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I think this is too early in the game to be analyzing it to be honest.
In my run, I found burst damage quickly became less feasible and I had to rely on Paralyze a lot, and use debuffs extensively against bosses. It was tough.
Delude probably could afford a buff though.

Love this hack! This has made TBS feel almost like a new experience for me.
I just have a few thoughts:
1. Kraken was a big difficulty spike. It took me quite a few tries and some grinding to beat it, whereas everything up to that point had been relatively easy. It also wasn't great afterwards when I had to deal with the tough encounters in Altmiller without being able to heal at an Inn.
2. Paralyze as a psynergy is almost too powerful. Obviously it doesn't work on bosses but on everything else it removes a lot of the challenge. Maybe make it cost more PP?

Progress update: I've started experimenting with animations, ability effects and power - basically I'm trying to find out what looks cool and does cool stuff for the moment. In addition, I've been changing item drops in particular from Mimics. It always bothered me that Mimics were these interesting looking treasure chests that would spring a trap on you when you went over to investigate and yet after all your trouble you would only get a game ticket. Now Mimics will drop interesting artifacts that should make unique equipment slightly more varied.

@Thunder-squall I'm just playing round with the editor trying to have fun, that all sounds too in-depth for my liking. However, as an attempt to start:
Hypothesis 1: I am going to increase the difference in stat changes between "levels" in a class tree which should make using djinn have a higher cost and so balance out somewhat the strategy of spamming djinn and summons.
Hypothesis 2: I am going to increase the PP and power increases of spells in a psynergy tree or add additional effects to psynergy which should make using psynergy a more viable strategy later in the game.
Hypothesis 3: I am going to introduce new artifacts and modify existing ones to have more artifacts giving bonuses to elemental power and resistance, which should also make using psynergy a more viable strategy later in the game and also reduce the penalty in using dual elemental classes as opposed to single elemental classes.
Hypothesis 4: I am going to be introducing a variety of spells in attempt to make Garet's base class tree more useful.
Hypothesis 5: I am going to assign a category to each class tree labelling it as "Support" "Attacker" "Single-Target Nuker" "AOE Nuker" "Tank" (potentially others) by giving every character access to at least one class tree of each category I hope to make the game more varied and interesting.

Hi guys, you may not remember me since I decided to vanish for a load of months but I'm back now and ready to hack!
This will be my personal hack for GS so naturally it's going to a mix of what I think it needs and what I think would be cool/fun. I'm probably going to be working on it little at a time so it'll probably take a while before I have something I think is worth sharing. I'm also going to hack both games to make it nice and continuous.

With all the intro out of the way here's some features I've thought up that I'm going to try to accomplish:

• Swap Ivan and Isaac's elements - so Isaac will be a Jupiter adept and Ivan Venus. I've always felt that Earth psynergy was the weakest and just generally disappointing so having an Earth Mage means I can make some nice high cost spells for Ivan to cast. Isaac on the other hand... just feels like a Jupiter adept.
• Rebalance the classes - Remember how everyone hated Garet? I'm hoping to change that. I've decided on very little at this stage but I'm thinking that whereas Isaac would be a fast hard-hitter with little defense (glass cannon) Garet would also deal heavy damage but more slowly and with more bulk to take hits. When I get on to TLA I'll be using the class separation patch too so hopefully the classes will be more interesting and useful than normally.
• Rebalance psynergy - A recurring complaint seems to be that psynergy quickly loses its usefulness, resulting in most battles being mindless normal attacking. I'm going to try and change this, making higher costing and more powerful spells. Also going to attempt implementing more strategic spells.
• Make djinn more important - so here you might be thinking there was nothing wrong with djinn in the original game, but let's not forget the tried and tested boss-fighting formula of spamming summons. With my system, that may not be a possible strategy: base classes will have their stats reduced and in particular the affinity each adept has with their element has been reduced, so psynergy spamming will be most effective with all djinn ready.
• General increase in difficulty - Not sure how much more I'm going to deal with this but I might see about increasing the defense of most enemies to further discourage blindly relying on normal Attacks. I'll make sure to balance weapons with these changes in some way.

So yeah, leave me suggestions and tell me what you think.

My biggest issue with DD was the Light and Dark types. It's the same opinion I have with the new Fairy-type in Pokemon; I never felt the system in the previous games was broken or lacking, so why did they try to fix it by adding new elements? Even worse, why did they make the new Dark element weak to every other? And to top it all off, the dark element was exclusive to enemies and the light element was barely mentioned in the game at all.
I mean seriously, Light and Dark are the most cliched and generic things they could possibly have added to the game and for me Golden Sun always felt very unique.

Furthermore after briefly introducing these new elements and otherwise having a plotline that begged for a sequel to continue it (even more so than TLA), by all appearances they've abandoned the series altogether since we've heard nothing about GS4 and after last time I'm not sure I'll care enough if they're pulling another "let's show up out of the blue claiming to have the sequel these people have waited years for!"

As for the battle system I never really experienced it being too difficult, even at the end where you're practically having experience thrown at you but this is probably because of my own lack of skill more than anything else.

