Time for more rambling. I have a bad feeling about the amount of text for this one...
Let's get the enemies and bosses out of the way, first. The missile base bosses were pretty lax and offered no real challenge. I was under the impression you couldn't save in between the soldier boss and the countdown, but my memory has been faulty before. But I wouldn't be surprised if this was another one of Callisto's divine blessings. Well, the BGH boss was a major disappointment as I ended up beating it quite easily with the 10 minute limit even without setting up boss-specific junctions. Just buff up and spam double magic, occasionally healing.
Back in the Garden however the encounters were much more interesting and enemies stronger. I couldn't just sleepwalk my way through so this is the first sign of a steepening difficulty curve in terms of normal encounters. I certainly would've enjoyed it happening sooner, but I suppose this is the first reasonable point where you can crank up the challenge for disc 2 seeing as the prison is such torture already and there's no encounters in the missile base.
Interestingly, you can still mug curse spikes here and they still refine to dark matter. So you could get super strong here, supposedly. Intentional?
Oilboyles deal decent dmg but their HP is quite low so rushing them is a solid option. I don't remember anything remarkable happening in the fight. Double magic spam is the best approach, again.
All hail Callisto, and thrill at the greatness of his deeds! There's a damn save point before NORG! This continues to be among the loveliest additions to the mod since I last played. This and the new no-exp abilities alone make it the best mod out there. In other news, NORG is an EMBARRASSMENT. NORG-TOO-FAT! CAN'T-HANDLE-REFLECT! Another accidental first-try win. Didn't even bother hitting the buttons other than to mug the stat-ups. Literally needed to just keep applying reflect occasionally and, wait for it - double spam magic.
The world opening up is always an exciting moment. A lot of things happening here so please excuse a short tangent. First of all the game starts throwing -aga spells your way, a MAJOR upgrade. You can go with card modding as half the people around are using lv6 monster cards all of a sudden(still not using it personally), or you can mug some overworld monsters for items to refine or if you're brave and adventurous enough, draw them directly from select monsters in the world. Naturally I opted for the latter option. Snow lions are still stupid fat, which I like. And threatening as well if you don't keep them asleep.
Accidentally ran into Hexadragons on Centra, didn't even remember they were around at this point. Angry little critters - no statuses seemed to work on them and they hit like an effing truck. Really enjoyed running into challenging enemies like this. Didn't find Thundagas until later, totally forgot where enemies with those were.
While looking for rare monsters, it dawned on me that it really adds nothing to the game to keep running into starting-area enemies around the world, especially in areas where there's also encounters with interesting/new kinds of monsters. I remember seeing some talk about changing some of the more boring encounters in the overworld but this is something I think could still be made more convenient - during exploration, I usually check up to 4 encounters in any given area to see if I run into rare monsters and then move on, but it's actually quite likely that it's not enough and you might still miss them. My recommendation would be to just remove the bite bugs, geezards, fastitocalons, thrustaevises etc. starter enemies from certain disc 2+ areas, thereby making the more interesting encounters more common. I mean you can find those starting enemies all over anyways. I know their drops and whatnot might change with their level but it's not like there's a shortage of places where to leave them.
In terms of sidequests, the little girl in Dollet does speak like a generic quest-giver instead of a sad, demure kid. More of a minor flavor thing but because the quest itself is a simple fetchquest at the end of the day, giving additional care in terms of her dialogue might endear players to the quest a little more.
Managed to find the Iguions by combing through this topic. A bit disappointed with the lack of clues as to the trigger condition. I don't know how you're supposed to guess that. To my knowledge, there isn't even any precedent for this type of trigger in the game so even just a blurp saying something like the iguions seem to be waiting to ambush unexpecting easy pray or some such flavorsome passage would be quite helpful. The fight itself on the other hand is super cool. They have a lot of different attacks and none of them are to be scoffed at. The scan still says that they have reflect cast on them even though they don't initially have it on, though. Diablos also wrecks this fight completely, 2 shotting the Iguions at around level 50. Felt like cheating. I might go back to the save at some point to experiment more. I actually like the thought that Diablos isn't just a miss on bosses(see my thoughts on the utility of GF's in boss fights), but they do need a resistance to it. Not sure if that's possible though given how the Diablos damage seems to be a special case mechanically.
