-) Elemental
I want to change most of the elemental defence available to only offer 50% reduction instead of Null and Absorb, with 1-Star Elemental Materia. There'd still be some armour/accessories offering null/absorb but they won't appear until much later in the game. The reason behind this is that I have a hell of a time trying to balance Boss attacks that use elements much later in the game due to the amount of ways that these attacks can be completely negated which is tough for balancing. 50% reductions, though, allow for a nice middle-ground that doesn't cripple the boss too hard. I'm pretty set on this but maybe someone can argue me out of it.
Ehhh... maybe? I dunno, 50% reduction at max kinda cripples what Elemental is supposed to do. Maybe you could just limit the amount of Elemental materia we can obtain, like, there's only one or two available. Or, maybe you could set the maximum to Null rather than absorb. I suppose it's not a huuuuge deal since I use Elemental more for attack than defense anyway, but I will personally stage a revolt if you do a similar change to Added Effect. Elemental defense I can deal without; status ailment defense, no way.
-) Junon Leagues
I hate this for two reasons: 1) it's too similar to Battle Square except much slower and less versatile with prizes, and 2) it revolves around 1v1 fights which are the hardest fights to make interesting without story context backing it up a little bit. So what I'd like to do is, at a later date, is revamp this completely and make it so that you manage a fighter rather than fight in it yourself (the battles would be organised to be super quick though, with a 3-5min countdown on them so they can't drag out). You'd customise this fighter with different parts to adjust stats/innate abilities and select which attack variants it will use in the AI cycle (so you could swap out a rocket punch with a flamethrower that inflicts statuses for instance).
Given how this might pan out, I'm not planning to do this for 1.5 but to instead keep Junon Leagues as it is for now but I'd like to hear your thoughts.
1v1 fights in general tend to be some of the trickier battles, so I don't know if I could handle one involving an uncontrolled AI, even one that's well-programmed. Even with a good setup, I'm not comfortable depending completely on an AI. I don't mind the Junon Leagues, but if you don't want them to drag out, you could just implement the timer on what we already have.
Materia Bonus/Penalties
1) I'm avoiding HP penalties on standard Materia due to it quickly tanking characters who are magic orientated as they tend to need more stuff equipped.
2) I'm going to separate Strength penalties off Magic bonuses to make hybrids a bit easier to put together.
3) Support Materia will tend to have penalties on it to make it more of a double-edged sword rather than a splashable equip. Looking at things like HP/MP/Magic penalties on things like All, Strength loss on Added Cut, etc.
Now that's interesting. I don't know if you'd need to get rid of HP penalties altogether, though it's hard to go lower than 2%. I'm just so used to FFVII that it feels weird to not have some kind of HP penalty. But I guess it would make the 10% reduction from things like MP Turbo more bearable when you're already loaded up on standard magic materia. Not sure about penalties on support materia, especially when the major ones like Quadra Magic already have some hefty reductions. But Quadra Magic is major and deserves some penalties; why does All need them? All already has a built-in limit, that being how many times you can use it per battle.
Getting rid of the strength penalty would be great, though. It could just be my playstyle, but NT doesn't seem like a mod where you can afford to be too specialized. I'll be looking forward to making Cloud a real fighter-mage hybrid.
Show Posts