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Endorph posted:What if he's a ghost? Then he's got rather substantial 1.3 buffs, at least.
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Jan 7, 2014 08:01
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Why both having played so much of the game just to let it die?
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Jan 8, 2014 03:21
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Hopefully he'll find time to pick it up again.
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Jan 11, 2014 03:15
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What gets me is the silence. If something awful happened to him, that's a tragic thing. But, people tell me that he still posts here, so presumably he's fine. If he's lost interest in the LP, then tell people and let them close the thread. It would be a pity, because it's nearly complete, but at least it's honest. Just stopping without a word due to boredom/indifference/more compelling projects is, for lack of a better term, unprofessional. I know that writing LPs is just a hobby, but it just seems like good manners.
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Jan 11, 2014 03:19
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JustJeff88 posted:What gets me is the silence. If something awful happened to him, that's a tragic thing. But, people tell me that he still posts here, so presumably he's fine. If he's lost interest in the LP, then tell people and let them close the thread. It would be a pity, because it's nearly complete, but at least it's honest. Just stopping without a word due to boredom/indifference/more compelling projects is, for lack of a better term, unprofessional. I know that writing LPs is just a hobby, but it just seems like good manners. You're totally right. I honestly hadn't realized it had been so long since I posted here. My bad, everyone. On the bright side, you can expect an update later tonight.
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Jan 12, 2014 01:15
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J. Alfred Prufrock posted:You're totally right. I honestly hadn't realized it had been so long since I posted here. My bad, everyone.  Seriously, though, good to see you back, man.
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Jan 12, 2014 01:35
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J. Alfred Prufrock posted:You're totally right. I honestly hadn't realized it had been so long since I posted here. My bad, everyone. I'm just glad you are well, Prufrock. I've literally had people disappear mid-LP or the like and found out that they died and, once, imprisoned.
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Jan 12, 2014 01:44
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J. Alfred Prufrock posted:You're totally right. I honestly hadn't realized it had been so long since I posted here. My bad, everyone. You're back!  Looking forward to tonight's update.
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Jan 12, 2014 01:50
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J. Alfred Prufrock posted:You're totally right. I honestly hadn't realized it had been so long since I posted here. My bad, everyone. Update, tonight!  Adding my voice to those ecstatic about your return Prufrock
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Jan 12, 2014 04:24
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Episode 44: Capricorn Part 2: Adramelk Dycedarg Beoulve just admitted to murdering his father Balbanes so that he could take control of House Beoulve, hoping to guide it into a new position of power by supporting Duke Larg through the Lion War. Upon hearing his unrepentant confession, our hero joined Zalbag Beoulve in striking down their older brother and his retinue. Unfortunately, at the moment of Dycedarg's death...  ...the Capricorn stone emits an unholy radiance. We all know what that means.  The demon within the stone joins with Dycedarg's dying spirit to be reborn anew as Adramelk, Ghost of Fury.   Adramelk teleports Zalbag away with a golden pillar of light much like those that transformed Celia and Lede into their Ultima Demon forms.   Welcome to the fourth Lucavi battle. Unlike the previous two, this fight is a straight 5 vs. 1 brawl.  If you were smart in the previous fight, most of your team should still be decently buffed. If any wear off, go ahead and reapply them. You'll have a bit of time.  As with most Lucavi, it's a good idea to lower Adramelk's stats with the Knight's Break skills. This will help keep the incoming damage at a manageable level. It's also important for another reason...  Adramelk's packing Counter Magic as his Reaction skill, meaning he'll throw many of your attacks right back at your face.  Counter Magic hits a lot more things than you'd expect, too. And whatever it can't bounce back is absorbed by...  That's right, it's Golem. This powerful Summon was made NPC-only in 1.3 and acts as more of a boss gimmick now.  