Final Fantasy Hacktics

Well, no. The only ones that have a longer reach than Asura would be the Linear or 3-Directional attacks, which are much easier to aim - you can use them with flanking or even adjacent allies, with little harm done.

Anyway, we've more or less decided how we want to approach Draw Out. I won't give it all away, but expect it to be much less gimmicky in the rerelease! Of course, the self damaging part has definitely gotten the axe. That was a mistake from the start, as far as I can tell. It makes Draw Out practically unusable anyway IMO.

Here's a little update on that for you.

We all agree that summons no longer differentiating between friend and foe isn't ideal. It makes them too identical to Wizard/Priest magic, and too dissimilar from standard Summon magic! You'll see some changes to that in the re-release. We already sort of knew about that one, but ended up talking it over after the topic of Draw Out came up.

Draw Out is very definitely NOT supposed to harm the user. Heal, yes. But not harm. As to whether it should hit allies, well, we're milling that one over. But expect Draw Out to be fixed for the rerelease as well, one way or the other!

I'm pretty certain that Draw Out and Summon hitting allies were intended changes.

Draw Out hitting the user, however? Looking at a vanilla ISO in the Patcher, it's got "Hit Caster" checked, but doesn't have "Hit Allies" - which seems to negate "Hit Caster". Most likely, when it was first set up for Jot5, "Hit Allies" was checked, and the fact that "Hit Caster" was checked by default ended up overlooked. And since Samurai's pretty deep in for Chapter 1, I guess no one really noticed before!

Good question. That predated me, so I have absolutely no idea! I'd say probably not though.

I'll get back to you on that one.

QuoteThe huge advantage for ME is that I can play the modified ISO directly on my PSP

You can play PSX games on modded PSPs as well, though.

QuoteThankfully, we've discovered a fix to the crystalization crash within the past month though!

That fix has actually been around for a while.

I remember having to adjust the text for that all the way back in 2011, when I first joined.

Yeah, sorry Bleu, you're not gonna be finding a lot of help to make ASMs for WotL just to push out a small vanilla rebalancing patch. When it comes to Patcher work alone, the advantages of using WotL may very well be worth it, but when it comes to ASM work...

I think I've described it this way before, but here's my understanding based on just what I've heard from others, as I don't do ASM work myself.

ASMing FFT is like painstakingly taking a broken car apart piece by piece in your garage and trying to figure out what makes it tick. ASMing WotL is that, but in total darkness, with a bunch of rabid weasels crawling over your face. While you're knee-deep in mud.

If you need ASMs to overcome what you're trying to do in WotL, either you figure it out on your own or it is not happening. Sorry, man.

The work remaining for the rerelease is beyond me and I couldn't even give you an estimate, sorry. Whether you should play the current release now or not is up to you - depends on your patience to wait for the new release, and your willingness to replay games you've beaten.

The question "how many battles" makes me laugh, because between storyline battles and Marks we plan to blow vanilla FFT right out of the water in that regard. Vanilla had a mere 55 battles across all four chapters. Most of 'em just in chapter 4.

QuoteI've been surprised at the vitriol against it.

Many non-Patcher tasks are hundreds to thousands of times easier on the PSX version. Plus, that awful spell slowdown. Can't blame folks too much for that one

Nice. Best of luck, though most of the greater FFH community generally ignores WotL stuff due to the sheer difficulty of doing even simple non-Patcher tasks compared to what's possible with the PSX version. The poorly-balanced, near-impossible-to-unlock new Jobs and multiplayer-ONLY items typically aren't worth the tradeoff.

WotL is less reliable when it comes to editing; it conflicts with custom work far more often than the PSX version. Might cause issues with the custom class change & formulas; that's all I know on those subjects.

The Bio spells can be freely changed with no issues. They're only in two skillsets overall IIRC.

I understand frustration with projects that are fraught with delays, but the whineposts accomplish nothing. Especially when you can see, on the very page you posted to, that Eternal's computer got bricked.

