FFT Arena: Balance Discussion Thread

[Barren]

Reraise is not in conjunction with cursed ring because while under undead status you are under the condition of possible self revival meaning that you can't get up by a raise spell or phoenix down. Cursed ring users however are an exception because they are immune to crystallization. HP Restore does work with undeads

[Shintroy]

Oh great. Was wondering what silentkaster meant by I should have dragon spirit and cursed ring.

[Barren]

Dragon spirit is nice to put on sturdier or even evasive units because they need to live through physical hits. But one thing to keep in mind is unless you have ways to heal the unit with reraise expiring then its just another attempt for the enemy to slay the revived unit with low HP. That's why usually its better to give the dragon spirit user high HP and Hi-Potion for healing and either evasion or protect/defense UP. Cursed Ring users can get back with up a random amount of HP but again its prefered to have self healing or they will just sit in a corner

[Andante49]

More mime miscellany:

Are Flails included in Equip Light Blade? Or are they with Harps, Clothes, and Bags as off limits to mimes?

I've noticed Mimes not paying the MP cost of the abilities they preform (not mimic), for sure with Shuriken and Hawk's Eye haven't tested others.

Have experienced Mimes losing their weapons mid-battle, especially with Jumps and Summons that the Mime trys to mimic but targets a panel off of the map.

[Shintroy]

Good to know Barren. Never made a good dragon spirit or cursed ring unit before. Figure I'd do both in one go.

Do you calculate forced 2Hand weapons with double PA, or are they just 2handed weapons with no additional PA benefit? Bows too?

How does Two Hands work with MA based weapons?

Does Blood Sword drain off abilities like Kagesougi or any at all?

How come there's no way to cast reflect outside of mad science? It's too easy to dispel reflect to benefit from reflect ring and mail imo.

[The Damned]

(I'll answer these in order to best of my knowledge.)

Forced Two Hand weapons get no added weapon boost despite needing Two Hands. That's part of the point of forcing them in most cases and hence why Knight Swords have such massive WP and yet don't easily hit for 400+ damage most of the time.

Yes. That's why a female Samurai or Bard using Whale Whisker with Two Hands is (still) so very dangerous.

This one, I'm not sure about. I don't think Blood Sword drain does since Kagesougi isn't technically normal attack. Then again, it does use a weapon strike and I'm pretty sure that Blood Sword's HP Drain works off Jump, though Jump is atypical so.... Shrug. Someone else will have to answer this one or you could just try it out in the meantime.

Mad Science doesn't add Reflect, actually, or rather it shouldn't be if it is; I don't think it is, but I'll admit I can't remember back to the last fight with Otabo's "Man Mode Strats" team. The only actual way currently to get Reflect is through Nameless Song, which is extremely unreliable, though that's not too surprising since I'd readily argue both Song and Dance have needed to just be overhauled for a while.

As for Reflect Ring and Mirror Mail/Reflect Mail becoming Always: Reflect, I could see that possibly working without being too overpowered since basically ever mage except Oracle has would have a way to get around that. "We" could easily change a spell or two in Yin-Yang Magic besides Dispel Magic to get around Reflect if that was the case--I'd personally vote for Spell Absorb & Life Drain since they've historically gotten around Reflect and see so little use.

That said, I'm ultimately undecided to that presently.

[silentkaster]

Always: Reflect would be pretty interesting..."Raise" and "Raise 2" are reflectable. I believe it was the same in Vanilla in that if you have Always: Reflect, you will not be able to use those spells on dead units as they will carry Reflect even while dead. So...might be interesting if that does happen.

[CT5Holy]

We've had Always: Reflect items before, and yeah, dead units would still have Reflect over their corpses.
I think FFM made those items Initial: Reflect so people could Raise/Raise 2 those units. Would feel bad losing cause you didn't know about that little interaction =P

Blood Sword will not drain off Kagesougi. 99%+ certain about this. Also fairly certain it won't drain off Jump, but I've never seen that before, so... guess I shouldn't say anything XD. Someone should test!

Reraise + Undead unit = unit will never get up once KO'd.

