FFVI Worlds Collide

So yeah, turns out I'm just blind about the whole stuck in Kefka's tower thing. I don't usually leave by foot if I leave at all so the doors just blended into the background. lol

One thing I forgot to mention before is that if you have the start with naked setting checked it effects Umaro and then he is naked the whole game because he can't be equipped. The naked setting probably shouldn't apply to him or perhaps make Umaro able to be equipped even if he can only equip bone club and snow muffler. I believe giving Espers to Gogo was a problem at some point (Read it somewhere long time ago. Don't know if someone figured out how.) but if we could give Umaro Espers, even if he couldn't cast magic and was still berserk, it would go a long way to making him usable cause you could at least boost his stats. Still wouldn't make him good but he would be like Gogo, usable if you get him instead of a place holder to be gotten rid of if you happen to get him. Although an Umaro challenge mode were you always start with Umaro and you can't take him out of the party might be a fun race mode.

Another thing I noticed is that without the Vanish/Doom bug enabled Intangir is a real pain to deal with. If there is a way to make the bug still apply to him but nothing else that would be wonderful but I'll live with it otherwise. If it is going to stay the way it is (and I imagine it will) I wish you could do something with it as it is such an annoying and time consuming fight it feels both amazing to find it and disappointing to kill it. My first encounter with it in WC went something like this "Oh boy! Intangir means free Magic Points! Oh wait I have to actually fight it. Well I should be able to handle it..... Wow it takes forever and does so much damage..... this fight is actually hard.... ok its dead! that was a complete waste of time." I don't know what you would do with this thing but i feel like you could take it out of the normal encounter table and make it its own boss encounter and perhaps beating it takes you straight to the Kefka fight or something. I mean, the thing is harder than Kefka himself honestly.

Now for the Paladin Shield. People like to talk about Ragnarok and Illumina and such as being super items and they are not wrong on paper. The issue is that damage in FF6 is ridiculous. So any item that buffs your damage is basically interchangeable. You can run around with the Illumina or a Dirk and your damage will be 9999 cause your spamming magic. While it is correct that you can mix certain set ups to create similar protections to the Paladin Shield, many of them are boss specific or require multiple really good items. The undisputed kings of items are these five: Paladin Shield, Snow Muffler, Ribbon, Safety Bit/Memento Ring, and Marvel Shoes. Now only Mog can wear 4/5 of this (because you have only 2 relic slots) but everyone but Umaro can wear Paladin Shield and 2 of the 3 defensive relics. Offering would be good but physicals mostly suck compared to the ease and power of magic. (The only notable exception, without getting into glitches, is 2x Fixed Dice + Offering + Genji Glove but that needs 4 items and is rather random plus animations are slow. Magic spam is probably still better.) Gem Box would be great but the added DPS is complete overkill making it a win-more item, most of the time. Pod Bracelet and Hermes Shoes are  just poor man's Marvel Shoes and Marvel Shoes are generally only slotted in if you know a boss doesn't use status or insta death and if they don't use either then chances are they are going to be dead before they can do more than 1~2 actions and your relic choices matter little. You might as well just equip 2 earrings if you got them. You can go through the whole game with one Character equipped with nothing but a Paladin Shield, Ribbon and a Safety Bit and only have problems with Kefka and Magic Master. (as far as bosses go) The former is solved with Life 3/quick healing and the latter with Life 3/Rasp or Osmose.

As for Cursed Shields, the real issue isn't buying 7 to unlock 4 in 256 battles vs unlocking 1 Cursed Shield in 255. The real issue is that you can unlock 1 with 4 in 64 battles and as I explained above you only really need 1 Paladin Shield. If you set up the Veldt right the 64 battles should not take too long, though in a race it might be just long enough. Someone would have to test to find out for sure if the clear is faster after the 64 battles vs the same seed with no shield at all. So cursed shields could be fine.

