FF6 - Brave New World

(I didn't take her to the Fanatics' Tower. I wanted to see if Cyan using physical attacks could be a useful way around some undetermined hindrance. Long story short, no, that was a horrible choice XD).

We could have told you that >.>

Sabin would actually be a pretty good character, though.

Lowered base Stamina would definitely make a nice difference too, especially if the Esper Stamina boosts are reduced so it has a larger impact.

Well, it looks like the current plan is to nerf Morph so that Terra doesn't become Little Miss Damage Cap in her esper form (see the list of changes for the upcoming update below)

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Here's what's on our plates for the next update:

• Write out some of the more gratuitous profanity in the dialogue and add an optional patch that removes *all* of the mod's profanity (and other assorted naughtiness).

• Rework stamina to bring it more in line with the other stats (and also to make the "Immortal Sabin" build less ludicrously OP), which entails significant edits to pretty much everything involving stamina at all: new regen/seizure formulas, reworked esper boosts, adjustment to characters' base stats, and very possibly having Cyan's magical Bushidos run off of stamina.

• Speaking of Cyan, a few of his Bushidos will probably be getting power boosts (namely Tempest, Eclipse, and/or Flurry).

• Umaro will get a massive stamina boost and his "Character Toss" attack will be reworked (current plans are to remove the 8-bit cap from its battle power and the bug that prevents it from critting when Mog is tossed).

• Enemy steals have been updated again in the hopes of making it a more attractive ability, and I'd also like to tweak the formula to slightly raise its baseline success rate.

• Morph will be nerfed a bit since Terra becomes Little Miss Damage Cap in her (current) esper form.

• The Atma/Omega Weapon formula may be tweaked somewhat to make it a less nerfed weapon given the lower levels in this mod; it will lose its back-row capabilities and evasion bonuses to compensate.

• Storm will now target all enemies instead of everyone so that it'll be less shitty and actually worth casting.

• The Palidor summon will be reworked into massive *physical* damage since its current effect is kind of crappy and opens up a *lot* of bug possibilities.

• Control will be going bye-bye since it's a crappy skill that is crappy; the Coronet and Dancho Doll will be reworked into something else.

• We'll probably do something with the Coin Toss formula so that it actually becomes a useful skill.

• Discord to sets bserk/muddle instead of halving the target's level as it was discovered that the level-halving effect was working even if the attack missed (i.e. it was working on bosses, which is bad).

• Make bosses immune to Rerise (via the same method used to make fractional damage attacks always miss them) because of issues with a muddled/bserked Relm (or Gogo) setting it with the Rainbow Brush and the fact that Rerise is (somehow) preventing bosses who drop things from dropping things.

• Correct an oversight wherein it was possible to kill Chupon with Joker Doom without triggering his Sneeze-out, thus rendering the battle unwinnable since Ultros is no longer targetable.

• Correct two zones on the WoR overworld that were incorrectly set to "no encounter".

• A bunch of other smaller things that aren't worth mentioning here quite yet.

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Also, there's a few items in the "I'm currently mulling them over" phase that should probably be mentioned here:

• I want to have a look at Mog's dances and shore up the lesser-used ones; to this end, I'm considering reworking the "Specter" step (Dusk Requiem and Love Sonata) to possibly do a bit of direct damage.

• I'm thinking about having Shuriken be free-targeting, which gives Shadow an early/cheap MT option that shouldn't be too OP since the damage should still split (I've yet to test this).

• The magicite item is really crappy, and I've been thinking about ways to make it more useful for a long time now; I'm curious if there's a way/if it would be a good idea to have it summon the character's currently-equipped esper rather than a random one.

From my perspective, Terra is my go-to character for boss killing. She's earned a permanent place in my top 4 characters due to her being awesome and looking cool too. The Gem Box is a wonderful Relic for Terra, giving her a way to make her MP last much longer than expected. Without it, her expensive booms are spiffy, but generally not sustainable.

Then again, I tend to pamper my highest level characters and leave my lowest to rot. If not for Kefka's Tower 'needing' 12 characters, I'd just go Terra, Figaros, and probably Gogo and win everything. Because of Kefka's Tower, I cobbled my team together, leveled a bunch there, looted the place, and swapped the best gear among parties as needed. That helped when I backtracked and got Locke and did some other things and basically felt like a well-earned overpowered badass.

