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Messages - TigerKnee

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1
Beat this. Sadly, I didn't keep a detailed playlog, so I guess it'll just be assorted thoughts and bosses that stand out (mostly on the difficult end)

- Outside of the rather rough early game (since you're generally pushed onwards through dungeons with no ability to head back to town areas to resupply if needed), the difficulty is generally fine - enough of a challenge to make you think, but not taking up a grueling 2 hours per boss fight like in other romhacks.

- Limiting E.Skill to 1 copy and Restore is kind of interesting, though I think E.Skill got hit a bit too hard (though I didn't go out of my way to learn any E.Skill specifically) even with the supposed advantage of packing a lot of options into 1 materia slot. Not being able to connect Support Materia with E.Skills actually hit the damage options pretty hard and a lot of the utility was gutted so it falters a bit from an action economy perspective. I think Big Guard is one of the few remaining power moves it has but I didn't end up learning it.

- I really like how some of the Support Materia were available much earlier in the game - Steal as Well with a Magic Materia ended up being my main Steal method through the game, and Magic Counter has interesting utility. Counter is a bit iffy due to how bad most of the early game options for it are but hey free steal.

- Limits ended up not mattering a lot to me in late-game - either the boss is easy and I blow through it or it OHKOs constantly and I can never build up meter. Built-in FF7 system flaw so I can't fault here.

- Magic feels rather weak late game - Comet/2 seems like the only decent attack spell option now.

- Didn't feel like doing most sidequests

- Not sure if Battle Square is worth doing now that Omnislash is received elsewhere.

Notable Bosses
Air Buster: Lost the first time until I figured out that you shouldn't attack except from the back because of counterattacks.

Materia Keeper: I have no idea what the intended strategy is supposed to be after he takes one character out of the fight permanently (which is also annoying because it's a reset if it happens to be the E.Skill holder) - he Hastes himself periodically and you don't have Time yet so Slowing by Spider Web is a questionable option and his attacks are brutal. I ended up winning through completely luck-sacking Cait Sith's Dice twice.

Palmer: Wrecked me until I remembered "Oh, Reflect"

Snow: Sexy Palmer - didn't realize this was gonna be a turbo-charged boss but significantly easier with pre-battle prep. A bit annoying considering how far the save point is.

Also no Circlet Steal despite the doc listing (it's stolen from Ultimate Weapon).

Proud Clod: I have trouble figuring out how to mitigate the giant laser (I had it dealing 2k damage on Cloud and then it jumps to 5k after I messed around with my setup) and I can't figure out why it takes 0 damage from physicals and gets reflect casted on it though eventually I figured it suddenly gets reflect up when it starts kneeling. After that it was a matter of bringing in some actual weak spells to remove reflect.

Ultimate Weapon: Tried a bunch of setups for 2 hours. Figured I wasn't going to win this because I hadn't made the proper materia investments (I only had one maxed Elemental materia)

Surprisingly Easy List:
Gi Nattak, Jenova Synthesis, Both Sephiroths after I came back with proper Status Resist.

Character Thoughts:

Cloud
Not very impressive overall. Early Omnislash is nice even with the nerf and you can get it Disc 1 but as I've said, Limits stopped mattering as the game goes on so he always felt like the leftover guy who takes care of healing and utility for me. He sometimes pulled the standard counter build (Cover / Counter Attack / Counter + Mug) if I needed to run 2 mages but I don't think there's ever a time when he has a weapon that would make him the best for it.

Has a bit of an awkward weapon situation near the end where you need to do at least the Gelnika for an end-game weapon. Compared to how easy most characters get their ultimate weapons Cloud kind of stands out for needing a lot of effort to kill a boss that's now properly post-game level.

Barret
You really don't want to be slow in FF7, but Barret does seem to have certain fights that specifically caters to his niche of being a tanky Long-Range guy who exploits Shot weakness like Bottomswell. Generally if you can hit something with magic you're better off doing that though.

Tifa
I didn't use her this time because I did in my last run of Vanilla FF7 but on paper, it seems that the Powersoul build is nerfed (but probably still her best build) while her physical game with other weapons are greatly improved. I'm really bad with slots so the 40% base crit rate on her weapons actually end up outdamaging limits quite often, which is odd.

Aeris
Probably the strongest magic user while she exists now, which is nice.

Red
Really good utility limits, especially Mass Haste now that you can't All-Time, though the low HP is actually kinda scary if you put too much Magic Materia on him and I never ended up unlocking his Level 4 because he kept dying on me. Easy Ultimate Weapon that's pretty easy to upkeep if you just turn him into a Physical build with utility.

