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Glad to see that did the trick,

I only knew of this because I ran into the same exact problems and was really scratching my head, only difference was on a different monster.  What's weird is that it never worked despite me trying every RN number from -2 to +2 so I suspect something is making the method pretty much not work at all, but yea since I dont really know this sort of stuff on the technical/memory level, no point getting further into it lol

You have way more than enough base elemental power, I believe 120-122 is the highest you need (mad demon in anemos).  Generally having 105 or more is enough, or simply seeing the flash kill

I had tri-ele classes, physical get kills so they had pitiful ele power lol

Non physical classes were doing ~100 damage which is why i forced physical classes, which were doing 500+

I'd just come back after serac to see if that solves your issue, and reasons I used this isnt for instant kill, its because it doesnt mess with RN and does a lot more direct damage vs others

go for the simplest solutions first rather than go down the speculation rabbit hole

Far as I know, cursed/clerics ring off-field characters have no bearing on RN

Hey there,

having played through this recently myself, I ran into an a few issues and eventually figured it out after reading up a lot on the RNG guides on gamefaqs/wiki.
hopefully 1 of these tips solves it:

-I ended up using serac because from what i can tell does not mess with RN and has a high multiplier
-sometimes if anyone in frontline has cursed items/clerics ring equipped it can mess with RN methods(applies to vanilla as well)
-are you getting the rainbow kill?  ensure they make the flash and funny sounds - i actually had issue with this due to not having enough elemental power - female characters had too little attack so I forced physical classes to do the finishing, it might be possible that you might need 1-2 more power even if you get the rainbow kill if you are borderline, not sure there

If you still cant get it to work, post a log of exactly what you are doing and people can look further

Thanks for the insights on hard mode, I think i'll do at least 1 more normal run before attempting hard since i've only done it once and want to try a few other setups.

Good to know that summon spamming isnt automatically the best option or the only viable option =)

regarding star magician adds, this is taken from wiki:
"It is also worth noting that any monster spawned mid-battle (such as the balls Star Magician summons) will retain their original normal-mode stats, and thus will be significantly easier than their Hard Mode counterparts."

are you taking too much damage and need to be more defensive during those turns?  I know for normal it was very easy to kill the adds right away, since i dont need to worry about dying nearly as much.  I was level~50 and had very good gear at that point.

For hard mode around what level do you predict is needed to beat star magician/dullahan?

and last question, anyone have a link to step by step instructions or a video on how to exactly import a dmp for VBA on gold passwords?  Ive googled it quite a bit and the only couple posts i've found say "go look it up" ....dont enjoy doing 6 pages of PW each time lol

Thanks for the welcomes all,

Glad to see I'm not just crazy for pointing out that specific enemies were out of place relative to others around the same area/level lol

Regarding difficulty, I played mine through on normal modded difficulty since I read on Cal's post that hard is untested

Not sure I'd enjoy hard mod in its current state - I've played through vanilla hard a lot and flat stat increases don't always work out well with how damage scales mid-late game.
My guess for hard mode of mod would be that physical does little to no damage due to:

-increased defense from in-game hard mode
-increased defense base from mod itself
-overall slight to moderate nerfs of physical damage potential vs vanilla
-bosses like sentinel physical would simply be a waste of time since +defense buff is more powerful

I think when dark mits had staff unleashes did more damage than phys. attackers, the reasons above is majority of the cause.  I noticed that early on there were a couple staffs that had particularly hard hitting unleashes compared to others for the time you get them.

My guess would be, the game experience would be devolved into abusing barrier djinns+lull abuse and summon spam being by far the best strat, and in some instances the only strat viable especially for superbosses.  That or excessive amounts of wonder bird slaying

Maybe just my personal opinion but I really dislike how summons damage is calculated - largely based on max HP and does not scale with player power aside from ele power.  It feels very not-RPG'ish because you'll do similar damage whether you are level 1 or 99(assuming all other factors same) late game doing the same summon.

Just thinking out loud here - normal difficulty of mod is tuned very well in 99.9% of cases but I think the flaws of base-game damage calculations and stat limitations really start to show on hard mode mod.

For stuff like characters it would be mostly an exception rather than a staple, like there's only one class with the full hp revive. I have to consider it.

