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my only regret is that i never called her biggie smallz
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Oct 15, 2017 22:02
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| # ? May 16, 2024 04:30 |
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 Episode 66: Death Roulette
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Oct 17, 2017 23:28
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Didn't you at one point get the weapon for Hawk that makes his Half Vanish do 50% Max instead of 50% Current HP? Feels like it'd do a lot of good on high-threat targets like Zombie Dragons, etc.
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Oct 17, 2017 23:51
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that only works on bosses if i remember Tea's explanation correctly
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Oct 17, 2017 23:53
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Huh, that strikes me as the sort of thing that would not work on bosses, but I guess it really just sets it to 999 out of A Fuckton. Fair enough.
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Oct 17, 2017 23:58
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it works differently on bosses - instead of taking half, it takes 1/32nd. this is how i calculated the god-beast of darkness's remaining HP during our battle with it. so i mean, yes, if you manage to cast half-vanish on a boss 32 times with his final weapon, you will kill it. for sure. no question. best of luck with THAT given how aggressively a lot of the bosses react though.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:36
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Coolguye posted:it works differently on bosses - instead of taking half, it takes 1/32nd. this is how i calculated the god-beast of darkness's remaining HP during our battle with it. Unless it heals.
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Oct 18, 2017 00:52
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Coolguye posted:it works differently on bosses - instead of taking half, it takes 1/32nd. this is how i calculated the god-beast of darkness's remaining HP during our battle with it. Oh, okay. Now all of that makes sense. 
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Oct 18, 2017 04:34
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Kyrosiris posted:Didn't you at one point get the weapon for Hawk that makes his Half Vanish do 50% Max instead of 50% Current HP? Feels like it'd do a lot of good on high-threat targets like Zombie Dragons, etc. gently caress me I'm a moron. Yes, this would work.
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Oct 18, 2017 10:19
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 Episode 67: Better Stronger Harder Faster As an aside, in Episode 66 Coolguy an I mentioned that we felt melee was weaker than it should be. Praetarius as ever kindly responded saying this: quote:I don't see why you think that your damage was "a wet noodle". Melee attack did 29-56, Hawk's arrow was 153 - that was also an enemy with very high defense. The number is higher yes, but you can apply normal attacks much more frequently and most importantly aren't stuck in a spot. You're not supposed to facetank enemies, so mobility is vital. Late game melee is supposed to be used with buffs, especially sabers, not standalone. Get the right saber and that would be about double damage at that point. Or energy ball for much more critical hits that give a similar damage increase. In doubt a pinch of power up/def down. In short: buffs are NOT only for boss battles. I actually think this is really interesting, because I sat down for a bit afterwards to think about whether what I was saying was fair. Thinking on it, I don't think I'm unjustified in my comments: My thoughts broadly are that a buff from Lise constitutes about a 20% damage increase and a saber is obviously a lot more potent. But since our sabers are located on Angela and have quite a long cast time, I've noted that our opportunity cost for a saber is snowmanning all enemies. Additionally since enemies have different weaknesses, we'd then have to switch sabers to hit weaknesses, which means even less time snowmanning people. So let's examine. I could buff Lise's damage, but Hawk with half vanish hits for around 700 damage twice, in the same amount of time it takes for Angela to cast a multitarget level 3 spell. Typically these do around 400 damage distributed across three enemies alongside status effects. So Hawk will hit for 1400 damage and Angela for around 1200 damage. In this time Lise rarely gets up Light Shot Spear, which means she's hitting around 2-3 times, for about 80 damage or so. So 240 damage overall + whatever Light Shot does, around 200 to each enemy last I recall. That adds up to around 840 or so. And of course this ignores that melee attacks can miss. So logically, were I to buff anything, I'd buff Int to up Angela's damage since it's higher than Lise's. Were I to use sabers, the same would be true. So broadly, whilst the game is well designed enough that melee is important because of certain boss mechanics, on a random encounter basis it just seems a lot weaker than magic and is purely there to keep monsters off your casters. Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Oct 19, 2017 |
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Oct 19, 2017 23:26
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yeah, even beyond that, quite bluntly i think that's a loving ridiculous notion with the current state of buffs. if buffs lasted until dispelled/until death, then yes, absolutely, i can totally feel where he's coming from - you set up your strengths and then play to them until your strength is broken. due to the setup the game has, and all of your buffs disappear from one screen to another, however, that's essentially asking you to stop and cast spells for as long as you intend to fight it out every screen. even if i weren't doing an LP, i would get entirely sick of that obvious padding very, very quickly. do not waste my time, as a player.