Golem creates a shield that will absorb a number of points of physical damage equal to the caster's Hit Points. Specifically, it blocks damage from the Attack, Jump, and Throw commands (and used to block the Archer's Charge command as well).  Effectively, it makes Adramelk almost impossible to damage with straight-on attacks, since you have to catch him with his shield down to do any actual harm. And of course if you use skills that get around Golem, you risk eating his Counter Magic. This sounds pretty daunting, but there are a couple of ways around it, which we'll be seeing soon.  For now, though, Agrias is relegated to Dancing duties.  One of the benefits of Last Dance is that CT 00 gets around status immunities, which can be useful for buying a couple of extra turns every now and again.  Of course, to be effective, it has to fire when the enemy's CT is near-full, rather than near-empty...  As far as offensive skills go, Adramelk relies on several staple Black Magic spells, made more effective by his naturally-high MA and cast instantly via innate Non-Charge.  Fortunately, the map is pretty spacious, so it's not to difficult to stay spread out, forcing Adramelk to target only one of your units at a time. He's fast, but not fast enough to win a fight like that, as you can swamp him with simple action advantage.  While Golem blocks most forms of physical damage, there are, as mentioned, ways around it. One such method are the various sword skills, such as Meliadoul's Crush Punch, seen here.  Now, Adramelk can Counter Magic sword skills, but there's a catch to it: they all rely on the attacker's equipped weapon as part of their damage formula, and Adramelk doesn't have a weapon equipped.  What this means is that, even if Counter Magic fires, it's going to do damage roughly equal to Adramelk's PA score, somewhere in the low end of the double-digits. Sword skills are probably the safest way to deal damage in this fight.  Applying Haste isn't as crazy-good as raising Speed directly, but Yell is still a powerful MP-free buff, and because the strategy here is all about action economy, it's very useful.  In addition to offensive spells, Adramelk is actually quite the physical fighter. Not only does he hit for a helluva lot of damage bare-handed, he also has Two Swords to let him hit twice. He can drop pretty much any unit he can hit in a single round (though he can be foiled by Evasion).  But that's fine, really. He can spend as many turns K.O.-ing a single unit as he likes.  Like pretty much all the Lucavi, Adramelk also comes equipped with the status-focused Fear skillset.  His version includes Loss, seen here, which causes AoE Confusion; Seal, a single-target Petrification that we saw Velius use; and Despair 2, a wide AoE buff removal.  Loss is the one to watch out for because it can potentially cost you three or more actions, and makes for another good reason to stay spread out. If you do get tagged with it, having a way to remove the Confusion from multiple units at once will help.   This was actually something of a problem with several Lucavi fights in the base game as well. Even with significantly buffed Speed, a single unit just can't practically keep up with five enemies. I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about making this fight more challenging without adding some Archaic Demons or whatever.  It's pretty rare to see Demi 2 in this fight without loading up on elemental immunities, and even then Adramelk tends to prefer his status effects.  Other Final Fantasy titles address the 1 vs. many boss fight in various ways, but it rarely seems to offer a satisfying level of challenge.  Giving the boss extra actions for each player character action has sort of worked in the past, but isn't necessarily something that FFT could handle well. With 1.3, the Lucavi simply have very powerful actions instead.  I do think that this fight does handle the “punishes certain actions with nasty counters” school of boss design pretty well, though it might be a little more challenging if sword skills weren't so ubiquitous by this point in the game. Adramelk's Counter Magic is certainly more interesting than Queklain's Critical Quick, which almost forced you to debuff his Brave score down to nothing in order to prevent it, or Zalera's Faith Up which you had no real reason to care about.  You can see one of the biggest weaknesses with 1.3's boss design right here: the Ruin skills. They can basically reduce every solo fight to a matter of staying alive until you land enough of them, which isn't all that much fun.  However, absent any other status effects, they're really the only way for the player to try and level the playing field. On top of that, it often seems like some bosses were designed with a couple rounds of stat breaks in mind. I wouldn't say that 1.3 requires stat breaks, but it certainly encourages them.   Adramelk's Speed is high enough that he'll occasionally get almost back-to-back turns when the ATB lines up. Something to be on the lookout for, because you really don't want to start slipping this late in the fight.  