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Releases / Re: [FF8PC-Steam] Ragnarok Rebalancing Mod (v1.2b & v1.1b)
« on: 2023-03-08 23:06:14 »..
I won't make a point by point answer since it's been awhile and I don't remember everything but I'll try to address most of your arguments. First of all I must admit I was a bit salty when I posted that since I was really disappointed at how my experience turned out and I was expecting something else I guess.
First of all I'm unsure when was the last time you actually did complete the game with the mod and if it was on Remaster or 2013 version since there has been patches to up difficulty and Remastered at first wasn't as hard (ATB changes, nerf damage to some abilities etc).
Irvine really is bad till mid-late game because all he has over Squall & Zell is SPD. His STR is too low and as such suffers from the damage calculation formula. Even if in a given duration he inputs more attacks, he'll end with a lower "DPS".
I don't remember the exact numbers regarding Zell & Squall LB but with both at 255 STR, Zell LB damage was not close to Squall with fast inputs. For some reason his normal attack damage was also lower than Squall which led me to question if Squall's weapons had a different formula.
Regarding of the difficulty argument, I'd argue having a hard time on certains bosses due to RNG because of high ATB and certain attack combinations resulting a wipe isn't difficulty. It's artificial difficulty. If for example a boss would be dealing 15k damage to the whole party every 3 turns consistently it'd be fine cause there's a pattern you can adapt. When in 3 turns a boss can either deal 5k damage to the whole party or 50k damage if you're unlucky, that's a fucked up design. The problem being exacerbated with sluggish targeting that doesn't freeze ATB is tedious, not difficult. Even the very first boss - Ifrit - suffers from that problem. I don't remember his attacks name but I had tries where he'll cast 3 times in a row his big party damage spell while on some other tries I'd see it only once whole fight. Same with his healing (or was his AoE also healing him ? Too far to remember). The variance is currently way too high.
We both agree with magic being way too imbalanced, sadly I don't have a proper solution because of how magic overall works. Even if you'd balance it to have roughly the same impact as STR chars, there's still benefits to MAG chars such as healing through shells. And you can't balance it to being less powerful than STR because it relies on limited ressources. So it's kinda hard, but in any case triple needs to go away or only works on support spells (berserk, shell, protect, esuna, haste, renew, etc).
I won't change my mind on how limit breaks are a cheese in FFVIII and how much they break both the vanilla game and this mod. Honestly there are many bosses (if not all) you still can just solo with Squall LB and any other two characters that keep healing and protecting themselves / reviving Squall. I really don't see the appeal and it removes all strategy notion. That's the most brain dead strat, it has the lowest variance on your inputs and you can hardly fail at it. It also implies you always have 2 characters ready to react to what happens while still inputing high damage.
In my opinion Darkside is held back by the high speed of bosses and since you can't really self heal from it, it means you need another character ready to immediatly heal. It means you basically use 2 characters for a single stronger attack which leaves you more vulnerable and still doesn't compete with magic anyway. In the current balance there's no benefit to it and even if MAG was nerfed, it still would be too risky in many scenarios. I honestly think the 10% HP was a fine price to pay considering Darkside also requires a command slot. I could see a compromise at 15% HP and slightly lower damage. 33% is just a no go in Lionheart.
I'll quickly address the broken stuff, I'm not exactly sure to remember how to get all of these but I think Heroes / Holy Wars could be farmed via cards (but there might have been another step needed, such as cards -> items -> items through the various means of transmutation). You can still farm character cards against the CC club in the Ragnarok.
For stat ups, if I recall correctly it had to do with the Magic Lamp. You can get it randomly by sleeping in Deling City inn (1/8 iirc) and then can trade it to some NPC though I don't remember where.
Omega wise, I'm not even exaggerating in my first reply. It's straight up bad even with a really strong defensive setup you'll get destroyed if you don't farm stats and/or devour. I've only seen 2 strats viable, either a character always defending and spamming mega phoenix to get the other 2 characters to spam their LB, or just spamming invincibility items. I haven't seen a legit clear done, and in fact even scouring youtube I only found a single person killing Omega in Lionheart difficulty (in the current version, apparently in the previous versions you could VIT-0 him which is impossible now). And guess what ? They spam mega phoenixes + LB. I don't mind people with the "use everything at my disposal" mentality especially for the hardest content, but when said strategy actually requires 0 brain and removes any difficulty, once again it's a bad design.
It means the fight is binary : straight up hell, nearing impossibility unless you get a really lucky try with a insanely generous pattern or just cheese and make it extremely easy.
A well balanced mod would be constantly pushing you to react at what the boss is doing and act accordingly. Here they are many bosses where at the exact same point in the fight you can :
- either wipe in 2 (ATB) seconds (stupidly fast ATB + a deadly pattern)
- can afk 15 seconds and still have your whole team alive.
This is the only Lionheart Omega on youtube. 18 minutes of straight boring mega phoenix. Sorry I don't see the difficulty there. You can also see the pitiful damage of his Zell LB despite being at 255 STR. For reference Squall LB there at 255 STR is about 4.5k per hit plus the potential bonus (Lionheart being over 10k iirc). Rinoa LB Flare is 30 to 40k ish damage ? The Tera break is hitting Irvine for 4k, Zell for 2k and there's 15 (? not exactly sure since there's a few overlaps). Yes he doesn't have the most defensive setup but it means two things :
- You need to sacrifice a lot of damage if you want to survive it legit, which makes the fight 30+ minutes
- You still can get screwed by a Megido Flame right before / after which still hits for 7-8k+ on the party with a high defensive setup. His Squall is eating 4.4k under defend with solid defensive junctions.
Also you can see some pretty unbalanced stuff if you scour the video, a good example is at 12:37 where basically there's 3 consecutive light pillar attacks, with 0 delay between the second and the third. After Shockwave Pulsar the boss has a chance to follow up any attack with a Light Pillar.
If shockwave Pulsar is supposed to be an enrage then something is definitely off balance. It happens around 11:30 and this strat has a decent damage output. Yet there's still 7 minutes of fight after that. I refuse to call that fight "difficult" or "balanced". It's just a mess.
Edit : When you think about it, all the tools STR character are supposed to have to compete with MAG are unusable.
Elemental damage via junction : Hardest content doesn't have an elemental weakness
Status-ATK via junction : Does this one needs an explanation ?
Berserk : Doesn't provide a big enough boost in Lionheart to the downside of only have 2 controllable characters left to handle support / healing
A few good options could be :
- To add an elemental weakness to all bosses while lowering the bonus damage done by spells targeting the elemental weakness.
- To buff considerably berserk to be a high risk / reward strat.
- To add a new status that reduces the DEF stat (that isn't VIT-0) so the STR char can make use of it (with a cap so you can't bring a boss DEF to 1).
- To give characters that currently have a higher STR stat compared to MAG a SPD buff. That would also balance healing (MAG can heal through shell, STR char have faster turns so healing through items is a considerable option, though it'd require a bit of balancing on certain items healing power)
All four don't need to impleted together, but some could seriously tighten the cap between STR & MAG in combination of the Triple spell nerf.