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The best part of these Lucavi fights is the faint cry of rage after the dust settles. It's as if they need to get a final  in
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Jan 3, 2013 17:37
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Rascyc posted:What other way is there for clearing undead this early in the game, if you didn't have the Cactuar?
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Jan 3, 2013 17:54
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Haha I'd never seen Queklain's JUDO CHOP before. It's cool that someone made this version of the game but I can't imagine wanting to play it myself. Good idea for an LP.
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Jan 3, 2013 18:05
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swamp waste posted:Haha I'd never seen Queklain's JUDO CHOP before.
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Jan 3, 2013 18:36
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Schwartzcough posted:I feel that these boss fights are too restrictive in 1.3- they almost require you to come in with certain skills and/or equipment. You almost always need to take out their Brave or their reaction abilities will destroy you. Most of the time you then need to break their stats SOME (so they don't one-shot you with their AoE attacks) but not TOO much (so they don't start using their 100% hit rate instant-death/petrify skills). They're immune to pretty much every status and at least Dark (which half of the powerful attacks in the game now are). They seem to have infinite MP, or innate No MP Cost. There's just not much room to be clever- you do it the Right Way or you lose, which isn't fun in a game based around giving you options. I disagree. Lucavi don't have infinite MP, it's just that most of their skills don't rely on MP to begin with. These are bosses, don't expect them to be vulnerable to the same number of things as any other generic unit. I know you have some sort of ideal scenario in mind where a player can get "clever" by poisoning, slowing, then doing a cute Frog on a Lucavi to win, but there's nothing clever about that. What is actually clever is that the player must now employ a variety of skills and synergy between units to win. Sure, these bosses are more difficult now, but they definitely don't pigeonhole you into one specific playstyle (with the exception of maybe Adramelk, and that one is indeed my fault). There's no one "right way" to win in any battle in 1.3. None of these fights *require* you to lower their stats to win. Prufrock could have defeated Queklain here with a multitude of other combinations of skills and strategies.
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Jan 3, 2013 18:39
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I thought the Lucavi battles were fine with two exceptions: 1) One of the later ones has way, way too much HP. They all kinda have too much HP but one of them just drags for way too long. 2) Another of the later ones (won't spoil it until we get there) can be completely trivialized to the point that its AI is incapable of actually killing anyone.
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Jan 3, 2013 19:06
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Random Battles: Choco Rumble In addition to the reworked story fights and the new Arena battles, 1.3 has a ton of new and altered random encounters, some with enemies seen nowhere else. It would be a shame to let all this content go unseen, so I plan to do a small series of Extras to show of some of the most interesting of the new encounters. Our first stop takes us to lovely Bariaus Valley, where we can take a dip in the river, do a little fishing, enjoy some mountain hikes, and frolic with the friendly...  ...Green Chocobos? Yes, in addition to the White Chocobo in our party and one other kind we've yet to see, the three new 1.3 chocobo types include the Green Chocobo.  If you recall FF7's rather exhausting chocobo breeding minigame, you know that green Mountain Chocobo is associated with stone and earth. 1.3's Green Chocobos absorb Earth damage, have innate Defense UP, and come with a moderately-powerful Earth attack.  Accompanying the emerald flock is a lone Taiju, a tree-like monster with an AoE heal and an AoE revive.  Since they start on the opposite side of the map, and since chocobos are all pretty fast, the gaggle of Greens will spend their first round advancing forward, usually just reaching the river's edge.  With good reach, this will give the player's team the first strike.  Since there are so damned many of the big birds, AoE attacks have no trouble finding plenty of targets.  Toad 2's animation is still pretty ridiculous. So much green.  Status effects, no matter how powerful, are not a permanent solution in this battle. Every single one of those Green Chocobos has Choco Esuna, so you can't rely on any conditions lasting more than a single turn.  Still, getting a little breathing room is nice in the face of such great numbers. Turns they waste curing each other are turns they aren't directing attacks at my team.  The signature attack of the Green Chocobo is Choco Quake, a 2-panel burst AoE attack that deals moderate Earth elemental magic damage.  Because the Greens absorb Earth damage, they will frequently use Choco Quake to heal each other while also damaging enemy units.  And boy do they every love to spam it.  When fighting Green Chocobos, try not to leave enemies sitting around at low health, as the rest of their team will pop them back up to full the second they get a chance.  Being the true pro that I am, I made sure to target that Toad 2 would hit only the chocobos highest on the AT order.  