Final Fantasy Hacktics

I'm not too sure why you chose to slap abilities on it in the first place then. 

It's easy to see that the (Master) OK's niche was supposed to be a powerful Job with high defense, raw attack power, and some good buffs from the Onion Armor (Regen, Reraise, Protect, Shell), for the tradeoff of not having Action abilities. The problem is that it doesn't really work - other jobs can do the whole brute tank thing with a lot less of a grind required (Knight + White Mage alone...), and the no-EXP thing just kills what little use the job might've had.
Plus the "reward" for Mastering a ton of jobs is a job that doesn't use any of the stuff from those jobs? What?

I mean, if you want it to stay close to its original niche, but still make it halfway viable, then perhaps putting some innates on it would do the trick? Innate: Doublehand (or Dual Wield?), Reequip, Counter; innate resistance to most negative status effects; innate Half resistance to (some?) elements...
and even if you dislike the idea of giving it some action abilities, maybe some that aren't that different from the other abilities in the game? Some ability that gives it Defend (if only to keep that final Innate ability slot free), and something that gives it some ranged/magic capability, even if not very far and only in a single panel?

I just think that leaving the OK as is would be a waste. Even the Arithmetician isn't this bad because at least it's broken in a way that rewards the player for unlocking it... but with the vanilla OK, you might as well slap on level 8 Bard and Dancer requirements just to keep it off the job wheel. ¬_¬

IIRC - You can't. He can only appear that way if his event appearance sets him up for that; as a party member he'll show up in Palette 1 by default. Think about any generic units you've ever enticed with an Orator; they always change from the 2-5 Palettes over to the generic one.

You need to swap out his base palette for one of the others in the .bmp file itself, making it so that his default is the color you want. If you want multiple friendly Clouds, then you need a different sprite for each of them. 

QuoteI would just get rid of it and replace it

You can't. The hardcoding around OK makes it INCREDIBLY difficult to do anything with it. The best you can muster is to stack it with a limited amount of powerful Innates and three strong abilities.

Specifically:

- There's no easy way to get rid of the JP/EXP block
- There's no easy way to make the OK able to equip your learned Action, Support, or Movement abilities
- The OK's skillset can either be a <Default> which lets you use the same slots you've learned abilities in for your base Job, this works really badly in practice
- or it can be a <Monster> set which forces all its Action abilities on from the start, prevents the other Jobs from using that skillset, and limits the skillset to 3 abilities (4, at most, with a BM beside you)

I mean, you could replace the OK with maybe a Berserker that's got Innates. That's it.

You also can't just slap a new job in. The number of jobs on the wheel is limited to what's already there; any new job would have to be put in the Onion Knight slot, and would then come with all the disadvantages that current Onion Knights do.

Frankly, I don't know why Square fucked up the OKs so badly. The lack of passive abilities is one thing, the lack of a skillset another... yeah, they can equip some OP gear, but they're useless without it, and even with it they can't hold a candle to a dual wielding Dragoon with Iaido or magic and Shirahadori. Which you'll probably have long before you get a Master Onion Knight.

And then you can't get EXP with the job! Why would you ever use it? There are much easier ways to get a character that can avoid most sources of damage and hit the damage cap on a single target at max level. ¬_¬

Well, here's how I've planned my own OKs out:

Apprentice
Action Menu type: Monster; all abilities have "Learn with JP (Player)" and "Learn on Hit" unchecked
- Self Haste
- Self Regen & Defend
- Centered-on-self AoE Heal
Innate: Counter Tackle, Concentration

Master
Action Menu type: Monster; all abilities have "Learn with JP (Player)" and "Learn on Hit" unchecked
- Self Haste, Regen, Protect, Shell, & Defend
- Centered-on-self Chakra
- A self level up (that Banishes the user)
Innate: Counter, Concentration, Doublehand?

You can also spice it up a bit by adding Poach/Tame in there somewhere - I'm leaning in favor of giving them innate Poach myself, but only because in my planned patch the Fur Shop is meant to be used a bit more often.

And as for the level up: the Banish is really only there to prevent someone from just leveling 0-99 in one battle, but you can use any sort of restrictive measures you like on it. Or you can keep the Banish, but make it an AoE too - the OK will be banished but none of the people it hits will.
The Chakra could also be done as a wide AoE, a big group heal thing. Put a CT on it so it isn't HORRIBLY overpowered.