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Oct 19, 2017 23:43
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I wonder if the cast times would feel less brutal if you had more Agility on Angela. I know the effects aren't supposed to be that huge, but I can't help but wonder that if she had ~25 Agility instead of ~25 Spirit if she'd be gunning things out noticably faster. E: That said this would also lead to her dishing out more damage faster, so who knows.
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Oct 19, 2017 23:46
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you would be looking at an extra 20 frames saved with an extra 10 agility per cast; honestly, the cast speed is not the thing that makes me object to this most - it's the spell animations! spell animations are fine and cool the first time you see them, but by the time you've used them 500 times, they are nothing but a time sink. and this is doubly true when the spell in question is something like Power Up and does not directly solve the problem of murdering a dude. if we've been doing it wrong by not having Lise start off the fight with a multi-target power up, then i'll take the collective time i've spent being wrong and go do an entire other let's play.
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Oct 19, 2017 23:55
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Yeah, that's fair, and I thought about that like a minute after I typed that, but oh well.
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Oct 19, 2017 23:56
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I'd also imagine that if you had, say, Kevin or Dark-path Duran around it might change how things get slanted somewhat. Or maybe even just Dark-path Hawk, who bundles debuffs and damage so well.
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Oct 20, 2017 05:38
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 Episode 68: Good Job Praetarius!
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Oct 21, 2017 13:06
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I’ve got to say, all of Praetarius’ reasoning for the hard mode mechanics just sound like he’s spent so much time tweaking things to his own preferences, he’s lost sight of what’s good or accessible for other people.
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Oct 21, 2017 18:25
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Stun Wind inflicts Silence, right? Might want to try that on stuff that resists Snowman.
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Oct 22, 2017 02:14
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Unoriginal One posted:Stun Wind inflicts Silence, right? Might want to try that on stuff that resists Snowman. There's also a mass chibikko spell that they have access to. It can even be cast at the same time!
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Oct 22, 2017 02:42
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Green Intern posted:I’ve got to say, all of Praetarius’ reasoning for the hard mode mechanics just sound like he’s spent so much time tweaking things to his own preferences, he’s lost sight of what’s good or accessible for other people. It's a recurring problem in hacks that increase a game's difficulty. Not everyone plays games in the same way with the same strategies at the same level. In general I've been pretty impressed with the balance of this hack and the effort put into it, but stuff like the demand for buffs/debuffs for even random encounters, the punitive and unrewarding nature of melee, and the overall difficulty spike in the last leg of the game still feel wrong. This is a really good hack, but I think a little less hardtype would go a long way.
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Oct 23, 2017 02:04
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Oh, Praetarius definitely put a lot of work into making the hack function, and I believe that there's some kind of internal logic and rules to all the various boss encounters and whatnot; they're just coming from a person who has one vision of how it's meant to be done, based on some unknowable number of hours. Game design is hard, making that design accessible is possibly harder?
