, as playing the storyline without level bonuses to enemies meant the xp gain was so meager that finishing a test run up to Exodus left my Marche at maybe level 12.
This is of course unacceptable since the units only really begin working well with their roles at around 8+, so as a workaround a level bonus was applied to random encounters and sidequests- the extra levels do make them tougher, which I'm not against in non-mandatory missions, but in my experience don't really make that much of a difference compared to them normally outgearing you or having strong abilities for you to work around. However the main point of these (up to 3) extra levels enemies have is to kickstart the player's own xp gain and hasten the progress of his units so they begin to behave appropriately as soon as possible.

As you can imagine from the above, yeah the idea of doing away with levels altogether has been considered before :D.
It's a fine course of action, I think. The very good thing it does is letting units behave as intended from the get go, then it also enables all classes to best use their available skills from the first battle (debatable whether pro or con)- however from here on you have severe downsides like starting units being hardlocked to their starting roles with no chance of ever changing them, secondary skillset decision becoming a lot more fiddly since your starting class may not have stats for it, generally a large deal of loss when it comes to customization.

Not all is grim though, an idea I've been toying with for a bit is leaving experience gain alone and just reduce the level cap to far lower, perhaps 10. This way the initial level the starting party has makes a far greater impact and should stop units from being in that awkward zone I've seen testers struggle with in the early game. All while retaining a decent amount of build flexibility and still having a progression that leads to being stat-capped around the end of the current patch, even if one were not to do any sidequests at all.
Similarly, it would allow to take off the extra levels on enemies that are currently used to give the player more exp. These encounters are already plenty hard in some situations, such as Frosty Mage that you bring up yourself and "Gelato's cat", which is how some of the lads referred to the panther that was initially wiping them pretty hard.

Tying in with your concerns about encounters in general. I do set them up with the intention that they create scenarios in which players' choices are important and you can screw up bad enough that you throw the mission. I've lost a significant number of fights myself, and I don't think there's an issue with this so long as it isn't unfair in an unfun way. What I mean by this is that human players have a significant advantage by grace of not being a gba game AI, so they can deal with pretty stacked scenarios as long as they are given a fighting chance.

Now, I had the good luck to have a bunch of friends who raced each others on the main release and could see how they adapted to problems and how they dealt with stuff. Since they all shared tips with each others there were hastes and due/zea skillsets as far as the eye could see, but some things started directly walling that type of approach so eventually I could witness them splitting into their own thing each pretty much. Overall, I was quite happy with the result.
Some things were toned down (a lot*) since they were dumb and forcing stupid approaches like a team of 95 evasion onion knights; other than that, spacing to stay out of range and some debuffs like slow and berserk might be a bit too general solutions that work really well, but as far as I know none of them were using savestates during battles or otherwise gaming the hitchance RNG and could make it through most things. One of them even killed the roaming naiads which is something I wasn't completely sure was possible.

Of course, some of this is hard (adrammelech, tower ruins when first available) and some of it is unfair (naiads), but I don't really mind that as long the chance to fight back is there (which is very questionable when it comes to naiads)- and this is primarily why development has become stunted lately, because the main contributor to unfun wipes are monsters that get turn 1 moves they're not meant to get, and are capable of doing tremendous damage that doesn't leave the player with enough resources to fight back. There's a world of difference between being able to get hastes, shells and grace up before sprites start throwing clay imps around and titanias get a move, and just getting four of your unbuffed guys whacked by a holy before they move.

As you can see, walls of text are not an issue here :P, I rather enjoy talking about the game and spitballing can lead to some neat improvements. For example as consequence of giving the level 10 cap some more thought I realized I have artifacts already mapped, so I could easily give access to the ones that let you choose the type of recruit you want after battles. The artifact system is pretty much a dead mechanic at this point since the list was trimmed down and their battle effects altogether removed, so this could be a neat way to flesh it out and give it a real purpose.

*a lot means solar flare used to hit five units, gelato's cat used to have rend, totemas used to gain speed as they leveled up (so adrammelech could actually be faster than some units), fae used to be made to act first instead of only getting it on accident, etc etc. We've come a long way :D
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Mickey B on March 16, 2018, 03:39:21 am
Still working on this? Been about a year...
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on June 04, 2018, 07:08:10 am
Hi, unfortunately the project was dragged completely into a halt some time back due to real life in part, but mostly indecision on how to continue it:

Basically I can either ignore the issues with speed and leveling systems as they are and continue adding story content and sidequests or I can mostly gut the leveling system so there's no need for enemies wildly superior in terms of stats, which will be better but won't allow real finetuning of speed (and would be a bit messy looking since monsters would need speed equipment too); there's also killing leveling altogether which -would- make for rather elegant speed handling and no wild stat disparities in general, but would obviously kill crossclassing and customizing characters stat-wise. This sounds bad but bear in mind it would place a focus on the recruitment system with early artifacts to control it, which could make for interesting reasons for doing missions and progressing in general.

Without being able to iron out the random stat gains I'm fairly sure the last option is inevitable, a very minor level range would actually be catastrophic because most of the stats should be gained through levels if they would exist at all, and that would make randomly generated units that are one level higher almost unkillable powerhouses.

So yeah, lifestyle changes in the future might prevent me from finishing this whatsoever, so I've been retreading it a bit and thinking about giving it some closure, but for that I'd have to decide what base change to instate if any at all.

For what's worth I've had good ideas for the rest of the content in these two years anyway so I think if you liked what was here already, well, you'd probably like what's to come as well. Or not so much.
Adrammelech might not look that bad in the end.


PS: the new sorting of editing tools and mods on the forums looks great btw, thanks for that.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Zeke_Aileron on June 04, 2018, 08:33:36 am
Quote from: dck on June 04, 2018, 07:08:10 am
PS: the new sorting of editing tools and mods on the forums looks great btw, thanks for that.


You're welcome if this is referring to the new stickies i made.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on July 20, 2018, 01:01:45 pm
Since I've had this on the back of my mind for a bit now here's some skill changes I just whipped up:

Archer:

Blind Archery:Retains random damage element (normally a boost anyway) and now dispels and reflects the target (which makes it mostly impossible for him to get rebuffed).

Gunner:

Fireshot:Now a fixed range 4, 5 AoE fire attack. All shots keep same physical base and go to 24 mp.
Boltshot:Now fixed range 5, piercing lightning attack.
Iceshot:Now fixed range 3, 13 AoE ice attack.

Forest Ranger:

Boldness:Can now be cast on allies up to 4 tiles away.

Black monk's 3 0.5x damage skills are probably going to be thrown away or buffed significantly since they don't make much sense as they stand, and red mage is in an awkward spot and might well be remade from the ground up, although I do realize some people like the entire fullscreening thing.
It might be obvious but working on this doesn't really take a very high priority for me right now, however if you have any comments on skills you find useless or other stuff you think might be worth looking at feel free to mention or shoot me a pm.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on July 31, 2018, 06:38:57 pm
Annd my drive to work on LN has actually kept up so far! Ability design always was my biggest draw to this game, so I took some time relearning and fixing things for a bit. The first post is now updated with the changed or new skills marked in red, it's not that much but it's stuff that always bothered me because it wasn't as polished.

Also after finishing Ezel's skillset (two years late) I have the way paved to the rest of the unique characters, for which I have much clearer concepts. Next up is Llednar and from there one more mission content until Mateus, which I'm really looking forward to as well!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 18, 2018, 10:44:12 pm
And as biweekly update, the level cap, monster speed changes and general speeding up of the early game's power curve is underway. As two people noticed, yeah the first post is being edited almost daily since I actually use it as a resource when comparing certain skills. It's also generally more complete since it's a good reference point for balancing things.

Towards the end of the week I got sidetracked with the numbercrunching for monster speed brackets etc and started making more skills because that's a lot more fun, so now (a few) vampires can resurrect the entire map as zombies or charmed zombies depending on team. Also zombify temporarily KOs the unit because that's a more interesting mechanic than just charming your units right away.
Mind you, this resulted in the cultist's Ritual ability being turned into a mini-mass resurrect too, covering an invocation area around him and with the same charm properties for enemies. Ritual was always cute but impractical and not really niche either, so this should be a lot more useful.

Also, I bit a very old bullet and started actually triple checking how the AI uses certain skills. Some I can't or simply won't fix as they're not worth the time, but I'm actually having a lot of success even getting them to nail you with reckonings -every time- they hit critical hp, which is cool. In general most of the "fancy" skills are actually AI friendly by now.

Next progress update sometime soon (maybe)!

EDIT: Testing more and more of how the AI works in detail is really interesting, it's not particularly cowardly but it has no way to judge the value of options if they only affect the user, so if it sees a negative effect it gets spooked and discards the idea of using stuff like Block Pain no matter what. What's funny is this changes immediately the moment it gets hit by astra lmao.

EDIT2: Actual AI edits are beyond the scope of this hack, but understanding this more is making it really easy making small changes so the skills are properly recognized and used. It was always an annoyance for example that enemy cultists couldn't really use most of their skillset, but now they can turn and charm/petrify your units without any problem at all! \o/
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: badabing93 on June 16, 2020, 07:31:14 pm
This mod is awesome.

I love what you did with the stats. Couldn't imagine a better job system either. The only change I would suggest here is boosting onion knight atk growth to 4.0, possibly at the expense of some bulk. His best use is robing and phys atk. Loss of an ability slot is quite an opportunity cost already. Didn't know this was unfinished so I took the time to squeeze in several levels as a fighter xD... black robe boosted backdraft is insane.

