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Quote from: Suco Quente on January 05, 2021, 07:30:33 pmI started playing this mod on new years eve, and have had a great time exploring this revisited classic. I thought it would be nice to share my experience so far.
INB4, I've never been a fan of hardmodes, those kind of mods looks time-consuming, stress-fueled and always failed me. Challenge must be on a strategic level, and the overall mechanics must not be exploitable to favor any sides, or give at least a slight advantage to the player, instead of some absurd difficulty spikes. Up to mid-chapter 3, Valeria 2.2 delivers an amazing experience, until I decided to grind for some abilities, oh boy, I fucked up trying to have Ramza master Samurai hahah
By grinding some, Ramza, Agrias and Mustadio and two generics got to level 30ish, below 35 for sure, but enough to bring me ruin from there on. The spike difficulty came to Luso's Zeklaus Desert battle. Dude, those Behemoths hit HARD. From there on I've had to save-scum every battle in order to achieve success and not frustrate myself by playing it. Riovanes Castle give some trouble also, Wiegraf wasn't as fear-inducing as he once was in vanilla all those years ago, but Belias and his gargoyles were a bigger threat, they nuked my more fragile members, while giving me less time to react.
So, after some insuccesses, I gave the documentation another good read, and by "exploiting" mediators Weaken, brought my whole team (even those who were far underleved) to level 20ish, Belias suddenly wasn't a threat anymore. But oh man how naive I was to forget about Marquis battle on the roof. Oof, he beat me hard, his Iaidos wipe Rapha in sometimes one to three hits, not considering the Ultima-nukers, insta-killing assassins, charming maids Elmdores assistants in the equation.
I just beat Fort Besselat, opening the hatches in game shows no respect to the astounding picture showed just after the battle. From Riovanes til now, save-scumming slowly became a win condition, and frustation started to hit me. Weaken abuse in order to keep every party member at level 25~ could not bring back fair fight (Meliadoul nukes hard) by itself, so spamming stop/stall became a rule to get me some good prizes (Worker 7 and his fear-inducing Hydras). Well, unfortunately I've lost some interest, even though I really would like to push it a bit further, up to Igros castle showdown, even finish the game without looting Midlight's Deep.
So, wrapping it up, my major complaints are:
- Difficulty progression. Getting some levels over the threshold punishes the player. As you've stated in documentation, balance here is a hard thing to achieve, but I hope that it may be achieved by tweaking other aspects of the game.
- Character progression. 700 to 1000 JP prices are far too expensive and will require grind, or else the player sacrifice some good spells along the way in order to get those higher JP costs abilities.
- Encourage player to get to the latter chapters more quickly without making the game easier. I really don't know how to approach this, but the more appealing characters with exclusive jobs (Bewoulf and Reis are AMAZING, Cloud really functions with CT reduced limits, even without Swiftness) are locked by the own game story. And by then, try to get some abilities for them forces the player to Weaken abuse once again.
Well, not all my thoughts about this amazing hack are cries over my inaptitude to plan accordingly, with mechanics in mind and everything else that is required to press onward. I really feel that a true fan of FFT did some great changes: Knights new kit, Archers as great debuffers, major balance over every class, removing the most broken dual-wielding combos, calculators being the most broken class final fantasy franchise has ever witnessed. Needed buffs were applied and giving purpose to needless and/or overshadowed items, well, about every touched mechanic is a good revamp to the vanilla formula, breathing more life to this game. You deserve every praise for your hard work. Really, you slapped some happy smiles on me, a rather vanilla player who was thisty for a good FFT mod.
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Disclaimer: Sorry for the long post, and so sorry if something is ambiguous or hard to read, I'm not an english native-speaker and have been in touch with the language mainly through games.
Thank you for sharing your feedback. I understand that Luso's fight is one of highest difficulty jump and I used to have similar cases with some battles in vanilla like saving Agrias and Rapha. Dealing with NPC is always tricky.
At first release I thought using high speed Ninja job to cast Shell/Wall/Reflect on Luso will do but people still struggle a lot about it so I changed Luso's weapon to Defender with innate Shell to help with Gigaflare nerf.
Still, it's not proper way to make everyone enjoy this so I changed Gigaflare to have self range in developing 2.3 and believe this should address difficulty spike so far. It was close to completion but I have to visit my parents before releasing so I'll release it when I get back.
Wiegraf fight wasn't that hard to me during testing run but it's probably because I play with no grind run so it's around the same level as I play before so no difficulty spike on my part. Maybe it'll be harder on higher levels with limited gear which is one thing I feared about level scaling.
About Gargoyles part, I usually use one faster attacker to bait Gargoyles with Ramza spamming attack. Ninja with Equip Heavy Armor and Geomancer/Samurai with Blood Sword can work to sustain longer. Then spam Holy damage on Belias. You don't need to kill Gargoyles.
However, I also added Weaken so you can exploit weakening Ramza to nerf enemies level. This can reduce difficulty to make tough fights easier and you can grind him back later. I'm never a fan of over grind so players who prefer high level can adapt play style as you see fit.
Valeria 2 is the most ambitious update taking many aspects to realize my vision so it took so god damn long time to release 2.0 despite not having everything implemented. 2.3 Will cover remaining parts of Samurai job that you love so much with elemental attribute and some adjustments.
Getting level scaling done right for both no grind and over grind is impossible due to gear limitations. I put my best effort to change all equipment attributes for this feature that I one day hope to realzie and trust me this is a lot realistic and reasonable compared to others.
As for high JP cost spells, that's what you should plan on making party from beginning and special characters that join will have jobs unlocked to reduce grinding a bit. In my run I always plan about what these units plan to do in the end and make use of JP Boost during early stage for JP farming.
Once I can get good core abilities, I stopped using JP grind and enjoy the game with support skill that can help. I also have a run with Ramza as Samurai and duel fight can manage with Blood Sword with some support like White Magicks/Items/Auto Potion/Counter.
You can't expect 1500JP to be easily obtained like 500JP as that will break game balance. That's not possible unless I can somehow add job level requirements on skill. I also tried reducing JP cost but then player will abuse it and cheese content. Maybe I can rework strong summon with lower damage and add debuff with lower JP if you agree.
Anyway, there's a lot of exploits to learn high cost spells without JP farming. I sometimes learned higher tier spells from enemies and also cast on allies to teach each other too. You can grind generic through errands and crystalize them to learn or use confuse on them to cast spell on you to learn also.
Despite the options you can choose, please keep in mind that high level scaling isn't what the game was designed for and every high level scaling challenges will need strategies and plans for adjustments to play properly. With right abilities and team setup, you can make it and my is the most compromise one among them.
As for unique characters in chapter 4, It's not like I never considered it but they're really good with great items that come with too. Trying to make them join earlier with some hacks will result losing some items and make content with them too easy.
Maybe your first run isn't smooth enough but you can plan and try to learn new mechanics better and enjoy the second, third, or forth in future like when 2.3 comes out with changes that should work with you better.
To be honest, I'm still waiting for more feedback about the game so that I can see where other players see in different aspects. Level scaling is one thing I always feel it's not 100% done despite all the effort I prepared for years before implementing. But workaround I prepared should give some rooms and glad to see you used that.
P.S. I'm also vanilla fan trying a few mods and felt like they are not FFT I remembered and decided to make no grind run mod since I love FFT but hate grinding. I didn't expect simple no grind mod to progress this far lol.