Back to the story. A pet peeve of mine is that just as there's talk of Selphie disappearing, you are able to bring her along for the occupied Balamb city part. Seems like an oversight, seeing as she can't be taken into the party in the overworld or anywhere else.
Anyways, I was surprised to not see a new save point before the Fujin & Raijin boss fight. It's a pretty long stretch to go through the whole balamb scenario & Raijin fight again just because you didn't remember to junction aero & float to elem-def. The fights themselves were really, really good. I was quite worried that this is where the challenge just dips because as mentioned, there's so much stuff you can do to get stronger at this point in the game but they put up a really good fight. Diablos could still be used to wreck house here but I banned his use from boss fights. I've continued trying out GF's to see whether my comments on them remain valid, and he seems to be the only GF(other than Carbuncle of course, since buffs are a different beast entirely) so far that gets competent enough results to be used but suffers from the opposite problem where he becomes completely broken with levels. This is okay for regular monsters and such, but bosses do need resistance, if such a mechanic is possible.
How did I forget about Odin? Word on the street has it that there's a new nifty mechanic for his summoning(no more wanton destruction!). And holy crap, there's a pretty scary ambush along the way. Aqua breath wiped my whole party from full HP instantly. Perfect; had to make a specific setup for this encounter. There's no way you're protecting yourself against everything either, as there's thundaga, earthquake and aqua breath. Excellent, complex fight, many variables. I'm a bit worried that people are going to be on the lookout for the easy way out seeing as they're not bosses, such as ways to instakill the monsters(degenerator? Didn't try it myself), using Diablos etc. but hey, at least the fight's hard enough to warrant some unusual strategies probably.
Odin on the other hand... wow. At long last he's done just standing there and being spanked all day. And boy, is there some pent-up anger. Good call on making his attack non-elemental(I think). This particular attack is so badass that it actually forced me to get a bit stronger before I was able to survive it with anybody, so I got curagas from Tonberry King for everyone. More on that fight later. Anywho with curagas junctioned to health, Selphie and Quistis were able to withstand the anger of Odin(spirit stat seemed to be the deciding factor), so Squall bit the dust every time. A fun challenge, but had my HP been any higher initially I don't imagine I would've had any trouble with him. I think if Odin snuck in some physical attacks every once in a while in addition to the thunder slam (not in stead of it, but a surprise physical all of a sudden in between major attacks) would complete this fight as a satisfying challenge.
Lowered requirements for summoning Tonberry King is highly appreciated; this is the right kind of QoL change that reduces tedium. But the fight itself is, quite frankly, way too boring and easy. Another one of those optional extra bosses, and a classic badass FF monster no less, where you'd hope to really have to go all-out in a hard mode but instead he's a total wimp. Haste & protect on everyone means there's not even the slightest chance of anyone dying, which is quite preposterous. He also has worse defense stats than regular tonberries, taking more damage from everything, which feels weird.
Because the boss is useless I decided to do some casual experimentation here. You might've picked up on my snide remarks on double casting magic. If I had to single out the most problematic balance aspect so far, that would be it. It makes other stuff feel so much worse in contrast, such as GF's, although the main factor that inhibits GF's potential is the whole status debacle, IMO. My experience so far is that the balance is really good, tight and intuitive otherwise if not for magic outshining everything else.
Magic was indeed mostly weak in vanilla but there's certainly some overcorrection going on here - simply double casting magic will usually be among the fastest, if not the fastest damage dealing method and involves no risk, strategy, skill or spending rare resources(pulse ammo for example has justification to be strong in this regard). It's a fool-proof, overly effective strategy that also outperforms most alternatives that involve more management, effort or risk, and I've yet to see a boss where it wasn't preferable to alternative strategies. This is exacerbated by the fact that you can refine endless doubles even on disc 1.
