On the subject of Monster Skill

[Oroborobo]

Recently I noticed a bug: Monster Skill doesn't normally work on the monster itself when added as an innate support ability, yet I was able to observe a Red Panther using Cat Kick assigned to the 4th slot in the current version of my patch, at Mandalia Plains story battle, where as we all know there is only ever one monster.

It took a moment of thought and a little testing to remember that monster skill only has a range of 1 and reflect on the circumstances of the event, thereby realizing the cause.

Which, despite my lack of ASM knowledge (I assigned monster skill to every monster in the hopes that I would care enough to alter the ability later), seems to be that the game flags tiles as monster skill tiles at the start of the AI monster's turn, based on the position of every allied unit with monster skill, and they remain as such till the end of it's turn meaning that a monster will fall under the effect of it's own monster skill so long as it moves exactly one space. I didn't see any other mention of this effect around so I decided to post. This is however, impossible to replicate with a player-controlled monster (unless charmed or confused perhaps?)

Which makes it really seem like vanilla monster skill is somewhat broken from the get-go, since the description of it is also wrong, and even though it doesn't normally have any application in game for effecting the unit that has it, it really, probably should.

On that note, has anyone already completed an ASM hack of monster skill to cause it to effect all tiles (255 range) or the tile of the unit that has it? If not I'd like to request that because it's truly the only thing I'm currently interested in changing in that fashion, and I'm not sure when I'll get around to it with basically the entirety of the games item and ability help text ahead of me to alter. Hopefully this information would be slightly useful in that endeavor.

[Choto]

You peaked my interest with this post. I looked into it a little bit so far. The algorithm they made for loading the player's skillset (only) checks if allied units with monster skill are on any adjacent units. I'm gonna rewrite this to be any allied unit in a specified distance. This'll also leave opportunities to take advantage of distance-related support abilities like some hackers have proposed in the past. Getting it to work with AI is another story, so I'm gonna have to look into that end of it.

[Oroborobo]

Hey, that's sweet! Anything to make monsters more variable is an awesome addition to any patch.

[Sterling LaVaughn]

Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but there IS a hack that allows monsters to use all 4 moves without Monster Skill.

spoiler

Code Select Expand

  <Patch name="All monsters can use 4 moves (v3).">
    <Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="11B634">
      01000234
    </Location>
    <Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="133960">
      00000000
      00000000
      00000000
      00000000
      00000000
      00000000
    </Location>
  </Patch>

[Oroborobo]

hey thats handy

I think after I set up everything else I might use that and add an extra support ability to all the monsters

they're pretty damn strong already but I loves me some variety

[hyunasnook827]

how do i use 5 moves with a monster skill? can you please help me.

<spam removed>

[Choto]

monster skill only unlocks the 4th ability.. maybe with asm work you could make it do a fifth, but you might as well just give him a normal skillset in FFTPatcher if you want to do more than 4 abilities.

[Dome]

I think it's a bot...