[RELEASE] Golden Sun: The Balance Age

[JetFavre]

I was bored today, so I decided to play through TBS and write some brief notes while playing. Every battle (except my last fight against Deadbeard) had all djinn set at the beginning. I did Kolima up to the Tret battle, completed Mercury lighthouse, then defeated Tret. I did vault/vale/lunpa immediately after getting the cloak ball. Otherwise, I stuck to the standard playthrough order.

Saturos: Level 9-10. Ivan fainted ~2/3 through battle. Had Earth djinn set on Ivan to give him more HP, but he was still dropped to 2 HP by eruption. Appropriately challenging at the time, though I think I got a little lucky with his target selections.

Tret: Level 10-11. Extremely easy. I'm guessing his strength was set to be battled before Mercury when you only have 3 members at lower levels. This was just use 2 djinn on each member -> summon -> use 2 djinn again -> don't even need 4 summons.

Killer Ape: Level 12-13. fairly easy. Doesn't do enough damage to warrant much healing, especially with granite every third turn.

Corona: This djinn hit really hard and felt much harder than any of the other djinn. I only had Garet alive at the end, but fought it pretty sloppily. I think the difference between here and Saturos is how often AOE psynergy is used.

Hydros Statue: Level 15-16. seemed appropriate. This fight without wish would have been really hard, but Ivan spamming it as the first move every turn and possible additional heals from Isaac pretty much meant no one could die. If given a stronger psynergy, it might require level grinding since you don't have revive.

Manticore: Level 16-17. pretty weak. Maybe replace mad blast with something stronger.

Kraken: Level 16-17. Slightly weaker than I'd hoped for. Spamming wish on Ivan or Mia is still a dominant strategy. He doesn't seem to have break, which means his damage is never high enough to be a threat after using corona/breeze.

Colosso: Level 19. Not much to say, just Ground -> Flint -> Ramses -> Cure Well as usual. There's little room for strategic diversity, so I don't think this could be changed in a meaningful way.

Toadonpa: Level 19-20. Probably at the correct difficulty. The base damage on his psynergy is low, but poisons often enough to make up for it. Increasing the single-target damage on poison-tail significantly may be a nice touch.

Storm Lizard: Level 21-22. Reasonable difficulty. I made it harder than it should have been when it took 4 attempts to revive one person because only Isaac had revive (Ivan/Mia had a higher speed, so I couldn't fully heal after using revive).

Deadbeard: Level 25-26. @#$% this guy. Took 5 tries and was very enjoyable :). I think a major error in my first couple tries was using Luff, which led to 2 Sweeps in a turn knocking out adjacent members. I also did a couple first-turn summons the fifth time to vent some frustration ;). My boring class setup had very few debuffs available and no early summons had resulted in his ward/guard/impact/etc. building up too much over the fight length. Out of curiosity, were his resistances significantly changed? Judgement wrecked every time it was used, but other Boreas and Meteor only did 25-45% as much damage. I just don't recall that big of a difference, but maybe it was always that way.

S&M and Fusion Dragon: Level 27-28. Slightly underwhelming, but close to the right difficulty. It probably would have been appropriate if I'd skipped crossbone isle and been 2 levels lower. I had to revive a few guys against the dragon and found reviving much easier than against deadbeard or storm lizard (i.e., it worked the first turn).

Why does Mia going from 4-5 fire djinn (Shugenja) to 6-7 (Righteous) cause her to lose the Wish series?

If you want me to expand on any of these, let me know. I'll probably play through TLA (sans Dullahan) over the next week or two and can give similar feedback.

[Caledor]

Hi JetFavre, thanks for your report, it'll be very useful for making a few adjustment here and there.

Just wanted to ask... which version were you playing with? Cause Manticore got Fireball and Flare Storm with the latest one.

@Deadbeard: His resistances are the same as vanilla: 72 Ve, 193 Me and 152 Ju.

@Mia: cause Righteous is Garet's class. For dual classes, after the fifth djinn, you must give that character a djinn of his element in order to keep him in that line. If you don't he'll end up in another character's line. This happens in the vanilla game as well, but doesn't happen in TLA with my mod cause i got rid of those partial classes there.

I'll be waiting for your feedback on TLA.

EDIT: Localization rant time. How's it possible that the translatiors/localizators managed to NEVER use the term "philosopher's stone" in both games, always opting for "stone of sages" and "wisdom stone" instead!? In a game that speaks of alchemy from beginning to end, no less! What pisses me off the most is that i already know the answer to my own question... i just can't believe they were THAT blind to not figure it out...

[JetFavre]

I was on the 1.32 patch. I just replayed it to make sure. Once you have Wish, enemies need a significant boost in their AOE psynergy or high single-target damage to be a threat. Things like mad blast, fireball, nova, etc. have decent damage, but one of them needs to be used twice per turn for 2-3 consecutive turns to realistically do anything. Idk, just my thoughts on it.

