Broken aspects of the base game, modifying them, other inquiries?

[Ethereal Embrace]

Modifying abilities is really nice because anytime you have a broken ability, it can easily be changed to be less broken (usually by adding an MP cost, or outright reducing the damage). But as of yet, there are no tools that deal with passives and reactions. Truth be told, except for Turbo MP, I don't think any of them are broken, HOWEVER, the computer AI cannot dynamically interact with these passives and reactions, making them very broken in the process.

Which is to say, if a unit has Reflex, and the enemy just uses regular attack and misses. Sometimes, it will keep doing regular attack to that same unit. Sometimes multiple enemies will keep doing regular attack on him. This is not good as enemies are using up their crucial turns doing nothing.

Does anyone know any way to change or modify these types of things? I'm willing to learn, I just have no clue where to look.

If there is no way at the moment, then the only recourse is to simply remove the broken passives and reactions. The ones I'm looking at:
- Turbo MP (way too absurd in a game that starts with max MP, BUT it's fun to give this to enemies every now and then).
- Halve MP (this isn't broken until we get to the big boy spells like Ultima, Hastega, etc. One way to deal is to simply increase the MP cost of most spells and better abilities, but at the same time, doing so pressures characters to basically all have Halve MP as their passive as a lot of passives aren't amazing as they are).
- Strike Back
- Magick Evade (what were they thinking)
- Reflex (might keep this one, but I don't know)

Some thoughts on this would be like:
- What if Reflex just rose evasion by an extra 10 points?
- What if Magick Evade rose evasion from magick attacks by 20?
- I don't think you can really balance Turbo MP
- Halve MP is not egregious, but in a game where almost every move costs a significant amount of MP, it feels extremely good.

Other thoughts:
- Counter Magick is problematic as you use full MP cost to activate this, despite only targeting one person. This can be a problem as what if that MP cost is so high that you are unable to perform wanted actions in the next turn? My idea is to either reduce MP cost to half or completely remove MP cost but reduce damage by 1/2.
- One of the problems with removing these abilities is that the game already feels very strapped for unique and interest passives and reactions. Removing these abilities will continue to exasperate that feeling. Counter is the most perfect idea of a reaction ability of all time, however, the game would be boring and stale if every enemy had it.

Being able to making new Action ability effects and parameters, Reactions, and Passives would be a goal but not completely necessary.

Other abilities:
- Doublehand and Charged Attacks are way too weak (+8 ATK)
- Concentrate only boosts accuracy by 5%. This is an overcorrection as in FFTA, it boosts by 20%. I think 10% is a very good compromise.

Clan Privileges:
- I actually don't know too many clan privileges but there is a clan privilege that halves MP, which stacks with Halve MP. Naturally, the only recourse I can think of is to get rid of that privilege.

Does anyone know how I can do that? Keep that privilege from being available to players.

- Bonus AP privileges are really good, however, I've found that I basically do not use any privilege but this one. In a game where privileges are basically required to use, I feel like being very pressured into basically only using these privileges is bad design. So I'm strongly considering getting rid of these abilities.
- It's with that in mind, that I would like to know, is there any way to modify the amount of AP received in a normal mission success? I know it's 80 per story mission, and 30 for anything else. Can I make it 100/50 instead?

If not, that's fine. I can simply adjust the AP needed for every action ability (not passive or reaction abilities though, as I don't know how to modify them, but those don't really need to be changed at all).

EXP Gain:

Sorry if I'm asking too many questions, but I wanted to know if there was a way to reduce the max amount of EXP gained per mission. I know it's 60+bonus EXP, I wanted to reduce it to either 35 or 40 per mission as I decided I wanted to reduce the level cap to 50 (or 51).

Ultima:

Ultima moves are really broken, so I think removing them is a good option.

Alternatively, right now, it's power 95 with 3x damage output (this means that it's generally doing 200 damage with a character with low Magick stat).
I was thinking that power 50 with 2x damage and 2x accuracy is a good compromise. Shouldn't 1-shot everything in sight, but still very good. Should probably have some other drawbacks as well.

So yeah, lots of questions, not all are technical or hacking, just what are your thoughts on some of these topics? Is Halve MP not completely OP? Is Ultima worth keeping? Do you think Bonus AP is bad game design?

[Ezzeth]

Yes Ultima is broken, nerfing it to not 1shot may be a good choice. But I personally want to discard it to gives the gameplay more variety. Not relying on Ultima for damage.

Halve MP is not completely OP on its own, but it easily breaks some skills. Increasing their MP cost will make them unuseable without Halve MP. Makes balancing too hard. Idk, my current approach is to disable it for now.

Bonus AP being picked almost everytime and no time to experiment with other privileges is a bad design, but disabling it will make AP gain too slow. So yeah, maybe its better to disable it and increasing base AP gain (or decreasing AP required).

There is no need to balance Turbo MP, just balance anything that gains more MP and Turbo MP wont be overpowered