Final Fantasy Hacktics

Just discovered this mod! Almost everything having such high MP costs scares me a bit, im curious for those who tried so far how well balanced it is. Are you able to make adequate use of all your abilities?

Played through a couple of mods recently (specifically, Emergence and Valeria for WOTL) and there are a multitude of things that I think could be addressed to make the game better. Some of these might be doable with FFTPatcher I believe.


Issue 1: Revival and "crystalizing"

I get it, it is a really cool concept and adds a sense of urgency when one of your characters die. However, all too often especially in hacks that increase the difficulty, your characters are going to be dying a lot more often. When they do your now forced into a situation where you have to revive them within 3 turns (which passes VERY FAST) or finish the battle before they die. This oftentimes just ruins fights and there have been several times in challenge mods where I would just have to let a character or 2 crystalize in order to finish the battle and lose them forever.

Now because of this as well...you're basically FORCED to have at least 2-3 of your deployed members to have some type of revival ability on hand. In Vanilla, there are 3 secondaries you can select for this: Item, White Magic or Martial Arts. In some mods, Summon can also revive and Ramza's "Wish" skill. But if you don't bring characters with these abilities, or the 2 characters you deployed with them are killed, frogged, petrified etc, your SOL. Not to mention, Revive from Martial Arts requires you to be right next to the dead character with a strict vertical limit, Phoenix Down brings them back in KO range only 1 panel away, and White Magic revival often has horrific accuracy issues.

You can make sure all 5 of your deployed members possess Item, White Magic or Martial Arts to help prevent a scenario where your only healers die, but that also greatly limits your character's diversity and creativity with builds.


Solutions:

I've seen "defend" and "re-equip" as innately present in all jobs as a mod. What about "Item". If every character had the basic Item command, you at least wouldn't be completely boned if your main field medics are taken out. This would make chemists somewhat obsolete minus "Throw Item", but if such a mod was made the chemist job could be reworked.


Another idea is to grant more revival abilities to help the player comeback from these catastrophic situations. Time Mage for example could "Rewind" someone who is KOed back to when they were alive, The Fairy summon could revive instead of heal, Wish from Ramza could revive. Oracle could get a AoE Reraise skill, Samurai could have a sword that does AoE revive, Bard could have a revival song, Mediator could have a revive speech skill.


I know it sounds like Revival Santa Claus, but it is seriously a huge issue in many of playthroughs with these hacks and it gets frustrating having to put Item and White Magic on almost everyone to get through a battle without my characters crystalizing.


Last but not least, is also to simply remove crystalization altogether, but I don't know if that's possible with FFTpatcher and frankly the idea is cool, there just isn't enough effective methods to bring people back from KO status.

Issue 2: Brave and Faith

This is another cool concept that is kind of core to the game and gives FFT some of its flavor. However, can be beyond stupid and broken. With the exception of Treasure Hunter / Move Find Item, (low brave to find the BETTER item....also kind of stupid) you want all your characters to have high Brave, which means spending a stupid amount of time at the Guild or abusing the Mediator. Faith functions as a double edged sword which is interesting.

I personally just try to ignore it and play the game, but with more challenging mods managing your character's Brave/Faith and only using character with the adequate levels is even more important.

Solution

Why not standardize Brave/Faith so all recruited characters have 70/70 of each? Or something along those lines (except Malak as Low Faith is his gimmick). Does anyone really enjoy using the mediator or spending all that time at the Guild to find units with the correct Brave/Faith for your team!?


Issue 3: Job Growths and Stats

This is one I know some mods have addressed. No one wants to spends all their time leveling as a Knight/Monk to get good HP and PA, Ninja for speed, or specific mage classes. You rather be whatever class you enjoy. That is why I usually just ignore Stat growth altogether and just play the game, and it only really becomes an issue when you had someone spend a lot of time as a mage class and decide you want them in a physical class later. Youre sort of forced into choosing a character down a physical or magical path.



Solution

Homogenized stat growth across the board, which several rebalance mods have already done.


Issue 4: Zodiac signs and RNG

It is another cool idea, and I feel bad that I keep up on crapping on the FFT team's ingenuity, but in practice it serves to be kind of annoying when your damage and chance of landing a positive or negative status varies so much.


Solution

Just remove compatibility altogether (Cerabow Mod I think has done this, maybe some others too)


Issue 5: The Battle of the Glass Cannons

Especially later in the game, the Damage/Health ratios becomes immense and you can start to OHKO many enemies, or 2HKO. Damage outranks all other strategy, why stop/slow/poison etc when you can kill your opponents so easily.


Solution

Lower damage or increase health. Increasing Health Growth and Health gained from Equipment is probably the easiest way to go about it. Doubled health totals would make battles so much more strategic and epic. At least until Health caps at 999, but by that point you should be near end-game anyway.


Issue 6: Charge Time

Once again, cool concept and adds an elemental of strategy. It's always very exciting when you see the enemy is powering up a big spell and you silence or kill the mage before they can get the spell off. But it also makes mages suck and extremely inconsistent. Charge times for bigger spells can be stupidly long, and frankly late game the Black Mage and Summoner in particular can be close to unplayable without the Short Charge ability, as you'll almost never land a solid Bahamut or Ice 4 hitting multiple people without that ability.

Solution

Innate Short Charge on all classes to remove it as a practical mandatory support skill for any magic set. And/or reducing CT on later skills so you can actually have a chance to cast something before all the enemies are able to just move out of the way with no effort.

Issue 7: Insufficient early game MP

In chapter 1 and 2, MP struggles for mages can be very difficult to manage. For physical classes, like trying to have a Knight with a Time magic secondary, or a Lancer with Mystic Arts, both of which are completely smart and viable on paper since most of the skills in their secondary classes don't need MA to drive them. However, these Physical classes have such low MPs they can only cast low level spells maybe once or twice.


Solution

Improved MP growth across classes and actual give modest MP+ boosts to armor/helmets/shields so physical classes can consider having a support magic secondary to allow more possibilities for build diversification.





I'm not sure if a Mod exists yet that already addresses all these things if there is I'd love to know about it!

Playing through for the first time still in Chapter 1 but I just had a question about the Monk Class. My Monk seems to be exceptionally weak. I tried unequiping and reequipping "Brawler" ability to see if by any chance Monk did not have it innately, but it seems he still does as the damage did not change. He doing significantly less damage than my other party members, and typically at the beginning of the game especially the Monk's damage is at least equal or greater than other physical characters since weapons are not very strong yet.

Did you make any changes to the Brawler ability or the Monk in this patch?