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[FF8PC-Steam] Ragnarok Rebalancing Mod (v1.2.3 & v1.1b)

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Nesouk:

--- Quote from: rakuanu on 2022-08-14 12:48:09 ---Enjoying my playthrough so far.

Just wanted to let you know that the Espers during the dream sequence with Laguna, Kiros, and Ward in the Esthar mining operation casts Cure and Protect on enemies (my team) instead of itself.

Actually.. it's also attacking its team mate, and casting Slow on themselves too... the target selection is a bit missed up here.

--- End quote ---

There is no mistake here this robot are deficient and do some stupid stuff like that, this was also the case in Vanilla.

rakuanu:

--- Quote from: Nesouk on 2022-08-15 14:03:10 ---There is no mistake here this robot are deficient and do some stupid stuff like that, this was also the case in Vanilla.

--- End quote ---

Oh, had no idea. That's pretty funny then. Also how do you re-learn EXP-none? I accidentally unlearned it and saved over it.

I actually went ahead and used the Hyne's editor to add it back in but noticed that Quezacotl and Ifrit don't have SumMag +30% and is listed as Forgotten but I'm very sure I didn't unlearn it with Amnesia Greens. Intended or something I should restore?

Necro:
I'm assuming I did something wrong in the patching process, but I'm stuck in the desert jail.
When Irvine shows up, the little cutscene shows him with no body, then I get a crash.
After some finagling, I managed to get a screenshot of the console, but the crash is so bad I generally can't even see the console.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/638384367848259606/1035272254788993034/unknown.png


EDIT SOLUTION: Found this digging back a couple pages. Easy fix.

"I checked this and it seems to be a problem with the Demaster tool. Opening the demaster manager in your game directory, and then unticking "Disable field character resolution limit" fixes this."

Fauve:
How do I get adamantine in this mod? High level adamantoises are only dropping orihalcons for me. And also what GF has no encounters? I just obtained the ragnarok and have not seen it yet.

aquecoucou:
This mod was a huge letdown. Easily the "worst" gameplay mod I played for a FF title (balance wise). It's not downright bad but it doesn't really fix vanilla game issues and adds a few more glaring balance problems.

I did 100% lionheart difficulty including new sidequests, etc. No cheese strat. Which means no aura / invicibility / no limit break cheese (no intentional low hp, or life / phoenix instead of full life etc, overall I think I used less than 10 limit breaks total for bosses and a few for some testing on trash mobs). No farming of stats up / devouring mobs for stats. Team was Squall, Zell, Rinoa. Didn't bother leveling the rest till I was done with the game to check their stat growth which made me realize even more how trash Zell is in this mod.

First of all, character balance strictly speaking, well there is simply no balance at all. Zell is pure trash, Quistis / Selphie / are okayish. Irvine is trash early / mid (due to lack of STR / MAG, his SPD doesn't compensate due to how damage formula works in FF VIII) and good at late game if you make use of his limit break, I don't think he can reach 255 mag without stat farming and a single mag ability which also makes him inferior to other mages.

So I feel like it needs to be asked, did you playtest properly your mod or did you just test segments with artifically leveled characters ? Roughly during the whole game Rinoa (and Selphie to some extent) can keep up their MAG stat to close enough the same value Zell / Squall  have in STR with proper junctions and upgraded weapons. Why does it matter ? Because under any circumstance an equal value in MAG to STR will make decent spells deal more damage than a normal attack. Which is hilarious with late game spells and various buffs.

At 255 MAG a high tier spell (flare, meteor, ultima ; which are easy to farm since you can draw them from mobs in esthar excepted ultima you have to refine from a fixed encounter in esthar which is slightly more annoying but still pretty easy) will deal more damage than an attack with 255 STR. Except that well ... you can triple cast. Which means your mage now deals roughly 4 times the damage of your STR character. But it doesn't stop there. A single GF has auto haste and I haven't found a single source of Accelerator since card refining was also changed. There might be a convoluted way to farm it via mugging a vysage and refining lightweights excepted I couldn't get any vysage to spawn, all fights were hands only so idk. Which means you'll obviously set the auto haste on your mage which deepens the gap between a MAG and STR character even more. (Self casting haste is often a waste of time between slows / stops and missed damage opportunity + the oppression of some bosses).

So what tools do STR characters have to compete with MAG ? Cheese strats with auras / crisis limit break which is stupid imo. The whole limit break system should be reworked but w/e I get it it's not easy and not the point of the mod. Though Zell limit break downright sucks compared to Squall / Irvine. So what's left ? Darkside ? Yeah it could be decent since it triples your attack damage. Except it was nerfed in several ways. It consumes 1/3 of your hp which is not a risk you want to take at any point due to boss patterns. The fact that almost every boss that isn't human can't be drained (thus you can't regen with drain linked to status attack with physical attacks) doesn't help darkside case. Second nerf is that there's only one GF that now learns it. Meaning your second STR character won't even that option.

The only other option STR chars have to dish a bit more damage is to use the counter ability. Which is pretty much useless anyway since most bosses spam much more spell based abilities which doesn't trigger counter.

There's literally no upside to not have 2 MAG character on your team with Squall. The fact that they can output 4 times the damage of a STR character while having an easier time to heal through Shell and maintaining buffs cause you want triple anyway just completly destroys the balance. There is also not a single boss that has a high enough SPR to make STR characters more viable. Not one. There's 2 bosses in the whole game that has the ability to alternate between immunity to magic and physical damage. One can be cheesed with Diablos and the other one can be killed before the magical ward with a single MAG character (or worst case scenario can be stalled).

The balance between MAG and STR is so terrible that my Squall against end game bosses with 255 STR and 122 MAG was dealing more damage with a triple flare than with a physical attack .. which is completly stupid.