Yuffie
Didn't use her for the same reason of Tifa. In theory game best speed is worth something like being a utility caster (even with that lackluster MP) and item tossing. I kinda like how her weapons are all high power balanced out by her meh strength because it provides a good source of Throw damage (Superballs are fairly cheap and does as much damage as a Fire 3 from Cloud).

Think Conformer was nerfed going by the numbers but I don't know how much that hurt her.

Cait Sith
On paper, this character shouldn't work. Terrible Barret level speed and either worst to game worst in most categories except Luck and HP, the latter of which is somewhat nullified by the poor Vit/Spi scores and Luck doesn't amount to much, but I admit don't know how FF7 numbers work. Slots also took a power hit because of collateral changes (such as most of the Summons having reduced numbers) which it didn't really need - bad attack stats means iffy offense actions while bad speed means iffy utility actions (he's not a good user of his own Manipulate Materia because the turns seem to be based on his own slow speed!)

Cait's saving grace is a handful of really good weapons, so when the weapons have worn out their welcome you should generally just switch him out since he doesn't need to build Limits up, an advice which I probably should have personally followed but hindsight 20/20.

These are
Silver M-Phone: Fixed 320 Damage (Man I miss its 8 slots from the original though)
Starlight Phone: Dice damage, 50% Accuracy.

I've used the Red M-Phone (No Slots, Mag + 51) but I suspect a different character would have been better during that period.

Looking at the White M-Phone I feel this has some use with intentionally attacking your own characters with Elemental Absorption for a quick Heal + Haste rolled in one action but that's just theorycrafting.

Sadly, HP Shout is bugged and always deals 0 damage.

The standard Counter set-up with 2x Cut (couldn't get enough AP for 4x) with Starlight Phone is pretty ridiculous and reminds me of Fixed Dice Setzer - I wore the Mystile to counteract its low hit rate. Only weakness is probably not being Long-Range, so don't bring Cait to any battle that requires that.

Vincent:
Didn't use him much - his Limits could probably stand to use more boosts since it's conceptually pretty flawed... and if I'm not wrong, if his physical stats were lowered it should actually be worse in this version.

Cid
Didn't use except when forced - I have trouble figuring out what his role is supposed to be. Looking at the stats, he's slightly better than Cloud in physical stats but has significantly worse magic, which is not a great trade-off given that this is in comparison to a character that's already meh. I believe in Vanilla his niche was a handful of good weapons with Double Growth but that doesn't exist in TF7 any more and "character with some super good weapons" got taken by Cait so he's left out to dry.

2
I'm curious to know what event led to the Steal EXP change.

Is Diamond Armlet / Elf Mantle more to buff the former or is the latter considered too strong?

3
Cheer Up is charged on a panel, unlike Quick. So if the unit moves before it goes off it will whiff.
That seems kinda counter-intuitive - is there any particularly glaring issue making it a "follow target" move?

4
I think this is the Frameskipping ASM hack he's referring to.

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=953.msg208161#msg208161

Creator says she thinks its buggy, but I think it worked on the PSP without crashing when I tried to use it on some other mod. Don't know about conflicts.

Also I got the impression he's trying to patch War of the Lions instead of the PSX version.

5
Alright, the NoRSM version seems to work on PSP - played it through the first Orbonne Monastery fight.

7
Belated reply, but yeah, the most recent version of LFT doesn't work on the PSP or on original hardware unfortunately, evidently the ASM that prevents you from equipping abilities that are already innate to the job is what crashes it.
I don't suppose we could get a version of the patch without that particular ASM applied? I think foregoing that particular functionality in exchange for being able to run it on the PSP is a worthwhile tradeoff

9
Very quick round up. Now that Skyrim is out I got a feeling I'll probably forget about the game eventually.

I kind of prefer Ice Giants to be the one staying instead of Fire because of Snow movement but 4 clubs is nice. Never really got to use Titan. Probably outclassed by Dragons if one is willing to train those.

Ravenmen > Vultan as far as I'm concerned. Having 1 more melee attack doesn't beat having one more "Hit-all" attack.

Where are the stats for banshees? Can't find it on the front page.

Witches kind of have a hard time lowering their alignment, seeing as how they can't kill anything. Once you do manage to promote them though, they're basically palette-swapped Mages.

Well, this isn't a "balance" issue but one thing I got to say is that a lot of classes feel kind of samey. I mean, yeah, Princess was overpowered with her "give everyone +1 attack" and Witches suck in the original, but that sort of thing kind of gave the game character since there's not much in the game system for differentiation.