Be sure to keep your health topped off and maintain your buffs.  Big AoE moves like Confuse 2 are a good thing on bosses, as they help overcome the action disadvantage by letting the boss affect multiple units at a time. Queklain, way back at the end Chapter 1, made good use of powerful AoEs. Unfortunately for Adramelk, the inside of Igros Castle is considerably roomier than the Lionel chapel.  Another word of warning: this fight is looooong. Adramelk has buckets and buckets of HP, so MP users can run out of gas fairly quickly. Item can keep that from happening.   If you want to use magical offense, breaking Adramelk's MA down to reasonable levels is necessary, lest you die to Lucavi-strength Counter Magics that do more damage than your initial cast. Double-digit counters are much more manageable.  And here's Seal, the instant-petrification classic. It's only single-target, so it's no worse than watching Adramelk double-punch your units to death; just be sure to bring some way to remove Petrify, or load up on immunity.  Should take just a bit more damage...  (Not shown: twenty more minutes of grinding Adramelk down.)  There we go!  I never cared much for Adramelk's dying lines in the original translation. War of the Lions posted:Adrammelech: Too soon this mortal coil did I assume! Angel of Blood, High  And with that, Adramelk, Angel of Wrath, formerly Dycedarg Beoulve, explodes into green light, leaving only the Capricorn stone behind.   Our hero muses on the ending of his family name. The eldest son is dead, the younger is gone to who knows where, and the bastard and his bastard sister have been declared heretics and murderers.  None of that matters now, though. We've got a sister to rescue! (Again!)  And a trophy for our labors. J. Alfred Prufrock fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Jan 12, 2014 |
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Jan 12, 2014 04:52
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It's great to see you back, Prufock. I was kind of scared you just decided this was too much of a pain in the rear end to do (honestly I wouldn't play 1.3 with a gun to my head, it just looks incredibly tedious).
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Jan 12, 2014 05:14
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I saw a strat that greatly speeds up this fight, leveraging the strength of Martial Arts' PA growth at higher levels and the good compat Orlandu has with Adramelk. Make Cid a dual wielding puncher, give him Hamedo and just enough HP to survive Adramelk's first swing (this causes Adramelk's AI to prioritize punching Orlandu in the face). Keep the others spread out and Adramelk will waste many a turn getting two-fist Hamedo'd, and as a bonus if he does cast Golem then Hamedo attacks ignore the damage shield. One can also add Chameleon Robe wearing casters slinging Holy to speed things up. Corvinus fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jan 12, 2014 |
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Jan 12, 2014 05:43
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JustJeff88 posted:I'm just glad you are well, Prufrock. I've literally had people disappear mid-LP or the like and found out that they died and, once, imprisoned.
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Jan 12, 2014 14:57
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MagusofStars posted:Seriously? Even for the famed LP Curse, that's pretty rough. Oh, I wouldn't make light of that, trust me. Thus my paranoia and concern. To be fair, most LPers don't keep a very regular pace, but when it's months like it was here, I start looking meaningfully at the panic button. The only LP writer I can recall who keeps a really impressively frequent schedule is ddgenha, who did a great LP of the three Gold Box RPG's set in Krynn which are now archived, and just finished the two Savage Frontier Gold Box games as well.
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Jan 12, 2014 17:17
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Glad to see this is back!
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Jan 12, 2014 17:50
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Poor Zalbag, all set up to become a party member and gets unceremoniously offed by Adramelk  Well, I guess we've got enough sword skillers as it is.
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Jan 12, 2014 18:41
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Alacron posted:Poor Zalbag, all set up to become a party member and gets unceremoniously offed by Adramelk It's worse in Vanilla, since the AI is dumber and you'll likely never actually see him use his swordskills.
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Jan 12, 2014 19:07
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Zalbag was still a fascist dick, he just probably wouldn't have killed his father and joined in with the church in a plot to control the nation. "Better than Dycedarg" does not a good person make. That being said, hell yeah more swordskillers.
