Messages

[190]

Sol Blade: 180 Atk, Pure Earth
Herculean Axe: 193 Atk, -10 Def

These are effectively the same weapon. Neither the damage nor the defense will make an especially big difference on the axe, such that the player will barely notice it. If the player is using an unleash setup, it's purely about whichever has the bigger unleash. Otherwise, if the player is predominately casting Call Dullahan (or similar), they're the same weapon.

Lachesis Rule: 147 Atk, 118 Int, 25 Power

This is the default choice for any caster. No other item you listed comes even close to competing with it. Highest Int *and* the highest EPow rating makes it a no-brainer, regardless of whether your role is damage or healing. For a caster item, it also delivers pretty respectable Atk.

Tisiphone Edge: 163 Atk, 48 Int, 8 Def, 4 Agi
Vajra Mace: 171 Atk, 20 HP, 26 Int, 15 Power, 10 Resist

Most of the extra stats on these items are irrelevant. The Vajra Mace is able to compete with Sol Blade or Herculean Axe, since it's a minimal loss of Atk but gives EPow. Tisiphone Edge is only relevant to Ivan (if you want to spec him as a physical attacker, since he can't equip anything better here); it could be relevant to more characters if the Agi is relevant, but I don't know how you're planning to scale Agility in this hack, so I'm not sure if 4 is a lot or a little.

Clotho's Distaff: 139 Atk, 97 Int, 12 PP, 25 Resist

This item doesn't exist. It's completely outclassed by every other weapon listed. Unless you're going the disgaea route and making healing based on res, this item offers nothing to anyone.

---

Functionally, you only have two weapons here, possibly three: A caster item in Lachesis' Rule, a melee weapon in Sol Blade/Herculean Axe/Vajra Mace, and possibly an agility-boosting weapon in the Tisiphone Edge. That's *if* the agility is a meaningful amount, otherwise it's just another melee weapon that you only pick because it's all you have left.

Based on your rationale for the items, this is how I'd fix it:

Sol Blade: 180 -> 190 Atk, Pure Earth
-- This will act as our baseline. Since I didn't like the way the ratios were working out with some of the other items (especially the axe), I opted to raise its Atk slightly.
Herculean Axe: 193 -> 230 Atk, -10 -> -40 Def
-- This is by far the greatest physical damage weapon, but you should feel that defense drop. Axes should cause you to lose almost a full piece of armor, but grant that same amount as additional Atk over a Long Sword.
Lachesis' Rule: 147 Atk, 118 Int, 25 Power
-- Untouched, since other items got more powerful around it. This remains the go-to item for a pure caster. Note that the EPow on this weapon boosts its damage further, while also improving healing.
Tisiphone Edge: 163 -> 173 Atk, 48 Int, 8 -> 0 Def, 4 -> 12 Agi*
-- Cutting out the pointless defense, and raising its Atk to make it a better contender as a physical option for mages. More agility to make the stat meaningful.
Clotho's Distaff: 139 Atk, 97 -> 92 Int, 12 -> 120 PP, 25 Resist
-- Yes, you read that right. That says 12 to *120* PP. With the incredibly low offensive stats on this item, it needs to provide hella fuel.
Vajra Mace: 171 Atk, 20 -> 108 HP, 26 -> 40 Int, 15 -> 0 Power, 10 -> 0 Resist
-- Cutting the pow/res since it didn't do much to create an identity for the item. Provides slightly weaker offense than a light blade and doesn't give agility, but makes up for it with some hefty bulk. I picked 108 for thematic reasons, but it comes out to be about right for an endgame weapon like this.

* (The agility on Tisiphone Edge assumes an average party agility of around 80-100 at endgame. If you're using a higher or lower average agility for characters, it should be set proportionately.)

The point of these modifications was to sharpen the identities of the items. Light Blade damage was brought up to be on par with Maces, since both weapon types serve the purpose of helping a caster spec into physical damage, but only Mia/Sheba can use maces, while only Jenna/Ivan can use light blades. Lachesis' Rule is untouched since the power of other items went up around it; if I had instead opted to leave Sol Blade alone and nerf the damage on Maces down to the level of Light Blades, it probably would've lost somewhere around 10-15 Atk. Despite the pretty massive stat buffs to Agility or HP on LBs/Maces, the Sol Blade should still be plenty attractive to primarily physical damage dealers, provided that Long Swords get generally stronger unleashes.