Thanks for the info on the other two points. I usually just stuck with monelemental classes until having all the djinn, so I hadn't previously encountered losing psynergy like that.

[dive_darkness]

Alright. Did some more things.

Farmed a few items:
Blessed Mace -> lol, I sold them immediately. It's weaker than the sacred mace bought In lalivero.
Feathered Robe -> equipped on Ivan + Mia for the speed.
Didn't get the giant's Axe.
Equipped Kikuichimonji on Ivan + Garet
And got the zodiac wand, which is waaaay weaker than Kikuicjimonji => sold.

With this, went to crossbone. Mainly did all the fights with summon to save the PPs for deadbeard (still did the last two with simple attacks/heal strategy. No other psy/djinn.)

For deadbeard: equipment were the best I could get. There's only two pieces of equipment I didn't get already: mythril Tiara and Giant's axe, so I don't know if I missed something.
Garett had muramasa, thunder crown, cleric ring.

And now... Yup. Deadbeard is hard. I tried a lot of different strategies which relied on psynergies and attacks. But because it seems that you CAN'T get rupture, you cannot dismiss his buffs, which condemn you to deal miserable damages and eating too much to be able to keep up with the healing.
I finally did it the cheesy way. 1st turn: granite, kite(Isaac), meteor, wish. 2nd turn: granite set, apocalypse, flash, djinn (not luff as it triggers the swipes of doom.), wish. Then it is just every turn setting either granite or flash, mia on healing duty, Ivan using his djinns and summoning procne when available. Used kite when mia ran low on pp and used a psy crystal.
This boss hurts just too much. A bad turn with him using 2x impact, then a swipe without Flash (granite only divide the damages by two. Which isn't near enough.) means more than 350 damage in central target. Ivan get OS by the attack with his 7 djinns set. Another exemple of bad turns would be barrier two time. Then summon inflics 200 less (procne deals ~500 damage). And a double swipe turn which isn't mitigated by flash means that you can just try again.
Did I mention that buffing your stats to mitigate his attacks just means that he'll use Rupture and negates all the boosts.

I came to the conclusion that if there's another viable strategy against him, I didn't find it. I also discovered that Ivan can get wish. Lol. Not useful at all against deadbeard.
The funny thing with this fight is that my equipments made Mia go too fast. I needed her to act between deadbeard's two turns, so I removed her running shirt and replaced her feathered robe by the princess robe.

And yup: last two djinns done only with normal attacks. Still die extremely fast (respectively the water in suhalla gate and the Jupiter in Babi lighthouse, both done with the relics you can buy in lalivero.)

I guess now I'll just enjoy my Garet with my infinite planet diver (thunder crown allows an infinite amount of uses, as planet diver costs less than what it makes you recover each turn). I need to do Lunpa, then Saturos/Menardi.

[Caledor]

Once you have Wish, enemies need a significant boost in their AOE psynergy or high single-target damage to be a threat.

Thanks, i'll keep that in mind.

Blessed Mace -> lol, I sold them immediately. It's weaker than the righteous mace bought In lalivero.
And got the zodiac wand, which is waaaay weaker than Kikuichimonji => sold.

ok how can both be true? if you don't like the zodiac wand due to the lower attack power you should like the blessed mace more since its stronger than the righteous mace attack-wise. i'm not saying you're wrong, i just want to understand your way of thinking. btw, all staves have crap tier attack. that's cause if you're equipping one it means you couldn't care less of that character's attack stat. they're used to buff spells.

Yup. Deadbeard is hard. [...]

you have a point. i think i'll lower the learning level of break (rupture) from 30-32 to 26-28. Also, thanks for reminding me that i need to nerf Flash (70%? 80%? Haven't decided yet)

not luff as it triggers the swipes of doom

Lol that's the only reason i gave him swipe to begin with... Sealing Deadbeard made the entire fight a joke. BTW, luff isn't a guaranteed seal anymore.

[dive_darkness]

Don't have much time, so I'll make it short:

I like to clear end game contents with psy/unleashes by boosting my stats. Blessed mace have no unleash, and the kikuichimonji give speed and a very nice wind unleash for Ivan. That's all.

[Caledor]

While trying to figure out how flash, granite and similar effects work, i discovered that in TLA effect 47 (Flash) and effect 88 (Guard Aura) are actually the same thing. This implies that:
A) the description is wrong (cause Guard Aura actually shields 90% damage and not 95%)
B) I can't nerf Flash without hitting Guard Aura as well.

[Salanewt]

A) Good to know for future reference, plus it also explains why I couldn't find any values for 95% reduction in character/unit RAM. Not really sure of a good solution to that though.
B) Hm... What if you replace the effect that Flash uses with 60% reduction? Or is that one not in GS1 for some reason?

[Aile~♥]

So does that mean 47 and 88 use the exact same code internally? What a waste when they could have just used 47 for both.