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Oct 23, 2017 02:35
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So two things: The first is that Coolguy was away this weekend so I'll be putting some bonus episodes up when I get a little spare time to record them. The second is on game design. I feel like the game has been incredibly well balanced for the most part and that melee and magic have been competitive with each other for a really long time. It's only come apart fairly late on which is genuinely impressive. The problems come because you have to balance Lise and Duran with Hawk and Kevin whilst being constrained by how the Str stat works. Specifically, with Aura Wave, Nightblade Hawk and Death Hand/Dervish Kevin can create a setup where they load an FST in a single attack. The question is then how you balance that with Lise and Duran without either becoming amazingly broken. I have no answer to that, other than to not have tech gauge gain improvers exist in the game, but they are genuinely so much fun to play with that it would be a real shame. When we compare to the base game, where a Duelist Duran/Wanderer Hawk party could oneshot every single pack in the game with two spells, it's still night and day. The final part is this. We're not playing the intended difficulty of the game. Praetarius balances around a harder difficulty and we play on one that's easier. I'm not sure how much that affects things, but that's also something to consider.
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Oct 23, 2017 21:08
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Sorry for no bonus episodes last week folks! Have some normal episodes instead:  Episode 69: Two Greater Demons
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Nov 1, 2017 00:03
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episode nice
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Nov 1, 2017 00:22
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I didn't think they could make Black Rabite's desperation spell combo worse but HERE WE ARE
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Nov 1, 2017 00:45
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I just finished this myself, though I haven't gotten through all of the LP yet. I'm running almost the same team as you guys on the same difficulty because I wanted to see how bad everything actually was if I actually knew how the bosses worked. I have Nightblade instead of Wanderer for debuffs, but otherwise I went with Vanadis and Rune Master. I knew the boss gimmicks for the bosses going in for the first few God Beasts but I just killed the others just fine without playing around any gimmick. I actually killed the Ice god beast way slower than you guys did in the winning run and had a lot of trouble with the moon one too, where I almost ran out of healing items. Wood GB was actually impossible until I left the zone to shop and come back cause I never bothered getting the status immunity items even though I knew the gimmick in my head, and the rest I didn't really do anything special for. I didn't focus the main head for Zable and just got it down eventually anyways, because Nightblade/Vanadis have full screen L3s and I use the "hits give 3 tech bars per hit" weapons, while Angela just multitargetted all her spells. Some general feedback on the hack: -I don't see how this game is actually playable without heal light. The reliance on spells and healing for late game is really absurd. -Because enemies use their skills so much and the game expects you to use your skills a lot in the hack, also because you have weapons that drastically increase your tech gauge rate, the game just gets really miserable because of the long screen freezers. -Black Rabite is much harder than the actual final boss. I'm not sure if Black Rabite was an optional patch I applied, but it might be. I didn't realize it would be required to get through the last area if it was an optional patch. -I also think physical attacks are terrible compared to magic. Angela gets off her L3 spells while Hawk/Lise are stuck in dodge animations before getting off a single attack. -Those imps that fully reflect magic (don't take any damage/effects from spells) and are also nearly immune to physical in the endgame are incredibly stupid. I think Praetarius expects people to carry Specter eyes and just use them on every enemy like this, but Specter eyes cost 3000 each and these imps can just spawn all over the place so that seems a bit absurd to me. -I don't think trying to make all equipment balanced no matter where you get them in the game is a good idea. It's not fun to feel like you're not getting upgrades in equipment later on. -Similarly, smoothing out the leveling so you end the game at high 90s is fine but again it's not fun towards the end to level up and feel like you're adding to a stat where you won't notice any difference. Overall, the hack does a lot of things to make the thing better but just highlights why I don't think this game, or a lot of other JRPGs, actually should have difficulty hacks. The engines are just not made for difficulty hacks and the difficulty changes don't necessarily make the game more fun or interesting. The combat is not made for technical play and a vast majority of things that are dangerous to you in combat you don't have control over anyways, since they're party-targeting screen freezers.
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Nov 1, 2017 19:14
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it's made me wonder what a game of this nature would play like using modern gameplay techniques and no screen freezing at all. perhaps we'll see with the SoM remake that's currently scheduled to hit steam next February.
