Final Fantasy Hacktics

Quote from: Eurystheus on August 28, 2022, 02:37:42 pm- The fur shop only lets your main character enter the shop when he has secret hunt equipped

That doesn't seem to be the problem.  I just poached about 20 different monsters and the fur shop still doesn't have anything for sale.  It was a variety of chocobos, goblins, werewolves, and bombs.  I tried equipping Secret Hunt and changing into a Hunter, but it still doesn't have any inventory for sale.

I'm using Duckstation which is one of the recommended emulators according to TLW FAQ.

They were the green and blue chocobos.  I think the green was Valmafula's sprite and the blue was Rudvich.

A couple things on the latest patch.

In the save Olan fight, the portrait for the thief on top of the building shows the vanilla mediator portrait.
In the Reis quest, in the first colliery fight the Cleric on the left starts as "dead" like a guest character does.
When Reis did her Magic Holy Breath in the final colliery fight, it did the animation, but nothing happened to the enemies.  It happened a few times.
Ashley's abilities seem to do pitiful damage.  I tried all of his abilities and they all did somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-20 damage.  Is that normal?
I'm mixed on the new Finath River fight.  That Dark Chocobo is pretty OP, nuking things from across the map with Giga Flare.  Also, the green and blue chocobos were incorrect sprites.
I've noticed that some of the in-game descriptions of the classes are wrong for the requisites.  Valkyrie says it only takes a level 6 Spirit Bender, but it takes more than that.  A few of them are incorrect like that.
I also don't think poaching is working correctly.  I've poached several different monsters but the guy at the fur shop just tells me to go away whenever I enter it, like I had never poached anything.

I noticed something earlier in a battle.  An enemy ninja had a Tempest Knife equipped and when I went to inspect it, the tip box didn't show up and just flashed the screen.  It then also broke all of the other tip boxes and they only flash the screen whenever you inspect anything.  The only way I could get that to fix was to restart the game.

I can confirm that the Reis quest is fixed now, and I'd say the Frost Bomb change was good.  I'm seeing it used a lot less by some enemies now.

Makes sense about the JP overflow, even though you can still run into that situation sometimes with some crystals and inheriting enemy abilities, though that's sort of a fringe thing I guess and can't really be changed.

Quote from: Valamar on August 20, 2022, 03:02:03 amFor the most part I enjoyed the first chapter but there was one move that I think is absurd and that's frost bomb; this skill is really strong and the enemy having so much access to it made some fights very frustrating, its decent chip damage, the accuracy is based off your weapon (and evasion is really low in chapter 1), and it always slows, since outlaws have it they will move first, slow all your units, and start double turning your units unless you slow them back.

This is really prevalent in the Thieves' fort fight and Dortor trade city fight in chapter 2 beginning, the outlaws will slow you and the mages will blow you up. On the players side I made sure to abuse this to, my comp was Ramza as a knight, 2 more knights and a chemist, Ramza had frost bomb, one knight had frost bomb and my chemist had frost bomb, alot of fights my strat was to frost bomb every enemy until I double turned, enemy knights felt very weak once slowed.
the 2nd Miluda and Wiegraf fight felt pretty easy and frost bomb was the reason, Wiegraff is just not a threat when hes perma slowwed and he getting double turned

I would suggest either making frost bomb cost more jp so it appears later, make the slow a chance to happen, or make the small cape the player can buy give immunity to slow.

-it could be an emulator issue but my units get no spill over jp (I use epsxe, I know I should really switch, if this is specific to epsxe you can prob ignore)

I can agree with the Frost Bomb statements (I have it written down in my notes).  Later in the game it seems like most Outlaws also have Concentrate so you're going to get slowed at some point and it is critically debilitating, even more so when the speed gets ramped up and Haste comes into the picture.  For about 90% of the game, the only accessory I was using on everyone was Rubber Shoes to prevent Slow.  I have had some fights where Ramza got Slowed, then the enemies got 3-4 turns before he could move again.  Slowing any of the Lucavi battles is almost an instant win button too.

I wasn't receiving any of the JP overflow either with Duckstation but I assumed that was because of the classes being different.

On the 1.9 update, there's a bit of an issue with the Reis quest.  When you finish the final fight where you have to protect Ries, the game will glitch out and play the Orbonne Monastery intro with Simon/Alma.  After the scene it puts Ramza, Beowulf, and Reis in a fight by themselves as Guests for eternity.  If you saved and reload the save before that, it automatically puts you in the Nelveske Temple fight with no warning.  If you manage to clear the fight, it puts you back out on top of Goland, but it leaves Goland as an active event location that will repeat the Beowulf side quest if you walk over the dot again.