Don't be afraid to give items a unique niche. If you water down their stats too much, they just become more of the same, and you still just end up choosing whatever gives the best damage.

edit: Also, I think it's a mistake to add the "has innate attack attribute" to all weapons of a specific weapon type (e.g. making all Long Swords have an innate elemental attribute on attack, like you do here). That's predominately used to add flavor to certain weapons, and you miss out on the opportunity to do some really cool stuff with other weapon types. Of note, it barely even factors into the power of a weapon at endgame, since if you're using the Attack command, you're probably going for an unleash anyway; it can factor into the power of weapons earlier in the game (when you don't have a very high crit chance yet), but that can easily be accounted for by just knocking a couple points off Atk, if you even choose to do that much.

It's not, because it uses integer division.

As ints, 20/7 + 1/7 = 2 + 0 = 2
As floats, 20/7 + 1/7 = 21/7 = 3

if (CurrLevel < 20): LevelsBetweenGoals = 19
else: LevelsBetweenGoals = 20

Stat gain = [(NewGoal - PrevGoal)*(CurrLevel - PrevGoalLevel)/LevelsBetweenGoals] - [(NewGoal - PrevGoal)*(CurrLevel - PrevGoalLevel - 1)/LevelsBetweenGoals]

It's kinda ugly, but this should bypass the problems of integer division. It basically calculates the projected total stat gain of the current level and the previous level, then subtracts them for the individual stat gain. As such, the total stat gain will *always* equal exactly the goal stat at goal levels.

Note: It should divide by 19 instead for the 0-19 range, otherwise you'll get slightly lower stats than expected.

I forgot to mention, Ivan is the only person who will be able to equip it.

You didn't forget to mention it. I'm trying to tell you that it's not balanceable. The ring item I posted there pigeonholes a character into spamming djinn. They will do it *extremely* well, at the detriment of everything else - perhaps even to the point of being overpowered. But if you *don't* make them laser-focused on one task, the character becomes blatantly overpowered in *every* respect, rather than just the one.  The fact that even with the *massive* drawbacks it might still be too strong should tell you something here.

Limiting an item with that much power to a single character just serves to make that character mandatory in all parties, which defeats the original purpose of making all characters viable. Even if you *do* somehow manage to balance it, that character will be completely incapable of deviating from their expected build path, which limits options. Either way, player agency is taking a hit.

And summons WILL be nerfed. If not, removed.

Why bother hacking GS at all if you're just going to remove summons? Sure, they could use a nerf, but djinn and summons are core gameplay mechanics that define GS as a series. If you remove them, there's nothing left to make GS stand out from any other generic RPG.

The proposal for Ivan still remains having an extra turn. I am thinking either give it to him via Jupiter based weapons or via a ring.

Ring is less intrusive, and lets him share weapons with other characters. On the other hand, this also means he doesn't have a ring slot, so if you were planning on doing more with that slot, it would still be pretty invasive.

Personally, I dislike the idea of extra turns as an inherent character mechanic, simply because of how abusive it tends to be. It basically makes *anything* the class does razor sharp, and you end up needing to water it down just to keep it remotely balanced.

Imagine an item like this, that could be equipped by anyone:

Thieves' Ring
(Ring)
- Turns +1
- 0.5x Atk
- 0.8x Max HP
- 0.8x Max PP

Now, what kind of character would you place this on? You don't get much by spamming the attack command due to the halved atk. You could become a strategic nuker with double AOE psys, but you can't spam cast since you'll run out of PP too quickly, and the second turn would probably come late in the turn order anyway (so it wouldn't be that good for random encounters). So what do you do? Aha, you spam djinn and buffs! It carves out a niche for a character that can only do one thing, but they do it extremely well.

Note, however, since this ring can be equipped by anyone and it has some pretty severe drawbacks, it remains opt-in for the player. There's no clear "oh I definitely need to put this item on *this* character." They might still choose to just not use the item - that's important. GS's classes and itemization is built on the player being able to make characters do *almost* anything, but they tend to excel at certain roles more than others. If you give Ivan an exclusive ring that gives him an extra turn, you *cannot* balance it without pigeonholing him into one build path.

Maybe both? No lie, I would love to see how the two patches work with each other.

If they're even compatible together, you'd have to gut spell power across the board to keep it balanced. Having two sources of damage for spells but only one for physical attacks means that spells are going to scale quadratically while physical attacks only scale linearly.

Block x% of damage: The 90% and 95% effects are treated the same but the 50% and 60% ones are not listed with them. I need to do more research on what this means.

Now that I think about it, this might make sense. These checks are for enemy-side effects, right? Is it checking if an enemy has this or if a player has this? Because block 95% is an enemy-only effect. And I'm not sure, but there might be a block 90% for enemies, too (or there was planned to be?). If it *is* a player-side check, then maybe the devs decided that block 50%/60% wasn't worth altering the AI for, but blocking 90% is? I've never actually noticed the AI change their behavior as a result of using barrier djinn, though, including flash.