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Jan 12, 2014 19:54
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Remember: he was the one who gave the go-ahead for Argath to shoot through Tietra. That being said, I honestly would've loved the ensuing awkwardness if he'd been able to join the party, then ran into Delita shortly thereafter.
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Jan 12, 2014 21:23
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Hooray, I'm glad this is back! And yeah, I wish Zalbag could have actually joined you here. Prior to playing this hack, I was always curious about his swordskills since he rarely, if ever used them in vanilla. That said, I still really like his sprite, to the point I've considered using FFtastic to hack it onto one of my generics or something, Formation screen glitches be damned!
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Jan 13, 2014 00:50
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How interesting would it have been if Zalbag joined the party and then Delita immediately stabbed him in the next cutscene?
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Jan 13, 2014 01:05
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At the very least, come back in corpse form again and teach Ramza his sword skills as a sort of redemption.
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Jan 13, 2014 04:04
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I always thought it was kind of weird that Ramza never gets any of the sword skills.
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Jan 13, 2014 04:36
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Alkarl posted:Hooray, I'm glad this is back! And yeah, I wish Zalbag could have actually joined you here. Prior to playing this hack, I was always curious about his swordskills since he rarely, if ever used them in vanilla. That said, I still really like his sprite, to the point I've considered using FFtastic to hack it onto one of my generics or something, Formation screen glitches be damned! What glitches? As someone who put the class+sprite in my own party on my own PS1, his sprite works perfectly. ...Golem as boss-only. Bleh. What a foul way to do it.
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Jan 13, 2014 05:07
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Full Battle Rattle posted:I always thought it was kind of weird that Ramza never gets any of the sword skills. At the beginning of the game it talks about how Balbanes reached the rank of 'heavenly knight' so I kind of assumed that was what Ramza was gonna become or something.
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Jan 13, 2014 05:11
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Regalingualius posted:Remember: he was the one who gave the go-ahead for Argath to shoot through Tietra. That being said, I honestly would've loved the ensuing awkwardness if he'd been able to join the party, then ran into Delita shortly thereafter. One thing I've kind of wondered is if Zalbag is really to blame there. He never actually says "Shoot the hostage", so one could theorize that instead of telling Algus to shoot Teta to get rid of the distraction, he meant for Algus to aim at Golagros, but Algus shoots Teta because Granted, as I recall, Zalbag never really shows any kind of remorse or mentions it at all, so who knows?
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Jan 13, 2014 05:14
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Bloodly posted:What glitches? As someone who put the class+sprite in my own party on my own PS1, his sprite works perfectly. Golem is basically the most overpowered spell in the game because it makes the AI poo poo its pants and desperately try to remove the buff, to the point that mages run up and beat you with their rods and staves instead of casting spells that would actually kill you.
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Jan 13, 2014 05:16
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Full Battle Rattle posted:I always thought it was kind of weird that Ramza never gets any of the sword skills. Yeah, it's weird when you play it, but in retrospect it's kind of a neat thematic thing, especially since Delita gets the big, flashy set, the one everyone thinks of first when you say "sword skill" or "swordskiller." Still makes me wish this was like Tactics Ogre and we got a Law path, though. It'd be neat to have some part of the game let you turn Ramza into the flashy kind of god-killer.
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Jan 13, 2014 07:22
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Bloodly posted:What glitches? As someone who put the class+sprite in my own party on my own PS1, his sprite works perfectly. For some reason he shows up in my formation screen as a discolored chapter 1 Ramza. Works fine in combat and whatnot though. But it could be that I kept doing it prior to his appearance here? 
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Jan 13, 2014 07:42
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JustJeff88 posted:To be fair, most LPers don't keep a very regular pace, but when it's months like it was here, I start looking meaningfully at the panic button. The only LP writer I can recall who keeps a really impressively frequent schedule is ddgenha, who did a great LP of the three Gold Box RPG's set in Krynn which are now archived, and just finished the two Savage Frontier Gold Box games as well. Nobody has poo poo on Grey Hunter. Daily updates for pretty much the real time duration of WWII. And I knew Golem was good, but I didn't know it was so good it turned the AI into mush headed idiots. And thematically I think it works better with Ramza not being one of the Sword Skill classes. He's the poor schmuck stuck in the middle of a war by circumstance and for his ideals, not the chivalry or rules of the various orders that train the skills.
