Final Fantasy Hacktics

Alright, I'm a complete noob when it comes to this and I've done very little FFT hacking.  Thought I'd try my hand at it, but I've got some questions...

1.  What properties do the elements in FFT Vanilla have?  I thought the element wheel functioned kind of like this:
Fire -> Ice -> Wind -> Earth -> Thunder -> Water -> Fire
Something like that? What damage multipliers are used in resistance/strengths?

2.  Is there any way to change the properties of the elements or remove elements?

3.  I guess I should probably tell you what after.  I want to make a class called a golemancer to replace geomancer.  Essentially, a golemancer would have an ability called soul-shift, which would cast element-like status effects on units: for example, "fire shift" would make them weak against water attacks, resistant against ice attacks, boost their fire attacks, maybe make there weapon attack carry the element, etc.  Is anything like this possible?

I think this could make elements a lot more relevant in gameplay, as well as make the strengths and weaknesses of characters more dynamic during a match.  For example, if an enemy unit is about to use Infrit on one of yours, you could "fire shift" the unit to nullify the attack. Or if you were casting Infrit you could "fire shift" the caster or "water shift" the target to intensify the attack.

PS - Thanks in advance and sorry about the cut-off post earlier, I got interrupted. 

...I think you posted this one a bit early, man.

What exactly are you asking?

He's clearly trying to shoot ice from an arrow XD


... or not.

My bad I got interrupted and accidentally posted early... My finished Q's are up now

It's definitely possible to make abilities that can change elemental parity. It would take some ASM hacking of formulas but it's doable.

There are 8 elements in vanilla: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Wind, Water, Earth, Holy, Dark.

A character can have the following: Weak (takes 1.5x damage I think) Half (takes half damage) Cancel (takes zero damage) and Absorb (absorbs damage).

Abilities and weapons can have an element attached to their attack. Some of the other guys could probably elaborate on how things interact in an advanced fashion..

1.  Elements in FFT have the following properties - Weak, Boost, Half, Cancel, Absorb.  Weak doubles the damage a unit receives from that Element, Boost increases the XA of a skill of that Element by 25%, Half halves the damage a unit receives from that Element, Cancel reduces the damage a unit receives from that Element to zero, and Absorb converts any damage from a particular Element into healing.  These numbers also stack with each other and other multipliers, so for example a unit with both Half and Weak receives 1x damage from skills.  A unit with Attack UP and Element Boost performing a corresponding weapon attack deals (((XA * 1.25)_RoundDown * 1.34)_RoundDown * WP) damage.  A unit with Half and Absorb will be healed for 50% of that attack's original damage.  Etc.

2. You can change the Element properties of things easily in FFTPatcher.  Weak, Boost, Half, Cancel, Absorb are simple functions of FFTPatcher controlled through the Item Attributes tab, as well as +X PA/MA/SP/MOVE/JUMP and Status Affinities.  There are 4F or 79 unique Item Attributes and EF or 239 unique Weapons, Shields, Helmets, Armors, and Accessories, meaning you can have 79 unique Weak, Boost, Half, Cancel, Absorb, +X PA/MA/SP/MOVE/JUMP combinations on your Items.  Items can share Item Attributes, so for example, all Items you want to have +1 PA will all share the same Item Attribute unless you want them to have other effects, allowing you to get far more use out of your 79 Item Attributes than you'd think you would with some careful planning and the acceptance that early throwaway items probably shouldn't have any Attributes at all.  WP, W-EVD, Range, Weapon Element, Shield EVD, Accessory EVD, HP, MP are controlled on an item-to-item basis regardless of Item Attributes, and Ability Elements are controlled by each unique Ability.  Abilities flagged "Weapon Strike" (assuming you use the WEapon Strike Fix ASM) will use the Element(s) of the Weapon and Element(s) of the Ability simultaneously. 

3. That would take a large amount of ASM to do properly.  You would have to make a Formula that adjusted the target's Element Affinity, then put into memory when that target's Affinity is updated again (via a Knight's Break or Thief's Steal skill, another Shift, etc.) to still somehow remember the old Affinity unless you want all these kinds of things to erase those.  Either way it's a giant pain in the ass and not something easily doable.

For something like this, regardless, you'll want to use this awesome thing here as the base .fftpatch of your patch because it does a lot of the more tedious work for you and has those handy dandy lists of things to help you map things out.

I did something somewhat similar to number 3 in a patch I was doing...

I had a class with skills that added an elemental vulnerability (x4/3 damage, IIRC) that was separate from any of the elemental absorb/immune/half/weak bytes, so I actually had to find an unused byte in the unit data for it, then change the code after the formula call to manually check for the new byte and multiply the damage if needed.

Then I had other abilities that exploited the vulnerability even harder, but removed it (x3/2 damage on top of the x4/3 for a total of x2), and I believe I had the damage boost in the formula code for those abilities.

I think I had to add another check somewhere to see if you were using the formulas that added/removed a vulnerability and actually do it, if so.

...Needless to say, it involved quite a bit of ASM hacking.  It was interesting though!