[Kraken]

About the graphical issue, my first guess is that since DD's sprite is actually a merge of 2 sprites (left and right half) the stun effect just centered on one of the 2. Other "split" bosses are Poseidon, Kraken, Orochi and Fusion Dragon so the same issue should happen for them too if i'm right. They're still all supposed to be immune to it though.

Kraken can be statused; it's notorious for being one of the only bosses in GS1 that status effects actually work against. And I believe stun is among them.

Well, the strength of poison depends on what you're fighting. Against a boss, poison is ridiculously powerful, capable of shaving off several turns of combat. But it's decent to unnecessary against everything else. It'll tag on some extra damage, but against most enemies, it won't make a difference. Against player characters, poison is very strong.

Delude is just bad all around. Monster skills bypass it, and I think unleashes might too. And of course anything that isn't selected by pressing "attack" bypasses it, as well.

Assuming GS is built like any reasonable game engine, animations are most likely defined by a state machine. This is important, as we'll soon see. There's two possible reasons for getting stuck in their current animation, but they're quite similar:

Common:
- Isaac and Garet derive from the same base character class as all other playable characters
- Isaac and Garet don't have a downed animation, but *do* have a downed "state"
- The game detects their health is 0, so it places them into the downed state
Case 1)
- Since their downed state doesn't define an animation, it doesn't play one (i.e. whatever frame they were on, they become immediately stuck on, with current animation set to null, so it doesn't try to overwrite it)
Case 2)
- Most game engines have a flag on animations that defines whether or not they loop
- When the character enters the downed state, this flag gets overwritten with the downed state's default, but since an animation isn't defined, they remain in their current animation until the end of the current loop, which then stops

They're both *very* similar, but in case 1, the animation immediately stops, while in case 2, the animation stops only after completing its loop.

Personally, I wouldn't have touched summons. Even if it's in the name of "speed," summons were already overpowered as is. I would also have avoided buffing psynergy too much early on, since that's already when it was most dominant.

Since one of this patch's main focuses is on speed, I think it might be worth looking into speeding up the pushing/running/climbing/log rolling/etc animations, or something like skipping emotes by holding B. This isn't something you can do with the editor, but I'd imagine salanewt or fox here might be willing to look into it for you.

I think sala (lord squirtle) meant the GSHC discord, which you're not in

Anyway, welcome! I'm quite interested to hear about these hacks you made for "innovation and speed."

@Fox: AFAIK, RNG abuse in golden sun largely comes down to simply quickly clearing the title screen with precise timing. After that, most RNG manipulations come down to battle events or using a field psynergy a certain number of times. Towns are extremely difficult to reliably manipulate the RNG in, since it consumes RNs for the NPC movement, resulting in extremely erratic random numbers.

44 felix cancels... that's some dedication right there.

Imagine getting through the entire game up to the reunion when you realize "Oh whoops, I did 45 by accident."

There was a costume contest at my school today, with free pizza. I went for the pizza and ducked out before the actual contest.

I'm not very festive.

Does that function reference luck? I think you have your answer.

Yeah, it's definitely referring to rainbow kills. I already knew that rainbow kills could fail as a result of insufficient epow, but didn't know the exact threshold.

Oh hi, I know you

Well, this is very interesting. Looks like you and leaf decided to take a more direct approach than my PP multiplier, which basically accomplishes the same thing. It would be perfect if you weren't forced to sacrifice another stat for it... so is that the only way? Cause i'm trying to weight the pros and cons of both.

Functionality-wise, it should be very similar to the previous systems. Characters tend to have a base luck of around 2-5, while most djinn grant luck as a bonus stat. Having a "luck" that varies from 5-14 based on how many djinn you have equipped should generally be only a couple points different from vanilla luck stats. Additionally, looking at enemies, enemies with high elvls also tend to have high luck, while enemies with low elvls tend to have very low luck, such that total elvl is often very close to luck. In all cases, it's no more than a few percentage points difference. While you do lose the class modifier, it didn't have a very large effect on base values in the first place, and tends to be redundant when you can have custom equipment that grants ailment resistance.

Hmm... Seems interesting.  How is spell defense handled?  Is it like other 4-stat games, where Intellect doubles both as Offense and Defense?

There's no spell defense. You can think of it as just using Int/4 instead of (Atk - Def)/2 for an EPA. I figured this would be the most controversial decision of the patch; there were any number of approaches that could have been deemed "right," so we opted for the simplest possible.