Final Fantasy Tactics: Redesign - Redesigned Opening Post! (Image Heavy)

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Names aren't the issue, once I have the class done the name will come somewhat easily.  It's thinking of the 5-8 skills needed to call it a class.

Note that when I say "random", I mostly just mean skills that either do between 50% to 150% damage and various forms of multi-hitting, etc.  It won't be the unreliable form of random, like Vanilla Axes, just a skillset with more power for less consistency.  I was just going for Fire/Dark combination because those are "power" Elements, though I hit an issue there.  Using the "standard" Fire/Dark + Earth/Ice + Lit/Wind combos means their entire skillset loses to one of the Element Shields.  This is unacceptable for me, so I'll need to look over my gear and think of a better spread for them.  The concepts will likely stay the same, though.

[Pylgrim]

This is fantastic and really helpful as it confirms that some of the crazy ideas I have for my future mod are indeed possible! I have a few questions, though:

This makes low Fury far less damning and even attractive

How can it be attractive if physical attack damage is now governed by Fury? Besides the improved Move-Find-Item (if you're keeping that at all,) I don't see any benefit or reason not to try and have as much Fury as possible.

Unit CT always resets to 00 on Turn End, regardless of Wait Only, Move Only, Act Only, Move and Act, etc.

Doesn't this remove strategy? Precisely managing the speed of your unit's next turn in relation to everyone else's is one of the things that separate novices from veteran at playing the game. Resetting everyone's CT to 00 (I'm guessing that it also means getting rid of "spill-over CT"?)  means that barring CT tricks a couple of jobs have, the AT list of turns will be unchanged for the whole battle, taking away both strategic manipulation of CT and unpredictability from it.

All forms of Elemental Parity have been removed, and mastering Elements can be key to combat

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by removing "parity". Do you mean that there are no longer elements that are weaker/stronger against certain others? If so, what use would there be for elements' existence at all?

Also, what's your reasoning for the elimination of Weapon stealing/shattering?

I'm very interested about how will you implement Blue Mages, a class I also intend to have. Will they learn the Monster Skill 100% of times when they're hit by it? It's there a limit of Skills they can learn? Should they have MP costs for human users? (I can think of some really powerful skills that would be brutal if simply spammed over and over without restriction of any kind. Also, a small suggestion for a Reaction Ability: "Counter Monster Skill", a sort of Counter Magic but that only applies to monster skills.

Anyway, kudos on all your hard job and all the amazing ideas -the pole with infinite length and the gauntlet that knockbacks are just a few of my favorites! Keep it up!

[RavenOfRazgriz]

How can it be attractive if physical attack damage is now governed by Fury? Besides the improved Move-Find-Item (if you're keeping that at all,) I don't see any benefit or reason not to try and have as much Fury as possible.

The damage you /receive/ is governed by your Fury as much as the enemy's, just like magic with Faith/Will.  If you're running a unit that doesn't use magic... you'll probably run 40 on that unit to receive less damage.  If your unit is magic-reliant, they'll probably want 40 Fury so they don't get killed by a stray sword to the elbow.  Obviously, Fury a bit out of balance since a mage that uses Attack properly is not only possible, but common if you want it, but that still comes at the risk of easier death. 

Doesn't this remove strategy? Precisely managing the speed of your unit's next turn in relation to everyone else's is one of the things that separate novices from veteran at playing the game. Resetting everyone's CT to 00 (I'm guessing that it also means getting rid of "spill-over CT"?)  means that barring CT tricks a couple of jobs have, the AT list of turns will be unchanged for the whole battle, taking away both strategic manipulation of CT and unpredictability from it.

Spillover CT will still exist.  I mean, you don't get a "bonus" by not doing something.  If you notice, weapons and skills meant to dock CT are actually really common (almost every Ice weapon/skill manipulates CT in increments of 15, a number no SPD value can relate to properly, closest is 8 SPD with hitting 16s, and there are others beyond those), and Slow / Haste are a bit more common as well.  The purpose is the put the player on the AI's level in terms of tools due to its Movement tendencies.  One of the big purposes here is to keep the player and AI even - no tricks to make the AI have cheaty-tools, no exploits for the player.  You're stuck on the AI's level and it wants to kill you. 

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by removing "parity". Do you mean that there are no longer elements that are weaker/stronger against certain others? If so, what use would there be for elements' existence at all?

