Patch: Independent Stop

Haha, yeah, it's pretty explicit; $3ADD is only used for this specific purpose! I should have clarified that I was thinking in modding terms, not in terms of sticking close to Square's vision. Even the decision to let Slow affect all timers, including Stop, is pretty explicit, so this patch already strays from bugfix territory.

Fun fact: there is in fact an unused copy of the Speed stat! C2/286D stores Speed into both $3B2D and $3B19, but only the latter is ever used. It's possible they intended to go that route at some point, but abandoned it.

My reasoning is vaguely based on separating buffs/debuffs into magical or physical type; Sleep, Freeze and Poison being physical, while Reflect is of a magical nature.

Sap and Regen are deliberately vague about what they represent; in the case of PCs, the Regen effect is clearly magical, while Sap could represent both physical injuries and magical curses (Phantasm obviously being the latter). However, a creature with inherent Sap or Regen could simply represent it having innate regenerative capabilities, or it suffering from sickness/starvation and wasting away (like Peepers).

Your point about Reflect and Stop is valid. The idea, I suppose, is that physical statuses are innate to your body while magical ones act on your body as an outside force. As such, Reflect's timer shouldn't be influenced by Stop, a separate outside force. The whole thing gets fuzzy with Sap and Regen, and I deliberately contradict myself with Poison, Sleep, and Freeze by saying that thematically, they should be affected by Stop, while on the other hand arguing that buffs and debuffs should remain mostly self-contained and independent of each other for gameplay reasons.

On the other hand, for the same gameplay reasons, I wouldn't want Stop and Poison to stack anyway. The biggest issue is allowing Sleep and Freeze to stack with Stop, I think. There might be no elegant way around it.

EDIT: Come to think of it, Stop itself is used ambiguously by the game, representing both Time magic and physical paralysis or immobilization (for example, Areneid's !Numb or Marshal's !Net). Another reason, I think, to only let it affect ATB and Wait timers.