One thing to be wary about when changing the power of psynergy is that enemies can use it too. In one of my hacks I completely messed up the balance of the game by changing psynergy and ended up being unable to beat Saturos because he could defeat my party in one turn.
I'll give your hack a look.

Wait, it's been 2 years and we're still struggling with the text compression?

Mid-battle chatter and good-quality voice acting would also be practically a necessity.

Not in Golden Sun.

the people saying "I don't want one because it has no games" are the same people who like buying every installment of CoD.

you know your an an idiot right? there are people out there who can't afford to buy something that's $300, let alone something that expensive which won't be used as much. Also CoD is crap (and I've only played #4 and only one level so meh... what ever)

And I kinda wish GS4 won't be on the 3DS since i have no money and can't really earn any money at the moment..

No offense but you can still want 3DS without being able to afford it, so your argument isn't really going anywhere.
I agree that it was expensive and still is quite expensive - but the prime argument of why anyone isn't buying a 3DS is because "it has no games", not because it's too expensive. Hence my comparison; these people would much rather buy a console that has hundreds of mediocre games than a console that has fewer but higher quality games.
Hell, currently the 3DS has almost as many games I'm actually interested in as my DS.

I hope GS4 is on the 3DS (and is announced at E3); DD's graphics were mostly ugly and sluggish and I doubt they'll return to 2D.
Otherwise in E3, 3DS Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon (or more information on BW2 & NA) and Smash Bros.

I got a 3DS. Got Ocarina of Time 3D, loving it, Starfox 64 3D, loving it, Mario Bros 3D, loving it, Mario Kart 7, loving it, Kid Icarus Uprising, loving it, Resident Evil Revelations, loving it.
3DS may not have many games, but the people saying "I don't want one because it has no games" are the same people who like buying every installment of CoD.

So yeah, you can guess what I want to see at E3.

Here's a thought: What if they're planning a GS5 in the same storyline?
They jammed a whole lot of content into quite a small area in DD, and also tried to introduce as many new characters as possible. Why wouldn't they do the same again with GS4 - have some party members we already know, and fill up the other slots with new characters - and then connect GS3 and GS4 with GS5?

They can't just scrap the characters from DD but at the same time we're already expecting enough GS4 characters that there isn't much room for all-new characters. And it has been pointed out that 16 characters is a bit ridiculous.

Alternatively, they could be planning a completely new party system; rather than constantly having 8/16/etc. characters in the party, you might just have 4/8 characters constantly in the party with the other potential party members wandering off to a 'home' place which you would have to go to in order to swap them back in.

i dont know if this has been suggested yet

http://forum.goldensunhacking.net/index.php?topic=1467.0
I'm confused, you replied to this topic and yet somehow don't know about it?

At any rate, I don't know anything about modding Minecraft but I'd certainly be interested in a GS mod, especially a server-side one.

My Minecraft got broken by 1.2. Yay.

If you use whirlwind sprint into two pots stacked on top of each other against a wall 'IN' a building corner,

...Who tries these things?

I started liking 5th gen a whole lot more after I started playing through it. Probably the same with 4th gen.
The reason why so many people hate later gens is because they haven't bothered playing through the later games. Hell, said people can't even decide whether 1st, 2nd or 3rd is the best from the ones they like. The pokemon gens is simply a controversial topic.

Having said that, out of the Pokemon I've encountered so far I only really liked Smugleaf (Snivy). Serperior does need to have a secondary Dragon type though.

I like most Pokemon, and the ones I don't are due to a combination of poor design and utter uselessness.
I like Bidoof. I am the 1%. But seriously, that thing is adorable and made even more so by Mystery Dungeon.

Having said that, there are a buttload of Pokemon I think could have been so much better; simple things like giving Charizard, Gyarados and numerous others a secondary Dragon type instead of the stupidly common Flying type; giving Parasect decent stats; not having 2 adorable Dragon worm things evolve into a joke - seriously, I hate Dragonite; Dunsparce, Smeargle, Unown etc. the list goes on longer with each generation.
Ok, they're slowly fixing these sort of problems by giving the useless 'mon evolutions. What I don't get is why they don't just do a Magnemite/Ton and retconning this sort of thing.

The worst glitch I've had was running into a wheelbarrow and suddenly dropping dead.

Steam: darthawec

The thought occurs that a remake of a remake would be stupid, yet Kanto is still by far the most popular region... Maybe this time they're making a Yellow remake? Perhaps an expanded yellow remake; Yellow was meant to follow the anime's plot more than RBG and the idea of a Pokemon game that properly followed the anime plot seems to be quite popular. It would also explain why they're so insistent they aren't making Pokemon Grey, if they're working on something larger scale.

Ok, just thought I'd point out, Blockades are @#$%&*! annoying.
The battle against the 3 Ruffians is ridiculous; the fencer deals half your HP in damage on most hits, the War Machine conjures up another Blockade/War Machine/Fencer every turn and the blockade uses War Shield every turn to reduce your damage to 1. Added to that, Wing Beat uses up 1/5 of my MP and the Mana Regen move is pretty pathetic (1 mp per turn). On top of all that, Blockades can replicate. I now have to kill 7 Blockades with 1 damage per turn. Woo.

Just my initial thoughts, I'll post again when I get further in.