Not sure if there's some huge disparity in Tonberry's VIT & SPR stats but I doubt it would upend my findings seeing as they reflect my experience thus far. For testing I had Squall's STR at 97, and Quistis did all the magic related stuff with MAG at 96.
Double casting -aga spells was pretty accurately 5000 every time, 2,5k a piece, without weaknesses. Double quake at this point is a tad over 6k total so quite a bit of damage.
On the other hand, I put the rare +30% sumdmg on Leviathan and that resulted in a meager 4100 damage. I had a +20% sumdmg on Ifrit and that did 3700. Pretty sad.
Renzo did a tad over 600 per hit on average so with crisis level 4 it totals about 4200, finisher on top for an additional ~1500. So with the best CL & a finisher proc you can actually slightly outdamage a simple doublecast of firaga. LOL.
Also tried some different ammo with Irvine. Demolition ammo & AP ammo dealt almost the same amount of damage, around 1000 per shot which leads me to believe the King's VIT is pretty bad. Pulse ammo was 1600 per shot and of course crits for double that, which is exactly as strong as it should be because Pulse ammo is rare, or at least should be. So yay for pulse ammo for being one of the few things(with a high enough CL) stronger than double casting common magic.
It's not like there aren't ways to do more damage than doublecasting by the way, that's not the point here. I'm trying to demonstrate how it's too strong in relation to everything else considering factors such as ease of use, utility, safety, complexity and availability. Most players are going to default to using doubles in boss fights anyways for protection, healing and stuff so it's just always there and costs nothing. It's particularly egregious that even for physical characters it's still better to just gear them for magic and cast away, indicating that the base power for spells is just too great to where it renders even the natural strengths and weaknesses of the characters relatively meaningless. It's just too much of a one-size-fits-all, easy strategy to always default to.
I want to restate that I still think that there's a superb balance in this mod overall, despite long-winded critiques. I try to present my case as earnestly & comprehensively as possible right off the bat because I know you'll make the best decisions based on that information and glean the well-argued and justified points from the ramblings, as you've always done. Spamming magic notwithstanding, I've loved using tons of different approaches for damage. Stepmine has found unprecedented use, and it counts as magic so it doesn't wake people up which is awesome and deals very respectable AoE damage if you're like me and run around a lot. Darkside is always useful. It's so much fun to experiment with limit breaks and they're super well balanced from what I've seen - Irvine's ammo used to be a cut above the rest and Zell used to be broken for people good with inputs but it's all in a fine place now.
Glad to see Rapture still around although a part of me wants to push for it to be allowed to appear a bit more often actually, for basically the same reason as back in the day - it doesn't work for bosses/meaningful fights anyways and letting players have the joy of ending the occasional random encounter instantly if they want is pretty harmless. It's a fun limit but really rare and I've only seen it once or twice(yea I know, I'm at a low level). I just wish there was a way to find a compromise for Selphie where her uniqueness would shine through more even in a low level game without making her overpowered.
Weapon progression has been pretty nice and linear, although some characters are still lacking a motive to upgrade the weapon seeing as many aren't physically inclined and magic is OP even for those who are. I wonder what could be done to make the other weapons more interesting. Maybe they could confer small bonuses suited for the character in question? Like they do in terms of crits for Irvine, and the magazines do a good job of detailing that nowadays.
I don't think I've ever gotten every gunblade in order before. I wonder if there are still ways to break to mold, so to speak - there's always the danger of making things feel too heavily regulated & controlled in the search for balance. A part of me still hopes that there's like some super duper secret way to get lionheart early, just for old time's sake. Not like I have a way of figuring it out anyways though. Adamantite still required for it? I certainly haven't seen any signs of that anywhere.
I'd like to have more reasons to get excited for the different Renzo finishers. Blasting zone has looked like a worse fated circle for me. If the other ignores defence, maybe the other could set a status, give a buff... Or in the case of blasting zone you could go for a thematic approach, like I've always joked about the amount of collateral damage it must cause because of the 1000 mile pillar of magic slamming down, so maybe it could actually have sick damage but also damages your team or something, haha.
Any stuff you'd like me to keep an eye out for?