Sabin is still one of my favorite characters due to him just being cool - Blitzes, personality, and relation to Edgar - and I've not found him to be overpowered. He's near the top of the power list and someone I'd rather have on my team permanently (since I pretty much have over the past 20 years), but not someone I'd seriously consider nerfing.

• Control will be going bye-bye since it's a crappy skill that is crappy; the Coronet and Dancho Doll will be reworked into something else.

Why not change Relm's Control ability into a simulacrum of Rosa's Bless abilty? You can either let it randomly cast a white magic spell on all targets or make two more relics that randomly allow her to cast a black magic spell on all enemy targets or a gray magic spell on the appropriate targets. This would allow some use of her magic stat, which is underused IMO since she gets only high spells. To offset the randomness, perhaps a MP cost could be attached.

• Control will be going bye-bye since it's a crappy skill that is crappy; the Coronet and Dancho Doll will be reworked into something else.

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• I'm thinking about having Shuriken be free-targeting, which gives Shadow an early/cheap MT option that shouldn't be too OP since the damage should still split (I've yet to test this).

• The magicite item is really crappy, and I've been thinking about ways to make it more useful for a long time now; I'm curious if there's a way/if it would be a good idea to have it summon the character's currently-equipped esper rather than a random one.

Would it be possible to rework the Dancho Doll into a relic that increased Relm's stats (by, say, 25%) expressly for Sketch attacks?

I'm all for Shuriken being free-targeting, especially if it splits. It might also give Shadow users another reason to choose Vigor/Stam over Speed when leveling up.

As far as Magicite goes, I never used it personally, but I saw the appeal in random summons, especially with how useful the retooled summons have been. It also let characters possibly use a summon they wouldn't ordinarily have access to (albeit with terrible odds if you're looking for something specific like Zoneseek's ShellX-like effect).

very possibly having Cyan's magical Bushidos run off of stamina.

Not going to lie, at this point I've been wrong on nearly half of the Bushidos, as far as what they use to determine damage or effectiveness. I would recommend adding a "relevent stat" column to the printme, to help avoid confusion (Would also help with some of the Tools and Blitzes).

• Speaking of Cyan, a few of his Bushidos will probably be getting power boosts (namely Tempest, Eclipse, and/or Flurry).

I was actually alright with Eclipse's base damage, mostly because I wasn't increasing anything but Vigor on Cyan but it was still dealing acceptable (Though not great) damage when I needed a reliable full-party smack. But, if Tempest/Flurry are getting buffed, then Eclipse could use one as well I suppose.

• Enemy steals have been updated again in the hopes of making it a more attractive ability, and I'd also like to tweak the formula to slightly raise its baseline success rate.

I had no issues with the success rate, mostly thanks to having Thief Glove on Locke from Zozo on; Mug gives me two shots to steal so even if I missed on the first try (Which was uncommon in and of itself), it was rare to miss on the second. Though if you're trying to encourage using Switchblade steals rather than defaulting to Locke, it might not be a terrible idea.

• The Atma/Omega Weapon formula may be tweaked somewhat to make it a less nerfed weapon given the lower levels in this mod; it will lose its back-row capabilities and evasion bonuses to compensate.

Not sure how I feel about this one. Yeah, the damage on auto-attacks is pretty poor (Not awful, I could get 1200 a hit with Celes endgame in the back row, which was about par with VigorShadow's Fight in back row), but the main advantage of Omega over Zantetsuken was being such a great stat stick along with back row functionality.

• Storm will now target all enemies instead of everyone so that it'll be less shitty and actually worth casting.

• The Palidor summon will be reworked into massive *physical* damage since its current effect is kind of crappy and opens up a *lot* of bug possibilities.

I like both of these changes; Storm made the Flan rage all but useless (Which is a shame because everything else on it was great), while Palidor was either useless or obscenely overpowered depending on how physically oriented your party was.

Control will be going bye-bye since it's a crappy skill that is crappy; the Coronet and Dancho Doll will be reworked into something else.