I think you could make it harder too... The player has so many tools at their disposal. Those counter draining vampires and naiads were on the right track. Maybe throw in some uber speedy guys like the snow fairy. The first babus fight left a little to be desired though. I suggest handing them more broken equips in general as the ai struggles to utilize skills.

Adramalech fight was one of my favorite moments of any game lol so props. Hope you finish this. Thanks
 
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on July 23, 2020, 08:22:52 pm
Those are really sweet words to read. I recently had a friend replay what is available of LN and it was surprising how little I remembered about the encounters as he reccounted them. I completely forgot the changes to totemas, or in general the few endgame fights I fit in the available patch.

This project is something I'd like to see finished since it has clear goals in at least revamping the story and base endgame missions completely, and in truth a lot of the numbercrunching busywork and major roadblocks to having proper balance are either already done or have gotten solutions in all this time, mostly thanks to the tools Leonarth has been developing.

I can't promise I will be able to work on this reliably, but what I'll do is put some effort to recall the main things that are still to be adressed for the upcoming days/week, edit this post with them as they come and afterwards gauge how to retake development. Not like I have the development files at hand right now anyway, so it would help getting back in the mindset.

I'm glad you enjoyed it and thanks also to the people who sent encouraging PMs or reached out on disc, I don't think I replied to everything but support is well appreciated :).

___________________
List for mostly personal use and cross-referencing thoughts later. Not exactly a TO-DO, though things are in rough priority order:
___________________
Maybes:


___________________
Changelog:
Despite their endgame strength, low levels were too hard for magic users; at low level they are restricted by MP and moderate skill damage, which on top of their often questionable defenses makes them very hard to use. The extra power should heavily reward using your skills appropriately early on and MP management during those levels before job growths actually let the job develop fully.
The extra HP is there to both give very low hp jobs less of a disadvantage (no reason why zealot should have 3.5x times the HP of a shaman, regardless of mechanics), given that HP is a much stronger defensive layer than DEF or RES. Also this counterbalances unintended weapon damage stacking mechanics (might neeed further readjustments) and weakens endgame magic to offset part of the flat power buff.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on July 23, 2020, 11:29:39 pm
I have very recently finished your mod. Yes, finished. I bought that mission using a vanilla save. Sped through the game with a hacked character.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: You have some very nice abilities and animations.
-Ether Talon
-Spit rock
-Bangaa with Llednar's jump and more.
-The golems, their sprites, and portraits.
-The panthers can prowl.
-Pudding
-Black monk is great. Even better that Shara gets to be one.
To me, the Assassin is broken because she is the single class to get a melee and a ranged weapon: Katanas and Great bows.
-Jobs with no speed but armor type gives speed. Clever workaround to the fact that FFTA cannot display negative numbers (although it can calculate them).

Quote from: dck on July 23, 2020, 08:22:52 pmHealboro doesn't actually work as intended and breaks animations on aiming at slopes. (delet)
Why not use Saint cross' animation? Holy's animation has a problem with positive numbers.If you mean Pudding then It's not your fault.

I honestly think that you should consider hacking FFTA2. The ability editing is very flexible and the animations have very little limitations. You'd make some great abilities.

Edit: I just tested Holy's animation, and it's bugged in MGBA, even on vanilla. VBA, the old one, is fine though. Tested Sanctus from your mod and it's working fine in VBA.
(https://i.imgur.com/krIFyqZ.png)
I'd like to see a purple dragon and a green dragon. Even your Sanctus' description reads "Breath of a divine dragon".
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on July 24, 2020, 06:37:46 am
Quote from: rrs_kai on July 23, 2020, 11:29:39 pmYes, finished. I bought that mission using a vanilla save.

w h a t
I'm pretty sure you're the first person to do that and it's such a simple workaround I'm surprised it never occurred to anyone else before, haha.

Also I can't be 100% sure, but I'm fairly certain the uploaded version isn't accurate to the ability desc in the main post.
The changes in red were done and finished, but I thought it'd be misleading to upload a new version after so long that only had ability balancing changes and finished Ezel who can't even be recruited yet, so it never went online.

I recall some separate problems with Puddings (they would never attack in melee regardless of aggressiveness I think?), but Healboro is a different thing altogether:
It's a fake class like the undead player races marked as ghosts or phantoms (idr which) you can find in some missions.
In this case it's a malboro quad-wielding heal staves that, I think, has double hit. I'm fairly sure I saw him healing his friends in battle during testing, but reports from players said that they attack player units as normal which defeats the whole point.

I just had an idea to fix them though, just spawn them as "allied" units lol. They can still be targeted and killed but they will naturally try to "engage" the enemies instead. Makes enemies probably waste lots of turns though. Might need counter and serve as chaotic neutral healer.

Thanks for the kind words regarding abilities and animations. By now it all feels quite distant but I remember spending lots of time making sure everything was functional and looked as good as I could make it. Panthers look so cool when prowling, damn.

Quote from: rrs_kai on July 23, 2020, 11:29:39 pmI'd like to see a purple dragon and a green dragon. Even your Sanctus' description reads "Breath of a divine dragon".
Haha, it reads that way for a reason! I'm fairly sure I left room for a few new classes and I would like to make new dragons as well. I think the main reason I didn't was because their portrait would look atrocious and I always wanted to look more into importing fitting sprites from other gba trpgs.

I know there's lots of free space in the rom so "leaving enough room" is a questionable concern, but my technical knowledge is pretty much zero and most of the hack is made through cannibalizing "bad" content or using the space left in original structures for new classes etc.

Very nice to have this back and forth! I'll have access to the development files sometime this weekend and in all honesty it's pretty invigorating to see other people working on their own things too, hopefully will have something to contribute soon!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on July 24, 2020, 01:27:31 pm
Quote from: dck on July 24, 2020, 06:37:46 amEzel who can't even be recruited yet
I've only finished the main story and I encountered two bugs:
-1- In Llednar's last fight, some ability crashed the game. I just out-sped him the next time.
-2- Li-Grim's Descent crashes the game probably because Totema's behavior was changed.

Quote from: dck on July 24, 2020, 06:37:46 amit's a malboro quad-wielding heal staves that, I think, has double hit.
I have not seen this.
Also, if you made 3 new monsters, why not include them in any of the story missions. I only went searching for the Naga and Pudding because they're mentioned in the OP.

Quote from: dck on July 24, 2020, 06:37:46 amI think the main reason I didn't was because their portrait would look atrocious
I very much liked the golem's shadow portraits. Howsoever you may have added them. If nothing, just leave the portrait blank, like those boxes and statues.

Quote from: dck on July 24, 2020, 06:37:46 amVery nice to have this back and forth! I'll have access to the development files sometime this weekend and in all honesty it's pretty invigorating to see other people working on their own things too, hopefully will have something to contribute soon!
:)
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on July 24, 2020, 02:34:10 pm
For a moment my brain fried and I thought you were getting crashes from encounters in the developed part of the game lol. Llednar should be complete in the version that never got uploaded and Li-Grim... Well, I never got even close to doing anything with Li-Grim but I've been 100% sure of what that fight will be like since I first started the mod. Not spoiling that but it's mean as hell.

The Healboro(s) I remember placing was in some forest's roaming clan and its help mission, iirc. In general I added most of the weirder or stronger than average things in help missions and roaming clans belonging to areas available only after fully unlocking the shop.
That's also the reason you can only notice a few unfairly strong units like the Medusa at that point. I wanted to have a normal-ish progression while the player learns abilities and fine tunes his team, and put the heat back on after the Exodus fight.

PS: Damn, thinking about it, I'm pretty sure current patch doesn't have the Black March ability on Vampires either. That patch needs to get updated and online sometime soon for sure.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on July 31, 2020, 07:54:03 pm
Hey rrs_kai, since you're the only person I know that could've had experience with recruiting Ezel the legit way, could you tell me if when he joined he had active abilities slotted in the reaction and support categories?

The idea was always to have Ezel and Babus both share their counter skills, so they both would have six total skills overall. I'm only now realizing Ezel spawns with the vanilla skill distribution and if that is defined in a formation I have no idea where it is. Looking into bcrobert's modules in case they mention something in the docs.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on July 31, 2020, 10:03:20 pm
Quote from: dck on July 31, 2020, 07:54:03 pmThe idea was always to have Ezel and Babus both share their counter skills, so they both would have six total skills overall.
smart

Quote from: dck on July 31, 2020, 07:54:03 pmEzel the legit way, could you tell me if when he joined he had active abilities slotted in the reaction and support categories?
Yes, he did. But he had only 4 skills, not 6. Oddly, two of those were the same combo.
(https://i.imgur.com/z0rNpYp.png)

You've made a purple flan. Could you tell me how to add/change monster palettes? I'm interested in Green/Purple Dragons and Blue/Red/Yellow Malboros.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 01, 2020, 03:48:24 am
Right, Ezel having only two real skills in that version is normal since it's so old it predates me finishing his skillset. I used to place magick combo as a placeholder to keep track of works in progress.

This is a bit of a bigger issue than I thought since I actually have no idea how to change his gear and equipment when spawning. Didn't see any formation that matches what he wears when recruited through "Bored!", and what's worse is that changing his recruitment data doesn't seem to affect that at all.

If anyone has any more info on how to change mastered abilities on special unit recruitment, please mention.

Regarding the changed sprites I think you'll be pretty disappointed, the only thing I did with those new enemies was going manually into their class data and changing the palette past the 02 AiO limits at, these are my notes about it:

Changed palette>

(521a7d > soldier entry) (521a88 > soldier palette)

05 undead
0d poison
0e berserk
ff stone

Those are the only functional ones, since they're all actually intended for use. Unfortunately there's no clean green effect ingame so you just get the gross poisoned green instead and weird glowing red from berserk as well.