The froggies waste turns running away, and their healers waste turns chasing after them.  Normally Lavian would be swinging for 100 per hit, but Green Chocobos are tough.  With half of them back to their starting positions, the half of the Greens that stayed behind are ripe for the plucking.  They don't have any vulnerabilities to exploit, so just pick your best attacks and fire away.  Spells are a good idea, since Defense UP obviously only applies against physical attacks.  Murasame becomes available at the start of Chapter 3.  It's a lot less potent than you might remember from vanilla, and of course no longer smart-targets either.  Gravi 2 has a cool animation. The sound effect is some weird ghostly shriek, too.  If you can get Green Chocobos to split up they become much, much easier to K.O. Choco Quake makes them most dangerous by far in swarms.  Choco Ball rounds out their attacks. It's no more powerful for them than it is for Iago, which is to say 'not very'.  Wearing away at a Green Chocobo's health obviously doesn't work when it's surrounded by its fellows.   Isolated, however, they can be chipped away, with no way to heal themselves.  For some reason the entire flock really hates Rad in particular in this battle.  Prufrock is carrying a Dragon Rod, a Rod with a whopping 20 WP, among the highest in the game. It can be obtained via Poaching a Red Dragon. (Un)Fortunately, very few jobs that can use Rods have anywhere near respectable PA.  The Taiju decides to break out that AoE revive I mentioned earlier. It would be a much more problematic skill if Treants could enter water. However, as they cannot, most of the Green Chocobos that got K.O.'d in the river are out of revival reach.  I dunno, maybe it's the pointy hat, but they just don't care for Rad one bit.  Good thing they also don't care about reaction skills.  Now he's got full HP and is ready to take another round of chocobo balls to the face.  I prepared Alicia and Agrias with Feather Boots. Not only does Float allow them to walk out across the water without sinking, it also makes them immune to Choco Quake.  Plain old Attacks are just not too threatening.  Sometimes the AI will get caught up on one particular target. This can be exploited with the right reaction skills if you can predict which unit will draw the most fire.   Against enemies that can easily heal themselves without losing momentum, have your own units work in pairs to be sure to always finish off wounded targets.  Confuse 2 is sort of like a giant Choco Star.   See? Agrias isn't even jostled by all the quaking.  The AI's response to status afflictions is kind of weird: some times it will do everything possible to cure them right away, while other times it will let stuff like Sleep or Charm go on round after round.  It doesn't take much to K.O. the last few birds.  This fight can actually be a bit challenging if you go in unprepared and don't know how to deal with the swarm. One could easily spend several rounds trying to outpace Choco Quake, never quite finishing any one enemy off.  With a little preparation and a little know-how, though... 
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Jan 3, 2013 22:04
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Dragon Rods used to be dual-wieldable. They no longer are as of a few patches ago. So slapping Two Swords on a Wizard no longer works out so hot. It still has a proc (Bahamut, I think?) but the lack of decent Rod-equipping PA characters as you mentioned kinda kills it. Obviously that was the intent though, and why Two Swords was removed from it. Very few 1H weapons even come close to approaching 20 WP. Hell, most barely eclipse 10 in 1.3. Honestly though I'd rather use a Wizard Rod or elemental rod in most cases. Interestingly, you can set compatibility with Two Swords/Two Hands independently for each weapon. In vanilla, it's set by category; you can Two Swords all Daggers, but no Dictionaries, but there's nothing stopping you from altering that for each specific one. This is how, for example, you can't dual wield Guns or Crossbows. Most notably, there's also a flag for Always Two Hands, which forces any character equipping it to use the weapon two-handed even if they lack Two Hands. I can't remember if Always Two Hands gives you the double WP benefit of two-handing it or not, my memory seems to be saying it doesn't. Or maybe it does. In vanilla, only Axes and Longbows are Always Two Hands, but 1.3 shakes that up a bit. Oh and you can still force-equip a formation enemy to use illegal weapon setups, like dual-wielding weapons that are not Two Swords-enabled, or enemies wearing armor that's not in their class category or not even in the appropriate slot. 1.3 generally avoids doing this too much, and it isn't like vanilla's not guilty of that anyway (there's characters in regular FFT who wore headwear as accessories).
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Jan 3, 2013 22:26
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Archael posted:I know you have some sort of ideal scenario in mind where a player can get "clever" by poisoning, slowing, then doing a cute Frog on a Lucavi to win, but there's nothing clever about that. But a dull repetitive slugfest as you wear down a bosses bloated HP is so smart, got it. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 3, 2013 22:37
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Dr Pepper posted:But a dull repetitive slugfest as you wear down a bosses bloated HP is so smart, got it. Maybe cut their HP down and massively increase their Speed so they take less time to kill but act far more often. I don't pretend to be a boss design expert.
