Monster Changes in Mercenaries (Assistance much appreciated)

[SilvasRuin]

Oh are the dragons in FFTA2 a bit more unique? That could be a good point of reference.

Apparently not as much as I remembered.  It was mainly their elemental resistances that were... interesting.  FFXII is where non-elemental dragons truly seem to shine.  Mostly it was non-elemental breaths that would inflict stop, sap, or other maladies, fireball, high level spells like the -agas, some had Darkra, and often they had some sort of buffing or healing ability that would make them extra nasty.

I was worried I was giving them too many abilities.  As I said, I'm a dragon fanatic... I like them being powerful and versatile.
And yeah, that last sentence about the trump cards was more of an observation than a suggestion.  I started to notice that I might be making monsters too powerful.

[Eternal]

Dragon Force and Mighty Guard, perhaps?

[Wasabi]

I never mentioned that the self-destruct formula imparts the "KO" status on the caster or anything else, just that the formula KOs the caster in the manner that it deals the current amount of HP that the user lost minus its maximum onto itself (along with the spread damage). That's why I suggested adding an element to the skill, so that if the monster (Behemoth) has an element immunity to the skill (Holy element), it won't damage the caster. Lost in translation, I guess? If so I apologize.

And Lamias should definitely be in this patch. I can already see a monster that spams status effects in this game, Charm especially.

[LastingDawn]

Well actually... that doesn't work. I tried that, the HP still goes down, since Elemental calculation isn't taken in that way.

[Wasabi]

I see, LD. And thanks for the heads up on both the self-destruct formula and my Meteorain query.

So, I did some research for Iron Giant. It's most common features are its high HP and defensive properties (mainly a variety of either elemental or status defenses along with its huge physical defense; traditionally weak against water but a weakness to lightning has also been found). They also traditionally wield a massive sword, but having seen the already made Iron Giant sprite I doubt that could be implemented. Maybe it can be like the FFIV Iron Giant, where its main attacks are typically beams (Automaton's "Dispose" a good suggestion?). But concerning their physical attack (mainly due to the massive sword), they usually hit in a "sweeping" range that targets multiple units, so something like Tail Sweep perhaps?

It also has a knack of using Hurricane / Twister and gravity magic, as well as an assortment of other magic spells, but no real definitive list of spells it traditionally uses. And in FFVII, they use a technique called "Adrenaline." Not sure what that does exactly. And in Crystal Chronicles, when it doesn't have its sword, it uses techniques called "Ram" and "Thunder Fist." "Ram" is just your typically charging attack, whereas "Thunder Fist" is a skill it uses where it jumps and punches the ground for lightning damage around itself.

So, here's my theoretical suggestion for the Iron Giant:

Iron Giant: ??? HP, extremely rare encounter, [secret] boss encounter. Innate Regen/Protect/Slow
Charge/Tackle/Punch (whichever) - single-targeting physical attack
Beam/Laser - just like Dispose, but with a range of 5 or less.
Thunder Fist - lightning/earth physical damage, AOE 2 around itself.
Graviga/Demi2

[SilvasRuin]

I'll reiterate again that I think the Behemoth skill should cause its own death on casting due to what seems to me to be the more common tradition.

I don't know how Dragon Force might be done without yanking Scream for it, and Scream can be nastily overpowered.  Though... if MP is used up for abilities with MP costs for monsters in Mercenaries, then their uses of it could be limited by an MP cost... just as long as there is nothing that can heal up their MP.  I'm rather wary of suggesting Dragon Force being put in.  (Though I suppose it would provide an incentive for the player to not to put off engaging the dragons or something.)

LastingDawn, were you planning on having only one Dragon breath attack or multiple elemental breaths?  If it is only one, were you planning for Fire, non-element, or something else?  If there's only going to be one, I suggest non-element and making it plenty good enough to warrant getting close enough to use, both for the Dragon and the Dragoon.

If the breath is made poisonous, then I suppose it would step on the toes of Bad Breath a little.  I like the gimmicks of the FFXII Dragons, but perhaps straight up solid damage is best.  It is too bad the FFTA AoEs for breath attacks isn't something we can easily mimic.
Ok, let's try again with the dragon suggestion:
Dragon Breath - 2 panel magical, non-elemental is my preference
Tail Swing - 2 panel melee
Mighty Guard - Or whatever ability with Protect and Shell you want to give them, preferably only able to be placed on the caster.
Restore - Only usable when Critical.  If a 100% HP is too much, then it could be lowered to 75% or 50% to make it less of a game breaker.