It also takes a real special kind of person to get asked to not be a dick by the mods, then go do it anyway on an alt account as if you think you're clever. So just don't.

QuoteRegardless of strategy though the beast master fight was quite brutal

I never found that one hard though >_>

It felt like it was a step up from other fights, but not horribly so. Kill the enemy healers, kill the enemy that uses AoE, be very careful about damaging the enemies that use Self-Destruct until you're ready for it (and then it turns out each of those will heal the other if they can, so you can take advantage of that to make one heal instead of fight - bonus points if they're in a position to both be hit by Whirlwind Blade). You start in a very well defended position that makes it easy to stack up and surround enemies one by one, too.

QuoteSorry I have to completely disagree with JOT5 being too hard. As someone who thinks it's not hard enough...I think it's a great middle ground

Don't forget, this is only Chapter 1!

Quotei personally found in jot5, that the start is extremely hard, but if you endure the "many" game over at the start XD then you get very strong skills, and it's not that hard anymore, more like enjoyable.

IMO, it's kind of meant to serve as a slap to the face that breaks you of some bad habits in regular FFT where your actual Tactics involve recklessly zerg rushing your enemies with little regard for positioning or keeping near your support units, because only a very small percentage of battles actually feature enemies who bring something more threatening than autoattack to the table.

Specifically: Ramza starts out just as strong of a melee fighter as the rest, but he's also the only one who starts out with a support ability. After that, almost every ability he can learn is a support ability.

Link's in a similar situation. He's a bit more attack-oriented, but he still has ranged and support options that are worth cultivating. That's why he only has a single sword ability, but three ranged ones and three songs, as well as the option to switch his equipment on the fly. (In the rerelease, switching his weaponry won't even consume your turn.)

Dante, too, has some very good versatility with his weaponry. Unlike Link, he can't switch Styles in combat, but his base job can easily adapt to whatever battles you have coming your way.
- As a Swordmaster (his default), he's a strong DPS character. You can keep him there, but you don't have to, and I would strongly encourage you not to if you're looking to pick up more utility on your team.
- Using a dagger to switch him to the Trickster and picking up those abilities suddenly gives him a ton of utility. He's got two ranged attack skills, one self-Quick skill, and a Regen/Defending skill that not only makes him tanky as hell, but also replenishes his MP, allowing him more freedom to use special abilities. You don't have to switch him to a utility character, but the option is there.
- Using a crossbow to switch him to the Gunslinger makes him a strong DPS character, similar to the Swordmaster, but with the added benefit from attacking at range, which protects him from some harm.
- Using a hammer to switch him to a Royalguard turns him into a very tanky unit and adds the ability to buff the party. 

Snake is designed completely around the idea of being a utility character. He's meant for surprise attacks, gambler strikes, chasing down and finishing off weakened targets, or simply distracting foes and being protected from the consequences of it thanks to his high Move, invisibility, and/or self-healing potential.

In fact, the only character designed to be a pure DPS character is Cloud. And considering the utility of Cross-Slash, even that's not 100% accurate.

The idea of backing away from pure zerg DPS is also why jobs like Knight and Ranger have major utility (Knight gaining heavy support, Ranger gaining heavy debuffing) while their equivalent Jobs didn't in FFT. It's why Wizard comes with the potential to inflict status on most of their spells.

It's also why the Chemist job suddenly becomes much more useful, instead of just having single-target heals and a billion different single-target cleanses. Sapling is powerful as hell, for example.

Basically, support and utility actually become important parts of FFT in Journey of the Five. The opening battles are hard because they're supposed to teach you early on to go get those types of abilities, instead of spending all your JP on pure DPS stuff. When you leave Lionel Castle thinking "aw man, that would have been so much easier if I'd had more MP," you put a higher priority on, say, Saria's Song or Encourage. (Fun fact: the three of the Five who use MP in their base jobs all have at least one way of restoring their own MP in said jobs.)

So an easy first playthrough with an automatically harder second one? I don't quite agree with that. That's more like artificially bloating the content of the game by making you do the same stuff twice over, just tuned higher.