No tears here, that's for sure. Even though I used it briefly near the end of the game, it takes away all functionality of your primary healer in order to dish out only halfway decent damage.

• I'm thinking about having Shuriken be free-targeting, which gives Shadow an early/cheap MT option that shouldn't be too OP since the damage should still split (I've yet to test this).

• The magicite item is really crappy, and I've been thinking about ways to make it more useful for a long time now; I'm curious if there's a way/if it would be a good idea to have it summon the character's currently-equipped esper rather than a random one.

Shurikens being free-targeting would be nice (Does this include Ninja Star, or just base Shuriken?), though I'm worried that the game might crap itself trying to do the animation for that. Would make Shadow more useful in the Imperial base for sure, possibly worth picking up for Zozo too.

Magicite being based on currently equipped summon could be problematic, since it would make it much easier to get Shell/Rerise on everyone during the tougher boss fights since Magicite isn't a rarity by endgame (I had about a dozen when I finished, plus 7-8 items in my inventory I could trade for it, and I only stole from 2 dragons at best). Or, on the offensive side, give me free Ragnarok/Crusader/Bahamut spam during the endgame bosses, making it easy to cheese them if I horde the item all game long.

From my perspective, Terra is my go-to character for boss killing. She's earned a permanent place in my top 4 characters due to her being awesome and looking cool too. The Gem Box is a wonderful Relic for Terra, giving her a way to make her MP last much longer than expected. Without it, her expensive booms are spiffy, but generally not sustainable.

This is why I tend to spam her status magic in random encounters.

Sabin is still one of my favorite characters due to him just being cool - Blitzes, personality, and relation to Edgar - and I've not found him to be overpowered. He's near the top of the power list and someone I'd rather have on my team permanently (since I pretty much have over the past 20 years), but not someone I'd seriously consider nerfing.

Well, again, the big issue is that if you slap a Life Bell on him, he'll never die. And this is more an issue with how we've handled stamina than it is with Sabin himself (a Vigor-based Sabin is much more in line with the other characters).

Why not change Relm's Control ability into a simulacrum of Rosa's Bless abilty? You can either let it randomly cast a white magic spell on all targets or make two more relics that randomly allow her to cast a black magic spell on all enemy targets or a gray magic spell on the appropriate targets. This would allow some use of her magic stat, which is underused IMO since she gets only high spells. To offset the randomness, perhaps a MP cost could be attached.

I think Flare and Meteor do a good enough job of using Relm's magic, not to mention Cure 3 or any magical attacked popped off of Sketch.

Would it be possible to rework the Dancho Doll into a relic that increased Relm's stats (by, say, 25%) expressly for Sketch attacks?

I like this idea a lot, but it'd be up to Synchysi.

I'm all for Shuriken being free-targeting, especially if it splits. It might also give Shadow users another reason to choose Vigor/Stam over Speed when leveling up.

My two driving points behind this are 1) Shadow is typically seen as one of the weakest characters, so anything that can help him out is appreciated, and 2) it helps make stars and knives more distinct as throwing weapons.

As far as Magicite goes, I never used it personally, but I saw the appeal in random summon, especially with how useful the retooled summons have been. It also let characters possibly use a summon they wouldn't ordinarily have access to (albeit with terrible odds if you're looking for something specific like Zoneseek's ShellX-like effect).

Yeah, the big problem with Magicite is that they have too low of a chance of summoning something useful to be worth using (and would be *way* too overpowered if you could manually select which esper to summon). Having it summon the currently-equipped esper seems like a good compromise.

Not going to lie, at this point I've been wrong on nearly half of the Bushidos, as far as what they use to determine damage or effectiveness. I would recommend adding a "relevent stat" column to the printme, to help avoid confusion (Would also help with some of the Tools and Blitzes.)

All damage is magical unless otherwise stated; all attacks that deal physical (Vigor-based) or stamina-based damage are specifically noted.

I think the only non-intuitive thing is that stamina-based attacks are considered magical (except for Gau's *physical* stamina-based attacks), and thus follow the same rules (i.e. use the magic damage formula and don't get damage boosts from the Atlas Armlet).