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Jan 3, 2013 22:46
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Dr Pepper posted:But a dull repetitive slugfest as you wear down a bosses bloated HP is so smart, got it. I personally believe Archael has it right this time (and you better be taking all the heat for Adramelk you monster ) One of the biggest problems with vanilla Lucavi monsters was that they were all pitifully easy (save for one, and oh god please don't bring back the memories  ). Any Lucavi monster with an ability that needed to be charged could be destroyed in no time at all, unless you're purposely gimping yourself. This makes all but that one boss fight not really a boss fight at all.Archael's solution (at least in 1.3, not necessarily so in content) was to design a fight that took more brains than brawn. Oh sure, I'm not going to lie and say some of those HP totals are fair (they aren't), but the alternative is that the fights become too easy. You can make the argument to lower HP totals by a bunch, but the effect that has on the battle is greater than you realize. Even removing 200 HP from a boss can make the difference between a quick kill and a difficult battle. 1.3 is not perfect by any means, but you cannot say that the bosses are not designed well, because they are. They're designed to be hard as balls.
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Jan 3, 2013 23:08
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UmbreonMessiah posted:1.3 is not perfect by any means, but you cannot say that the bosses are not designed well, because they are. They're designed to be hard as balls.
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Jan 3, 2013 23:20
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UmbreonMessiah posted:Any Lucavi monster with an ability that needed to be charged could be destroyed in no time at all, unless you're purposely gimping yourself. I think it should take no time at all anyway, and make these fights giant damage races. The rest of the game tests your ability to respond to diverse situations and to manage the momentum. These fights should focus elsewhere. Or maybe I just like the second Lucavi fight in vanilla so much because its difficulty comes from the sheer speed.
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Jan 3, 2013 23:24
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There are damage race bosses, but almost all of them are against humanoid bosses who don't have ??? stats. Because they're capped at 999 HP max (and most don't even get there), they're somewhat more fair to deal with and tend to be offensive monsters instead of big sacks of HP and frustration.
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Jan 3, 2013 23:33
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Nakar posted:Dragon Rods used to be dual-wieldable. They no longer are as of a few patches ago. So slapping Two Swords on a Wizard no longer works out so hot. It still has a proc (Bahamut, I think?) but the lack of decent Rod-equipping PA characters as you mentioned kinda kills it. Obviously that was the intent though, and why Two Swords was removed from it. Very few 1H weapons even come close to approaching 20 WP. Hell, most barely eclipse 10 in 1.3. Honestly though I'd rather use a Wizard Rod or elemental rod in most cases. Ah, so no more sword-skillers as dual wielding Sage, with Dragon Rod in mainhand, sword offhand. The "Always 2H" flag in weapons doesn't give the bonus that the Two Hands support skill does.
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Jan 4, 2013 01:52
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:I think it should take no time at all anyway, and make these fights giant damage races. The rest of the game tests your ability to respond to diverse situations and to manage the momentum. These fights should focus elsewhere. I would argue that making the boss fights of a strategy RPG be nothing but damage races would be sort of missing the point, but since FFT actually does do damage races, I can't really do that. I can argue that the speed of the second Lucavi fight isn't really what makes it memorable, or even where it's challenge comes from. Though if you mean "speed" in the sense of "it can be over for you in about one turn" then I totally agree with you 
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Jan 4, 2013 02:00
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Archael posted:I know you have some sort of ideal scenario in mind where a player can get "clever" by poisoning, slowing, then doing a cute Frog on a Lucavi to win, but there's nothing clever about that. I feel you are straw-manning this a little with the addition of that "Frog" comment in the end. I certainly hope that no one is expecting what is essentially an instant-death spell to work on a "boss", but on the other hand, Slow and Poison are two status effects (which aren't insta-kills) that most people would assume is meant to be used on big, threatening, singular targets... well, except that most JRPGs have already mentally trained people to not care about status effects because they never work on anything that would be worth it but you can bet that those would get used against bosses in WRPGs.
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Jan 4, 2013 02:56
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UmbreonMessiah posted:Though if you mean "speed" in the sense of "it can be over for you in about one turn" then I totally agree with you Yeah, that. Not losing because you lost momentum, losing because your entire team died to Cyclops because you couldn't kill him first.