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Jan 13, 2014 07:51
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Bloodly posted:...Golem as boss-only. Bleh. What a foul way to do it. What else would've been a good way to balance Golem? It just breaks the AI; no way around it. It was probably intentional so that it wouldn't feel useless to the player (much like the AI ignoring reaction abilities), but in a patch that tries to balance the game and provide a challenge, Golem had to go.
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Jan 13, 2014 08:09
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Heavy neutrino posted:What else would've been a good way to balance Golem? It just breaks the AI; no way around it. It was probably intentional so that it wouldn't feel useless to the player (much like the AI ignoring reaction abilities), but in a patch that tries to balance the game and provide a challenge, Golem had to go. The only good answer would be to rework the AI to handle it better, but that's very risky as it's easy to introduce horrible bugs or break the AI worse, and is beyond the scope of a difficulty patch besides. Not sure if I'm talking out my rear end here but I think Archael was against doing ASM-hacky stuff and especially tweaking the AI. He just wanted to give it better tools to work with.
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Jan 13, 2014 09:05
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Bufuman posted:Granted, as I recall, Zalbag never really shows any kind of remorse or mentions it at all, so who knows? Basically Algus was right, nobody gives a poo poo about commoners. This is made marginally more clear in WOTL with the extra Wiegraf scene, but it seems like the Templars were taking advantage of this fact to recruit commoners like Wiegraf and Delita. Meaning evil demons are more socially progressive than human nobles. Why, it's almost like man is the real monster... 
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Jan 13, 2014 15:06
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The base plan of the Church is to bring the kingdom(s) under the control of the church via popular uprising, heroic legends, and so forth. They're hoping to create their own 'Zodiac Braves' to inspire the people in this time of civil war and everything sucking worse and worse. They have zero idea of what the stones are actually capable of, nor that some of the weirder stuff like demons and superpowers has truth in it. It's hard to say whether it's just a power-grab or they genuinely want to help a bit. The two tend to mesh together as a matter of course. The Demons don't care one way or the other, as long as they get to work undisturbed, get Altima into the world, and unleash their full powers upon the world. What they intend afterwards is anyone's guess. Anyway, it's not that they're working together properly.
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Jan 13, 2014 15:35
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Isn't the church also fundamentally unaware of what they're worshiping? It'd be like if the Catholic church was, in reality, just a lie made up by Shiva to control the affairs of Earth.
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Jan 13, 2014 16:44
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As far as they're concerned, it's the Germonik Scriptures that they regard to be the truth(Ajora's a rabble-rouser more than a saint).
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Jan 13, 2014 20:12
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Bloodly posted:As far as they're concerned, it's the Germonik Scriptures that they regard to be the truth(Ajora's a rabble-rouser more than a saint). I think most of the church is unaware of the Germonik scriptures - hence Simon being shocked by what he discovered, and the fact that they weren't locked away or burned already, since they basically say "everything the church believes in is a big lie."
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Jan 14, 2014 02:14
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Figured this might be of interest to the thread: there's a new Kickstarter out for a tactics game, Unsung Story. It's being run by Playdek, who have made a name for themselves as one of the top two board game port publishers on iOS. Why do you care?
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Jan 15, 2014 01:51
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PFlats posted:Figured this might be of interest to the thread: there's a new Kickstarter out for a tactics game, Unsung Story. It's being run by Playdek, who have made a name for themselves as one of the top two board game port publishers on iOS. Man, this loving rocks! I've never KickStarted anything before, but as soon as I get my next paycheck I know where a slice of it is going. To be able to play a fresh Matsuno TRPG...drat.
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Jan 15, 2014 03:49
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I have finally been broken on Kickstartering a game project.
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Jan 15, 2014 04:30
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