I mean things like how Wizard's Fire/Bolt/Ice Spells are palette-swaps of each other, as are the Ninja's Fire Ball / Water Ball / Lightning Ball, etc.  There are no set of skills or weapons where they do exactly the same thing outside of element, with every element having a rough strength in terms of DPS and a unique secondary and sometimes even tertiary effect associated with them.  (For example, Fire does fucktons of damage, Lightning does less but is unevadable, fast, cheap, etc.)

Also, what's your reasoning for the elimination of Weapon stealing/shattering?

The "Fist" formula in Redesign is abysmally weak (PA*3), which is a large part of why Monks get Gauntlets.  That, and it's to prevent cheesing bosses by just breaking their weapon and denying their skills, which is especially crippling with the aforementioned Fist formula.

I'm very interested about how will you implement Blue Mages, a class I also intend to have. Will they learn the Monster Skill 100% of times when they're hit by it? It's there a limit of Skills they can learn? Should they have MP costs for human users? (I can think of some really powerful skills that would be brutal if simply spammed over and over without restriction of any kind. Also, a small suggestion for a Reaction Ability: "Counter Monster Skill", a sort of Counter Magic but that only applies to monster skills.

They'll have MP costs whether monster or human, hence why every Monster I posted has Move-MP UP innately.  I've got to redo a lot of my monster related stuff and a bunch of numbers in general after noticing a serious error I made, though, hence why I stopped updating this for now.  I've already got a nice idea of what Blue Mage's spellbook will be... and honestly?  I'm not telling.  Discovery will be half the fun with him.  It's a pretty cruel and devious set of skills, though.  Blue Magic skills will all be covered under Double Magic, though.

[Pylgrim]

The damage you /receive/ is governed by your Fury as much as the enemy's, just like magic with Faith/Will.  If you're running a unit that doesn't use magic... you'll probably run 40 on that unit to receive less damage.  If your unit is magic-reliant, they'll probably want 40 Fury so they don't get killed by a stray sword to the elbow.  Obviously, Fury a bit out of balance since a mage that uses Attack properly is not only possible, but common if you want it, but that still comes at the risk of easier death.

Duh, of course! That's quite cool.

Spillover CT will still exist.  I mean, you don't get a "bonus" by not doing something.  If you notice, weapons and skills meant to dock CT are actually really common (almost every Ice weapon/skill manipulates CT in increments of 15, a number no SPD value can relate to properly, closest is 8 SPD with hitting 16s, and there are others beyond those), and Slow / Haste are a bit more common as well.  The purpose is the put the player on the AI's level in terms of tools due to its Movement tendencies.  One of the big purposes here is to keep the player and AI even - no tricks to make the AI have cheaty-tools, no exploits for the player.  You're stuck on the AI's level and it wants to kill you.

Hmm, I see. That's quite clever. It just means that I need to change a bit the way i use to think about it.

The "Fist" formula in Redesign is abysmally weak (PA*3), which is a large part of why Monks get Gauntlets.  That, and it's to prevent cheesing bosses by just breaking their weapon and denying their skills, which is especially crippling with the aforementioned Fist formula.

Well, bare punches (without Martial arts) have always sucked, so if they now suck even more I don't think it would do a big difference. On the other hand, stealing weapons is one of the most exciting things the game offers and against certain formations it's the only really helpful thing that a Thief in your team may do for you. You can always micromanage bosses with innate Maintenance.

They'll have MP costs whether monster or human, hence why every Monster I posted has Move-MP UP innately.  I've got to redo a lot of my monster related stuff and a bunch of numbers in general after noticing a serious error I made, though, hence why I stopped updating this for now.  I've already got a nice idea of what Blue Mage's spellbook will be... and honestly?  I'm not telling.  Discovery will be half the fun with him.  It's a pretty cruel and devious set of skills, though.  Blue Magic skills will all be covered under Double Magic, though.

Brilliant! I'm really excited about this. May your code be true and repellent to bugs.

[Generic19]

The "Fist" formula in Redesign is abysmally weak (PA*3), which is a large part of why Monks get Gauntlets.  That, and it's to prevent cheesing bosses by just breaking their weapon and denying their skills, which is especially crippling with the aforementioned Fist formula.

I guess giving them innate maintenance would disable all of the break and steal techniques from being used against them when you simply want to ensure that they can not lose their weapon?

[Generic19]

Can AI be made so as to use 'equip change'?  That is to say for example, they could be given innate equip change, and then set so as to equip a new weapon when theirs is broken.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Sorry about the lack of reply here, I've been busy with a lot of things.  I have a bunch of updates for this that'll be updated when I post, streamlining a bunch of balance problems I noticed when running my numbers again and getting my last four generic Jobs on my lists, among other things.