Also, @Sala, I think the 60% reduction effect isn't in GS1 because Shade is the only thing which uses it, and Shade was introduced in GS2.

[Caledor]

Actually I wanted to separate flash from guard aura till a moment ago. I've already written the code for damage calculation but now I think i'll take the easy way out and move flash to shade and shade to granite (so basically 50%, 50% and 60% damage reduction for granite shade and flash respectively) so guard aura remains untouched.

[Salanewt]

If Shade is still single-target then it would only be as effective as an unchanged defend command with 50% reduction. Which probably makes it a bad djinni to ever use barring certain exceptions, but it's your choice.


Jamie: Looks like Fox beat me to it, so I'll just copy what he said so it doesn't get lost in the chatbox (being topical to the current discussion and everything).

0811D6EA = Change this from 01 to 02?

[Caledor]

Actually Shade has always been multitarget just like Granite and Flash. Lol if it was like you said it would've been quite the blunder on my part :P

About the whole Defend/Djinn Wall thing. It's true that a certain byte (IIRC char address +0x12B) is used by Defend, Granite, Flash, Shade, the Enemy move total defense and the vanish effect. In GS1 having that byte set to 1 cuts the damage by half (Defend and Granite) and having that byte set to 2 cuts the damage by 90% (Flash and Total Defense).
In TLA 1 is used by Defend and Granite, 2 by Shade (60% reduction), 3 by Flash, Guard Aura and Total Defense (90%) and 4 is the vanish effect.

[Salanewt]

Oh, wait, Shade /= Haze. For some reason I mixed the two up this time. :P

Values: Makes sense. A part of me is tempted to try changing how that works so a flat value is written to RAM and calculations are based off of that, but I don't really know if I want to do that when I am in a bit of an animation mood.

As for the wave animation, I just have to fix the palette swap issue before I consider it finished. I can upload what I have later if you'd like, the only downside is there would probably be a palette fix shortly after.

[Caledor]

The values thing is a very nice idea. the code for the damage reduction would become ridiculously short, you'd just have to tweak the 3/4 effects (50,60,90 and 95 reduction) to set the right value instead of 1, 2 or 3. There's one downside though. You can't use "4" cause the game would treat it as the vanish effect, and fixing that might be a little annoying (i know the value for vanish is checked in at least 4 functions before the damage reduction one in the code).

About Wave, if you upload it i can test in the meantime. repatching after is no biggie ;)

[Salanewt]

Yeah, that's the thing. Plus I would also have to tweak the effect-only formula to also ignore those effects (like I did for another patch) so they don't try to damage you.

This is true. Okay then, here you go. I should note that the patch assumes you also have the overhaul patch installed, so all you need to do to fix that is go to #0816AED4 and load r1 from [r0, #0x18] to have it use argument. x6981 is the hex for that. Please note that I haven't tested how it looks when an enemy uses them against you, but I imagine it should look okay for the most part.

[Caledor]

Hmm... if your fix to the wave line requires the animation overhaul patch, it's gonna take some time for me to implement it cause i've got to apply the changes of the overhaul as well. I'll let you know how it goes.

[Salanewt]

Well, it "requires" it. The only changes made without it are in the wave function itself, so with a tiny bit of assembly you can just change a tiny section of code to make it argument-compatible. But the bonus with the overhaul is that your animation options open up a bit, with the lack of certain multiplier-compatible variants of abilities like Double Bite; nothing you wouldn't be able to fix manually though.

Edit: Also, it doesn't actually change the animation table. So there's that too.

[Caledor]

i should be able to figure out which changes the animation overhaul brings to the wave line... i just hope it's not gonna take too much time. Also... Did you change Dreamtide itself? I mean... the old dreamtide is still somewhere within the code (for the original unleash)?

Just tested all three both as player and as enemy... they're just perfect. Amazing job! ;)

[Salanewt]

Changes: Aside from the animation/pointer table and the part that assigns the main argument, the overhaul does not change the wave animation itself.

The original Dreamtide, with the spiral, is no longer there with this patch; Watery Grave is mostly the same as before though, but is now argument/tier 2 of this animation. You may need to decide on a new animation to replace Dreamtide with for the weapon's unleash.

Awesome, that's so good to hear. Thanks! :D Just the palette swap issue to resolve and then this animation is completely done then.

[Caledor]

I've put temporarily on hold the implementation of the new wave animation cause i've found something amazing to tinker with: making this

I just don't like summon rushing at all... it kinda ruins the fun of the game for me.

Heck, if I could I'd remove the option entirely. I've already thought of a nice method: On turn 0 of a battle you can't summon more than Ramses/Megaera. Each subsequent turn, the number of djinn you can use in a single summon increases by 1. That simple. The problem is i have no idea how hard it would be to code that.

real.

Also, another translation error fixed: The shopkeeper at Apojii mentions a place called Garapas. She actually refers to Apojii, 'cause Garapas is the japanese name for the island.