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Jan 4, 2013 03:28
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Davzz posted:I feel you are straw-manning this a little with the addition of that "Frog" comment in the end. I certainly hope that no one is expecting what is essentially an instant-death spell to work on a "boss", but on the other hand, Slow and Poison are two status effects (which aren't insta-kills) that most people would assume is meant to be used on big, threatening, singular targets... well, except that most JRPGs have already mentally trained people to not care about status effects because they never work on anything that would be worth it but you can bet that those would get used against bosses in WRPGs. It's a little bit of a straw-man, yeah- but consider this: Zodiac bosses are ONE unit, vs your whole team. Think about that for a second. Statuses become much more powerful vs a lone unit than vs a team that can cure them and isn't totally disabled by one or two members of the team being statused. I can't think of any status effects that I could enable on Zodiacs that would not trivialize a boss fight like that versus a ??? Unit: Frog = Obvious No No Petrify = Obvious No No Faith = Good candidate, opens a weakness with the cost of strengthening the target's faith based magic Innocent = OK candidate, renders Zodiac immune to magic, but also removes Zodiac Faith based magic, might be OP Slow = Auto Win Poison = Auto Win (Mega damage ticks, Poison is % Max HP based) Don't Act = Auto Win Don't Move = Might work, maybe Stop = Auto Win Berserk = Auto Win - It'd disable all of his abilities and reduce him to nothing but easily blockable physical attacks Silence = Might be good, depending on how much it really disables from the Zodiac's repertoire Confuse = Would only last until the Zodiac takes damage, but that gives you an eternity to do whatever else you want on the map, uninterrupted. OP. Oil = Really great status vs bosses, I believe it is enabled to work vs all Zodiacs. Any Zodiacs Oil doesn't work against should be fixed. Float = Might work, Air Weakness is cool CT 00 = Currently enabled to work vs most Zodiacs. Really strong, but has low % chance to work, so it might waste your turns if you try to spam it. I feel that many people who yell "LACK OF OPTIONS! WHY CAN'T I STATUS!?!!? THIS GAME ARE SUCK!!" never take the time to consider what their rainbow utopia of "options" really means on the actual field of battle, especially vs a boss. The 1.3 Zodiac boss battles have several layers of strategy behind them, and there's hundreds of ways to go about defeating them. Queklain is a great example: - If you status break Queklain, he starts spamming Sleep and/or Undead on you, and Full Life on your Undeads, so he's a threat to you even with 1 MA / 1 PA. - If you don't status break his MA, he will spam AOE Dark Bio, which means he won't be statusing you down. - You can tank Dark Bio with M-EV - If you try to tank Dark Bio too much without Dead Immunity, unlucky procs might kill you - When he's low on HP he starts seeing Critical Quicks - You can bring Precision (Mocking Strike) to break his Reaction ability - If you bring Mocking Strike and waste too many turns reducing his Brave to 0, other aspects of the fight might kill you - If you corner him to prevent him from moving, his targeting is weakened, and you can pelt him from afar with ranged units - If you corner him and don't watch your positioning, he will break out of it with Loss, confusing your units, ruining your control of the fight - All of this would be trivialized instantly when statuses enter the picture. Statuses disable basic functions of units. I can't give more examples of strategy layering without spoilers, but trust me, there's more of that dynamic later on. If someone asked me what Zodiac boss I'm most proud of I'd have to say Queklain or Altima I. Altima I = what I consider to be the best fight in 1.3. Adramelk is bad. I need to work on Adramelk. Archael fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Jan 4, 2013 |
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Jan 4, 2013 04:14
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Archael posted:Don't Move = Might work, maybe Maybe give them a weak but battlefield-covering move if the player tries this then out-ranges him? Or maybe make parts of the Fear skillset longer-range so they still get hit with statuses, but aren't in danger of attack spells? Zombie could work too, allowing the player to weaponize healing.
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Jan 4, 2013 04:43
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:Maybe give them a weak but battlefield-covering move if the player tries this then out-ranges him? Or maybe make parts of the Fear skillset longer-range so they still get hit with statuses, but aren't in danger of attack spells? Forgot Zombie. Zombie's good, except then you gain a 999 damage Nuke with Full Life.
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Jan 4, 2013 04:44
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Archael's right that there are several strategies to beat Queklain; mine was to debuff his MA so he wouldn't cast Dark Bio, stay scattered so he wouldn't try a status move (and if he did, it wouldn't hurt much), and simply let him karate chop one unarmored character over and over. The AI in this game is remarkably dumb. FFT's status effects are really, really strong. This is okay in those fights where getting one character out of 5-8 disabled isn't a huge deal, but when dealing with a single, extremely powerful unit, it's just game-breaking. It might be possible to design a boss with more status weaknesses as long as he comes in with hardy sidekicks who can throw support skills around to cure him, but that might still be too easy a fight to win.