Currently there's really no noticeable difference to me on whether you're using Ravenmans, Liches, Sirens or Mages as your back row "hit-everyone" dude and most front-line slashy guys feel the same because there isn't any stand-out best or worst class anymore. So, great for balance I guess but I don't know whether that makes things actually interesting. Maybe I should have used the vampire/werewolf/tigerman line more? Those seem to have interesting changes but eh.

10
Bahamut only has 3 colds, not 4 like the patch says.

I haven't seen any Sirens available to be promoted to Banshees yet. I can't find them listed in the patch list either.

Also, I might not see this to the finish because it's getting kind of boring, though that's more of a limitation of the base game rather than this mod. We'll see how it goes.

11
Quick stuff:
The first stage against Gares still has a bunch of front row wizards IIRC.

Siren is apparently Low Sky. Could be intentional but I'm thinking this is probably a leftover from its base from the pixie unit.

I have a generic Hawk man at level 14 with exactly 50 ALI and it can't change into either Eagle or Raven man, unless I'm missing something...

12
Giant changes aren't listed, I think.

I have a level 10 witch that can't promote because ironically her alignment is at 51. You need to actually kill people to lower alignment, right? I'm thinking that I have to downgrade to an Amazon and find a low level neutral to kill before switching back or something, right?

13
Stuff:

I completely messed up on recruiting Deneb I think, which is kind of annoying, because I spent an hour intentionally tanking my (extremely high) reputation only to misread the directions somehow and not get her. Oh well. Since there isn't a "Gameshark Deneb into army" code I can find I just decided to Gameshark my reputation back up to like 3/4 full.

What happened to Ice Giants? I can promote to Titans immediately at level 10 it seems.

Mage having no alignment requirements (that I can see of) to promote is so convenient, since they have a tendency to murder everything in sight and drop to 0.

My army is extremely lop-sided with way too many knight since they're the most common free recruits that come with storyline characters apparently. My most common set-up is something like

2-3 knights in front
1 Angel line/1 Gryphon/1 Valkyrie line in back (obviously not all three but a general mix)

I really do need to develop a powerhouse "evil" squad so I don't have to worry about tanking my powerful high alignment squads.

I really hate cockatrices. I seem to have the sort of terrible luck where the first dude to get petrified turns out to be my AOE damage dealer or something, making me lose the fight.

I think Wyrms need to promote into wyverns a tad bit faster. Gilbert was dead weight until then.

14
Playing the Thunder Lord. Can't remember how to control Alignment/Charisma and stuff, it's been years since I last touched this game. Kind of leaving me low on Knights.

Holy crap at Lake Jeltennia. I'm not very good at this game but the Tigerman gave me a lot of problems with 3 Lifesucks and the center town gets flooded really quick and I lost it once which I hope doesn't tank my stats too much. The fact that the only two temples are REALLY far away means if you don't have a flyer you will probably have issues reviving dead guys (unless you stocked up on revives, which I didn't)

That's all for now.

15
I can't get the patch to work, it tells me the ips file is corrupted/truncated.

In case it's a problem with my rom, I tried a couple of other Ogre Battle patches and managed to get them working but this one refuses to, for some reason.

16
Discussion / Re: Musing over BoF4 Character Balance
« on: September 23, 2011, 06:00:55 AM »
Nina being #1 up to now is kind of funny considering how not great she was in 3.

17
I know what you mean. One thing I'm having trouble getting used to those patches is that after LFT I absolutely can't stand the standard progression for JP in FFT anymore, but just about every fanpatch uses Vanilla FFT for JP costs.

Speaking of the spontaneous list project thing, I honestly found it funny that Squire is like 5th to be banned. I mean, I know Move + 1 and Gained JP up is great and... actually, yeah, they're basically what you slap into your support and movement slot 24/7. Nevermind. Still, it's funny because the Squire skillset is just so terrible.

18
I'm actually interested to see what you think of the class balance and design  in two certain "close to completed" total conversion patches for FFT.

Celdia's Class Patch:
http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?board=60.0

and Eternal's Parted Ways:
http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?board=48.0

When I was beta-testing Celdia I think I actually used the "Phoenix Down on its own would be a top tier skillset" line too, which is amusing.

There's a bunch of my scattered analysis (though not many mathematical ones) throughout the forum, sometimes in Bug Reports, Discussion or Battle Logs and I'm kind of interested to know what you would think of certain changes that I did analysis on, such as Two Swords -> Two Guns, Mustadio new Elemental formula attacks in Engineer class and weapon balance.