It worked for the proof of concept thing I wanted to do with new classes, but if I wasn't so deep into a duct tape tower of class changes I'd just use Leonarth's solution for directly putting sprites into the game and assign those to a new class. Even as it is I might still try.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on August 01, 2020, 05:42:27 am
Quote from: dck on August 01, 2020, 03:48:24 am(521a7d > soldier entry) (521a88 > soldier palette)

05 undead
0d poison
0e berserk
ff stone
Oh right, every job has those 4 palettes. The golems were a nice addition. Why not distribute them in other maps as well? Or do they already exist somewhere?
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 01, 2020, 06:23:11 am
Since you actually saw the post-Exodus content, you might have noticed weird formations like clans with tons of angel rings and multi-totema fights at the very endgame.

That's actually not my work but remnants of the original FFTAX- I don't particularly like how those fights are designed because they're very repetitive, but the long story short is that I intend to put most of the new content like new enemies etc in those kinds of fights towards the endgame. Golems are pretty cool so they'll definitely make the cut, they are also each their own class (which might have been stupid) so they are pretty customizable overall, even if they are locked in terms of looks.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on August 01, 2020, 08:29:34 am
Quote from: dck on August 01, 2020, 06:23:11 amSince you actually saw the post-Exodus content, you might have noticed weird formations like clans with tons of angel rings and multi-totema fights at the very endgame.
It was 80% vanilla for the story. I've not played much with clans. I just went looking for the Pudding and Medusa. Good to hear the golems made the cut. Their portraits are great.
If you have space, consider some petrified monsters. The vanilla game has many name-only jobs. These names got me interested for monster variations. First time I played FFTA, I was quite disappointed that they were just names and not any unique monsters. Not even new colours.
Magewyrm and Worldwyrm.
Ochu, Neochu, Top Malboro, and Devilboro.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 01, 2020, 11:41:05 am
Sure, that's also the reason I made a few fake classes like Phantasms and Healboros, it's pretty annoying to see something with a different name only for it to be just a normal monster. I can't expand on those a lot but I tried to make them stand out where they showed up. In the released mod most of this is in side missions and random fights.

Currently trying out Leonarth's job&race customizations to see how they play out with the myriad of changes I did in animation structures and man, I wish these tools had been available when I started out.
So many things that were hacked together repointing animations, when instead with this base would've been completely seamless.
Of course, it works beautifully but everyone gets these KO stars on them during cutscenes, and a lot of cutscene animations break as well, even for characters like Cid I've never worked with:
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/507960187890565131/739143955169542274/unknown.png)(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/507960187890565131/739144546734309376/unknown.png)
Oddly enough this happens even if I comment out the four options that handle extra playable/special character animations, which I'd rather do not to lose all the manual finetuning that went into assigning cast animations for skills in general.

Another reason to look deeper into the engine hack is that it's the only viable solution I see for dogtags and it also would allow much more freedom for new monsters. I'm not sure I would staight port things from other games given the unique and simple style FFTA has, but it would open up for much better edits.

Furthermore, the way it handles jobs actually gives Ezel his skills. Unfortunately, that is because it automatically gives any job any skill that requires 0 AP, which breaks the "master 0AP skills upon touching item" interaction the mod is based on. Could always hit some level of compromise with that I imagine, but I need to figure out causes for the cutscene issues first.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Leonarth on August 01, 2020, 02:54:25 pm
Quoteand a lot of cutscene animations break as well
Any examples? This could mean pretty much anything.

Quote from: undefinedI need to figure out causes for the cutscene issues first
That's something I've never seen before...
This is probably caused by you having some but not other of the required things?
Using the engine hacks any way other than through the provided ROM Buildfile.event is going to be tricky.

I'm pretty sure your cutscene characters just have 0 current hp, but from what I remember you were using the new level up stuff so that shouldn't be possible?, the KO stars have literally nothing to do with unit animations either way.

If you are getting the job and race customization stuff from the thread instead of the repo, don't do that, that's old and hasn't been updated in... ever.

Quote from: undefinedit automatically gives any job any skill that requires 0 AP
Yeah... It just compares required and gained AP, I guess I could look into always requiring the mastered bit as an option. I remember having issues with this because units that spawn with equipped items don't actually set their bits correctly.

As a side note, I've had an idea for a while: loading palettes into the 3rd and 4th slot (normally used by totemas and li-grim) based on mission ID, with a default case and some other options, which could give people either 2 new always usable palettes to give jobs (which is incompatible with totemas, I guess), or 2 mission based palettes for bosses and the like? or I guess a combination of the two options.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 01, 2020, 03:42:55 pm
I never considered cutscene characters were actual units that could have HP. What I meant by animations being broken was that they were behaving in a way I couldn't find a pattern for, like Marche in the post-snowball fight cutscene laying down (in his pajamas) when looking at certain angles, or Mewt/Ritz constantly kneeling as can be seen in one of those screenshots. Cid himself is using an odd sprite too in that same shot.

Of course if they're actually dead that would explain a lot. The game would be calling for the right sprites for that and those are much lower in the tables, where more niche sprites tend to be.

I got the files from the repo, but I'm pretty sure I misunderstood installation process because what I did was make my own ROM buildfile.event out of the jobAndRaceCustomization.event.
I was unsure of whether to modify the FreeSpace offset in the buildfile or in every .event it calls, so I thought I'd use it separately like newlevel and negative items. I'll report back after trying the provided buildfile.

Incidentally, is it normal that upon commenting out the special and weapon sections, the make_hack was giving out an error about these two lines (84,85)? They can't be commented out because then there just won't be animations pointed at to actually play, but I was under the impression these "animation fix" features of the hack were separate from the graphics installer and system for custom jobs.

(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/507960187890565131/739201279796052068/unknown.png)

Regarding the AP handling. I'd personally appreciate the mastery bit feature as it'd play nice with the 0AP interaction. I think the only use case in which it would matter would be if you disarm a unit that has been given access to a certain skill only through having that weapon equipped, rather than actually mastering it on formation.
Even then, it could be seen as a potential feature as it allows for the 0AP interaction to be used without losing the ability to give units skills tied to gear pieces that they could lose in battle- thus losing the skill.

Thanks for taking an interest btw, I was holding off on asking you directly until I understood more of what was happening.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Leonarth on August 01, 2020, 04:46:27 pm
Those two lines reference labels that are set in specialAnimations.event and weaponAnimations.event, so if you comment them out EA won't know what they mean and won't be able to proceed.

If you want to remove the fixed special and weapon animations, delete everything from
//setting up special animationsup to
//never register as special character for the original dismiss message routineSo, lines 48 through 95.

I also went ahead and added an option to enable/disable the installation of the fixed animations, so you can use that instead.
Please let me know if I messed up.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 01, 2020, 06:54:23 pm
Wanted to test this ASAP so I did the same makeshift buildfile with only jobAndRaceCustomization.event- tried a wide array of custom animations with no issues, meaning the new graphics can be loaded while old stuff remains unaltered, works great!

The issues with units being dead in cutscenes persists, but I think that should be fixed upon using the proper buildfile; I had a few questions about that if you don't mind:

When commenting out functions in general, do you need // more than the #include that defines the function? I've been commenting out the whole block but wondering if it's necessary.

When choosing options in ROM buildfile it doesn't acknowledge some engine hacks, like job&race. I know about their data and options .events for fine tuning, but I can't tell what file needs to be modified to actually choose which of those unacknowledged engine hacks the buildfile will install.

___

Separately, I went looking into what "playable characters" covered for the weapon fix and I noticed it seems to stop on units don't normally use weapons. I applied it (without specialAnimations) and was pleased to discover that even though monsters aren't directly adressed, there's a safeguard that makes them able to aim weapons up and down slopes without pulling sprites off of other monster tables due their shorter lists.

Is it feasible to make a patch option that applies only to monsters/totema enemies that don't usually wield weapons?
And if not, would deleting the current content of animations.txt be a good way to recreate this effect of keeping monster weapon swings using other tables, while leaving the rest of weapon usage effectively vanilla?

I have no idea how you made the animation.txt for each individual unit and I can't see a way to make them for monsters, but I'm pretty keen in keeping this ability for monsters to properly use weapons as it can make for interesting encounter design and to spice things up in pretty cool ways.

EDIT: On further testing, I thought the reason I was getting issues with some skill animations despite not using specialAnimation.event was that they call for weapon animations and those were somehow conflicting with the replacements from your weapons fix. In reality I just had leftover code from specialAnimation that was interacting with those skills directly.
As far as I can tell right now, the weapons fix is fully usable and nothing needs to be deleted for it to be usable on this project in particular, very thankful for that since it means no work goes to waste, and in reality I never used any weapon animation replacements that were any better than just punch.

EDIT2: Not overly concerned about this since I'm testing it without applying the patch properly, but I'm getting (very rare) irreproducible crashes when going into the job selection menu for a unit during battle deployment phase. Can't go into detail right now (not that I have any) but just mentioning in case it's familiar to you.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Leonarth on August 01, 2020, 08:18:58 pm
You shouldn't need to comment out any #include directives, the ROM buildfile.event file is made to contain the options of which engine hacks to install, if you don't see one in there then that means it's considered essential and is always installed.

Of course, some engine hacks have their own options elsewhere, but other than those options and  the ones in ROM buildfile.event you generally shouldn't need to touch anything else, other than some lists here and there, and all of the options would be #define directives.