I have only been playing on the base multipliers of 10,5,5 so it may be that getting GP is too easy with these values but in all the full clears I have been doing I have had millions of excess GP sitting there staring in my face at the end of the run. This remains true even with minimal grinding. I remain highly skeptical that you can set the cost for the shields high enough in a shop in which it is not worth simply buying them at some point in a race as even a fraction of my ending amount would still be hundreds of thousands of GP. You only need 262,140 GP for 4  Cursed Shields at max possible cost or only 65,535 for 1 Paladin's Shield. This could be prohibitive when combined with the time sink for 64 battles for cursed shields. Depends how fast you can get to 262,140 by selling items or selling + minimal farming. However, Paladin's Shield will always be worth a short GP grind as you only need 1.

What this means is that so long as it works out that you can get an early Paladin's shield 51% of the time or more you should fish for it because it just wins the race vs those who don't fish. My experience puts it cautiously at about 60% that at least 1 armor shop has one of the 2 shields, though it is a small sample size. Basically I have been running more of thorough stress tests rather than for speed but 4/5(80%) of my runs have had Cursed or Paladin's Shields (2 & 2) in a shop and in the other I found Paladin's in the Coliseum. Assuming the small sample is inflating the size, I'm hypothesizing that the odds of 1 of the 2 shields falls somewhere between 50-60% and odds of only Paladin's being 25-30%. I got to 60% by basically forcing one of the 4 shield finds to a failure to find to skew against the outcome of a false positive that the results seemed to be showing. I then further skewd the result by only a -10% Margin of Error (instead of +/- 10%). I did this because my original Hypothesis was that the odds of getting the Paladin's Shield early were high enough to invalidate other settings for the seed but an 80% find rate seemed way to high and my sample size was low. Basically I wanted to be able to say something that wasn't "I need more data", even though I do, so I just tried to see if I could form some assumptions against my own hypothesis to try and counter a false positive result.

So what does all this mean? As far as it invalidating the settings, I may have jumped the gun by overestimating the value of cursed shields in a race. Its likely that wont be an issue. The thing to look at is that % chance that you have a seed with early Paladin's available because the higher that is the more the only setting that matters is whether Paladin's Shield is in the buyable item pool or not. Right now it feels likely (I do need more data) to be hovering around the 20-25% mark which is still 1 out of 4 or 5 seeds which still seems high to me. Paladin's Shield is simply such a powerful effect on the game that I think it SHOULD be restricted to chest, boss or Coliseum rewards unless you opt to put it in the shops. You have like 50+ different ways to get 9999 damage a round in this game. Nothing comes close to Paladin's shield. Even Force and Aegis shields, mighty and impactful defensive gear mind you, look pathetically weak after you have used the Paladin's Shield even once. Another option is to mix the shop pools together while allowing repetition of items, either shop to shop or within the same shop's inventory. This increases the number of slots the shield could appear in but drastically decreases the odds of it being in any single slot. It also makes the shops much more random and increases the impact of any single chest. Personally, I think chests should have the greatest impact on gear in a randomizer and shops should merely fill in. My sense is that aiming for a 5-10% appearance rate in one of the game's shops would be fine for the Paladin's Shield if it does stay in the shops at all. That's 1 out of every 10 or 20 seeds and insures that even if someone finds a quick way to get and uncurse a Cursed Shield that the above mentioned % Value never reaches above 50%.

It should be noted that, while i have like 20k+ hours in FF6 in its myriad of forms, I'm neither a programmer nor a speedrunner though I have watched some speedruns of FF6 and some randomizer races. If there is some flaw in my assumption on the impact of the Paladin's Shield on an actual race then I imagine an actual competitive racer can point it out. My theories are based on the assumption that an item as powerful as the Paladin's Shield would be able to shorten one's time if gotten early enough in an impactful way. Thus if the option to obtain that item was available often enough then everything in the race would be warped around a single dichotomy; Can I buy Paladin's Shield, yes or no? and depending on the answer everything else about the race would change. Thus one single flag would wind up being vastly more important than any other and invalidate all the other flags if turned on. If the item is not as impactful as I think it is or if the occurrence is rare enough then all of this is moot. It looks like, baring someone breaking Cursed Shields, it will be rare enough to not be a huge issue but I am wondering now if my initial assumption may have been wrong altogether? In any event, I appreciate WC. I have been waiting for this kind of hack for a while as FF6 is my favorite FF game. Keep up the good work! Noticed the new flags and stuff too. BACK TO MORE RUNS!