If the difficulty is really giving you that much grief, I'd suggest using save state abuse as a crutch while you get used to the transition from the vanilla FFT playstyle, though it's not ideal... you're supposed to learn how to roll with the punches earlier on, and get used to the playstyle differences between vanilla FFT and Jot5. Jot5 puts a lot more emphasis on status effects and playing defensively than FFT "low level Archers and Knights in Ch. 4 storyline battles" ever did.

For example, Immobilize is ridiculously beneficial, especially given how many major Jot5 enemies are melee fighters. Focus Bangles block the Crystal status, meaning you don't have to rush to rez fallen units. Knights have easy access to Reraise. Regen is mad useful. These are all things you don't really see in vanilla FFT, because they aren't worth it there - but I promise you, they are here, and they're effects that can easily turn the tide of battle.

RNG is a part of the game, but it's not always just down to luck. There's a mod out there for FFT that sets up the AI for heavy sandbagging, and some LPers are experienced with it, so they come into Jot5 already used to having a harder time with the AI than the FFT "let's have you fight low level Archers and Knights deep into Chapter 4!" style. Those LPers know what to take advantage of without having to think about it as much as someone who's just played vanilla FFT.

That said, you do have a magic bullet at your disposal for countering bad RNG or forcing good RNG instead - save states. Use them every several turns as a precaution, and you can easily recover from something horrendous like accidentally screwing up the range on an ability. Or you can attempt to force Link's Ice Arrow to cause slow if you're in a corner and need to get some healing done.

That isn't how you should be playing, mind you, but if you're still in that post-FFT adjustment period where you're not used to being unable to brute force most encounters yet, it's an option that can make things significantly easier.

I know I've posted a lot of useful tips for Jot5 here and there in the proper topic myself, but the biggest general tip is that this simply isn't like normal FFT where the jobs are horribly imbalanced - so make sure you get good use out of the early jobs; don't just try to rush to Ninja or whatever. You can send a couple characters to climb all the way up the trees, sure, but this isn't a game where the majority of your enemies bring nothing more threatening than Attack and Fire 1 to the table, so you'd better be sure you're not doing that either.

The PSP exclusive items were crudely tacked on in a completely separate item databank that was never made available to anything the Patcher can affect. All you can do with them is change their stats, names, and descriptions.

Saying that WotL is mod-unfriendly compared to the PSX version is, frankly, putting it lightly.

Even now, there are still people coming in to ask about 1.3, even though it was removed from the site quite some time ago at the request of the guy behind ID. I mean, there's a forum for 1.3 at its own website, but people still come here to ask about it, which is... odd. And yeah, it can get annoying. If people went to the PSX FFT board to ask questions about FFT Advance - repeatedly - over several years, you'd probably see an annoyed rule about posting those questions to the right place too.

QuoteThese things seriously get old, and it's very annoying to repeat ourselves over and over again.

There's been user overlap between the two sites, of course, but this simply isn't the place to come ask questions about 1.3 if you want accurate answers. If you want to know about 1.3, you should be asking on the 1.3 forums. Which do exist.

Dark and Onion Knight as GENERIC Jobs, expanded party roster, the (crudely) increased number of items for all the multiplayer stuff.

Whether that plus the rest is important enough to make up for not being able to mod the PSP version as deeply is up to you.

But yeah, 1.3 isn't available or supported here - we can't really tell you what differences may or may not be there between their PSX & PSP versions. We aren't the ones who'd know.

The CT on Jump is kind of supposed to be the "cost" of the move, which is why it doesn't have an MP cost, can go up to eight panels away, AND deals bonus lance damage... all while leaving your character invulnerable during the Jump.
As a rule of thumb, never use it on an enemy whose CT is higher than 50 unless you're sure that your Jumper is that much faster than them.

Evade With Motion has nothing to do with tracking the enemy after they move. That feature comes in a different checkbox, which isn't available for Jump skills.