Green mage ideas Help

[azavier]

Hello guys just needed help in developing a green mage class. I have decided to replace oracle and they essentially are the samw type of class other than green mage also adding buffs. Here is what i've come up with so far and wanted to know if you guys can help me come up wity some cool unique ideas.

In my hack Dancers use Harps only so i needed someone to use cloths so Green Mages are using Staffs & Cloths ( which have now been hacked to deal damage based on MA)

 
Accelerate ( like Yell but cost mp has ct & can be cast in AOE to increase allies speed )
Dispel Magic
Shell 2 ( only hit allies )
Protect 2 ( only hit allies)
Oil - inflicts Blind + oil
Paralyze
Silence
Poison
Frog
Zombie
Petrify
Difference ( deals dmg based on enemy mp) - renamed Matra Magic

Reaction - Barrier - on hit cast protect + shield

[nitwit]

If you have the werewithal to do some image and animation hacking, you could make a new ranged Harry Potter wand type weapon. Someone's doing work on animation reverse engineering on the wiki and I assume the discord.

As for your green mage in particular, it really depends what you're doing with the other classes, and whether or not you have a cap on SP boosting built into your SP boost formula.

If your other classes are moderately vanilla-ish but with a few things from other classes mixed in - which is what it seems like you're doing - then this seems reasonable. Actually seems like a FF12 green mage TBH.

By "cap on SP boosting" I mean a check in your SP boost formula that makes it fail if the target's current SP > base SP + gear SP bonus + some number. A reasonable cap depends on your SP ranges and your preferences.

This seems like an anti-mage build of a green mage. If you have all skills require MP, and classes have more MP because of that, it could be more useful against other classes.

Things you should consider:
* Putting multiple debuffs on a skill to make that skill more useful.
* Using all-or-nothing to inflict all of them, random to do one of them, or separate to do at least one and possibly more.
* Balancing debuff pairings for usefulness and severity. If you have something that's always great, then why use anything else?
* Do you want to pair up anti-warrior debuffs on the same skill, anti-mage on another, and ditto for those pertaining to mobility and reaction negation? It may get more mileage out of less used debuffs.
* Interactions between status effects that cancel each other.
* Canceling actions by canceling performing, charging, and defending, if that's possible.
* Do you want to do damage with debuffs, and if so how much?
* Where are you putting drain and osmose, how are they modified, how are you nerfing their anti-zodiac/tank utility (they work on a % of max HP), and are you giving them elements?

[azavier]

That does sound interesting.. i'll look into the wand weapon.

How do i do a cap on the sp boost? is it a asm hack of sorts?

If you were playing a green mage which skills would you want to see added? I probably can pick between petrify or frog since both basically shut down the person. I also was thinking of adding Allure from the assassins.

Drain and osmose has been moved to black mage. which is where poison and frog came from since they barely ever used it. Maybe the green mages will use them as the ultimate status debuffer/buffer. Protect 2 and shell 2 comes from the journey from white mage and a nod because they have these moves in ffta2.

Matra magic i put on their to give them some type attack move .. since the rest of the abilities are status effects.

[nitwit]

That does sound interesting.. i'll look into the wand weapon.

I admit that I want a wand that shoots a blast or stars or something, where the blast palette can vary depending on the wand palette perhaps.

How do i do a cap on the sp boost? is it a asm hack of sorts?

Yep. It's very involved if you're only familiar with high level programming languages, even more so (almost impossible) if you're not.

To start, look at these three formulas:
https://ffhacktics.com/wiki/3A_%2BBrave_(Y)
https://ffhacktics.com/wiki/36_%2BPA_(Y)
https://ffhacktics.com/wiki/39_%2BSP_(Y)

Flip between them using Ctrl + (Shift) Tab in your web browser, and you'll see they're almost identical other than a few things and their addresses/locations. You can think of them as a sort of template for doing a + stat skill.

I'm not an asm hacker, but they don't seem to allow failure. So you need to somehow get the base stat, gear stat bonus, and the current stat from the target's battle stats block:
https://ffhacktics.com/wiki/Battle_Stats

Code Select Expand

0x0030 Original PA (will recalculate from this level after something like a level up, does not persist after battle)
0x0031 Original MA (^^)
0x0032 Original SP (^^)
0x0033 PA bonus from equipment
0x0034 MA bonus from equipment
0x0035 SP bonus from equipment
0x0036 Current PA (temporary, reverts upon something like a level up)
0x0037 Current MA (^^)
0x0038 Current SP (^^)
Then add the base stat and stat gear bonus, compare them to the current stat, and branch to to the "miss" code if that's the case (or set the miss rate to 100%). I highly recommend you read the tutorials and get in the discord (preferably AFTER you read the tutorials) if you want to dip your toes.
https://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=9204.0

If you were playing a green mage which skills would you want to see added? I probably can pick between petrify or frog since both basically shut down the person. I also was thinking of adding Allure from the assassins.