If you have something specific you want to try to get done just send me a dm and we can look into it together.

QuoteI noticed it seems to stop on units don't normally use weapons
QuoteI have no idea how you made the animation.txt for each individual unit
This is because I made these with a script, it took specific animations from specific jobs (say, sword animations from Soldier) and used the data of those animations, together with sprites that all jobs have (like standing, punching, etc) to make new animations for all of the jobs. Of course I did need to make new sprites for a bunch of special animations. None for weapon animations, though, all jobs have all needed sprites for those. I can try to explain the format if you would be interested in making your own.

Quotethere's a safeguard that makes them able to aim weapons up and down slopes
If a unit doesn't have the animation for a specific thing, it uses the walking animation instead, I think is what I did?

Quotewould deleting the current content of animations.txt be a good way to recreate this effect
I'm lost here, why do you want to remove the weapon animations?
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 01, 2020, 09:38:44 pm
Quote from: undefinedthe ROM buildfile.event file is made to contain the options of which engine hacks to install, if you don't see one in there then that means it's considered essential and is always installed.

Damn, now that is what I was missing completely. That is a very interesting system, I'll run it properly tomorrow and update with changes, if any.

Quote from: undefinedThis is because I made these with a script (...) I can try to explain the format if you would be interested in making your own.

I was assuming they weren't made manually due to how much data they handle, but yes. I'm not sure I have any case use other than monsters with weapons but it would be good to learn about it.

Also yeah, if they don't have an animation they stand still during the swing.

Quote from: undefinedI'm lost here, why do you want to remove the weapon animations?
Tl;dr is that it's hard to internalize that the hack changes the way animations are used and I was worried it'd break existing skills, so I was trying to minimize the changes in a way that kept functionality I can use (the safeguard monster thing in weapon fix' case).
Upon further inspection it's clear there is no way weapons fix alone could cause new issues with previously working skills, and there are no negatives from the status quo since I used a mix of punches and standing animations as well for all this too.

EDIT:
Got around to install things properly. I had previously identified the root of dead cutscene units and it was just not properly installing newlevel. Using the buildfile everything works as intended, bar the missing mastery bit option for working with 0AP. I misremembered it being a real feature rather a potential one (lmao).

That said, I've run into not so much of an issue but a customization question:
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/507960187890565131/739475732123746364/unknown.png)
Left is the base hack and right is post engine hacks- although I know by now you have better systems in place, this hack plainly uses repointing for a lot of its custom text, including cannibalizing useless entries for space while writing descriptions (big yikes).
Do you know if any part of the engine hacks overriding these repoints could be commented out? Descriptions and in-battle text is still working as intended, so I was hopeful this isn't part of a crucial system and can be toggled off on build.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Leonarth on August 02, 2020, 11:52:25 am
Quoteit would be good to learn about it.
If you look at the animation template, it contains a very big list of pointers, such as "idle_front_pointer".
You can search for the label in your text editor "idle_front_pointer:" and it will get you to the data for that animation.

Once there you'll see, first of all, the ALIGN 4 and label, that's just setting the label for usage.
After that there's a "WORD X", where X is the number of frames the animation has.
Then you'll see a list of aFrame() macros, the a stands for animation.

The format of aFrame is define in Graphics Helpers, and if you go check that you'll see it's not entirely documented.
For the named stuff: tiles, oam, duration
Tiles is a relative offset (0x69B89C is added to it by the game when it reads it) to the graphics of the frame.
OAM is also a relative offset (but using 0x852E7C as a base instead), this time to the sprite data.
Finally, dureation is... the duration.
As for the other values, I know some of them just shift the whole thing up/down and left/right, others are more important, as they control stuff like when ability animations start and end, as well as loops. I kinda just copied vanilla for what to put on those, though, so it's not really all that well documented.

You'll also see aFrameV() macro definitions, those are the same as aFrame but without the relative offset adjusting for the tiles, these are meant to be used if you are translating frames directly from the game, so you can just copy the tile offset value from those instead of having to add 0x69B89C to them, and same for the oam.


Quotebar the missing mastery bit option for working with 0AP
I've been looking into this and it's honestly way more much work than I originally though...
This is going to be a lot of spaghetti so I'm not sure when or if it will get done.

Getting the mastered on equip to work is extremely easy and it'll work just fine in battle, what is hard is getting it to DISPLAY as mastered or not properly, in the learnt abilities tab. There are a ton of exception for 0 AP cost abilities, because of the item abilities and such.


QuoteThat said, I've run into not so much of an issue but a customization question:
That's because the text tables are repointed and/or reworked by the engine hacks, for easy expansion and such.
I believe those entries are part of the "Others" table.

If you don't like that you can find this line in the master hack installer
////////////////////////////////TEXT CHANGESand just delete everything from there up to
////////////////////////////////GRAPHIC CHANGESIt will probably break some stuff? But if you aren't using movement abilities are JP learning I think it should be fine.
You will get some errors from the master text installer but you can just go and comment those lines out.

Or if you don't have a ton of edited text entries, you can add them back in through the master text installer.

Keep in mind the engine hacks are made to be used as a base, rather than be added on to an existing hack, so it's really just natural that you'd find issues like that.
Happy to help, though.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on August 02, 2020, 02:45:14 pm
Quote from: Leonarth on August 02, 2020, 11:52:25 amKeep in mind the engine hacks are made to be used as a base, rather than be added on to an existing hack
I'm using them as an add-on. I make all the changes in the AIO/nightmare and then apply the engine hacks at the end.  :?
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 02, 2020, 03:30:26 pm
Quoteability mastery issues
I was initially misreading this and thought you meant the functionality of "permanently learning an ability upon equipping" was very demanding to recreate. I understand the concern of having an inaccurate display (ability is mastered but doesn't show the tag), but in the four years since the hack has existed no one has shown interest in replicating the 0AP system for any other purpose.
I don't think going into extreme lengths to polish a system likely no one else will use is a good idea, and if this easy change you talk about recreates the vanilla interaction, I'm perfectly fine with missing the mastered tag next to learned abilities.
I'd be concerned with lack of visual distinction with abilities that can't actually be mastered, but these already have an empty AP bar next to them.

Plus, it won't impact jobs showing their "mastered" star or not, since none can master their combos and thus even in the current hack the star is impossible to obtain.

Since I don't know how familiar you are with the specifics- the whole point of using this is creating a scenario in which mundane abilities can be learned immediately upon getting the item, while also leaving some impossible to master due to no sources of AP existing in the game, effectively linking them to the item that grants them.

Quoterepointed text questions
Nice. I'm still surprised by the modularity of all this. Before I decide whether to keep it or not I'll take a look at the table and see how much I'd realistically have to add on it. I have my changes documented, but it still a lot of content to port over.

Furthermore, wouldn't breaking support for text changes now cause further issues down the line if say, support for custom items was added one day?

Also, please don't misunderstand. The engine hacks are by a long shot the base I would use if I was starting the hack today, I'm aware the few weirdnesses we're running into are caused by fankensteining it together with an already (questionably) hacked base- more than anything I'm surprised that they actually play so nice with all the changes, given that I've always prioritized end experience results and consistency over anything else.

Thanks for the detailed explanation btw, I'm currently stablishing a base I can trust to handle the content to come and it's very helpful to have this kind of docs to avoid pointless limitations. No yellow or stoned ahrimans as "secret endgame monsters", wow!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Leonarth on August 02, 2020, 04:02:28 pm
Quote from: undefinedI understand the concern of having an inaccurate display
The display is much worse than you described, not only does it never show the mastered tag, it also does not have a bar and the ability name is always white, there is essentially no way to tell the ability isn't mastered.

I was thinking this could be done in a different way, instead of making the abilities have a 0AP cost, I'd give them a high cost, maybe 0xFF? This can then be checked when the item is equipped and the abilities would be mastered right there, instead of setting the equipped bit. I'm not sure I would add that to the engine hacks but I could make it for you, I guess.

Quote from: undefinedsupport for custom items was added one day?
Not sure what you mean by this, what is preventing you from adding more items?
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 02, 2020, 04:49:20 pm
I'm sorry, the display is this then?
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/507960187890565131/739576605436936413/unknown.png)

That is the current hack's display, I think there was some confusion because what I referred to as "mastered" was the ability permanently staying in the unit's set after equipping the item, while I think you were talking directly about it displaying the mastered bit or not. None of them do in the hack as is, and the only ones that display any AP information are the few that will never permanently stay in the unit's set (because they require AP you'll never gain), with their empty bar.

If there's something else I'm missing, I wouldn't mind trying that solution with setting their cost high and making ones with that cost artificially trigger. However that might create some weirdness with the way items display ability costs; showing 0AP isn't perfect but it sends a message clear enough that they don't cost anything to learn.
Otoh, 255 or some other high number would make it much harder to grasp at a glance. I understand this display could be edited too, but it seems like work I can't help with and that would pile onto you.


Quoteitems

I guess all it needs should be there by now, now that I think about it. Last time I tried (3y ago) the main limitation was putting images into the game and since it was unsurmountable it stopped me from looking further into it. I remember I tried to use artifact sprites too, but they don't render properly in the inventory UI so I shelved the whole thing.
Given that I'm not using more than a handful artifacts, I could very well turn a lot of those sprites into actual items, will need to be later down the road though.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on August 12, 2020, 03:31:37 pm
Quote from: Leonarth on August 01, 2020, 02:54:25 pmAs a side note, I've had an idea for a while: loading palettes into the 3rd and 4th slot (normally used by totemas and li-grim) based on mission ID, with a default case and some other options, which could give people either 2 new always usable palettes to give jobs (which is incompatible with totemas, I guess), or 2 mission based palettes for bosses and the like? or I guess a combination of the two options.
I tested and saw that the game can handle a totema and Li-grim on the same map.
Why not release a test patch where all player units are Addremmelech coloured and enemies are Li-grim coloured. I want to see how normal units look in a totema's palette. I am biased towards Addremmelech's palette and prefer seeing the other two totema in his palette.