19
Tried to get a bunch more Boss Hive wins. All I need is Wizard and Blood Mage now... so that being said...

Bloodmage Analysis:

I hate the Bloodmage.

I believe the design philosophy for the classes were that the tier 1 classes were supposed to be simple to pilot but average in power levels, while the later ones are more powerful but harder to use. This generally sort of works. Monk is better than Priest once you figure out that his abilities mean he can regenerate around 4 times as fast, although it breaks down for some, seeing as how Thief is really good (not top, but better than a lot of classes) while Sorcerer is honestly extremely simple and yet powerful too.

The Bloodmage manages to be the opposite of the Sorcerer. It's horrible and hard to use effectively and the strange thing is that I know classes had a huge overhaul in one version so I'm curious as to why it still terrible. I'm going to try analyzing it, but mostly with "concepts" rather than hard numbers (I've never been good at those)

Starts with Blood to Power Glyph: I'm curious as to why the developer believes this glyph is apparently on the same level as Halpmeh, Cydstepp and Poison to be locked along with them as a Tier 3 class. For one thing, it's not standalone. You need to get Fireball or Halpmeh or it's basically useless.

Let's see, it's great on Sorcerer, who can turn the extra mana into super efficient Halpmehs or Fireballs. Wizard works too for the same reason, although less efficient. It's great for Transmuters because... well, they don't regenerate health anyway. Maybe if I push a little I could say it helps Rogues with Fireball regen strategies to get an enemy to first strike range if they can't engage normally for some reason (you didn't pick Dwarf)...

But Bloodmage? He doesn't have anything to help the glyph at all! His other abilities are honestly kind of independent (they semi synergize with each other but not this one). I mean, a Paladin at least comes with physical resistance to facilitate regen strategies with Halpmeh.

Sanguine: The big problem with this ability is not forgetting about it. Normally, an enemy is blocking a corridor, I kill it and then I usually immediately click on the spot it was in to continue, using up the bloodstain. Not that you have a choice most of the time anyway, unless you want to use EndIsWall to carve out paths in the dungeon which I'm not sure is worth the regen tiles.

This ends up with me having maybe only 2 health potions worth of stains at the end of the dungeon. Is this good? I dunno, I could play a Thief, it'll be much easier on me. Would be much better with much more "open" maps though. If only they made it so that stepping on blood with full health wouldn't use it up...

Power Hungry: This ability does weird things to race selections, and I'm honestly not sure if I count it as a ability where you come out on top overall due to potion wastage. Hand-to-hand/Diamond body at least lets you be roughly even (except vs Poison/Mana Burn and Nagas) and rapidly grants you an advantage once you get Attack power-ups but this one... shrug, how does it work mathematically anyway? It seems to really hurt strategies which combine both magic and physicals since drinking a pot means dedicating yourself to tossing fireballs.

Oh yes, there's also the whole "forgetting about this ability" part. Seems to be quite the trend with Bloodmage, being able to screw yourself over. You start chugging down your mana potions, realize you don't have enough health potions to cover and go "FUDGE!"

Come to think of it, I should consider this ability for just taking out high level wraiths to exp slingshot. Is it worth spending a potion to take out a high level wraith?

Bloodmage Race selection:
Elf: This is basically the best one. You're a caster class... kind of (not that your abilities help with it), more mana means more fireballs and you want the most bang out of your Power Hungry potion use.

Gnome: This is interesting. Normally Gnome wins with Pactmaker while Elf wins without. On the other hand, you could very well end up with too many mana potions and not enough health potions to use them! Mana potion shops become a lot less useful because of that. Because of that, I would honestly go Elf for both consistency and because Bloodmage really needs more early killing power.

Human: This seems counterproductive in a sense. If you drink a potion or use BludToPowa, you're basically trading physicals for whatever damage your fireballs does. Does Halpmeh heal the extra damage from Power Hungry? I'm not sure if that glyph helps you gain an advantage overall.

Halfling: Mmm, nah. More health potions does ease power-hungry but it doesn't synergize with blood stains and Bloodmage isn't great with physicals.

Dwarf: This is kind of interesting too. Like Halfling, more health does ease power-hungry too AND it does synergy with blood stains. Still, Dwarf is weak for the most part and since you start with BludToPowa, one of the advantage of dwarves (you can start regen fights with enemies that would kill other races in one hit) is lost since you can just replace that with pure fireball regeneration.