Ahh did not realize it was unique to a class already, I tried out a handful of classes but of course most of them were not given serious time, as I think most single playthroughs would not.  Perhaps a middle ground for some classes to have a 75-80% revive and its way less efficient than default revive, to a point most players would default to the cheaper option unless they 100% have to use the more expensive option.


"Would it be possible to change Ker's weight to be not cursed or somehow get a second cleric's ring?"

Nope :P They can be that broken exactly because you have to choose between warrior and mage getup.

I think my post ran on for too long before and I had the request worded wrong.  What I really wanted to ask is change ker's weight to non cursed but be toned down so its overall same power as the other 3 elemental staffs at highest tier, so earth alone isnt locked behind clerics ring.

Then have another staff be more powerful overall but it's cursed.  It's not a big deal I'm just really OCD(i bet a lot of rpg players are) with wanting optimal gear, with earth mage I gotta run with nebula/gaia staff vs other elements getting a better version.

Asking for another Cleric's ring was a bad idea tbh as that would just give player too much power since you've given cursed equip a nice overhaul

i'll definitively check the reported enemies. keep in mind though that that's the first open world area. The cause might simply be that you did it in an unfavorable order.

I dont belive I did eastern sea in a bad order, maybe it wasnt optimal but main point originally is that those particular monsters I mentioned felt out of place relative to others in the same area, as all others within the same area were fine

1. change descriptions for abilities in-game that can add status effects - especially higher tier EPAs, but for spells too if they have a chance for some status effect.  Perhaps add a line in a sample format for say, Odyssey:

line1:default txt
line2:(damage modifier%, %chance to land debuff, -x turns)

would be great if technically possible...no idea on line/character limit...and I imagine it can be a lot of work but would be a great QOL vs constantly checking spreadsheets

2. assuming no hardcore grinding/abuse, the economy felt good prior to reunion...I bought lots of vendor gear since they were decent upgrades most of the time and early artifacts/gear dont sell for a lot I was constantly broke..felt good.  really liked the consumable changes as well

once late game comes around though the player is once again swimming in gold in normal play...

instead of trying to control the coin flow other than maybe gear$ nerfs, introduce some gold sinks like potions/psy crystals at special vendors that cost a ton..maybe 8-12k a piece(just making this number up)

3. perhaps introduce ranks to certain spells rather than just ST/MT

Good example is hp/psy drain.  I like how much it got buffed but at certain points of game it felt super out of place.  when I was level ~20 at aqua rock, fairy monster would drain more than my entire PP pool in 1 go, leeching 85-95 points.  Since that would require expensive/rare consumables to be used or slowly run back to town/come back i just kept resetting there.

I think it would be cool to have it scale to some stat, have different ranks so its not so insane early on but later on it can scale to very large amounts if player builds around it

Revive would be another caididate for consideration here, maybe 3 ranks at rank 3 it revives with full hp but costs a ton of PP to use.  currently unless your characters are exactly speed tuned the revived character can easily miss the party wide heal/buff then die again and again

maybe do the same thing for buffs/debuffs

Jenna's valkyrie class is a great example ....looks like its the only max ATK buff in the game

This might just be from my experience...later on sometimes its not even worth trying to buff, at least more than 1-2 total buffs because bosses that matter will break you right away.  also with the nerfs to them, you get even less benefit that I found often its a waste of PP/turn.

I also found debuffs very unappealing(ST or MT) since again...anything challenging or worth using debuffs on just fail to land even with +ailment too much and fall off insanely fast I found them not worth using, only exception would be some EPAs where I'm not expecting it to land too often and considered it a bonus.
Debuffs are insanely strong vs djinn/non super bosses but late game they fell off for me hard.  maybe i'm doing something wrong for the above mentioned, idk.

4. gearing is totally awesome, from incremental upgrades to getting to late game.

almost everything end game is at least situationally good or best in slot.  the endgame gear hunt was really fun for me tracking down and getting all the best stuff for my party...
only real complaint i had as a result from this was, running out of inventory space all the time-not sure how this would be, or if it can be changed since inventory size is native to the game

I ran into a hiccup where using certain djinn suggested by guides/wiki messed with RNG, however I did not realize this for quite some time and it was driving me nuts.  One good example was Gel ...guides recommened this and it does work in vanilla, but in the mod the RNs get messed up so when i finally switched djinn the gears dropped.  I know you mentioned some Djinn got changed around..is there a list somewhere, or can you provide a bullet list of changes that would cause certain djinn to mess with RN vs vanilla?