Also, I saw on spriters-resource that Marche has a hoodie/cap sprite. I do not recall any scene where he wears a cap. Is it japanese only?
(https://i.imgur.com/c62rvNa.png)
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Leonarth on August 12, 2020, 04:45:15 pm
Quote from: undefinedI tested and saw that the game can handle a totema and Li-grim on the same map.
Of course it can, that's what I said, and also happens in vanilla. The 3rd and 4th palettes are used for this.
The 3rd is used by totemas, the 4th by Li-Grim.
Either way, that has nothing to do with what I said about freeing the palettes so I'm not sure why you are bringing it up.

Quote from: undefinedI want to see how normal units look in a totema's palette
They would probably look terrible because the palettes are not made to work with regular sprites.
If you want to know just replace the palettes with your desired palette. Open the debugger, go into the palette window and just use the search function in a hex editor.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on August 13, 2020, 12:03:02 am
Quote from: Leonarth on August 12, 2020, 04:45:15 pmI'm not sure why you are bringing it up
You know that when there are two totems on the same map, in their special palette, the game shifts one of thier colour. I was only saying that the game did not cause this error.

Quote from: Leonarth on August 12, 2020, 04:45:15 pmOf course it can, that's what I said, and also happens in vanilla.
I don't think we get to see Li grim and a totema, in their special palette, paired on the same map in vanilla. Li grim is paired with the Deph-purple variant, which does not cause any palette shifts. it does

EDIT: Leonarth is right. I thought that the purple palette was normal, like Ezel, but it's totema-special.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Leonarth on August 13, 2020, 01:38:35 am
Quote from: undefinedI don't think we get to see Li grim and a totema, in their special palette, paired on the same map in vanilla.
We totally do.

Quote from: undefinedLi grim is paired with the Deph-purple variant
Which uses a unique palette that is loaded to slot 3...
Quote from: undefinedwhich does not cause any palette shifts.
Which does change palette 3.
Also, this purple palette is used for the Remedi fight as well, in order to have two different totemas on the map at once.

If you do go look at the palette you will see that it's not like the regular red palette at all, it has more shades of purple than it has shades of red, the colors are less vivid and the yellow/brown part is pretty different. And, of course, the order is different.
As for the Li-Grim palette, it is mainly blue, and it does have the blue colors on the same place as the normal blue palette, but they are slightly brighter and the palette has golden instead of green, as well as dark purple instead of yellow/brown.

All of these sprites could be redrawn with the already existing palettes and they would look pretty okay, or if not then they could be drawn with two new (static) palettes, which would be purple + blue and green + red, which is why I say these palette slots could be freed without necessarily having to lose the totemas and such.

I'll explain this again:
Totemas use palette 3.
Li-grim uses palette 4.
Or viceversa, I'm actually pretty sure it's the opposite and I have been saying it backwards the whole time but I haven't looked at it in a while and honestly the order is the least important part.

If you won't believe me, just open the debugger and go look at it yourself.
Simply go to a map with a totema (or more) and you will see how palette 3 is updated to match them.
Do the same with Li-Grim and palette 4 changes.
You can actually have Li-Grim and any totema on the same map and it will work perfectly, it's only having 2 different totema (unless they are deph totema) that breaks colors.

And just to be clear, we start counting from 0, so palette 3 is the one that goes right after the 3 regular palettes.
(So the first black one, unless there's a totema).

Anyway, we have hijacked this thread enough, this is moving into off-topic category very fast (sorry), if you want to keep talking about these things I'd say that it is best to either start a new thread or take it to the DMs.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 13, 2020, 05:17:43 am
So, I don't have much to contribute to this whole conversation but the totema fight I've been working on recently happens to use a totema pulling from the normal unit palettes alongside a dephts one. It could've been a normal one instead or up to two more regular unit palette'd totemas and they would all render fine.
This is a pretty straightforward option for anyone to do, but posting it since it might've not come across kai on his attempts to place different looking totemas on the same encounter:
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/507960187890565131/743396889604390912/unknown.png)
I haven't followed the whole conversation (started in another thread I think?) so sorry if that's already something you've tried.

Freeing the palettes does sound like a very good idea still; in fact I started with the normal unit palette in this fight as a placeholder, though I've grown used to it and might use it regardless- don't think it looks so bad? Will see.

Also that Marche sprite wearing a hat. I'm pretty sure that's in some scene in game in which he is listening on people trying not to be recognised, after Palace puts a price on his head.

And more on topic (lol), work has kept going. I'm mostly acquainted with thr game and its quirks again, fixed a lot of issues with abilities not respecting boss immunities and saw Leonarth fix things that have been major problems since day one.
Also, given that ahrimans are failures who will try to gaze attack someone's shoulder, I've been working on a new ability set for them that would have them target fallen units to "wound" them, removing them from the fight and spreading damage or status effects around them.

That's partially related to why the Mateus fight would feature two Mateus, each with different abilities.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 15, 2020, 03:16:22 pm
So I realized a big thing that was eating a lot of my dev time when it comes to abilities was trying to do things far outside of what tools were made for in vanilla:
There are only so many ways to target units, and one has to undertake a lot of restricions like self-targeting AoEs to even achieve simple abilities based on two different criteria (eg, aim at humanoid target and if successful, charm all monsters around him).
Some of those work for player use, but they'll be completely unusable by the AI; that's already the situation with some abilities and it's not something I want to keep doing- it also requires for the player to actually choose to aim the ability the right way unless you restrict them the way I mentioned above, so in general it makes for wonky gameplay.

tl;dr the Mateuses(Mateii?) are done, although differently from what I initially intended I like how they came out and they're 100% AI friendly.
I intended to release the patch with content until this fight since... well, there's two years old content that I never actually uploaded so there's more content than one might think- but there's tons of improvements stemming from Leonarth's engine hacks I want to learn to use and set up for future content, so it might also take much longer.

Preview for one of Mateus' abilities!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 16, 2020, 11:07:15 am
Small update since there was so much talk about totemas and their palettes- the blue Super Mateus Sister(many question marks) looks significantly less janky now, after a lot of messing around with palettes to understand how they worked (even though all the info was spelled out from step 1) all again thanks to Leonarth's info about special unit structure and data.

Also I was keeping their mechanics a bit hush-hush, but since I prob won't release for a while a bigger look at them shouldn't hurt. Here's how the AI uses them and one of the unreleased cultist abilities:

Initially I wanted them to only have one ability, but I might give them another that consumes their status effect before release. Also will prob make their ranges melee too.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: rrs_kai on August 17, 2020, 11:30:54 am
Quote from: undefinedbut they'll be completely unusable by the AI
That's very nice to get the enemy use "Remove Unit". The AI never uses Parley/Oust/Wyrmtamer.
Seeing you, I made this. Thanks for the idea.
I added "Remove Unit" as a secondary effect to Fire. The AI just thinks that it is damaging the enemy. Even when Marche was removed, the game did not crash, I just got the GAME OVER screen.
(https://i.imgur.com/diPV96p.gif)
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 17, 2020, 11:42:05 am
If you use the exorcise effect slot without the fix Leonarth made for it past week, the units hit are permanently removed from your clan; hence the game over from removing Marche.

And yeah tying neutral side effects that the AI doesn't normally consider to simple damaging ones etc does "let it" use them, but it needs some more fine tuning if it's supposed to be used somewhat restrictively instead of just affecting everything regardless of context.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Tessa on August 27, 2020, 11:06:50 pm
Hey! I'm not involved in this community at all but I'm really happy to see you still working on a 4 year old hack to a 17 year old game :lol: ! FFTA was one of my favorite games growing up, and your hack has been great for keeping it fresh. This is going to be a lot, and I know some of these would take a huge amount of work.  Pick and choose what you want obviously.  Also I haven't been following the thread, and just skimmed it right before posting this, so sorry in advance if any of this has been addressed and I missed it

More than anything, sorry if this $%#@s all over your vision

You're close to making this what vanilla should have been all along, but the class system needs some tweaking. I'd be less afraid of having units with too-similar growths and more that some classes are better than others at the same job. It doesn't make sense that a lvl50 gladiator turned into a white monk is so much better than a lvl50 white monk, or that a black mage/white mage is better at either than a white mage/black mage. It seems like the drop off between 4>3 atk/pow growth is huge, while going from 4>6 def/res is very minor. Every unit ought to have 4+ atk or pow (paladin should have soldier stats, monks should be the same as duelist, etc.).

This means none of the half-casters really "work," and need to turned into mostly physical or mostly magic classes.  Most of them are too underpowered, while shaman/elementalist is too squishy (it's also weird to give them high attack but super long range abilities?).  The exception is zealot, since HP/atk based abilities synergize with a melee unit instead of detracting from it. Your hack is really min/maxy, lean into by giving everyone a clear mechanical specialty (like how white mages heal, duelists are anti-range, firebreathers do fire)

I like starting stats based on race, but it causes problems with e.g. warriors simply being better than soldiers, while bishops start out very weak and never reach their full potential compared to other casters. Maybe give bangaa/nu mou 2 less speed, moogles/viera 2 more, and give moogles the same atk/def/pow/res as viera (they have a lot of phys units)

Soldier/warrior- I love how you turned these from boring to versatile, really shows how much you can do with minor tweaks alone. Especially great as a 2nd A slot, to fill gaps in other classes skillsets.