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Jan 4, 2013 05:06
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I never liked Lucavi battles, even in vanilla. I always preferred the fights with multiple units, even if there was a 'boss' unit there. (Miluda, Weigraf, That one dude who shoots the fire that gibs my wizard EVERY TIME). More strategic, in my opinion, then the standoff of 'alright who has he dictated to die this round' that ran through the lucavi battles.
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Jan 4, 2013 06:55
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Lucavi mostly disappointed me in Vanilla because I didn't even get to use all of the crazy power my team had accumulated. It was an enemy design that should have worked wonderfully with the "hit for gobs of big numbers" mentality that Archael is opposed to, but they just didn't have the HP to let me play with them. It seems like the mechanics of the 1.3 Lucavi fights need something new, though. Like spacing games with attacks that charge, or damage floors, or some other interactivity. It would be nice if the engine allowed for status effects that work the same but on a lower scale, like if slow worked but didn't work as well. Or maybe if petrify worked kind of like in FFXII, where it decreases physical damage dealt and received.
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Jan 4, 2013 09:35
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Archael posted:It's a little bit of a straw-man, yeah- but consider this: Zodiac bosses are ONE unit, vs your whole team. Think about that for a second. Statuses become much more powerful vs a lone unit than vs a team that can cure them and isn't totally disabled by one or two members of the team being statused. I can't think of any status effects that I could enable on Zodiacs that would not trivialize a boss fight like that versus a ??? Unit: Well first of all, you just listed a bunch of options that could potentially work but that the player can't use because the boss is immune. And some of the ones you list as "OP" aren't all that OP- confuse, for example- when a boss has almost nothing but highly damaging big AOE attacks and they're the only enemy unit, they're STILL going to be pounding your team; just not as "intelligently." Plus, as you say, as soon as they take damage they're cured. And Innocent- it would require building your team around physical-based offense, and most bosses have plenty of non-Faith-based very dangerous attacks. It would just change the battle dynamic without making it a cakewalk; you know, adding strategy. Archael posted:I feel that many people who yell "LACK OF OPTIONS! WHY CAN'T I STATUS!?!!? THIS GAME ARE SUCK!!" never take the time to consider what their rainbow utopia of "options" really means on the actual field of battle, especially vs a boss. This actually doesn't show you the "rainbow utopia" of options- this is showing all the ways that Queklainn shuts down most options. Statuses are out. You can't break his stats too much or he'll start using unblockable status kills. If you don't break his stats, he'll wear you down with his huge AoE instant free attacks- healing options for a group typically requires magic, meaning you'll run out of MP quickly (Prufrock had Dance, but most players won't without obscene grinding or using a save editor). You could cluster around some Monks, but that's just asking to get statused to oblivion in no time (and Chakra is not likely to keep up with Dark Bio's damage unless you break Queklainn's stats). His AoE damage spells also proc death, so you'll need to have revivers in addition to your healers or you'll get worn down in no time- which slows offense, which speeds you running out of healing resources. You can "tank" Dark Bio with M-Ev, except there's minimal M-Ev gear available at that point, so good luck relying on that. Then you have critcal quick, with 100 Brave, a ton of health, and Defense Up and M-Def Up. You're almost guaranteed to trigger it multiple times, which will become an overwhelming amount of damage/statuses to recover from. This is why Brave-lowering is basically required (hence my pointing out that you are practically forced into bringing certain skills). I didn't mean to go on so long, but my original post remains valid- Queklainn is "well designed" in that he is very difficult, but perhaps TOO well designed to the point where you have extremely limited options. He almost becomes a gimmick boss of "find the right approach." I'm not debating that people have probably defeated him in a couple of ways, but the amount of possible valid approaches is VERY limited compared to almost every other battle. There's not much "strategy;" it's just "find the one or two ways to prevent him from destroying you, then it's a slug-fest to see who runs out of HP first."