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Nov 1, 2017 19:32
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Coolguye posted:it's made me wonder what a game of this nature would play like using modern gameplay techniques and no screen freezing at all. perhaps we'll see with the SoM remake that's currently scheduled to hit steam next February. Something like Seiken Densetsu Warriors (c.f. Dynasty Warriors / Hyrule Warriors / etc.) would probably work pretty well, though those games tend to emphasize one-vs-horde combat. Otherwise, your average 3D brawler / style-em-up (Devil May Cry, God of War, etc.) would be a decent starting point. Hell, that D&D arcade brawler (Shadows over Mystara) could plausibly be remapped to the Mana series; it even has ring menus for casting spells and using items! I expect any remake to hew pretty closely to the original game's mechanics, though.
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Nov 1, 2017 20:40
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So Ultima, I feel like our experiences mirror one another because of just how polarising Rune Master is. Rune Master is just a stunningly powerful class with her final weapon. There's literally no other class in the game from Praetarius' notes that can lay down mass status effects the way she can and since snowman is so crippling to so many enemies a party will naturally just end up centralising its composition and tactics around Angela. In fact the more I look at it the more Praetarius' design seems to goad you into doing something like this. The requirement for buffs and debuffs means that at least two party members get placed into utility roles to ensure you have good coverage. The last party member is at more liberty to focus on damage. In a way Coolguy and I defied that a little by placing Hawk as a wanderer instead of going into the more natural ninja master route. But for the majority of the game we were still majorly focused on Angela. If you will, engage in a bit of a thought experiment where our party concepts instead center around a physical damage character. My initial thought is Kevin/Hawk/Lise, Death Hand/Ninja Master/Vanadis. We equip them all with sudden spell and Death Hand Kevin with as many tech boosters as he can find. Death Hand comes with a basic increase to level 3 tech damage and packs a maxed out 30 STR (1 less than Vanadis Lise). Every encounter your party casts Attack Up with Vanadis, MT Earth Jutsu for def down and Aura Wave with Death Hand. Kevin strikes twice, immediately hits a level 3 tech, uses it and can just keep doing that over and over. I wonder if that setup is polarising enough that you'd almost entirely rely on melee for the rest of the game. That being said that doesn't stop the problem with screenfreezers since we're just trading a spell freezer for a melee one instead. So let's try to fix melee without resorting to freezers at all. I think almost all the problems melee has ultimately resolve around Agility and the long term consequences of Praetarius fixing the stat. The first is that dodges shouldn't provoke your character into doing a dodge action. You just get stuck doing a useless backflip because you had enough agility to dodge, but since your agility affects your ability to hit, you can either take none and be unable to hit anything or take enough and lose tonnes of time to backflipping. Second, Agility should affect the amount of raw melee damage you do as well. Casters have a straight advantage over melee in an SD3 where stats actually work. Our Angela just piled every point she had into Int because of how much it improved her damage and then focused on defensive stats. We never put a single point in strength for her and honestly, we never really needed to put a point in agility either since the castspeed increase per point is honestly pretty miniscule. So of 6 stats she could just max 4 and be very very effective. Compare to melee, where they absolutely need Str and Agi or they can't hit and absolutely need Vit/Pie/Luck otherwise they get battered. The only stat they can really ignore is Int and if they do they spend more time casting buffs and debuffs instead of battering the boss (For Lise, Duran and Kevin). Again, our problems arise because melee needs to be focusing on both Str and Agi at the same time. I feel like this is something that Praetarius should /probably/ look at. But I think more importantly Praetarius runs with an implicit assumption that buffs and debuffs favour melee more than ranged when in reality they're value neutral. Additionally he's running with an assumption that sabers are powerful tools for random encounters, when the mixed nature of the packs he sends at us makes them incredibly limited at best, for all we know the Earth sabre that we cast could end up healing another enemy.
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Nov 2, 2017 19:35
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 Episode 70: 794!