Would it be possible to change Ker's weight to be not cursed or somehow get a second cleric's ring?  I liked Darksword's appraoch with non elemental because you dont need to swap gear depending on fight...however with Ker's weight being cursed you dont get that benefit compared to darksword while cursed
Maybe change nebula wand to earth and kers weight to something else...but thematically that wouldnt fit as golem core forgeables is the earth type

5. Overall game experience was smooth, with a few outliers:

I want to emphazise that the game can be made way wayyyy harder while being possible, but it would not be any fun for most people, so my approach has this in mind.

tundaria region the bear is totally over-tuned.  insane HP, DEF and damage compared to anything else, i killed one just to see how it'd go and i always ran from them.

aqua rock - the ROCs(forgot name, ostrich looking dude) same story as bear but are SUPER fast as well, going before my default sheba sometimes.  these guys are worse offenders than bears, sometimes i reset just from seeing them if i cant run.

aqua hydra boss- probably my least favorite part of the entire mod.  its not that he was too hard to beat, but early game theres not a lot of options at all other than doing a long boring grind.  I believe I was at par level for this guy and the damage from hydra is just insane.
Very often the flood aoe + chomp combo would kill any female character, with full HP and 1-2 buffs.  and this gets spammed....wasnt super hard but just really really annoying and not fun

Late game:

Valkur and sentinel - strat wise pretty similar to vanilla, just harder so not too much to say here
Valkur stunned me at 40 luck, it only happened once ~10 tries or so, what happened there?  I doubled checked at end of fights and am 100% sure I had exactly 40 luck. (sheba, pure mage)

Star magician: my favorite fight by far, the strat is such an overhaul compared to vanilla(leave all thunderballs up and focus down boss, tank n spank)

The wide variety of debuffs, summoning balls that must be dealt with fast, and potential damage output really made me use wide variety of my characters movesets.  only fight where casters kept using the highest tier of offensive psyenergies as needed

If high damage is coming from adds and boss, then MT heal(s) need to come and play more defensive until HP is topped off, while picking off anger ball

It was really cool having to use such wide variety of moves and not having to pray to RNGesus compared to many boss fights, RNG being females dont get targeted 2-3x in a row -> dead

doom dragon:
this is where having my old GS1 file screwed me, anyone from GS1 constantly got stunned/debuffed/KO'd due to bad luck stat and this fight was so much harder than it needed to be.  because this fight was such a nightmare i dont really want to bang my head against the wall on dullahan, will do another playthrough in the near future w/o luck-sacked characters

6: Balance changes:

Really liked the much-needed huge buffs casters got for late game.  Now there's much better reason to use the more-likely to die characters/setups - since in vanilla you can just use warrior classes for healing/support at much lower death rate.

I noticed that in both the mod and vanilla hard-mode, physical damage gets a much bigger penalty vs magic.  Getting even a small boost in defense can result in a large phys. damage reduction.  I think thigns are fine so far but if changes are made in the future increasing defense by a lot penalizes physical users harder than magic, and even more vs summons

Hello there,

Played through the game for the past week or so and I had a blast with very few exceptions.  Love >99% of the changes that were made which made the game so much more open ended with party options while the classes people stuck to were for the most part untouched or slightly buffed vs vanilla(ninja)

Got through everything except Dullahan so far, unfortunately I didnt realize that importing my GS1 save from forever ago would screw me...over level 40 so RIP luck.  Think i'm going to go for a new save before attempting.... i get very tilted constantly dying to condemn/charon or anything with instant death tied to RNG

GS is easily 1 of my fav series and this version is amazing work, hopefully I can help improve it.
Im sure you spent countless hours working on this so I'll spend maybe ~1 hour writing this up and make an account(which i never do lol)
everything I say is meant to be constructive, so bear that in mind.  A lot of feedback is based on personal experience...although I've played this game a lot I definitely know very little compared to probably most people here so if I post something not correct no offense is intended

Im going to make a list of feedback/thoughts/suggestions, the number just means a different topic nothing else...I have no idea how technically possible some requests are as I have no experience in hacking ROMS.

It's a really long post but eh, figured more details the better