The other huge issue is that sentence from the changelog :


--- Quote ---Tweaks to the enemy AI have been made as well. For example, enemies now skip their turns less frequently
--- End quote ---

The thing is in vanilla game the bosses were balanced (at high levels) around skipping turns for unpredictability but also for breathing room. It means the time between two attacks was variable and sometimes they were very agressive and sometimes more passive, letting you buff back / heal if you made mistake. It also diluted the RNG of a single character focus. With that change in Ragnarok (and especially Lionheart) some bosses have a crazy fast ATB and will always attack every X seconds depending on their SPD.

It causes many issues such as :
- Some bosses have crazy high ATB (which is the case of Ifrit, supposed to be a tutorial boss, literally impossible to kill without abuse if you go straight there without grinding in Lionheart)
- Higher ATB speed in general leads to two problem. When single target damage is high you can be unlucky and the same character will be focused twice before you can leading to his death. There's nothing you can do to prevent that scenario and I suspect a general AI script was changed or implemented because bosses tends much more to focus a single character for several turns. When it's high damage AOE sometimes you'll just get wiped before you can act because that AoE will be used twice in 3 seconds.
- In the remastered version (unsure if it was that bad in the 2013 one) the battle menu is also in 15 FPS which is sluggish. So much that sometimes it skips inputs and leads to the wrong targeting. But the real issue is that "Wait" mode doesn't freeze ATB while targeting (was already the case in Vanilla) but since the menu lags you need time to properly target and with high ATB speed, bosses will often cut your turn to attack while you're targeting spells.
- Some scripts changes leads to frustating situation, not necesseraly hard but overall annoying such as Ultimate weapon fight. The fight isn't hard but tedious when you buff and the boss immediatly goes Dispelga -> Pillar (one chaacter die, fixed 9999 damage) -> Pillar (same) -> Pillar -> Dispelga. I had it happens a few times, you just waste time buffing / using full-life for no challenge at all.


I also don't get the removal of a few endgame stuff.
Aura spell :  There's still aura stone farming for the same result (except you can't triple cast it but it doesn't really matter to begin with)
Heroes / Team invicibility : still exists but is more convoluted to obtain, meaning if someone really want these he'll get them, just need more time
And all of that to add a new hyper broken spell called Renew that cast regen, protect and shell at the same time.

Like you reduce the sources of broken endgame stuff but add another one farmable in 5 minutes. You can literally get 30 Renews every minute or so stealing behemoths. The whole endgame was clearly balanced around Renew and 9999 HP since almost everything towards end of disc 3 and disc 4 has high ATB speed and requires protect + shell while still dishing 5k+ damage in some cases if you don't farm stat ups and devour (which shouldn't be mandatory, it should only ease fight, not be mandatory).

So what happens with all these balance issue ? If you did your junction properly, take advantage of Renew and figured out the predictability of bosses ATB, disc 3 bosses are piss easy, Bahamut is piss easy (2 minutes fight with a single MAG character, you can probably get him in a single turn with 3 MAG characters ..). Ultimate weapon was easy with a single MAG character, just annoying wasting time buffing / reviving instead of finding a way to keep chaarcters alive.

Every boss in disc 4 was also piss easy including Ultimecia, once again everything with a single MAG character, imagine with 2 or 3. The only thing that made me struggle a bit was Adel because I didn't have Rinoa for the fight and had a level 30 Selphie that was getting one shot even with Renew so I was left with only 2 STR char.

Then comes Omega. Clearly wasn't tested properly. Every AoE hit for a few thousand. Then he has Megido Flame which was roughly 9k damage on characters level 100 with best junction possible in VIT / SPR and a DEF / SPR +30% in their weaker stat (and that ignores protect / shell). And then there's Terra break, a meteor like spell hitting many times random characters, each hit being 4k+ under shell protect. Literally impossible to survive with lvl 100 characters, Renew, best junction for SPR/ VIT and +30% in SPR/VIT. The whole team get wiped. Omega also has a high ATB speed, meaning often Megido Flame will result in a wipe because he'll do an AoE (often ultima) right before or after it.

If you don't farm VIT/SPR up or don't devour mobs, you simply can't survive Omega unless you abuse invincibility or have a character dedicated to use Defend and spam Mega phoenix (which makes the fight ultra boring). This is bad design. Farming stas up should make fights easier, and shouldn't be mandatory. There is a convoluted way to survive by casting zombie but since you absolutely need renew, it means you'll degen + you'll have issue healing and considering his ATB you won't have time to remedy+ or triple esuna before the next AoE.

So overall for a mod that claims to rebalance stuff, it destroys MAG / STR balance, it destroys AI scripts and it adds a broken spell to "balance" the endgame. It's really far from hitting the mark.

Aside that, the mod itself is fine especially QOL wise (removing the draw limit, meaning you don't waste much time getting full stock of spells is really good). Delaying access to final weapons, and higher tier of spells is overall fine and done nicely. I also liked the GF choice, either you draw to make the fight easier or you don't but get more rewards, that was well thought. The junction balancing could use some tweak in the SPD / LCK stats (make it a bit higher imo). I think there should be a way to get +40% SPR / VIT on GF, else the stat growth is fine. The fixed enemy level has a solid base you did a good job on that.

The "new" fights are kinda meh mainly because some models are reused too much though I understand making new models isn't easy and not a priority but there was a redundancy feeling. Also moving Enc-None from Diablos to Eden is stupid, please don't. It doesn't make the game harder, just more tedious and more time wasteful.

Most of the issues I describe are probably less perceptible in the normal difficulty mod especially ATB wise but Lionheart is in a bad state balance wise and could benefit from a revamp of a few systems (limit break, MAG triple casting, ATBs).

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