[TrueLight]

After some testing:

A jumping Blood Sword user will not get healed by the jump. A Blood Sword - Kagesougi user will not get healed after the attack. A Blood Sword Kagesougi attack will also not heal undead units.

[Shintroy]

Reraise + Undead makes a unit permanently dead? There goes my Hallows team.

Good to know on blood sword as well.wanted to make some absorb hp tanking units. Single Target damage won't do though. I got a team that'll change the meta though coming up for sure.

[The Damned]

(This is what I get for being even lazier than usual yesterday.)

Having just finally tested it myself, I can confirm what TrueLight said. I must have been confusing Blood Sword + Jump with the ability of Jump to maybe still activate procs. I may be mis-remembering that as well, though, especially seeing as how I only just now realized today upon waking up that I really under-counted the amount of available Item Attribute space. It's annoying given I accurately counted it when doing the ARNEA 1.39 stuff in the event that FFMaster never returned, which thankfully never happened.

Anyway, that's solved at least. Thanks TrueLight.

Always: Reflect would be pretty interesting..."Raise" and "Raise 2" are reflectable. I believe it was the same in Vanilla in that if you have Always: Reflect, you will not be able to use those spells on dead units as they will carry Reflect even while dead. So...might be interesting if that does happen.

We've had Always: Reflect items before, and yeah, dead units would still have Reflect over their corpses.

I think FFM made those items Initial: Reflect so people could Raise/Raise 2 those units. Would feel bad losing cause you didn't know about that little interaction =P

Meh. It's pointed out in the Master Guide that both Raise & Raise 2 are subject to Reflect. Given Always: Status clearly still apply even through dead in most cases, it's really the team maker's own fault for blanking out on that.

In any case, both Raises being subject to Reflect is what makes me want to use Always: Reflect given White Magic is easily one of the stronger Faith-based magic skills, if not the strongest just due to having the best resurrection. Weakening that a bit by forcing someone to choose between how defensive against magic they want to be would only be a good thing in my mind, especially since "we" could make Raise (1) get  around Reflect while Raise 2 didn't if we really wanted to.

I'm just not sure Always: Reflect is a "needed" change, at least for Reflect Ring; Mirror Mail/Reflect Mail is kinda meh though, but I'll readily admit that's my own horrible luck with it also talking.

Reraise + Undead unit = unit will never get up once KO'd.

Reraise + Undead makes a unit permanently dead? There goes my Hallows team.

No, Reraise + Undead doesn't actually seem to make sure you "stay" dead if Undead, at least if you make the Undead unit Immune: Crystal & Treasure. I thought much the same thing for a long while because Lady Luck hates me despite all my testing, but I was shown differently at least two years ago. I'm pretty sure the video is even in this subforum.

Besides, Dragon Spirit shouldn't really work on Undead units anyway since, unless FFMaster changed this, Undead both cancels and blocks Reraise status. I'm pretty sure that he didn't change that, so it shouldn't ever come up anyway, using Diamond Helmet with Cursed Ring aside given Initial & Always: Status always trump immunities for some reason.

[Shintroy]

Ah I see. The only thing close to this I tested was 138 phoenix blade and trying to work around the Always slow with equipment with immune slow. I figure it would be possible since you're able to poison a unit with always Regen.

silentkaster uploaded a video of my Hallows team about two days ago. The AI from the other team seemed to straight ignore ky cursed ring, dragon spirit unit entirely so I never got to see of it would work. I'll go with it probably not working though. No use wasting time in having a broken team being recorded or commentated on.

spoiler: ....

I really tried to make that theme work.

[The Damned]

(This is probably my last comment for today between how long I've been awake and how I'll be away for at least five hours.)

You can Poison a unit with one of the Always: Regen items because a) Regen doesn't block Poison and b) Regen isn't being constantly reapplied by those items, but rather is just constant. This is why you can't use a Regen-adding ability to get rid of Poison on those same units since they still, technically, have Regen; it's just that Poison is overriding it since it cancels Regen.

Undead completely blocks Reraise, so...yeah. Again, it's not going to work unless FFMaster changed it and I'm pretty sure that he didn't since there's literally no reason for him to do so.

Like I said, if you really want to screw around with Reraise & Undead at the same time, then Diamond Helmet with Cursed Ring is a completely valid option.