I was actually alright with Eclipse's base damage, mostly because I wasn't increasing anything but Vigor on Cyan but it was still dealing acceptable (Though not great) damage when I needed a reliable full-party smack. But, if Tempest/Flurry are getting buffed, then Eclipse could use one as well I suppose.

I'm really not sure how Cyan is going to be handled yet. All I'm really looking at right now is how players are using him: Tempest seems under-appreciated, Flurry and Eclipse are largely ignored, and Dragon ends up being way overused.

I had no issues with the success rate, mostly thanks to having Thief Glove on Locke from Zozo on; Mug gives me two shots to steal so even if I missed on the first try (Which was uncommon in and of itself), it was rare to miss on the second. Though if you're trying to encourage using Switchblade steals rather than defaulting to Locke, it might not be a terrible idea.

I'm trying to encourage stealing in general, really. And this means if it's not fairly easy in the early game, most players are going to be turned off by it.

Not sure how I feel about this one. Yeah, the damage on auto-attacks is pretty poor (Not awful, I could get 1200 a hit with Celes endgame in the back row, which was about par with VigorShadow's Fight in back row), but the main advantage of Omega over Zantetsuken was being such a great stat stick along with back row functionality.

The back-row functionality was really just something that was put there as a desperate attempt to make the Omega Weapon appealing (bear in mind that I grossly under-estimated how appealing the "all stats +7" bonus was). Ideally, it would function much better as a weapon, albeit a more gimmicky, harder-to-use one than the Zantetsuken since it still gives nicer stat boosts. This also has the added benefit of (maybe) even making the Atma Weapon somewhat-useable when you first get it.

If you want to back-row Locke, give him a Wing Edge

Shurikens being free-targeting would be nice (Does this include Ninja Star, or just base Shuriken?), though I'm worried that the game might crap itself trying to do the animation for that. Would make Shadow more useful in the Imperial base for sure, possibly worth picking up for Zozo too.

This would be Shuriken and Ninja Stars (as I noted above), though using Ninja Stars in such a manner would probably be a waste.

I actually tested this animation awhile back with throwing knives (though I don't think I tried it against a fully enemy party of six) and noticed no ill effects, so it should be good.

Magicite being based on currently equipped summon could be problematic, since it would make it much easier to get Shell/Rerise on everyone during the tougher boss fights since Magicite isn't a rarity by endgame (I had about a dozen when I finished, plus 7-8 items in my inventory I could trade for it, and I only stole from 2 dragons at best). Or, on the offensive side, give me free Ragnarok/Crusader/Bahamut spam during the endgame bosses, making it easy to cheese them if I horde the item all game long.

Hey, more power to you. That's the sort of thing I'd like to see magicite actually useful for. I have no problem whatsoever with people actually making use of rare items in the end-game to make their lives easier - that's what they're there for.

Hey all, another new register. I found out about BNW from the Betus Beat like so many others, and I'm enjoying the heck out of it. I'm up to the final string of bosses in Kefka's Tower, so I'll hold off on my full list of comments, but I saw you were looking for feedback on GP Rain, so I gave it a go.

There's a number of problems with it. First and foremost is that you find Heiji's Coin at roughly the same time you get the Fixed Dice, way at the end of the game, which begs a comparison. Assuming you haven't changed the fixed dice formulae, it breaks down like so:

• GP Rain: 60 damage per level, 30 GP per level, disables slots (so no free heals)
  
• Fixed Dice: ~142 damage per level (assuming use of Daryl's Soul), no GP used, doesn't sacrifice slots
  

Fixed Dice are just better in every single way. It's not even close.

Making GP Rain attractive will take some finesse, but here are some suggestions:

• Make Heiji's Coin available much earlier, possibly in Daryl's Tomb.
  
• Buff its damage. It's already buffed compared to vanilla, but it needs to do impressive enough damage to justify the loss of Slots. If it did the damage of a typical winning slot combo, guaranteed, it could be worth losing use of Go Fish and making Setzer use Cure 2/3 to heal instead.
  
• Eliminate split loss. In the context of the above, this seems like a no brainer.
  