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Nov 3, 2017 01:42
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gently caress yeah, Full Vanishing trash mobs.  E: Holy poo poo that Archdemon fight. Kyrosiris fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Nov 3, 2017 |
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Nov 3, 2017 07:35
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Do you get anything for killing Black Rabite, or is it just for fun?
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Nov 4, 2017 00:04
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In the normal game nothing. In this game, he blocked the way to progress so he was another boss.
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Nov 4, 2017 00:19
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Bruceski posted:In the normal game nothing. In this game, he blocked the way to progress so he was another boss. Actually in the normal game he can drop a Moogle Badge which transforms the party into Moogles.
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Nov 4, 2017 12:56
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 Episode 71: Dead that really happen?
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Nov 4, 2017 23:28
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As the first time I've ever actually seen any of the endings of this game (despite loving it to death), thank you so much for the entire ride. Nat20 and Coolguye, thank you for the LP, and thank you Praetorious for making this mod. The entire experience was a treat.
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Nov 5, 2017 00:18
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Ditto, there was a lot of suffering that went along with this and I know that I definitely appreciate all the work you put into it. Until your next project!
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Nov 5, 2017 03:08
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Thanks for the LP, you two!
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Nov 5, 2017 03:57
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Thanks so much guys. It was a pleasure to do this and playing the LP every Sunday was a genuine highlight of my week. I went through some pretty bad times while this was happening and doing it always brightened my mood. I've one more video coming up, Let's Review SD3 Hardtype, that I'm busy scripting up at the moment. After, I'll probably close up the thread and keep updating bonus episodes through my channel if people are interested. Looking back at the LP and reviewing how it went is probably also important: Good things: How we started out. So one of the things I'm consistently impressed by is how well we retained viewers through the first 12 episodes or so. There's a dropoff after episode 1, but around 70-80% of people kept going through with us, which I was really pleased about. To analyse why: by luck our first episode ended up having an amazing hook thanks to the ninja that threw out silhouette slice. But also, I was absolutely meticulous with sound editing for those first few episodes to make us sound silky smooth. More than anything though that speaks to Coolguy's experience in guiding me in the LP and keeping things light while I tried to analyse everything that was going on in the game. Voting: I felt like the class change voting kept people involved in the thread and built up a fair bit of hype when we were first picking our party. I was impressed by how many well thought out opinions came when talking about teams and was really pleased with the team we ended up with. Bad things: My biggest mistake was not thinking about the bonus episode concept until really late in the game. It would have helped during the absolute hell week that was Dolan. Also my first pair of bonus episodes were absolutely terrible because I messed up the recording. Lategame interaction: Perhaps inevitably, interaction in the thread fell off with the God Beasts and the Dark Castle. I think a better LPer would have been able to find a way around that and looking back I could probably have posed a lot of the more introspective questions I had about the mechanics of Hardtype earlier as a way to promote more discussion. Also perhaps inevitably, later on I got a little laxer with sound editing. For the early episodes I would spend around a minute editing sound for every minute of recording we had. I'd edit out every button press from Coolguy I caught and would edit away any time we talked over each other. Later on I abridged that process a /lot/ because I could feel myself burning out a little. Still, were I a better person I would have kept that effort up. Weird things: So oddly enough, the biggest dropoff I saw in viewership was when we hit the sub-zero snowfield. I'm at a loss as to exactly why. I think at that point we'd hit about 7 hours of recording or so, so my best guess is that people were just tired of watching for so long, which I'll take into account for the next LP. Speaking of which, I'll have a vote on what that should be when I finalise the options in the next couple of days.
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Nov 6, 2017 20:38
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| # ? May 16, 2024 04:30 |
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The only thing I can think of re: Sub-Zero Snowfield is that ZSNES ruins that zone's music track, like, it sounds completely wrong. I don't know how that tracks to reduced viewership though. 
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Nov 6, 2017 21:24
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