Paladin- Needs something extra to give it a more defined purpose.  Maybe some anti-undead stuff, or (if the engine allows it) powerful abilities that burn JP.  Drop weapon should cost MP.

Fighter/Gladiator- give them 2 def.  Right now there's no reason to take other melee units over them

Duelist- I adore this class.  Flavorful and powerful without being *too* OP.  Just change dagger to aim:arm, disable with damage AND range is too much for a class that would still be top tier without it  :lol:

Shaman- Ley lines are hard to use without hitting your own units, and a little too good when you can. Would it be too much animation work to make ninja the onion knight and bring back blue mage, with it getting its abilities from souls?

Hunter/Zealot- Again I know I'm asking for a lot animation wise, but what if you put zealot in the hunter slot (giving capture and ultima to archer), and turned illusionist into a magical fighter with pow based melee abilities (see what I did?  Inverse zealot, the ultimate anti-tank weapon!)- a 6MP fire/lightning/blizzard punch, double attack for 18MP, etc. Give it firebreather growths, but 4 def and 1 res. You'd have really fun synergy with different 2nd A slots- WM for a healer on the front lines, or BM for some range! The nu mou and human versions would both be good while feeling very different, with the nu mou being more of a glass cannon. This would elegantly solve a lot of problems at once. Two bowman classes is redundant, especially when humans and viera each get their own. Nu mou have the exact wrong stats for zealot, and this would give them a melee class that gels with their stats. Humans need more magic options, and leylines (if you keep shaman) would be easier to use with a frontline unit than a squish that needs to hide behind your tanks

Cultist- I love zombify but too many abilities are multi-turn combos that take too long to be worthwhile.  Maybe turn it into a dark/holy mage, keeping kyrie, undead, drain, and ritual and give it plague, holy or sanctus, and cure? We could use a moogle healer

Gunner- Guns should do more damage to keep them competitive with bows

Firebreather- SO GREAT FUNNEST CLASS EVER.  The only thing I'd change is making incandescence damage and disarm only

Bishop/Dragoon- Give bishop higher MP/pow growths so it isn't so held back by its starting stats.  Give dragoon 4 atk/pow in exchange for 3 HP and 2 res. It won't be OP since only being able to equip armor means it trades speed and res for versatility, and low starting pow means breaths will never be that strong, especially early/mid game

Defender- The problem with a "defender" class is that's every bangaa class! Why not a samurai with draw weapon who can equip katanas and bows? Or even just a straight bowman, to make use of the high starting atk

Nu Mou casters- Sage and alchemist are kind of pointless.  Maybe make one a buff-focused class and give the other more status effects.  Make them, psion, and white mage all have black mage stats.  Then the starting nu mou can fill 2 of any 5 roles, and you can change them depending on the battle

Forest guard- This one is an odd duck and I'm not sure what to do about it. 

Dream walker- Not sure how I feel about this one, it's weird and hard to use

Paragon- A little bland. Maybe give it the same stats as gladiator/fighter, and more duelist like abilities

Summoner- The best viera caster, but the growths make more sense for a red mage. Needs more MP and less HP

Red mage- There's no way for target all attacks to do enough damage to matter without being OP.  Why not keep it more like vanilla and give her a 0 AOE fire/lightning/blizzard/cure/poison, and maybe get doublecast from the beginning

Elementalist- Not as useful in practice as it should be, compared to other units.  There's better units for ranged status effects, so it's main abilities are mostly very little damage for a relatively large amount of MP, and the power attacks hit too rarely to be worth trying unless you're out of MP.  Increase the pow and MP growths if nothing else

Half MP- This is kind of overpowered when MP doesn't regen (since you're getting DOUBLE your normal amount of abilities), as a I discovered in one run where I got it at level 6 (my gladiator/templar was ridiculous, since I also got intercession at level 15).  Maybe make it 2/3?

Whew, that was more than I meant to write when I started...
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 30, 2020, 01:33:10 pm
Hi!
It's kinda funny that when people talk about the mod it's always in very long posts/DMs, though I always take it as the mod being fun enough to warrant that attention instead of something negative, haha!

The issues you bring up with stats are interesting:
It's hard to judge how jobs perform because weapon damage is extremely overpowered, the damage formula (which is horrendous) takes main weapon + equipment atk bonus as a total for both its damage multiplier and flat bonus. On top of any weapon, it's possible to stack 30+ atk bonus with just shop items- this yields almost 2x more damage than intended for some weapon types.
Meanwhile magic just has its base ability power and additions are just that, additive. It makes focused power users match up with weapons (a little) due to sheer numbers, but hybrids fall flat because the numbers are smaller. Point of this is, stats need to be looked at when this damage formula changes to be just atk - def = dmg.

On that topic still, bulk has already been increased with higher HP minimums. Under a certain amount units just don't function well and Zealots really don't need to have over 3x the HP of Shamans. Defense might actually be hilariously overtuned after conversion to a no-multiplier weapon damage formula, so in general everything will be tinkered with.

Different speed spots for races within their tier is cool and I don't think I ever tried it. A simple base speed of 1(Bangaa, Nu mou), 2(Hume, Viera) and 3(Moogles) wouldn't change overall turn amounts but would let plate Moogles act before plate Bangaas/Humes, for example.

Now tying this into your comments for jobs. The reason they all cover different stat niches is that when I started the mod almost everything was limited. Jobs, races, abilities, effects.
That's no longer the case. With the newer options a very resourceful developer has been putting together it's possible to add unreasonably large amounts of unique jobs, abilities and more.

This enables not only more custom units, but also to reintroduce any job that has been cut and to port some from A2 that would work well.
I probably won't bring back some old jobs without a good idea behind them, but the potential for expanding the job pool is enough that stat growths don't need to massively define what an unit can or can't do.

Now regarding the direct job comments:

White Monk
Gladiator turned monk hits hard but it doesn't really have the MP to make any use either Iron Will or most of the abilities.
Question is, does it need to? I guess not because it can apply 350 base attack twice in one Fight command.
That sounds like an argument for shifting some of the job's damage into the weapon itself; can't be done with the current formula but with a new one it definitely could.

Paladin
Paladin definitely needs a few more identity-defining abilities. Prayer and Saint Cross are cool but it could use merging Cover and Defend to make a 4th holy ability.

Duelist
The new job most work went into and one of my favourites too. Looking back it really didn't need ranged disables with the already strong kit, not damaging ones at that :D

Shaman/Ele
I found their offensive/MP focused growths work pretty well. They're getting more HP with the stat revision but I like being able to competently whack people in melee as well as their unique options at 0 MP.
I also like that Shaman's massive range acts like an Illusionist-lite, rewarding positioning (maybe too much); Ele on the other hand needs more unique ability design since I just don't like her 0 MP abilities all being inconsistent damage spikes.

Hunter
Hunter is in a weird spot but it needs a serious revamp rather than dying, Capture can be moved to an item, now that we can make proper Item abilities that actually use them up. As a whole though, Monsters are very dangerous and I think should have a few more counters, not less.

New class
I do have a planned Viera/Nu mou job similar to your description for when Spellblades are put in the game, so no worries there!

Racial uniqueness
I initially didn't like Nu mou being just "the magic boys", same as I didn't like Bangaa being "the tough lads"- that said, now we have tools enough to expand on ways they can use their stronger stats without dabbling into archetypes that spread them too thin.

The original Sage will definitely come back (without cutting Professor) and with those, Alch is getting seriously changed to avoid overlap.
Dream Walker suffered from being limited in ability slots, as it was sharing them with monsters. Ranger was... Experimental? It's not bad, but it will be flavored differently in the future.

On the Bangaa side, I know the power based abilities have a very rough start and it will be looked at. It was kind of intended for Dragoons to only develop breath damage with investment, but they might become closer to tankier Shamans since they also have a good set of rather long range abilities.

Also that ranged/melee fighter idea isn't bad at all. I wouldn't kill Defender (probably) as I want more Bangaa overall since they have the lowest job count. It might be 2h guns or something else instead of bows, but still worth keeping in mind.

Cultist
Pretty sure the uploaded version has the Cultist with unbuffed Dark Pact/Sever Link. Ritual is different as well, though all in all the job might still need touch ups as well. The list in OP is updated if you wanna check this stuff.

Gunner
The whole meme with guns is that they're 1h weapons and thus can be dual wielded. Didn't actually make their ambidex available in current patch though!

Firebreather
E N T H U S I A S M
I really like this job because a friend of mine was really pissed that I'd waste a job making it themed on one element. One run after release he actually tried it and it's his staple ever since lmao.

Paragon
Currently her only change is having a higher AoE Swallowtail. I think it's ok for her to be simpler, but I really want to get a heavy armor only Viera that can stand out as something different altogether.

Red Mage
So I had an idea of giving her unlearnable Doublecast, but I just don't think other abilities should be balanced around RM casting them twice. I never considered giving her Doublecast as a basic ability from the start, but I definitely will try it.
Also I've hated the fullscreen attacks since forever anyway, so they can prob just all get thrown away and replaced with direct, no AoE abilities as suggested. Good ideas all around!

1/2 MP!
It was literally the first thing I ever had reported as OP and I never remembered to gut it in some way. It really has no room in the MP-tight battle design so something will be done.