• I'd be surprised if this were technically feasible, but giving it free targeting (like a typical spell) and scaling the GP used by how many enemies were targeted. To my mind, that'd be the ideal model for the attack, but it'd probably be a pain to implement.
  

More generally, GP Rain/Gil Toss suffer across all FF games because they look more like throwing away money, rather than paying for a guaranteed awesome attack. Reversing that reputation is a tricky prospect.

It's probably fine for the attack to be relatively expensive. You don't want it to be a permanent replacement for Slots. But ideally, a player would pick it up and give it a try and say "Dang!" but then maybe save it for later when they have more money to burn. But that first impression is important: it's much better for it to be seen as a notable amount of money for a great attack, rather than a modest amount of money for a pathetic attack.

And it'd be a dumb gimmick for sure, but you could also potentially change the move's name to make veteran players give it a second look. :p

Plenty more to say on this awesome mod, but I'm gonna finish the game first. Back soon!

A quick note: there's actually two copies of Heiji's Coin in the game. The first is indeed available right after Daryl's Tomb: the Tarot trades in for it at the Colosseum.

The one in Kefka's Tower is mostly just a cue to unload all of your cash, and probably works better with Gogo than it does on Setzer.

CORRECTION: you're *supposed* to get one from the Colosseum, but the Tarot currently incorrectly trades in for a Relic Ring. This will be fixed in the next version.

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Looking at Coin Toss's formula, the good news is that this should be *really* easy to tweak since it's a simple formula that I don't think needs to be changed beyond altering some of the values (and likely removing the damage split). I think that GP Rain is a really good candidate to utilize a bit 'o stamina-based damage, as well - just substitute it for level and adjust the other values as necessary.

Of course, Synchysi is the one who'd be editing it, so we'll see what he thinks.

In other news, I finally sat down tonight and crunched some numbers with Cyan. I'd like to see this bad boy really shine in the next update, so here's what I came up with:

• Dispatch from 150 power (same as Pummel) to 180 (same as Suplex)

• Empowerer to maximum power because why not?

• Flurry (A.K.A "Quadra Slam") from 75 power to 90

• Dragon from 90 power to 60 and set to use stamina instead of magic power

• Eclipse from 90 power to 100

• Tempest from 60 power to 75

• Aero to have twice as much power (120 instead of 60) when randomly cast from from the Mutsunokami

So, yeah, pretty much bumped up across the board except for Dragon, which will only do the same kind of end-game damage it does now with a pure stamina build. A good equipment load-out in the early game helps keep it the most powerful attack Cyan has when he learns it, even without any levels in Kirin. And bear in mind that it still retains back-row damage capabilities *and* the capacity for instant kills with petrification, so it's still a badass bushido to hold and to love.

On the physical end of things, I wanted to make sure that Tempest was unchallenged for pure damage output even on a stamina-focused Cyan. A high-level (35+) vigor-based Cyan in the front row will eventually break the damage cap with a single-target Tempest; if he seems in danger of being overpowered, I could always slow him back down to being Strago's physical counterpart. Flurry getting a bump likely won't be noticed since those attacks don't ignore defense and still probably won't be hitting for much (the main draw there is still the muddle effect), and I'm still on the fence about bumping up Dispatch to match the power of Suplex instead of Pummel. On one hand, this will help keep it (albeit slightly) relevant in the late-game. On the other, most humanoid opponents are fought early in the game and already eat it hard enough to Dispatch. On the third hand (I can't count), one of those humans is Number 24, and I'm always itching for a good reason to take Cyan to the IMTRF. If I decide against it, my fallback plan is to switch Dispatch to being Cyan's seizure-setting attack rather than Empowerer.

(Bear in mind I'm trying my best to avoid turning Cyan into a Sabin clone, so the more distinct I can keep their skillsets, the better. I'm already giving them both a row-ignoring stamina-based attack that tempts the player with an alternate build, so I sort of don't want to add to that the fact that both of them have their initial attacks set seizure.)