[formerdeathcorps]

I think Stall's JP cost should be 200 or 250.  Stop < Sleep in terms of the AI (because the AI will not attack the sleeping unit, keeping it out of play for longer) and Mimic Daravon (also 300 JP) is AoE with only 5% less hit chance.

[Shintroy]

I don't think Talk skill needs a nerf since there's also Yin Yang Magic and Time Magic that benefit from faith (faith up, rod, pilgrimage). Not even mentioning compatibility affecting talk skill more than anything else. There's always units having anti status gear as well, and abilities like Heal and item thst don't cover multiple status effects.

I can agree with a slight stall JP reduction, but at the same time I don't think it matters since there's always ai tournaments and no jp limit team making. Stall 250, Daravon 300, 200 blackmail seems the most sound though. Mediators do tend to have jp to spare anyway. 250 or 300 sounds perfect.

[Shintroy]

Been messing with the Zombie status and just wanted to clear some things up.
- Are undead weak vs Holy? If so by how much?
-Blood Sword reverses Drain damage on undead, but does Healing Staff harm undead?
-Can you remove the undead status on downed units, and is the revival chance still 50%?

Mostly curious of how friendly ai act with undead units.

[The Damned]

(I'll try to answer these to best of my ability, but only FFMaster (or maybe Dokurider) could give definite answers.)

Also, you'll need to rephrase some of your questions better. What do you mean by "friendly A.I. act with Undead units" exactly?

Regardless, in order:


1. No, Undead units still aren't innately weak against Holy. If they were, then it would be the still stand 200% weakness every other instance of "Weak" creates. Undead units are also still not, at least as far as I'm aware, innately absorbent of Dark.

2. Healing Staff should harm the Undead. The same goes for Murasame the katana (though that's also true for the [overpowered] ability). I'm almost 100% sure of this; I just can't remember if it's happened (as of late).

3. No, even if Dead weren't (somewhat unfortunately) apparently hard-coded to not interact with anything that isn't a Cancel: Dead ability, being able to do remove Undead status on a downed unit would defeat a large part of the usefulness of Undead status as an offensive tool. As for the revival chance, yes, even without Cursed Ring, it's still a 50/50 chance of getting up or becoming a Crystal; it's just that Cursed Ring (now) blocks Crystal, so with Cursed Ring it's a 50/50 of getting up or staying down for another turn after you would have otherwise become a Crystal.


I'm pretty sure all of this stuff is still the same as it was in vanilla, but only FFMaster can know for sure. (Well, I guess PX could too technically, but he's never around, so....)

[Shintroy]

Trying to scrap my worst team for a solid team with a Grand Cross unit. I have to know though, since rainbow staff counts as all elements, does pairing it with grand cross and any absorb element equipment make you absorb the attack? No way to testing it myself. I'm just going to assume if it works you can pair up with the matching strengthen equipment as well.

I doubt it working, but I can't escape the thought without confirmation. Earth clothes plus rainbow staff grand cross shouldn't worm since there are the other 7 elements to think of.

Does pairing rainbow staff with 108 gems do anything? Can someone just test rainbow staff please?

[Otabo]

Last I checked, Rainbow Staff isn't all elements. I thought that was removed a long time ago, unless FFM forgot to change that in the master guide?

[Shintroy]

Oh yeah, the master guide has rainbow staff down as an all element staff. Probably forgot to updatethe weapon since its so underused. Went ahead and solved my problem though.

Anyway, I've been trying to get people who play Tactics into Arena. Problem is after I have someone download everything they then have to learn how to build units and teams with outdated teams. My solution to this was to make easier versions of teams. There's three levels of difficulty I figured would work without being too overwhelming for a new player.

Easy - Teams can only use one job per unit.
Normal - Only two jobs per unit.
Hard - Teams with a single unit above 3 jobs fall under the hard category. All current teams would fall under this category already.

I figure for medium and easy teams, under "player", anyone interested in making Easy or Hard teams could just put (E) or (M) followed by their name(for example I'd put Player: (E) Shintroy). This way when I eventually make a memory card generator for 139, easier teams are easy to find.

Anyone like or dislike this idea? Anything I could do better?