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Jan 4, 2013 10:25
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I think it's more than just one or two ways, though yes, they all involve surviving and lowering his HP to zero, that's just an aspect of FFT, bosses have HP and so do you. By this logic, the entire game is a "gimmick". I'm pretty sure you can take 100 different 1.3 players that have beaten Queklain and you can find differences in the teams they used to do it.quote:And some of the ones you list as "OP" aren't all that OP- confuse, for example- when a boss has almost nothing but highly damaging big AOE attacks and they're the only enemy unit, they're STILL going to be pounding your team; just not as "intelligently." Archael fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Jan 4, 2013 |
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Jan 4, 2013 11:27
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Archael posted:I think it's more than just one or two ways, though yes, they all involve surviving and lowering his HP to zero, that's just an aspect of FFT, bosses have HP and so do you. By this logic, the entire game is a "gimmick". I'm pretty sure you can take 100 different 1.3 players that have beaten Queklain and you can find differences in the teams they used to do it. Now now, don't be deliberately obtuse. I obviously wasn't saying that lowering his HP to zero was the gimmick- it's that you are basically required to lower his Brave (so, bring Precision), and probably lower his stats (so, bring Battle Skill) and bring strong area healing (White Magic or Summon). I'm sure 100 different players will have different teams, but I bet 90 of them will have lowered his Brave and/or lowered his stats. THAT is how it is gimmicky. And as to Confuse, the player units can't be "doing whatever they want," since they can't actually HURT the boss. Meanwhile, the boss will be hurting them. I can assure you the vast majority of players will not grind up a team of 5 bards to laugh smugly to themselves about how they trivialized the boss. I'll give some alternate approaches for constructive criticism- instead of making bosses immune to all statuses and have Def and MDef Up, take away MDef Up and give them, say, 30 Faith and some status vulnerabilities (say, Confusion). Now they'll take less damage from Faith-based magic and be hard to hit with magic statuses. Does a player want to potentially spend several turns trying to land a 20% status that will only partially hinder a boss? That's risk/reward analysis- strategy. Or do they want to bring Boco, a generally unhelpful unit for a boss fight, with his Faith-independent Choco Star ability? They're weakening their team to exploit a vulnerability. Or say there's a fast, mobile boss with strong physicals and some nasty AoE attacks, but he's vulnerable to Berserk. If you Berserk him, he's strong enough to OHKO a unit every turn, and he gets turns frequently. Hamedo is expensive so most units won't have it, and it will only activate at most ~70% of the time. You'd probably have to find a way to load up on physical evasion for your entire team with lots of revivers. Or you could grind up Hamedo for everyone- is it worth it? These things at least give you multiple options to consider.
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Jan 4, 2013 11:52
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I'm not sure whether the technical details works out but if Temporal Strike is any indicator, giving a boss powerful abilities that are "unlocked" by having Poison or Slow on them might make for an interesting "trade-off" addition to the fight. Can't do that with something like Frog or Don't Act for obvious reasons but a few of those status effects on the list "fits" Though I can see a few problems like AI stupidity or lack of unused abilities to replace...
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Jan 4, 2013 11:53
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Davzz posted:I'm not sure whether the technical details works out but if Temporal Strike is any indicator, giving a boss powerful abilities that are "unlocked" by having Poison or Slow on them might make for an interesting "trade-off" addition to the fight. Can't do that with something like Frog or Don't Act for obvious reasons but a few of those status effects on the list "fits" This is how the Tactician class in CCP works. You get really powerful battlefield-wide abilities, but they require you to be things like Poisoned, unable to move, etc. Makes you wonder if Poison is worth it whent he enemy can get battlefield-wide effects out of it.
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Jan 4, 2013 12:14
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Even just 85 Brave would be a reasonable change to that fight.
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Jan 4, 2013 13:25
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Heavy neutrino posted:FFT's status effects are really, really strong. This is okay in those fights where getting one character out of 5-8 disabled isn't a huge deal, but when dealing with a single, extremely powerful unit, it's just game-breaking. It might be possible to design a boss with more status weaknesses as long as he comes in with hardy sidekicks who can throw support skills around to cure him, but that might still be too easy a fight to win. Random Joe Fuckstick Generic Enemy #153 being immune to almost everything good because he happens to have Item as his secondary and therefore is flagged Immortal is what bothers me. Schwartzcough posted:I'll give some alternate approaches for constructive criticism- instead of making bosses immune to all statuses and have Def and MDef Up, take away MDef Up and give them, say, 30 Faith and some status vulnerabilities (say, Confusion). Now they'll take less damage from Faith-based magic and be hard to hit with magic statuses. Does a player want to potentially spend several turns trying to land a 20% status that will only partially hinder a boss? That's risk/reward analysis- strategy. Or do they want to bring Boco, a generally unhelpful unit for a boss fight, with his Faith-independent Choco Star ability? They're weakening their team to exploit a vulnerability. Though it'd work for Queklain, as you could easily just make Dark Bio MA-only or UnFaith dependent, or even give him some Untruth-like abilities. You'd basically lose Full-Life though as it would tank its accuracy, but that's one of the only "normal" spells he gets. Archael posted:I'm not sure you understand how Confuse would actually work in a situation like this. A boss that can be confused is immediately trivialized with 5 player units running around the map doing whatever they want. It'd be very OP. code:Perhaps not making every boss vulnerable to this status or that, but maybe each of them has a vulnerability to one or two things would be interesting. p.s. There actually is a boss that's vulnerable to Berserk in 1.3. I presume that wasn't intended, because it is actually pretty hilarious. Berserk should definitely not be an option on any enemy that isn't largely a physical attacker to begin with... though I could see it as a vulnerability on one or two human bosses. The real problem with Berserk is it never wears off, or else it'd probably be fine.
