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Love Reis? Me too! What are some ideas for modding her?

Started by Sorceress, December 29, 2021, 06:08:03 pm

Sorceress

Hi everyone! This is my first post, so I hope I'm placing it in the right place!

I just got started modding FFT:WOTL (although I'd love to do the original too, but baby steps  :lol: ) and it's seriously the most fun I've had during this pandemic. I'm looking to make many changes to the jobs/characters, and have made a lot of progress. What I'm looking for are some ideas to change Reis while maintaining her uniqueness. I always related to Rafa and loved Reis' design, but found that playing them didn't feel as rewarding as others.

I searched through the forums and found some ideas, so I just want to get some opinions and brainstorm on changes or tweaks!

- Dome made a post suggesting having her abilities hit all monsters, which I think is cool, or making her a blue mage. I replaced Arithmetician with a Blue Mage build (and the sprite works fabulously imo!) but realized it takes a LOT of time and dedication to have multiple people master it. I also saw people using Luso as a blue mage, but ultimately I'll be replacing him at some point. What skills and equipment do you think would make Reis a viable and fun blue mage?

- Raijinili suggested Reis could learn hydra attacks as well, which I would love if I could change them to not hit randomly (which I fixed with Malak and changed to PA formula, single hit...but not Rafa [I'm still too new to figure her out and keep her animations/MA with what I want]). I'm going to keep searching the forums to solve my troubles!

- I want to take serious consideration of Shrikesnest's newbie tips of difficulty, stat multipliers, and behavior. For my personal game, I'm not looking into higher difficulty, more so uniqueness and changing Reis  ;) I definitely want to change her growth and multipliers, so has someone else liked what they changed in the past? Either in her current class or a custom one? All of these questions wrap up into what kind of behavior the player will assume when playing her with changes.

I'm taking her background into consideration, so please correct me if I'm wrong. She has no special connections to dragons other than her curse, right? Aside from in-game days passing plus a few, I can't imagine she's been a dragon for too long, right? So I don't necessarily see why she becomes a master of dragons, or dragonkin, so quickly, which is why I feel that she could use a change. I'd rather create a story for her from her beginnings kind of and use them moving forward, so I'm definitely excited to see if anyone has done this or has ideas. I'm thinking she's a Templar's lover, and knows the Celebrant from church, is a noble/of middle rank, so maybe she knows magick? I was thinking of a Disney Princess/Cinderella-like theme (I know...I know. Bear with me) in which she's close to animals, can speak to them, or something else to maintain her uniqueness of monster-related skills whether it be blue magic, more dragon abilities, or skills affecting all monsters.

Thank you for reading ha ha! Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions!  :D

  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

nitwit

Quote from: Sorceress on December 29, 2021, 06:08:03 pmHi everyone! This is my first post, so I hope I'm placing it in the right place!

I just got started modding FFT:WOTL (although I'd love to do the original too, but baby steps  :lol: ) and it's seriously the most fun I've had during this pandemic. I'm looking to make many changes to the jobs/characters, and have made a lot of progress. What I'm looking for are some ideas to change Reis while maintaining her uniqueness. I always related to Rafa and loved Reis' design, but found that playing them didn't feel as rewarding as others.

I searched through the forums and found some ideas, so I just want to get some opinions and brainstorm on changes or tweaks!
Simplest fix for Rafa/Malak is to make their skills faster and reduce their vertical tolerance (I think that's the name of it) so they are more easily constrained to fewer tiles. They could stand some better stats and gear options too.

edit
I think that Malak's formula doesn't work as intended, and that there's an asm hack to fix it, so that too.
/edit

Quote from: Sorceress on December 29, 2021, 06:08:03 pm- Dome made a post suggesting having her abilities hit all monsters, which I think is cool, or making her a blue mage. I replaced Arithmetician with a Blue Mage build (and the sprite works fabulously imo!) but realized it takes a LOT of time and dedication to have multiple people master it. I also saw people using Luso as a blue mage, but ultimately I'll be replacing him at some point. What skills and equipment do you think would make Reis a viable and fun blue mage?
As long as monsters are easy to find, I don't think hunting them all down for every character is a humongous issue. You could give each randomized battlefield 1 or 2 monster sprites that will be in every battle, and vary the other enemies.

The real issue with a blue mage is that monster MA is much higher, and their skill X/Y values much lower. You need to adjust them to resemble human MA and skill X/Y values. Simplest way to do that is to:
  • Figure out which human skill each monster skill most resembles, and paste the human values for X and Y over to the monster skill. So turn the Skeletons Spirit skills' power into something halfway between Fire 1 and Fire 2.
  • Figure out which human class each monster most resembles, and paste the MA growth and multiplier values over the monster class.

There are I think 16 monster families, and 16 skills per skill set, so it just barely works at 1 Blue Mage skill per monster family. Other than that, a lot of monster skills are lackluster and don't merit inclusion in a human class. Pretty easy to improve them though, I can give advice on that if you want it.

