FFVI Project: Meltdown

-Critique on ideas. I've had varying responses to some of the things I have or want to implement.

Hmm...a lot of the things that you have posted give you new options to varying degrees rather than compose a change in themselves. It's hard to really tell how these will work out until you put things into practice.

-Blind affects magic accuracy.

While that breaks from the standard FF formula, it should probably help to make Blind a meaningful status that you'll want to heal more often. Or you have the option of tanking the fight by just using moves that hit 100% of the time, if that's better suited to the scenario.

-Vitality figures into damage reduction as well as additional HP and MP growth.

This is great, because those are the things that people expect from Stamina, and what it usually doesn't deliver in hacks of this game.

-Agility figures into evasion and accuracy. I presently forget if magic side takes it into account. I think it does.

Depending on how this is implemented, this could alleviate brokenness or contribute to it. It's hard to tell. My biggest worry is that with the ATB pausing during animations, speed is now even more likely to become the "God Stat", like it sometimes seems to in games where animations don't play a role. If speed is contributing to your defense (through evasion), your healing, and your attacking (because you get more turns), you'll have to be very careful not to let it come close to outshining Stamina, Magic, and Vigor/Magic in their respective roles.

-Actual strength and vitality stats now exist for enemies, as do elemental resistence stats. (Previously, they only were provided with weakness, immunity, and absorb stats)

These changes are cool from a technical standpoint, but I don't know how much they'll actually matter. The effects from Vigor/Stamina can be provided by adjusting other stats in most scenarios, I reckon, unless you're really fine-tuning the enemies to be a certain way. Spell resistance is harder to identify than spell immunity, but likely has around the same effect once identified. A player will simply not use a spell once they know it's resisted.

However, it could be used to give enemies varying levels of immunity. If an enemy is resistant to every element except Fire, and weak to Fire, you have an enemy with a 4X weakness. Then just adjust their Magic resistance to what you're going for.

-Back row has a multiplier of 1.5x damage from magic. This could change, but I haven't gotten enough of the game done to really see its effect on balance.

I feel like this should not be a thing. I already think being in the back row generally needs to be discouraged, not encouraged. Taking it slow and steady is often a good idea even when your characters are hindered damage-wise, people really don't need incentive to be there.

-Yes, the gem box is nerfed. No, I don't know if it'll remain nerfed, at least as-is. I may reduce the nerf from half-damage to 3/4 damage.

So you'll get to use twice as many spells, at half power? That sounds pretty interesting. Instead of a broken endgame Relic that improves damage (though some problems would be alleviated if you nerf Quick), this is now a decent midgame Relic that boosts versatility instead. It would allow a character to heal and attack on the same turn if your party needs healing (if your half powered healing spell could do the job), or use two status effect at the same time. Instead of improving it to 3/4 damage, I'd prefer to see it halve MP depending on how hard MP is to restore in your hack. Otherwise, you're losing twice the MP and a Relic slot for some versatility, which doesn't seem worth it. That's how I can see the Relic being interesting anyhow.

-Save points recover HP and MP. Generally, people already use a tent anytime they reach one as it is, so I felt that changing the tent item to something else and automating the process was more efficient than worry about the Tent item's effect on financial balance.

Cool, I keep forgetting to buy those things... XD

-I've dabbled in making curative items fractional, but have abandoned it. I may return to the idea. Presently, I intend to simply add a multiplier.

Personally, I prefer the multiplier, as it sets the healing Items (which don't scale) apart from the healing Magic (which does scale) while still allowing Items to be worth something later on.

-Natural magic lists exist for all characters, but presently only four are utilized. I've been considering at least partially utilizing more, but I would be unsure as to how to allocate that.

Wow, this is pretty cool for hacks in general. No clue how this would be utilized though, so I can't comment.

No comment on Esper bonuses yet, I'll think on it later.

In my opinion people who creates the hacks cares too much about settle a new balance, changing damage formula etc... the only parameter who needs some improvement should be stamina, i believe...

If you edit spells, actors and monsters in the proper way, you've solved the balance problem

This won't solve any balance problems. Vigor simply isn't useful enough when compared to Magic. If you spend the whole game pumping Magic, you will see a significant investment, but if you spend the whole game pumping Vigor, you will see extra shave damage. The formula simply has to be altered to provide balance between Vigor and Magic, no matter what your attacks look like. If the stats are fixed, you can balance them in the way you mentioned, but it won't account for improving stats.

Similarly, (ignoring the menu trick, which is counter-intuitive and fourth wall breaking, something that shouldn't be an inherent part of the game), speed rarely makes a difference because your characters will usually be on par with enemies 1:1 in terms of turns due to animations, if they're using decent attacks (which usually have more elaborate animations as they get better). This could be fixed by changing characters and monsters, but only by slowing the game down to the point where animations make little difference. The ATB patch hurts pacing a little, but that's worse.

@Tenka The other things you mentioned would be cool, but only if they're within the scope of the project.

Those are just my intitial impressions. Take them or leave them.

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