Weapons using the Item Damage Formula

[Karifean]

So I had the idea of having Barret's and Vincent's guns work similar to FF XII, in that they completely ignore the enemy's defense, always hit, and mostly (in FFXII: completely) run off their own attack stat rather than the user's stats having much/any influence. So I turned to the item formula.

Now of course the problem I had already predicted would appear did indeed appear, which is that the attacks always deal between 240 and 256 damage, because Attack has an attack strength of 16, and nobody cares about the weapon's or character's strength. Is there an easy way to circumvent this problem or would that require rewriting the game's damage calculations? Or is there a good alternative? If it doesn't work out I guess I'll just go with the regular damage formula.

[Sega Chief]

Does setting the attack power of the actual weapon higher not help it deal more damage on the item formula? 18 x 16 should hit for 288 damage (which is probably too high for the start of the game) and while it would need to scale much faster than regular weapons, 255 x 16 would still hit for a hefty 4000 or so damage. For proper damage variance you might need to drop the ignore defence part, though; otherwise it'll hit for the exact same damage every time.

For alternatives, you could try experimenting with Throw or Coin Damage, but I think Throw has the character's strength stat in there somewhere.

[Karifean]

You describe exactly how I would've liked it to work, but Item Damage Formula is "Power x 16", and the 'Power' of the Attack Command is 16. The user's Level or Strength or Attack Damage are completely ignored.

Hmm, that's a possibility, I don't really know how those formulas work but I'll look into it.

[nfitc1]

It won't work because the Attack command sets the power. The Item command defers to the item.