Hey Sega Chief, thanks so much for this mod, it's my favorite mod of all time. Is there any estimate for when 1.5 will come out?
It was supposed to be a few weeks ago but I had to stop for a heady cocktail of unit assessments and a week's holiday abroad. I'm back to work on it now, but I can't really say when it'll be done. I've got the week off work again next week but not going anywhere this time so I'll use that to power ahead.
If that's the case than yes, I am certainly against it.
Take a look at my playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3B-NAl8G2fMzaKwXtY5AGeop8iFJnxNn
You'll see that virtually all of the boss fights fall within the time frame of 8- 15 minutes as you think it should be, which I agree with as well. The only ones that are outside of that range are either bosses that should have more health seeing as they are more important to the story or game as a whole, or are bosses that were either bugged at the time and have been fixed, or had too much health at the time and have been shaved down some. I should also note that I was by no means getting the fights done as fast as I possibly could either. In a lot of them I had Sadness which reduces damage dealt and limit fill speed, both of which could have pushed these times much lower. Couple that with that the fact that I could have probably done my Rank Up's and materia situations better and to shave more off and you begin to see how I did not do a lot of these fights anywhere near as fast as they could be done. Hell, you can even factor in that I also had Intro and Outro's for every single video, and that probably adds up to another 15 - 20 seconds that could be taken off the total times because they're just for show, they're not apart of the actual fight themselves.
It's kinda funny actually, looking at those playtimes and with all the points I made, you could actually make an argument in the opposite direction and say that some of these bosses may need a buff in health instead of a debuff! Not that I am asking for that mind you. By and large I think you've pretty much got the boss health numbers where they should be across the board. Could they use some tweaks here and there? Perhaps? We shall see when 1.5 comes out. But I think the health numbers are in a great spot personally.
This speaks more to potential enemy AI tweaks that could be added to make bosses change their attack strategies when they get lower on health than health itself. Adding those kinds of things to ALL bosses though would probably be a ton of work I imagine? And judging by what Sega said that's probably not going to happen when 1.5 hits. So yeah, I agree with the just small tweaks and changing of health numbers if necessary, but as I mentioned, I don't think it is.
This! Having the bosses change strategies when reaching the "critical" stages keeps the fight intense and actually alleviates the feeling of having the battles drawn out.
The timeframe thing is a personal preference; there's no set rule for how long a fight should be, so long as extremes are avoided (1min or 1hr+ for example). It's actually not too difficult to change a Boss' attacks when they reach a certain HP threshold due to most of them having a HP check in their General Counter AI and the ability to have them read attack IDs from variables instead of directly (letting you load a different attack into the var when the conditions are met). The majority of the Disc 1/Disc 2 bosses have altered behavior after conditions are met like reduced HP or certain attacks are used, whereas a lot of the Disc 3 ones don't change at all. Maybe that's what's missing?
I apologise if this was posted already, but with 203 pages it's a bit hard to verify.
I seem to have Cait Sith and Vincent's innate abilities swapped on my installation. I don't know if I need to simply reinstall it or not.
I've tried the two fixes, but it seems I'm already "up to date."
(I've just done a clean reinstall and it's fixed issues I was having with Dark Cave's Guard Scorpion.)
Nevertheless, this mod is excellent. I never imagined I was going to play this game again, as even though I was always a fan of the game's mechanics, there was only so much playing around with them I could do. This mod really forces you to use and understand every aspect of the game and it's brilliant.
The innates were swapped but the text wasn't (I forgot); Vincent now has the MP > HP regeneration and Cait has the passive MP regen. Vincent's one matches his Limit forms quite well because it lets that MP get used while he auto-attacks. Cait's is going to be changed so that, on top of the MP regen, he gets a much stronger MP regen while defending (+20 or something). I should mention the new innates for 1.5:
Cloud: When an ally is KO'd, he gains Wall + Regen (effect activates once - this innate only available after Cloud recovered from Mideel).
Aeris: Geo-stance covers more elements (space issue prevented this before)
Yuffie: Magic evade was dropped, physical evade set to 255% when hit by a physical but wears off after a few turns or if targeted by a magic effect. Issue with this is that accuracy gains evasion, which'll need something done to the .EXE. This problem applies
Cait Sith: Passive MP regen of +1 per tick; when defending, this becomes +20 per tick.
Vincent: HP sporadically raised by current MP as an irregular regen.
Cid: Starts battle with a STR/MAG boost, loses this for rest of battle if his HP drops below 50% at any point.