You'll want the ASM hack that enables the last monster skill slot to appear even when no one has the Monster Skill support equipped, so you can put more skills in there.

Since you're working on dragon related stuff, IMO dragon breaths should be 3 range/aoe, and each dragon should get dash, tail hit, and 2 breaths. If possible you should make a breath for every element - you can save slots by consolidating Reis' breaths and the dragon breaths if you fix the monster skill X/Y values and monster MA to match that of humans.
  • Dragon becomes Green Dragon and gets Dash, Tail Hit, Thunder Breath, and Air Breath (?).
  • Blue Dragon gets Dash, Tail Hit, Ice Breath, and Water Breath.
  • Red Dragon gets Dash, Tail Hit, Fire Breath, Earth Breath.

Then make a few Holy and Dark dragon random encounters on your battlefields that use the Dragon sprites in every battle, and adjust the sprites so that Dragon Reis uses a 4th palette if possible and a dark dragon uses a 5th palette (again, if possible). I think the 6th palette is unusable. All this is necessary because there's a spritesheet limit in battle.

Someone has done a lot of research on animations recently, so check the discord before you worry about animations not working with both monsters and humans.

I don't know about armor; her stats are very high as it is and armor makes her even tougher. She needs a full set of elemental boost weapons if you turn her into a caster blue mage. If she's a traditional blue mage, a combination of caster and warrior weapons, along with light and mage armor.

If you go the incomplete transformation route and she has like dragon wings and a tail, then monster girl Reis could get - instead of superhuman stats - innate fly, a new sprite, possibly innate float, slightly above average stats all around, and use light weapons and armor suitable for a blue mage.

Quote from: Sorceress on December 29, 2021, 06:08:03 pm- Raijinili suggested Reis could learn hydra attacks as well, which I would love if I could change them to not hit randomly (which I fixed with Malak and changed to PA formula, single hit...but not Rafa [I'm still too new to figure her out and keep her animations/MA with what I want]). I'm going to keep searching the forums to solve my troubles!
Unless she comes back with 3 heads (or two hydra heads coming out of her back, like Ashton in Star Ocean 2) skip Triple Breath, but the others are cool... though maybe you could add a few poses to her sprite where she opens her mouth and puts her hands to both sides, and add the Triple Breath animation to it.

Quote from: Sorceress on December 29, 2021, 06:08:03 pm- I want to take serious consideration of Shrikesnest's newbie tips of difficulty, stat multipliers, and behavior. For my personal game, I'm not looking into higher difficulty, more so uniqueness and changing Reis  ;) I definitely want to change her growth and multipliers, so has someone else liked what they changed in the past? Either in her current class or a custom one? All of these questions wrap up into what kind of behavior the player will assume when playing her with changes.
If you want to get into events and spriting, you can make choices that determines some aspect of her transformation back into a human.

You could create a battle event where you need to find a spellbook that deals with monster transformations, and leave multiple options to retrieve it. Put one in the hand of mages, another in the hand of warriors, and so on for every possible Reis build you want to provide. Then create duplicate Reis classes (and sprites, that reflect perhaps an different type of incomplete transformation based on her role) and change the transformation event to pick one depending on which group Ramza fought. If you're not going the blue mage route, it might be wise the change the skillset each alternate Reis gets to suit her stats.

Quote from: Sorceress on December 29, 2021, 06:08:03 pmI'm taking her background into consideration, so please correct me if I'm wrong. She has no special connections to dragons other than her curse, right? Aside from in-game days passing plus a few, I can't imagine she's been a dragon for too long, right? So I don't necessarily see why she becomes a master of dragons, or dragonkin, so quickly, which is why I feel that she could use a change. I'd rather create a story for her from her beginnings kind of and use them moving forward, so I'm definitely excited to see if anyone has done this or has ideas. I'm thinking she's a Templar's lover, and knows the Celebrant from church, is a noble/of middle rank, so maybe she knows magic? I was thinking of a Disney Princess/Cinderella-like theme (I know...I know. Bear with me) in which she's close to animals, can speak to them, or something else to maintain her uniqueness of monster-related skills whether it be blue magic, more dragon abilities, or skills affecting all monsters.
In D&D, lycanthropes are cursed shapeshifters, and they have a bonus to various skills with their associated animals. Their curse is heritable too, which suggests that though it's applied magically there is a biological element.

No recruitable PCs are mage-like other than Malak, Rafa, Beowulf, and arguably Ramza. The game could use 1 or 2 more mages. She could get Ovelia's skillset, along with a few dragon related skills: the 3 elemental breaths, holy breath, general beast (or dragon) handler skills, and learn on hit hydra skills.

You could make the game not necessarily harder but more fair by improving monster skills and making them more viable. If Monster Talk wasn't needed for Talk Skill then Mediator would be slightly less terrible.