Goblin: Shrug.

Orc: Nope. Don't use this. Inferior human.

20
The new list seems fairly accurate to what I think to, though it's kind of strange Wizard and Berserker are so low. Wizard because its class abilities seems like it should be good and Berserker... well, I beat most of the e3 demo dungeons with it. Granted, the rules have changed quite a bit on that version but still.

21
I'll play this if I have time... and if Bowser doesn't suck anymore.

22
When I beat Boss Hive with a Fighter (Human fighter even), I think I sort of realized it... really isn't that hard.

Speaking of hard, have you ever completed the campaign, MC? The campaign starts out at average difficulty (Elf Rogue, then Elf Wizard) and then ends with what the hell (Elf BERSERKER vs a magic teleporting goat) and you got to ration gold between all of them.

Incidentally, if you were to rate the DD classes on a tier list, what would it look like? For me, Sorceror, Warlord, Assassin and Transmuter would be tops, while Fighter, Crusader, Bloodmage (ESPECIALLY bloodmage) would be around the bottom.

23
I posted my first four on a different forum so I hope you don't mind that I'll repeat it here:

"Vampire - Early levels are kind of hard because while in Normal/Ranked you can pretty much one-shot level 1s even at 1hp, it's a lot harder with the boss stats but once you get going you can basically slingshot easily to a win.

Transmuter - One of the stronger classes in the game because it gives the finger to luck. Did you get "locked" in by powerful monsters? Just blow up a wall for a measly 1 MP. If you get Binlor it's basically an automatic win although I managed to do without on my first try.

Assassin - I used a Goblin for this one. The most useful ability is the "automatically kill lower level" one since it means Meatman and Zombies (two of the most annoying enemies in this mode) just roll over automatically.

Berserker - Slingshot against Mage-type enemies (most of them don't get the huge improvements of enemy types, it seems), hope you get Cydstepp.

I also did Thief, Warlord, Sorcerer (all very strong classes) and Crusader."

As of now I added Tinker and Priest to the list. Rogue is annoying me because at level 1 if you meet a vampire you die instantly due to rounding errors.

What do you think of the Changeling class? I think it's weak but the creator of DD apparently disagrees with me. The best you can get is maybe using a Medusa to take down a 50% dude but a lot of abilities you can steal don't seem to help much for taking down high level guys (which is the basis of DD high level play).

24
If it's 1 per level/conversion then that's...really strong.  Way better than Human.  (Without any outside percentage bonuses, that's equivalent to +20% per conversion.  With outside percentage bonuses that's arguably more-like +30% per conversion).  So...I'm guessing that's not the formula.  And...just in general, I'm not expecting a scaling formula, because it's too similar to what human does.  Not sure what would be a good non-scaling formula; maybe +3 per conversion?  That's enough to make you stronger than human early, but weaker than human by level 10.  This is pure speculation, though--I haven't seen the formula.

I'm a bit sad about this change, though; Orc was an interesting race--let you level up at a timely moment to get a full heal.

I'm dumb and didn't take picking up attack powerups in account. I think it's just a set 2 Base Damage per glyph, I believe. I don't know how that adds up but for me it works better for like... Thieves and Rogues, and not great on Monks. I don't know how it adds up on a "neutral" user.

Oh, by the way, I think I didn't convey it properly, but the old EXP glyph conversion is still there. Now:

Goblin: Convert Glyph to EXP
Orc: Convert Glyph to Base Damage.

The effect that was removed was the old Goblin's glyph -> gold conversion, which isn't useful for actually winning anyway and only useful for gold farming before starting your real run. But this does have the side effect that farming gold is now more obnoxious without the old goblin. I just hex-edit my save file to get maximum legit gold before each of my runs.

I guess this distribution makes more sense. Orcs were never a quick-learning race in fantasy tropes while Goblins are a "cunning" sort.

25
You are right, the mode is easier than the higher levels of Gauntlet.

Although the enemies there also get "boss" special abilities. For example, Medusas get 100% death strike instead of their usual and bandits are super annoying because these version have First Strike meaning unless you get a level up heal off killing them, they will always annoy you with Poison/Mana Burn. Makes for a very weird set of strategies despite being easier overall.

Also, the Orc class has been changed. Their old EXP bonus conversion was given to Goblins and Orcs now have a "Base Damage increase" glyph conversion. I'm not sure how that works out mathematically (1 per level/conversion, scaling like dwarves?) but it seems to me that Humans are still better overall for increased damage? Might be worth looking into though.

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