There's not a ranged attack included in there.  any decently powerful spell could do for one, depending on how versatile you want them to be.  If you want to carry over FFTA2's and FFXII's tendency to make them Dark aligned, you could give them Dark Holy and name it something more traditional, like Darkra or just Dark.

Lamias would be a good excuse to fit in the Blue Magic Night.  Make Lamias immune to sleep so it doesn't hurt them to cast it, then give them a weak physical attack (Slap) designed to wake up the other enemies after Night is used.  Dash's formula should work well for that.

[Eternal]

Slap usually inflicted status ailments, also, such as Paralyze, Blind, and Silence. Just for the record. =D

[SilvasRuin]

Oh right.  >_>  Name it Wake-Up Slap then?  Or Smelling Salts or something.  The point is what it does, not what it is called.

[Skip Sandwich]

The lack of speed of the tonberry and iron giant is probablly not actually best simulated by a low speed value in tactics, but a low MOVE value, since a two low speed value just makes the unit incredibly weak, regardless of it's other stats, since even if it has some 999 damage huge AoE move that kills three or four people every time it gets a turn, if you get 12 turns to its one, you'll never actually be in danger of losing provided you have some halfway decent sandbag capability.

Iron Giant - Ancient weapon from the time of St. Ajora, given life by the power of the holy stones
HP - Great
MP - poor
PA - Great
MA - Great
Speed - Great (20ish speed at level 99)
Move - 2
Jump - 4
Innate: Cannot enter water, walk in lava

Crush - basic physical attack, may inflict sleep or confusion (hits with enough force to daze or outright knock out with a single blow)
Laser - dispose effect, holy element, deals 50% max hp damage to a single target at long range (based off of the blue magic spell)
Judgement - basicly to the Holy spell what Flare 2 is to the Flare spell (based off of the Alexander summon/esper)

[Shade]

Ok this topic is fun.

Monster rebalancing:

Tomberry (if we are going to have it.)
Have the karma cost mp and give tomberry move mp up. it will be fair. and try to have right max mp so tomberry can use it every turn still.

Chocobo
Chocobo Meteor should have only 2 changes, AOE of fire spell, charge time, but not too big.

Ghost
new abilitys to ghosts:
Doom - 100% death sentence to 1 panel
Zombie Infection - In 1.3 there malak has more hits in his spells and that combined with summon aoe and 100% zombie status.
Mega Doom - same as polka polka, but death sentence instead of reducing stats and it's instant.

Ahriman
New Abilitys:
Shadow Realm - Summon AOE and 50% change to inflict Dark Matter
Call Of Fear - Change to inflict stop, don't act. don't move
Flare 2 - you know it

[SilvasRuin]

If it has enough max mp to use it every turn still, then what does giving it an MP cost accomplish?  ...unless it is supposed to be Blue Magic.  I suppose that would work to reduce how often a Blue Mage could use it, but I don't know that Karma was planned to be given to Blue Mages.

Zombie Infection is very impractical as that is a very wide area to cover try try and get some hits in.

I've never known an Ahriman to cast Flare throughout the games.  Or do you remember something I don't?

[Shade]

If it has enough max mp to use it every turn still, then what does giving it an MP cost accomplish?  ...unless it is supposed to be Blue Magic.  I suppose that would work to reduce how often a Blue Mage could use it, but I don't know that Karma was planned to be given to Blue Mages.

Zombie Infection is very impractical as that is a very wide area to cover try try and get some hits in.

I've never known an Ahriman to cast Flare throughout the games.  Or do you remember something I don't?

I meant opposite of it.

Dude it's same thing as the holy bracelet from vanilla. Expect it has more hits and zombie status instead of damage or element.

If I do not remember right one of ahrimans in FFX or FFX-2 could cast flare, but that's stupid to say. Think about... I don't know A CHOCOBO FROM FFT! So do you recall them having chocobo cure in every came before this?

[LastingDawn]

If it has enough max mp to use it every turn still, then what does giving it an MP cost accomplish?  ...unless it is supposed to be Blue Magic.  I suppose that would work to reduce how often a Blue Mage could use it, but I don't know that Karma was planned to be given to Blue Mages.

Zombie Infection is very impractical as that is a very wide area to cover try try and get some hits in.

I've never known an Ahriman to cast Flare throughout the games.  Or do you remember something I don't?