Lastly, Eclipse is probably the most-ignored bushido of the bunch, but I only ended up giving it a slight boost. This is because it has to compete with random Aero casts from the Mutsunokami, since there's no reason to wield said weapon when its random cast is significantly weaker than something you can spam at will and for free. Another concern was Gogo, since I didn't want to make bushido any more overpowered on him than it already is. As for the random Mutsunokami casts, 120 power seemed to be the sweet spot, as I felt it worked best for both Cyan and Shadow with respect to the other MT attacks available to each character.

Heads up incoming +Mag Cyan build. Storm/Eclipse/Holy spam go! [EDIT: Looking the printme over, it looks like Cyan doesn't actually have any +mag espers available. Still going to go for all the +mag items I can find though (NirvanaBand/MagicCube/ForceArmor/Kazekiri go!), and then probably go for a +Stam build to see how that stacks up]

Will probably give Gogo a shot this time around too, since I 100% ignored him last time. Any recommended builds? BTB likes to hint at a couple different builds he's seen for the mime, but I don't recall seeing any concrete "I used him for this" statements.

Between those, a Tools-focused Vigor Edgar, staffrod dragoon Mog, and a more focused attempt at using Setzer (960 health endgame because I only ever gave him +Stam was laziness on my part), I'm going to have a totally different party feel on my hands here. Will probably go for a more vigor-oriented Terra this time around too, leaving her magic more or less untouched so she doesn't run away with the late-game again. Maybe try to rush certain WoR espers as well, so I can have a proper magic-heavy Celes. Any other alt builds people want to suggest? I'll probably keep my "all vigor, murder everything" Locke because I loved that so, but I'm open to other options (I had considered +Mag Shadow, but he doesn't actually have +mag options so that's out; might still try a RogueCloak/MementoRing build for laughs though)

Hey all, just registered to discuss Brave New World. Spent most of the weekend buried in it and just beat it about five minutes ago. Everyone was level 50, so Kaiser and Kefka weren't much trouble. All in all, it was an absolutely fantastic take on one of my favourite RPGs. Well done to everyone involved.

To offer some perspective on Umaro: I did find him quite useful early in the WOR, since he was consistently doing 2 - 3k non-elemental damage every turn, which helped me brute force my way past enemies with specific weaknesses. By the time I'd started seriously building the rest of the characters, though, he was totally outclassed. I'd suggest he needs much higher stamina, but I see you're already planning on that.

MVP World of Balance: Gau. His Stamina was obscene thanks to Stray, so I gave him the Life Bell and he was effectively immortal. I was able to use his Rages in a supporting role (Flan, Rhinox, Defender) or an MT damage dealer (Albatross, Sand Ray, Ninja) depending on the situation, and they weren't redundant. Dragon and Io were useful for a lot of the WOR, but once my spellcasters started hitting the damage cap, he fell by the wayside.

MVP World of Ruin: Strago. Neglected the guy in the WOB, but once he got access to Black Omen, he was tearing through random encounters AND bosses with no trouble. He and Terra were able to kill off all four Kefka tiers simply by alternating Black Omen and Ultima while the rest of the party healed them. Raid meant he was never short of MP.

LVP: Shadow. Less "he sucked" and more "he's very situational". Smoke Bombs saved me during the battle against Kaiser (I wasn't expecting Kaiser to be there and had to wing it, though; I wouldn't have taken him had I known). I think the big issue is that he's a supporting character with a few very powerful support abilities (Fenrir, Regen, Haste, Smoke Bombs) but once he's fired them off... what does he do then? Setzer can at least use curative magic, but Shadow's reduced to throwing shurikens and scrolls, which aren't as useful as the other characters' physical and magic attacks. Maybe if you gave him a bunch of knives with stronger elemental / status effects and kinda made him a version of Sabin that relies on dodging rather than tanking? I know I could farm non-shuriken throwable weapons from the monsters in the Zone Eater, but that seems like a waste of time when the other characters are able to do comparable-if-not-higher damage without wasting rare consumables.

Glitches: In the Fanatic's Tower, the chest containing Crusader opened normally, then defaulted back to its "closed" graphic after I'd entered the menu. It stayed "closed" for the remainder of the game.

Miscellany: I take it Gogo's ability to equip Daryl's Soul is because you're going with Gogo = Daryl?

Also, have Edgar's Air Anchor and Debilitator been removed entirely, or did I miss them?