Read this thread I made on gamefaqs, titled "How would you rate the seriousness of these debuffs?":
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197339-final-fantasy-tactics/78921840

Actually it looks like a ton of posts were deleted, so maybe that's not useful. I may ask that again here. I thought I already made a status effect thread?

Anyways, the worst debuffs are those that turn an ally into an enemy. Next are those that fully disable an ally. After that are those that partially disable an ally. Last are those that force you to waste a turn doing something other than attacking an enemy or otherwise deal damage.

All of those are worse if they are permanent, and easier to deal with if they are temporary. Ditto for hard to remove vs easy to remove.

Something else to consider: are you keeping calculators, and if so how are you limiting their access to other mage's spells? I think they should have access to the low level spells, like the red mage in other games, but if you want a high power game by all means give them access to everything.

My take on green mages is that they are the best and truest examples of magical debuff dealers, and tinged with darkness as a result. Their HP/MP drain spells would be dark elemental, and all of their debuffs would be the 5-tile cross AoE (aka the standard wizard/priest/time-mage/oracle spell). Since their skills don't rely as much on MA as other mages, they are best served with slightly lower MA and higher SP, so they can get more turns. Along with this their spells should be faster and relatively expensive for whatever your MP totals are, and drain/osmose should be cheap and have great hit rates.

Here's my plan for them.

Code Select Expand

* oracle
  * Speed Mage. Uses mage head/body gear, (MA + SP) / 2 * WP weapons.
    * maybe make drain and osmose MA powered: (MA * X)% or (x + MA)%?
    * drain and osmose are dark elemental, seems very easy one liner hack.
      * that only improves hit rate if strengthen is present
      * need to modify and/or reverse damage.
      * else change max hp in "calculate % of damage" to current HP.
      * check if % damage skills have damage reduced by protect/shell/m/def up
    * Alternate idea: Drain_HP(MA * X)%
  * no room for oil.
  * 16 spells: range 4, aoe 2, vertical 0 unless specified. maybe change aoe to 3 to give it a power boost if you keep vanilla hit rates; else boost hit rates.
    * Utility determines MP cost. Maybe determine CT, AoE, MP cost via point-buy system.
    * Speed mage needs fast spells, put most of the cost in MP rather than CT or AoE.
    1  : Drain. CT , MP cost , power , vertical , AoE 1
    2  : Osmose. CT , MP cost , power , vertical , AoE 1
    3  : Blind.
    4  : Undead.
    5  : Silence.
    6  : Berserk.
    7  : Confuse.
    8  : Disable.
    9  : Death. //maybe not. oil instead? Dispel?
    10 : Sleep.
    11 : Petrify.
    12 : Poison.
    13 : Charm.
    14 : Vampire.
    15 : Frog.
    16 : Doom. //death immunity should not prevent doom from working. undead/doom shouldn't stack.

I haven't gotten into specifics yet because CT and MP cost should wait until after you have HP/MP/evasion totals figured out.

RE doubling up debuffs, here's an example skill set so you can free up skills for other things.

* Necromancy: add_random(undead, vampire)
* Pheremone: add_random(oil, charm)
* Yellow Noise: add_random(berserk, silence)
* Blind Frog: add_random(frog, blind)
* Bath Salts: add_random(confuse, poison)
* Soul Bind: add_random(disable, petrify)
* Nightmare: add_random(sleep, death)

I tried to pair them up so you have the least useful with the most, and so you have an anti-mage and anti-warrior option.

Drain and osmose has been moved to black mage. which is where poison and frog came from since they barely ever used it. Maybe the green mages will use them as the ultimate status debuffer/buffer. Protect 2 and shell 2 comes from the journey from white mage and a nod because they have these moves in ffta2.

Fair enough, but consider the roles of your classes. While there should be more than one way to skin a cat (er, heal, remove debuffs, buff, and raise your KO'd allies), I don't think that any two classes should have exact same ways of going about it.

Given that the white mage is the archetypal defensive support, if green mage does support maybe it should get buffs not present elsewhere in the mage job branch (at least in the standard spell form), and maybe those supports should be more conditional or circumstantial. Thus the green mage keeps it's offensive support (debuffer) role, and it gains a minor buffer role.

Spells like Berserk could be a circumstantial buff if they allowed player control but prevented the use of any skill except attack, or if they blocked the use of any skill with the "silence-albe" flag (which is mostly spells). I doubt the AI would use it correctly without significant hacking unless someone has a hack that dehardcodes AI status effect behavior to the status effects unused flags.

Invisble/transparent is a buff, though it's mostly useful for keep away. If it faded after the end of the target's next turn or action then that would be more useful. Or if it functioned like blink, as a physical attack evasion boost that works similar to reflect (or - for both reflect and invisble - if it's CT was instead the number of times you can get hit and evade before it fades).

Undead can be a buff if nothing can deal healing damage, there's little risk of KO-ing, you have plenty of dark element stuff for healing, and the enemy uses dark element stuff.

Matra magic i put on their to give them some type attack move .. since the rest of the abilities are status effects.

It's as good a place as any for that skill, and they could use more attack options.