I meant opposite of it.


Dude it's same thing as the holy bracelet from vanilla. Expect it has more hits and zombie status instead of damage or element.

If I do not remember right one of ahrimans in FFX or FFX-2 could cast flare, but that's stupid to say. Think about... I don't know A CHOCOBO FROM FFT! So do you recall them having chocobo cure in every came before this?

Ahem... no, he's right. If you would have Read the topic, you would have seen that we already confronted this issue and crushed it, Random Hits, in a large AoE Then 5 squares is just Too much of a waste of time.

Also Mercenaries is meant to be a Tribute to other FF games, and Flare is just a copout, when we could think of something much more meaningful to give to the class. Also Horrible example with Chocobos. Chocobos weren't Fought in any other FF game Up Until FFT, so your argment is moot as FFT did set the standard for their skills in all further games since. Don't have such a militant tone here either, it seems as if you're going out of your way to subtly insult people who are only critiquing your ideas.

[SilvasRuin]

FFT had an excuse to give Chocobos new abilities.  It was the first game to feature them as full combat enemies that wouldn't run away when first struck.  They needed a full roster of abilities, and they only had Choco Kick and Chocobuckle before FFT.

One Ahriman I've looked at so far had level 3 Flare.  Most have Doom + Haste and level based abilities, not straight up attacks.

Edit:  Yeah, after looking through them, level abilities and Doom that may or may not include Haste are by far the most common abilities.  Stares and Roulette are two other semi-recurring kinds of abilities.

[Eternal]

Skip, why do Iron Giants have 'great' speed? IIRC, all the Iron Giants in the series have been fairly slow.

[SilvasRuin]

I believe Skip addressed that.  I got the impression his reasoning was low Move should emulate the traditional low speed, not low speed itself.  Thing is... low Move means it is slower about getting to you, but once it has caught up to your characters, it no longer has that handicap unless you've spread them out pretty well.  Maybe a combination of mediocre speed and move is better than low one or the other.

[Skip Sandwich]

as I said, I choose to represent the iron giants lack of agility as a lack of movement rather then a lack of speed, since overly low speeds result it a drastic drop in difficulty, you you should still be able to outspeed it with dedicated speed jobs/equips, but it shouldn't be decimated easilly due to a lack of actions. At worst it should be about even with the party in terms of speed, but not much slower, oryou'll just double/triple turn it to death with no effort. If 20ish speed at level 99 still seems to fast, maybe give it Initial: Slow, so it starts off slow, but after it warms up, it goes into overdrive.

:EDIT: @SilvasRuin
part of the reason I like the use of low move instead of low speed, is that lighter, more mobile units have an advantage over more powerful, but less mobile units. The idea is that no human could possibly be strong enough to stand toe to toe with this thing, so you want to play keep away with ranged weapons and spells, or otherwise get flattened into the ground.

[LastingDawn]

I see, LD. And thanks for the heads up on both the self-destruct formula and my Meteorain query.

So, I did some research for Iron Giant. It's most common features are its high HP and defensive properties (mainly a variety of either elemental or status defenses along with its huge physical defense; traditionally weak against water but a weakness to lightning has also been found). They also traditionally wield a massive sword, but having seen the already made Iron Giant sprite I doubt that could be implemented. Maybe it can be like the FFIV Iron Giant, where its main attacks are typically beams (Automaton's "Dispose" a good suggestion?). But concerning their physical attack (mainly due to the massive sword), they usually hit in a "sweeping" range that targets multiple units, so something like Tail Sweep perhaps?

It also has a knack of using Hurricane / Twister and gravity magic, as well as an assortment of other magic spells, but no real definitive list of spells it traditionally uses. And in FFVII, they use a technique called "Adrenaline." Not sure what that does exactly. And in Crystal Chronicles, when it doesn't have its sword, it uses techniques called "Ram" and "Thunder Fist." "Ram" is just your typically charging attack, whereas "Thunder Fist" is a skill it uses where it jumps and punches the ground for lightning damage around itself.

So, here's my theoretical suggestion for the Iron Giant:

Iron Giant: ??? HP, extremely rare encounter, [secret] boss encounter. Innate Regen/Protect/Slow
Charge/Tackle/Punch (whichever) - single-targeting physical attack
Beam/Laser - just like Dispose, but with a range of 5 or less.
Thunder Fist - lightning/earth physical damage, AOE 2 around itself.
Graviga/Demi2

Well thanks for the information, I think Skip Sandwich has the right of way on this though. Great history to it, Thunder Fist in particular sounds interesting. that might make it in.