@Pylgrim: Bare punches (in Vanilla) are honestly fairly broke near the end of the game, hence why I had to change the formula.  Innate Maintenance means your Thief or Knight can't use half their skillset against the boss.  Stealing/Breaking things such as Armors, etc. are straight debuffs, anyway.  Debuffing is going to be intentionally useful against bosses, since the basic DPS rush won't always be favorable for a number of reason.

@Generic19: You got it with the Maintenance bit.  There's no way to get the AI to use Equip Change without retarded levels of ASM hacking, though, hence why I removed it.   I'm trying to heavily minimize things the AI cannot use.

[Generic19]

Sorry about the lack of reply here, I've been busy with a lot of things.  I have a bunch of updates for this that'll be updated when I post, streamlining a bunch of balance problems I noticed when running my numbers again and getting my last four generic Jobs on my lists, among other things.

I waaaaant.   

[RavenOfRazgriz]

I'm vegging out after finishing EasyVent Editor Super Perfect v1.9, but to give you an idea of what my notes will be including when I update:

4 new Jobs - Paladin (weapon based MA/healer class), Geomancer (Still PA+MA based, but not terrain based and with a very different skill pool), and two Jobs that currently have no names.  One will be a Mystic Knight-like Job that will use the Samurai's current skillset, and the other will be a fast, low damage physical class that relies on either AoE, status, or both.  Samurai will get a reworked skillset closer to their original Draw Out skillset, but not Katana based and utilizing PA+MA as well to emphasize their statistical advantage in those areas.  Some existing Jobs have new skills coming up to flesh out their sets, too.

Heavy statistical rebalance - I redid my entire stat tree to fit these Jobs in while still satisfying my meticulous OCD, and have new WPs/HPs for most Weapons/Armors due to an error in math I made.

Special Job concepts - I was able to iron out how I want most Special Jobs to function, along with rough ideas for their names and gears, etc.  I'll be doing my best to avoid every Special Job being an X Knight.  As a small teaser though - Swordskills are now Bladeskills, and work with any bladed-edged weapon, including Daggers, Axes, and Spears, and will derive their damage from the weapon's original formula, similar to the Samurai's current Flair skillset.

Reaction Rate changes - 100% was stifling my creative ability far too much.  I've got a new rate setup in mind that I feel is generally more effective.

Misc changes - Charge is no longer going to be innate, since I realized having this and the Flair skillset simultaneously is retarded and I feel Flair is pretty usable as-is.  You'll still get Innate Defend and both Item and Throw as Support skillsets, though.  Not sure what I want to do with Jump yet.  I'm thinking I might make it a boss-only skillset, but I don't know.

[Generic19]

Reaction Rate changes - 100% was stifling my creative ability far too much.  I've got a new rate setup in mind that I feel is generally more effective.

Have you considered the system Arena uses?  I think it's (Br + Fa)/2.  I think that system has a lot of good points to it.  Or is it something completely new? 

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Considering that's one of the ones I suggested for Arena, yeah.  I considered it, but I'm gonna use the other one I considered that FFMaster didn't use.  Specifically, Br+Fa-40.  This way every Brave or Faith point over 40 will count for 1% of your Reaction rate.  If you want heavily tanky units that take very little damage, they don't React much but will survive like all hell.  If you use 70/70, it'll drop much faster but have that juicy 100% Reaction rate.  Etc.

[HeroPenguin]

Raven, are there any updates on this mod?  It's the project that has me the most excited on the board, closest to what I would do if I could code worth a toenail.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

I'm very busy as of late.  I haven't had time to work on this in forever.  Any time I've been getting to work on FFT-related things (which has been 0 for over a month now) has either been devoted to Elric42's Journey of the Five or on EasyVent Editor Super Perfect.  If you're excited for this project, I recommend giving Journey of the Five a spin when it comes out.  While it's using a relatively low amount of ASM for the battle system, I'm making the entire system ground-up basically solo so you should get an enjoyable experience from it if this project is interesting to you at all.

(I'm not using many of Redesign's ideas on Journey of the Five's battle system, but when the same designer works on two projects, they often end up with similar hearts beneath all the fluff, so...)

[savantopus]

Yo man first time reading about this project of yours and it sounds bad ass. I like the reductions of player movement and jump abilities, along with many other changes.

[Jumza]

Yay necrobumps!
I'm sure this project is dead Savantopus, try not to find old threads and revive them just because you think the ideas are "cool". If you really like them make your own patch based on this stuff!

[savantopus]

haha alright Jumza thanks man! Indeed I have been using soooooo many ideas from this forum!