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Jan 4, 2013 15:10
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Nakar posted:p.s. There actually is a boss that's vulnerable to Berserk in 1.3. I presume that wasn't intended, because it is actually pretty hilarious. Berserk should definitely not be an option on any enemy that isn't largely a physical attacker to begin with... though I could see it as a vulnerability on one or two human bosses. The real problem with Berserk is it never wears off, or else it'd probably be fine. Does Berserk affect gun damage? It might be a good option to give the player for gun-using bosses, since it'd trade their abilities for really big damage that can't miss due to the gun's innate Concentrate.
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Jan 4, 2013 15:30
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Schwartzcough posted:I'll give some alternate approaches for constructive criticism- instead of making bosses immune to all statuses and have Def and MDef Up, take away MDef Up and give them, say, 30 Faith and some status vulnerabilities (say, Confusion). Now they'll take less damage from Faith-based magic and be hard to hit with magic statuses. Does a player want to potentially spend several turns trying to land a 20% status that will only partially hinder a boss? That's risk/reward analysis- strategy. Or do they want to bring Boco, a generally unhelpful unit for a boss fight, with his Faith-independent Choco Star ability? They're weakening their team to exploit a vulnerability. Also, the issue with making the bosses vulnerable to Slow is that they either keep their current speed, in which case Archael is correct that Slow trivializes the battles, or they get their speed amped up to account for the fact that they can be slowed, which simply forces the player to use Slow or die horribly. The problem with status effects - especially against a single enemy - is that they're nearly all incredibly binary in effect.
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Jan 4, 2013 15:33
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:Does Berserk affect gun damage? It might be a good option to give the player for gun-using bosses, since it'd trade their abilities for really big damage that can't miss due to the gun's innate Concentrate.
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Jan 4, 2013 15:41
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Schwartzcough posted:I'm sure 100 different players will have different teams, but I bet 90 of them will have lowered his Brave and/or lowered his stats. THAT is how it is gimmicky. From what I've seen on the 1.3 board (which is where I read the majority of playthroughs in) very few people bother to spend the turns to lower his stats because they can just play against him and win with a capable team. You have the option to lower his Brave by investing a bunch of turns, but really, once you learn the game, Queklain getting a few extra turns when he's about to die won't make a difference, and neither does his Dark Bio spam. If you're first learning the game, then you can throw someone a strategy of "bring Battle skill and lower his MA, just watch out for statuses later" to help them out since it's rather easy to explain. It's the same later on- You have the option to use Mocking Strike or Knight Ruin skills, but that's just a feature of what those skills do and how they interact vs single target boss fights, because the effects of those skills stack. Spamming Mocking Strike and Ruins is not always the most efficient method of taking down a Zodiac boss, which is why I disagree with you. Sometimes it's better to just have a good team capable of handling the fight, full stat-boss or otherwise. That said, it's awesome that those skills get a chance to shine vs Zodiacs. The fact that we can now see a large variety of stuff being used (and encouraged) throughout the game is a big step in the right direction. quote:The problem with status effects - especially against a single enemy - is that they're nearly all incredibly binary in effect. quote:I obviously wasn't saying that lowering his HP to zero was the gimmick- it's that you are basically required to lower his Brave (so, bring Precision), and probably lower his stats (so, bring Battle Skill) and bring strong area healing (White Magic or Summon) quote:Or say there's a fast, mobile boss with strong physicals and some nasty AoE attacks, but he's vulnerable to Berserk. If you Berserk him, he's strong enough to OHKO a unit every turn, Archael fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jan 4, 2013 |
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Jan 4, 2013 16:30
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Archael posted:This guy gets it. A lot of status effects are indeed pass / fail in a single target boss scenario. Confusion included. If you could Confuse them, the strategy would globally become: "Reset until Confuse lands. Spam Bard Songs / Ruins and win" for EVERY lone Zodiac boss. Or I guess you could theoretically arrange it so you could hit him with confusion right before each of his turns while still getting a few attacks in, but if somebody can figure out how to do that reliably, I think they've kind of earned the victory.