Alternatively, ignore all of these abilities and turn the Onion Knight into a complete support unit. Movement range of 1, no weapons, no PA, and give it your pick of three unlimited range, one-target support abilites:
- copy Move! from JoT5 but give it a (closer to) 100% hit rate, so the OK can give any of your units Quick at any given time
- Reraise
- Formula 49 to let you refresh an ally's MP by 30 for free
- Regen
- Esuna
- Sleep (for enemies; keeping this limited to one-target and the fact that Sleep breaks on hit keeps it from being TOO OP)
Plus an innate Vanish so enemies leave it alone more often

I mean, it kind of goes against the spirit of an Onion Knight, but it's an option.

Also, for what it's worth, the OK's Monster skillset can't be equipped by other Jobs. So you can give it some of the OP factor of Arithmeticians without having the whole "copy skillset to less awful Job for blatant abuse in game" issue.

On the topic of Onion Knights - what are you doing to give them a learnable skillset? In my own testing, setting them to anything outside of Monster just caused issues - Default worked but only as a reflection of the Base Job's skillset. I.E. if Agrias knew ability 1, 3, and 4, so would the OK.

And yeah, they can't gain EXP and JP normally. If you want them to level up as OKs, you can give them innate Accumulates, a Steal EXP skill, or a level up skill with a non-Crystal status tied to it (using Wall as Banish might be a good one, preventing it from being used more than once in a single fight)

In the worst case scenario, you can abuse save states to pull off vital status inflictions.

In their base jobs alone, Snake gets an unlimited-range Quick, weapon-range Death, self-Invis, and melee-range Sleep; Link gets an AoE Stop and can inflict Slow via Ice Arrows; Dante can do a variety of stuff (but I personally made him go knife just so I could have a decent Chemist - that got me a Paralyze and a self Regen); and Ramza has Regen, which restores MP in this version.

I never found a boss that was immune to Slow.

You should also make liberal use of the Knight's Invigorate, it's relatively easy to come by, and with the MP return alongside the Reraise you'll rarely feel the cost of the spell.

If you charge in blindly on tougher battles, you'll get slaughtered. The enemies in JoT5 will ABSOLUTELY make you fight for your victories. But if you're REALLY struggling you might want to go JP grind for a while.

And think about picking up a Generic Female with perfect compatibility with Snake and a high Faith stat - He can sit in a corner and spam Move! at her with something like a 66% success rate all day long.

Oh, and as for Guests... you want your Guests to have self heals. White Magic if you don't want them to consume Potions all the time. I didn't give my Agrias a self heal, and every time she got critically wounded or revived she would spend her next turn running away from everything to go hide in a corner. ¬_¬

Quoteadding 1 more skill that doesn't work like all the others

You can have it work just like all the others, but just with different numbers. Alternatively, you can give her some kind of defensive or restorative ability.

The problem with trying to get a bunch of nearly-identical skills in a set is that the game really doesn't do that for any skillset at all. Even jobs like Knight or Oracle have abilities that break the mold, and so do several of your own custom jobs already. Following that idea for your Hunter job would've resulted in a skillset like Arm Shot, Leg Shot, Eye Shot (blind), Throat Shot (silence), Head Shot (confuse), Heart Shot (charm), Liver Shot (poison), or other creative places to shoot someone that might result in status effects - but I see Seal Evil on that skillset, which I'm guessing still comes with its vanilla effect?

Having a unit that is basically just dependent on whacking people with a staff all day is kind of like the problem with vanilla Cloud in that he required too much time spent for his base job to be usable compared to what you could already have. Granted, Cloud had other issues, like his low level and that silly Materia Blade requirement, but still.

If she had bows or even guns right from the start, I might think differently, because at least then she could be a ranged harassment unit, which gives her some actual use while she's still grinding up to her first spell. Or if she had a self-invisibility spell as befitting the assassin she's supposed to be, perhaps - allowing her to move in close without being taken down.

Quotethinking about adding a 0 JP Cost non-elemental skill for Rafa.

That's kind of what I was thinking of. Though 0 JP seems a bit low, even for a weaker spell. 80-100 for a ranged or weak all-field ability would probably be a more appropriate range - she's likely to have that after one battle.