Edit: Also, whenever you finish the game, it replays the Ashley recruitment scene.  Doesn't seem to mess anything up that I can tell so far, but it's definitely a bug.

Enjoying the mod for the most part, so far, on the 2.5 leveling.  I'm digging the sprite changes and the overall changes to the classes, but I have to say, some of the damage formulas are absolutely bonkers.  I've seen Throw Rock from a level 1 Recruit in the prologue fight one shot kill a party member (40+ damage) and noticed several times that they actually choose to move away and throw rocks instead of using their sword to hit people.  At Sand Rat Cellar, I've had multiple instances of a level 6 Fighter do well over 130 damage with Pummeling Fist, instantly killing anything they target with it, knights in rendezvous gear included.  It makes the entire fight go south if Algus moves to the door, gets bodied the next turn, then you get swarmed by the enemies.

I'll probably restart on the 1.2(?) patch with static story fights.  Leveling mods can be fun, but if the enemies have equipment 1-2 tiers higher than you in every fight, it becomes much less fun.

I can say I enjoyed a majority of this mod, but a lot of it was equally frustrating too.  I played up to the chapter
3 monastery sequence before I just got bored with it.  Part of it was the mod, the other part is that's just how FFT goes when you've played it for 20 years.  Magic and rangers are straight up overpowered compared to a majority of things available in the game.  I can't really agree that this isn't an "added difficulty mod" overall.  For the points below, keep in mind I did next to zero additional grinding, as that was stated in the OP that the game was intended to not grind through.

Some good stuff:
1.  I like the unique flavors of some of the classes with how their skills are handled and changed up.
2.  The innate passives are an interesting touch and changes the way some of them are played.
3.  Removing/changing a lot of the overpowered abilities definitely makes you think of other strategies to finish some fights.
4.  Most of the equipment changes were good changes, though I feel the shield nerfs were unnecessary (except maybe the ultimate shields.)

Some bad stuff:
1.  Story fight scaling is fine if everything was still vanilla cost, but with the reduced/changed JP costs of some abilities, combined with the formula changes, it gets absurd very fast.  Level scaling is fine, but their gear should not be 1-2 tiers above what you have available.  With zero extensive grinding, around level 23ish, the knights at Lesalia had crystal equipment.  Such inflated HP totals that they almost literally just walked through everything I threw at them and proceeded to chop people for 80-90HP a swing while the monks sat back and spammed Aurablast or Shockwave.
2.  There isn't any consistency for the difficulty of the story fights.  My first point of contention was Dorter.  Already a fairly difficult fight in vanilla, this cranked it up to 15/10.  Having an archer with almost half the entire map as range (able to deal over 50% HP per attack), two black mages that instant cast -ra spells for 90-100% of your HP (I had my full HP knight one-shot killed several times), and a tanky knight that outclasses all of your gear just isn't fun.  Without excess grinding you don't have nearly enough available to match the enemy.  Every other story fight was a breeze up until the execution site.
3.  The execution site is where I adopted the "mass summoning until everything is dead" tactic because nothing else was working.  Gafgarion being able to move effectively across the map and deal 60-80HP with Night Sword is nuts.  Rangers are so fast that whatever Gafgarion didn't finish off, they could shoot across the map and finish off whatever he didn't before you even have a chance to recover.  Not to mention if the time mages woke up on the wrong side of the bed, instead of actually being a partial nuisance with haste/slow, they nuked everything below them with time/black magic.
4.  Magic and bows are overpowered.  I felt consistently much, much underpowered through the game because I just didn't have the HP totals to even remotely stand a chance against multiple mages or archers.
5.  I can understand why some of the nerfs were made to Agrias' skills but from what I saw, they were effectively a waste of a spot now, and you were better off just giving her magic instead.  Magic has better range, no vertical limits, does more damage, and hits more spaces with less restrictions than her sword skills.  She's nothing more than a generic 2.0 now.

There are probably a few other things I'm failing to remember, but that's most of my feedback for the mod.  What actually got me to stop was the dragoons in the monastery.  If I play the classes I want, they outspeed me and go stab people in the face for 90+ damage before I get a turn to move, while having almost 400 HP due to being in full crystal/platinum equipment.  If I try and build beefy characters or inflict status effects, it's back to relying on RNG to land the statuses while they're wailing on me for almost half my HP per hit.  I was back to either running way until they were sufficiently grouped and obliterated them with summons/magic or relying on RNG that everyone didn't get murdered before I could inflict them with enough status that I had a decent chance to live long enough to kill one of them.  It just lost its fun at that point.  If story scaling was removed, I think it would make it much more enjoyable to play through.