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Jan 4, 2013 18:47
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The Wu-Tang Secret posted:It's not pass/fail, though. It wears off as soon as he takes damage. Confusion just means he'll sometimes attack the closest person and sometimes throw out random AOE's, and that will last until either one of your guys hits him or he tags himself with a Dark Bio. Since you can't attack him, all that does is give you time to buff your guys. I guess you could use Battle Song or Magic Song to buff everybody's PA or MA to 99, but if you seriously think grinding several characters up to a high-level job just so you can stand around for a hundred turns before killing him is going to become the global strategy for defeating Queklain, then I think you might be wrong? Stat breaks won't clear Confusion. The strategy would be: Land 1 Confuse, Stat Break to 1, clear confusion, dps boss down. The AI needs to not be so easily shut down / manipulated via statuses for these bosses to pose anything close to a challenge. I'm not sure you guys are really taking into account just how bad this AI is in comparison to what you as a player can become aware of. As I mentioned before, this isn't chess, it's an RNG driven SRPG- you will be limited as a player, and the AI won't always play by the same rules as you. I'd rather they remain immune to pass / fail statuses than to create complex abilities / if / then / elses just so people can feel good about having their statuses work on bosses. It's a bad way to tackle what's essentially a non-existent problem.
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Jan 4, 2013 18:56
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The game engine and AI are critical parts of how a strategy game can play, and unfortunately for 1.3, most of FFT's limitations are hardcoded.
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Jan 4, 2013 19:08
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The AI can be really sharp tactically, like being able to bounce a reflected spell across the map. But it's really dumb strategically. A lot of the time in 1.3, AI abusing is the fallback strategy when all else fails. There's been many a time where the AI continues to choose the "best" option while being completely unaware that it's making no progress. Also, a Berserked boss would be incredibly easy to handle. Any player who has made it to a Lucavi boss can easily handle one unit OHKO'ing once a turn.
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Jan 4, 2013 19:23
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Archael posted:It's a bad way to tackle what's essentially a non-existent problem. Against a Lucavi boss, for example, it's hard to recommend Planar Magic. White Magic, Summon, Dance, and even Talk Skill are all much better than it is. The counterpoint to that is that you could say "Yes, but Planar Magic shines in encounters with large numbers of generic enemies," but it slides off quite a bit later in the game due to voluminous status immunities and the long CT on some of the abilities that do still work like Return 2 (which, admittedly, can be used to lock down encounters if chained, but it takes some genius-level CT manipulation to pull off). And it isn't like Summon and Dance are bad in those scenarios either. This isn't strictly limited to status effects of course. You have situations like Steal having little to no use against non-human enemies, which is something that was largely true of vanilla. But compare Steal to the redesigned Battle Skill; sure, the Breaks don't work on non-humans, but the other half of the set still does and is incredibly useful. Non-human Charm-immune enemy? You have Gil Toss, which is marginally stronger than Throw Stone... but Basic Skill has a status remover, a free revive, Accumulate, and a move that ignores evasion. A certain skillset for a special character that had this same problem in vanilla got a move added to make up for it, so I think it's worth considering (although I couldn't tell you what Steal could possibly get that would be useful and not overpowered). If some classes had situations where, at worst, about half their stuff still worked and could form part of a winning strategy, I think it'd feel a lot less frustrating even if status effects remain mostly blocked. Talk Skill for example still has lots of things it can do when Threaten/Insult/Mimic Daravon don't work: Preach your units for Reraise, Solution enemy buffs away (enemies ought to buff themselves more by the way, especially over innate statuses), Warn to increase evasion, and Persuade to try for CT0. That's three separate support roles (sandbagging, damage mitigation, and enemy weakening). Also, Black Magic's best spell being something that 99% of bosses absorb seems like a cruel joke when Holy still works and also gives you a set with healing, revival, and status cures. I wish it were a nice chunky Fire spell instead so that the Oil combo on bosses would be a highly encouraging way to dish big spell damage but with some required setup. Just a question, but is Oil removed on the first hit of a multi-hit fire attack or at the end? I never tried Asura + Oil.
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Jan 4, 2013 20:00
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