On the other hand, if her very first appearance starts her off at Job Level 2 or 3, then she'll either have one of those abilities already or she'll be so close to acquiring one that it wouldn't matter so much. In that case, none of this matters

QuoteThe PSX version isn't nearly as complicated.

Oh, neat. Didn't know that.

For Rafa - and I'm not sure if others would agree on this, but - the idea of needing to use her for multiple battles and essentially get her to job level 2 before she can even think about learning her first action ability seems kind of harsh for her. Maybe you can put in a cheap, low-damage, low-hit-chance attack using one of the elements she doesn't have on that skillset?

Oh? I assumed that would have been something that was just designed to happen with the region change on the PSP itself, not the games. In that case, yeah, if RBS can find some way to change that on their Go...

QuoteI would love to insert him naturally into the story, but I'm still very raw, very n00b to this mod'ing business.

Event 188 should be the one in which Ramza's first party members - fellow Academy squires - join. Changing one of the Squires is the quickest way to do this.

Take note that you'll almost certainly need to slice open the fftpack and swap out some of the stuff if you want a custom sprite to appear properly in the Formation Screen - for some reason the Formation Screen doesn't take the sprite/portrait directly from the actual sprite. 

Quote90% of everything will be dummied out of the re'release so none of ya'll can spoil my fun

Why stop there? Throw in some red herrings while you're at it. A fake Sheik for one, maybe

The problem then is that your PSP is too new. PSP-3000 and up are very resistant to custom firmware. So unless there's a superior cfw option for a Go, I expect that's the end of the story.

Patching the buttons to change in a specific game would be a massive undertaking. Every single function the X button has in FFT is going to have its own coding. The only viable solution was for your hardware to "change" where the X button was "located", and if it can't do that, well...

No, no, no, the other kind. Don't bring up that one. *shudder*

I should also point out that having a character join after Orbonne, then appear during the Gariland battle... might break the chronology of the plot just a teensy bit.

Are you loading it up like a normal game or are you loading emulator savestates?

Are you definitely, 100% for sure booting up from the right path - you have no copies of the ISO whatsoever that you might be booting up instead?

Oh, no, I figured that one out as soon as you said it.

I'm talking about if there's a way to change what KO Counter 0 changes your status into - normally it'll choose one between Crystal or Treasure, but if there was a way to change that to Wall, and you then set up Wall as a pseudo Banish, it would make the death penalty a little less harsh but still give you the same combat penalty.

Fairly late reply to this, but it might still be relevant for anyone wondering about it.

A bit of FFT Patcher tinkering just to check it out says yes:



If I knew of any other accuracy boosters I'd test them, too.

Attacking from the side doesn't change anything, and Cloud has Good compatibility with Snake.

QuoteNo problem, never mind the undead stuff

Yeah, that was me, sorry

Just to satisfy your curiosity, my undead idea is balanced by the fact that nearly all healing and resurrection then becomes ineffective for an undead character. They might never crystallize on you, but unless you gave them a drain attack, or cleanse off the effect, you can't heal them. Once they go down, if you want them to get up again, you have to hope the RNG swings in your favor when their CT maxes out. In my testing, it can be a long wait. Haven't gotten the chance to test all possible rezzes though - if Ramza alone had one that worked on Undead I don't think it would be too imbalanced.

Quotethe thing was just going to make every human unit immune to Crystal and Treasure

I don't know if there's any way to change which status effect you're inflicted with at the end of the KO counter, but if there's an ASM for that, you could theoretically change it to Wall with no CT and the Stop CT option checked - effectively Banishing dead characters, preventing them from being resurrected, but not destroying them. IMO, would be better than just having the counter mean nothing at all.

QuoteBut loss and risk and reward are in my opinion, key parts of tactics.

Absolutely. That's why I'm personally satisfied with my Undeath often taking a long time to revive units while rendering them immune to things like Phoenix Down. Plus I'm adding in a Banish spell.

Letting units passively lie there, able to be restored at your leisure, with no real drawbacks - it does kind of cheapen it. I don't think the risk necessarily needs to include permanently losing them and (most of) their equipment, but there needs to be some consequence that's greater than that of a Stop or Toad spell.