That's about it, also heres a tl;dr for the current goals and WIPs for the mod:

Redo descriptions so they work in the new system.
Repoint abilities for every race.
Repoint ability effects.
Repoint ability animations.
Redo stats according to new formula.
Finish worldwyrm.
Re-add/design/import 4 jobs for Bangaa and 3 for non-Humes.
Replace abilities unnecessarily repeated through sets.
Move away from 0 AP system to JP learning.
Balance for cheaper abilities found in items that require you own the item to learn them, as well as always available but more expensive ones that you can work towards over time.
Also account for new jobs without worsening item bloat.
Delete JP cost from Combos.
Increase Combo participant bonus to compensate for JP bonus loss.
Continue development past Mateus.

Also, I'm open to suggestions as for what job concepts people would like to see covered/returning. I've always just done it on my own due to all the constraints but given the extra freedom it's not bad to have a few more ideas. Just writing this post was already good for getting a good overview of things to work on.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Dual-Wielding Ninja on August 30, 2020, 03:19:49 pm
Quote from: dck on August 30, 2020, 01:33:10 pmAlso, I'm open to suggestions as for what job concepts people would like to see covered/returning. I've always just done it on my own due to all the constraints but given the extra freedom it's not bad to have a few more ideas. Just writing this post was already good for getting a good overview of things to work on.
If possible, would love it if you imported the whole Mirror Items gimmick over to Alchemist as well as give them Mix and Stash from Final Fantasy X-2!

Or at the very least, update Firebreather so that they're basically a living Fire Force along with a name change to "Pyromancer".
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Tessa on January 30, 2021, 04:19:35 am
Quote from: undefinedHi!
It's kinda funny that when people talk about the mod it's always in very long posts/DMs, though I always take it as the mod being fun enough to warrant that attention instead of something negative, haha!
Oh definitely! Like I said I've been playing FFTA for years and years and have the vanilla meta mastered. Relearning it for your hack has been a lot of fun.  I do a couple FFTA playthroughs a year and your version has replaced vanilla for me.  I think I'm on run #7?

QuoteThe issues you bring up with stats are interesting:
It's hard to judge how jobs perform because weapon damage is extremely overpowered, the damage formula (which is horrendous) takes main weapon + equipment atk bonus as a total for both its damage multiplier and flat bonus. On top of any weapon, it's possible to stack 30+ atk bonus with just shop items- this yields almost 2x more damage than intended for some weapon types.
Meanwhile magic just has its base ability power and additions are just that, additive. It makes focused power users match up with weapons (a little) due to sheer numbers, but hybrids fall flat because the numbers are smaller. Point of this is, stats need to be looked at when this damage formula changes to be just atk - def = dmg.

Thanks for that explanation! Is the atk bonus issue why some abilities in vanilla (air render) start out much more powerful than regular attacks, but get much less over time? I thought it might have something to do with equipment but I've never looked at the combat math under the hood

QuoteDifferent speed spots for races within their tier is cool and I don't think I ever tried it. A simple base speed of 1(Bangaa, Nu mou), 2(Hume, Viera) and 3(Moogles) wouldn't change overall turn amounts but would let plate Moogles act before plate Bangaas/Humes, for example.

I might think about having a few items with a 1 or 2 speed bonus too. The way the hack does speed is vastly better than vanilla but you could use more granularity between units


QuoteNow tying this into your comments for jobs. The reason they all cover different stat niches is that when I started the mod almost everything was limited. Jobs, races, abilities, effects.
That's no longer the case. With the newer options a very resourceful developer has been putting together it's possible to add unreasonably large amounts of unique jobs, abilities and more.

This enables not only more custom units, but also to reintroduce any job that has been cut and to port some from A2 that would work well.
I probably won't bring back some old jobs without a good idea behind them, but the potential for expanding the job pool is enough that stat growths don't need to massively define what an unit can or can't do.

Good to know!  I was wracking my brain to think of new unit ideas using what vanilla gives and it's HARD!

QuoteWhite Monk
Gladiator turned monk hits hard but it doesn't really have the MP to make any use either Iron Will or most of the abilities.
Question is, does it need to? I guess not because it can apply 350 base attack twice in one Fight command.
That sounds like an argument for shifting some of the job's damage into the weapon itself; can't be done with the current formula but with a new one it definitely could.

True, but I didn't really miss them with the ridiculous amount of damage it does. Sounds like the changes you're making to the combat math will fix that though

QuotePaladin definitely needs a few more identity-defining abilities. Prayer and Saint Cross are cool but it could use merging Cover and Defend to make a 4th holy ability.
Cover/defend would be great! I still think you need more anti undead abilities, maybe an attack that stops them from reviving if it kills them. This seems like one that will really benefit from half casters being more viable

QuoteShaman/Ele
I found their offensive/MP focused growths work pretty well. They're getting more HP with the stat revision but I like being able to competently whack people in melee as well as their unique options at 0 MP.
I also like that Shaman's massive range acts like an Illusionist-lite, rewarding positioning (maybe too much); Ele on the other hand needs more unique ability design since I just don't like her 0 MP abilities all being inconsistent damage spikes.
Tbh I hadn't used shaman much outside starting my 2nd human as one my 1st playthrough, when I really needed another heavy.  I tried Shaman as one of my BMs 2nd slot and really liked it. I'll give it another shot

QuoteHunter
Hunter is in a weird spot but it needs a serious revamp rather than dying, Capture can be moved to an item, now that we can make proper Item abilities that actually use them up. As a whole though, Monsters are very dangerous and I think should have a few more counters, not less.

I'm just not a huge fan of bows in FFTA. Monsters need more counters but I think they should be spread between more classes instead of concentrated in one class that's less useful when you aren't facing them.  If you're keeping it I'd definitely drop the cost of sidewinder and sonic boom

QuoteThe original Sage will definitely come back
I like that a lot.  I feel like I'm locked into making my starting NM a WM to take advantage of it's power, which locks me into BM so it has some offense.  Sage opens up a lot of options!

Quote(without cutting Professor)
I was a bit harsh on it, it's a good idea but currently the high MP abilities don't give enough bang for your buck and mean it doesn't synergize well with most other NM classes
QuoteAlch is getting seriously changed to avoid overlap.
Oh neat, what do you have in mind?

QuoteDream Walker suffered from being limited in ability slots, as it was sharing them with monsters.
I like the idea of a shock trooper that heals itself as it hits, which is a cool way to compensate for lower atk, and the stare abilities fit that role well. The real problem is it doesn't do enough damage to be worth using.  With the current math that might be as simple as giving souls more damage.  Cultist could use it too

QuoteRanger was... Experimental? It's not bad, but it will be flavored differently in the future.
I like the idea of trading debuffs, it's a neat way to add "cost" beyond MP. The issue right now is trading the same debuff gives no net advantage, and plenty of other units can debuff without it. Maybe double up on enemy debuffs, like disable/immobilize in exchange for silence. Thinks that change the flow of combat in quirky, asymmetrical ways. Maybe even give some high level abilities with a blood sacrifice theme, like one that kills a nearly dead monster for a major self buff

QuoteOn the Bangaa side, I know the power based abilities have a very rough start and it will be looked at.
It's a shame because I really like bishops on the whole! Another issue is you have limited options for their 2nd A slot.  Since they don't get any offensive abilities until late game you're forced to use Dragoon.  The breath attacks make for a fun and unique unit, but it has an odd power curve, starting out really weak and useless once it goes through it's meager MP, then suddenly getting ridiculous mid game (esp with a black robe) then kinda suboptimal late game as other mages overtake it, especially without a way to regain MP on its own.  The last parts a shame since that's when it gets its best abilities!
QuoteIt was kind of intended for Dragoons to only develop breath damage with investment, but they might become closer to tankier Shamans since they also have a good set of rather long range abilities.
I think they'll find their place with different combat math etc.  Lmao what if you made them robe-only, sort of the Bangaa's speedy light attacker

Also that ranged/melee fighter idea isn't bad at all. I wouldn't kill Defender (probably) as I want more Bangaa overall since they have the lowest job count. It might be 2h guns or something else instead of bows, but still worth keeping in mind.

Cultist
Pretty sure the uploaded version has the Cultist with unbuffed Dark Pact/Sever Link. Ritual is different as well, though all in all the job might still need touch ups as well. The list in OP is updated if you wanna check this stuff.
Whoops  :lol: TBH I haven't used it much outside my first playthrough (undead was critical for boss battles with with my badly optimized party). That's another one I should try again.

QuoteGunner
The whole meme with guns is that they're 1h weapons and thus can be dual wielded. Didn't actually make their ambidex available in current patch though!
Ohhhhhhhhhhh!  That'll be really cool, especially if you do the speed changes

QuoteFirebreather
E N T H U S I A S M
I really like this job because a friend of mine was really pissed that I'd waste a job making it themed on one element. One run after release he actually tried it and it's his staple ever since lmao.
I was skeptical too, but the ability list sounded too much fun not to use!  I think that's the only job I've used every single time
I've yet to find the Enthusiasm item, unfortunately  :cry:
QuoteParagon
Currently her only change is having a higher AoE Swallowtail. I think it's ok for her to be simpler, but I really want to get a heavy armor only Viera that can stand out as something different altogether.
I like the swallowtail change.  Bland was the wrong word, but it needs more variety to its stillset. Give her First Aid at least!