I'll reiterate again that I think the Behemoth skill should cause its own death on casting due to what seems to me to be the more common tradition.

I don't know how Dragon Force might be done without yanking Scream for it, and Scream can be nastily overpowered.  Though... if MP is used up for abilities with MP costs for monsters in Mercenaries, then their uses of it could be limited by an MP cost... just as long as there is nothing that can heal up their MP.  I'm rather wary of suggesting Dragon Force being put in.  (Though I suppose it would provide an incentive for the player to not to put off engaging the dragons or something.)

LastingDawn, were you planning on having only one Dragon breath attack or multiple elemental breaths?  If it is only one, were you planning for Fire, non-element, or something else?  If there's only going to be one, I suggest non-element and making it plenty good enough to warrant getting close enough to use, both for the Dragon and the Dragoon.

If the breath is made poisonous, then I suppose it would step on the toes of Bad Breath a little.  I like the gimmicks of the FFXII Dragons, but perhaps straight up solid damage is best.  It is too bad the FFTA AoEs for breath attacks isn't something we can easily mimic.
Ok, let's try again with the dragon suggestion:
Dragon Breath - 2
panel magical, non-elemental is my preference
Tail Swing - 2 panel melee
Mighty Guard - Or whatever ability with Protect and Shell you want to give them, preferably only able to be placed on the caster.
Restore - Only usable when Critical.  If a 100% HP is too much, then it could be lowered to 75% or 50% to make it less of a game breaker.

There's not a ranged attack included in there.  any decently powerful spell could do for one, depending on how versatile you want them to be.  If you want to carry over FFTA2's and FFXII's tendency to make them Dark aligned, you could give them Dark Holy and name it something more traditional, like Darkra or just Dark.

Lamias would be a good excuse to fit in the Blue Magic Night.  Make Lamias immune to sleep so it doesn't hurt them to cast it, then give them a weak physical attack (Slap) designed to wake up the other enemies after Night is used.  Dash's formula should work well for that.

Non elemental Dragon Breath was my plan, and I agree with you on the Behemoth self-destruct, but what status effect, or effect file should be used for it? I am not so fond of Mighty Guard for the Dragon, it just seems too much to me, I still do like Restore, I guess Darkra will do.

Now Night is tricky... Sleep in FFT is Completely overpowered, there is no spell in Mercenaries that guarantees Sleep on enemies, because of how broken it is, the player can abuse it to no end. I'm not so fond of making this a blue magic... it just seems too much.

The lack of speed of the tonberry and iron giant is probablly not actually best simulated by a low speed value in tactics, but a low MOVE value, since a two low speed value just makes the unit incredibly weak, regardless of it's other stats, since even if it has some 999 damage huge AoE move that kills three or four people every time it gets a turn, if you get 12 turns to its one, you'll never actually be in danger of losing provided you have some halfway decent sandbag capability.

Iron Giant - Ancient weapon from the time of St. Ajora, given life by the power of the holy stones
HP - Great
MP - poor
PA - Great
MA - Great
Speed - Great (20ish speed at level 99)
Move - 2
Jump - 4
Innate: Cannot enter water, walk in lava

Crush - basic physical attack, may inflict sleep or confusion (hits with enough force to daze or outright knock out with a single blow)
Laser - dispose effect, holy element, deals 50% max hp damage to a single target at long range (based off of the blue magic spell)
Judgement - basicly to the Holy spell what Flare 2 is to the Flare spell (based off of the Alexander summon/esper)

Fully agreed, low Move Stat should represent low "movement". Though keep in mind levels in Mercenaries only go up to 50, that's 10 levels per patch, since balance isn't Too far broken than and it's not a 999 one shot game yet.
 I like your reference to the Iron Giant being similar to Alexander, and everything else there looks solid, I'll probably add in the Thunder Fist ability mentioned earlier if I can.

[SilvasRuin]

I like the Alexander reference too.  Creative combination, and it makes sense to do so.  Laser being Holy is an interesting departure.

I'm not quite sure which you mean about the effect file.  I don't see why it should inflict any status.  Meteorain (100) or Meteor (02F), either one will do for visual.  Formula could be 43, 4F, or 52 as long as the caster can't be outside of its range and avoid it.

[Eternal]

Ah, I apologize, Skip. I missed that part.