Quote1/2 MP!
It was literally the first thing I ever had reported as OP and I never remembered to gut it in some way. It really has no room in the MP-tight battle design so something will be done.
What about bringing back MP regen as an s ability, maybe slower than vanillas? I like the idea of MP manipulation but I feel like a flat reduction has the same too much/not problem as target all

QuoteMove away from 0 AP system to JP learning.
Balance for cheaper abilities found in items that require you own the item to learn them, as well as always available but more expensive ones that you can work towards over time.
I like this idea! AP learning was by far the worst part of vanilla (I can't go back now  :lol: ) but now your party is a little too determined by what items you find.  Which is fun too but not what you're going for I think.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Tessa on February 07, 2021, 08:12:21 pm
Quote from: dck on August 30, 2020, 01:33:10 pmShaman/Ele
I found their offensive/MP focused growths work pretty well. They're getting more HP with the stat revision but I like being able to competently whack people in melee as well as their unique options at 0 MP.
I also like that Shaman's massive range acts like an Illusionist-lite, rewarding positioning (maybe too much); Ele on the other hand needs more unique ability design since I just don't like her 0 MP abilities all being inconsistent damage spikes.

Started a new run and my shaman/WM is turning out to be an absolute MVP. I love how its role changes over the course of battle (debuffer->healer->melee/human shield) and how it is still useful after it runs out of MP.  I wouldn't give it too much HP, making it vulnerable to archers means you have to be more careful with positioning.  If anything it might need more MP

Ele doesn't need too much reworking, just make it a mid range mid damage debuffer like vanilla. Or maybe a class built around changing elemental resistance (reliably, not like elementshift)
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Retrogamer1987 on February 11, 2021, 02:01:11 am
Just discovered this mod! Almost everything having such high MP costs scares me a bit, im curious for those who tried so far how well balanced it is. Are you able to make adequate use of all your abilities?
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Tessa on February 16, 2021, 12:52:22 am
Quote from: Retrogamer1987 on February 11, 2021, 02:01:11 amJust discovered this mod! Almost everything having such high MP costs scares me a bit, im curious for those who tried so far how well balanced it is. Are you able to make adequate use of all your abilities?

It's pretty brutal early game, but only until level 15 or so. Gotta learn to make those abilities count!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Manuel099 on October 05, 2021, 11:54:09 am
Quote from: Tessa on February 16, 2021, 12:52:22 amIt's pretty brutal early game, but only until level 15 or so. Gotta learn to make those abilities count!

Just started playing it, it feels really good. The game invites you to test a variety of synergies and starting formations, positions matter like someone else said, a lot posibilities but in general all fair, it's not hard nor easy, it's balanced . Enjoying the early game so far.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on October 06, 2021, 12:31:12 pm
I'd say the start of it is rather unbalanced due to a few quirks in magic units being worse off due to not having their character-specific growths at level 1, as well as the attack formula getting very out of hand again at the very late game and dumbing down physical classes.

This is a project that isn't as much forgotten as it is in hiatus, and there's still a good chunk of will to finish it so as always feedback is appreciated. Not many of the plans above have been implemented in a way that is set in stone so hearing about people's experiences can help shape them.

Personally I have to say I never found it very hard, but I'm hyperaware of the tools available and the value of things like daze etc.

Also fun fact, I found out a few days ago that Tessa above never found the weapon for Enthusiasm because it's not actually available in the game and that friend of mine who played with it apparently did so only in a run with a preset team I gave the testers that had everything pre-learned. Whoops!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Snackshaq on October 29, 2021, 12:08:34 am
Hi, honestly think the whole idea is fantastic. I probably just suck at the game in general, but guest montblanc had full mp and decided to use his rod to attack the whole beginning fight. Did nothing to help and with the added damage that weapons do I got stomped in the tutorial. I like the added difficulty but not going through the whole beginning again just because i didnt expect that. Though I still say you did an amazing job on it.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on October 29, 2021, 04:30:09 pm
Haha, I'd probably stop playing as well if that happened to me and I had no immediate backup, don't worry. Stuff like that was very rough around the edges in the available version since there was no simple way of making allies player-controllable back then or skipping the tutorial.

As implied, it has a long since been changed into Montblanc (and all allies) being controllable by the player, though before that there was a period of time with an option to skip the intro altogether.

If you do give it a shot feel free to post your thoughts, it's good to have a wider view on how people see the game even if it's not in active development at the moment.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Cellery on March 10, 2022, 10:04:59 am
I was wondering if there's something I'm doing wrong thats causing my units to have 1 speed while the others have around 90. Especially when Im recruiting new members to my clan. They come with 1 speed. I have a ranger who I was using, then switched her to sniper and now she never gets turns because her speed is doodoo.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on March 10, 2022, 06:37:31 pm
I thought that was explained in the OP somewhere but basically it's because speed is given by armor type. Light armor units go first, medium second and heavy go last.

EDIT: Didn't realize to explain further but- this means if your unit isn't wearing any body armor they'll effectively have no speed.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: Jhojho on August 02, 2022, 01:09:14 am
Initially wanted to give feedback regarding difficulty but after reading through, guess I'm not pointing out anything you're not already aware of.
I don't mind difficulty. It's more rewarding, for sure and I've had fun setting up pitched skirmishes in corners with ranged/mages acting as support with revives and items for the front line. The minute an enemy got into a formation after someone gets downed and there's no one to block his rear it's basically a loss. I like stuff like that, never had to do it in vanilla. As you've pointed out however, getting nuked with Holy by a fairy before you even take your turn in early game (Mission: White Flowers) isn't quite fun.
I think having access to an item that can increase speed early game, besides robes would help on it's own quite a lot. I like the challenge you've set up. I just would like more options at the start aside from relying solely on mages with robes and silence or disable.
I believe you were looking for ideas for classes and I saw red mage being brought up a few times. I like doublecast from vanilla in-game but I don't like it from a design perspective for exactly the same reasons as you, the game shouldn't be balanced around one class ability. I don't mind full-screen spells but I understand why some don't care for them in a tactics game. Very grug, big spell go boom. I think full-screen spells would work better in this game format for status spells that target your party. Full-screen reflect, barrier, protect and/or shell at an increased MP cost would make the class good at support in ways other classes like psion don't quite hit. For damage, I've been playing a bit of ff12 and I like how they handled maces. It's a weapon with a damage formula based on magic power instead of strength, so melee mages are actually viable. I was thinking how this could work for the red mage's rapier. Djinn Flyssa enhances wind damage. You could replace the red mage damage spells with 0MP elemental attacks (like gladiator's spell sword) that base their damage in magic power instead of weapon attack. They could progress to do heavy damage for a significant MP cost. Maybe give her a non-elemental ultima/melee flare based on mpow if that isn't already offered by another class lol. I'm not sure how much you've edited items so far in-game but have a few rapiers with enhance elements aside from wind and I personally would find this very interesting, especially if it was combo'd with a fencer ability kit to draw weapon. It would give red mage something to do with that rapier, wouldn't break its interaction with other classes (afaik) and isn't far off from what a red mage does anyway. Perhaps doublecast could be integrated as a way to double tap enemies with one of these 0MP melee skills at a cost.

Anyway, just thought that might resolve the identity crisis of that particular class. From everything I've read and what I've played (so far just breaking out of level 10, starting to hit that smoother part of gameplay), I love what you've done. The zealot, forest ranger and firebreather are great. Moogle summoners make a lot of sense. Loving that Montblanc has access to an elemental flare as a blackmage with firebreather. Hope you keep going strong and looking forward to what's next.
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: dck on August 06, 2022, 03:39:32 am
Someone actually likes the Forest Ranger! This might be the first time I've gotten feedback on it other than friends of mine saying that bow nu mou is weird so they're steering clear of it, haha.

Your thoughts on red mage are very interesting. I'm not sure how I never thought about simply making their melee magical when it would've been such an obvious choice- I guess that them being phys/magic hybrids is kinda neat, but I never really saw it playing very well. I never really saw myself in situations where I was setting up gaze attacks either, which imo were the weakest part of both this and Dream Strider, even despite Addle and Sleep+ being pretty good status to inflict.

I guess looking back a lot more movesets than I remembered were affected by the ability limit we used to have. There's no real reason to be re-using monster skills on jobs like these other than whoops no slots lol.

QuoteI just would like more options at the start aside from relying solely on mages with robes and silence or disable.
I completely agree, but it's curious to me how differently people perceive options early on. I've had a number of people swear up and down that the game is actually unplayable without a Zealot in your team. Others make Onion Knight tanks to bait enemies to swing (and miss) at them, others have Duelists and Snipers and say that without being able to daze enemies it's impossible to play.
Dragoon I agree that is kinda overpowered since Wyrmtamer has too much range, but at the same time it's a counter job, so it seems like it should be able to handle dragons more efficiently than others. It also doesn't do much when no dragons are on the field.

I think the speed choices were good, but I agree it needs more granularity. If you want to sacrifice something like boots or an accessory offer to make your heavy armor guy move in the robe bracket, there's no real reason you shouldn't have that option. Or to guarantee that your robe guy moves faster than other robe users.

I believe Leo's changes to the inventory let us add more items, so seeing that I don't barely use artifacts at all, it'd probably be a good idea using some of those as new accessories etc. That used to be a problem before since you couldn't render artifact sprites in the inventory screen properly, but I believe that is also no longer an issue? I haven't been active in a while so I forget some details.

Thanks for the feedback and happy you're enjoying the mod!
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: 7ffta7 on January 22, 2023, 03:04:35 am
How did u set the ap costs to instantly master in the editor?
Title: Re: FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!
Post by: lokko12 on August 09, 2023, 07:11:50 am
Como se puede probar el parche?