[RELEASE] Golden Sun: The Balance Age

[Caledor]

Savestates: never used them during a boss fight (only for farming specific items). I used it to test guardian aura. And it seems to work differently than EVERY other psy in game. The point isn't about savestates, it's about how this particular psy works.

Then... how does it work? cause i think i didn't get it.

Summon spam is the most efficient way to hurt bosses in vanilla, yes.
In your mod, I have to wait. What if I want to summon catastrophe ? I have to wait 6 turns. Daedalus 7 turns. 3 for eclipse, and so on.

3 for eclipse, 4 for dedalus and catastrophe. Right after unlocking 5-djinn summons on your third turn, you unlock both 6 and 7 djinn summons on the following one.

On another note, why is the Xylion armor so "normal" ?

Right about this one... in fact i've already tweaked it long ago for the new mod.

The golem core is an end-game forging item, and apart from the titan's glove, nothing is good.

Salamander Tail and Golem Core aren't endgame forging materials but late game at best. In fact both have only 1 item with lategame potential (Ardagh from Sala and Titan Glove from Core). Endgame materials are mithril silver, orichalcum and dark matter.

[dive_darkness]

Well, all actions from an enemy is determined by the RNG. But the rng during fights is special. The only way to modify the battle rng outside a fight is by using a psynergy or changing the floor you're on. During a fight, by acting. For exemple, defending doesn't change the battle rng. Using an attack psynergy add 2 to the rng for each target, and so on...
Every action from an enemy is determined by this. You can open and close the menu as many times as you want, wait 20 seconds before selecting a target or whatever: the battle rng will not change.
The only thing are the targeted characters. If I change the target of my action, the enemy's target will also change. But it is still preset for each rng and target selected.

The guardian ball's guardian aura act differently. And it is the only action that is different. It seems that depending on which enemy you target, you will trigger Guardian aura, while every single other enemy in the game will merely change it's target, but still take the same action.

I hope you understood this explanation ><

Summon: yeah, got the turns wrong...


Golem core and salamander's tail:
Well... Salamander's tail ok, there are 3 in the game, but you can farm them in the second part of treasure isle. But the golem core ? There are 2 in Loho and 1 in magma rock. That's all. The only way to get more is in Anemos sanctum, so for me, it is an end game material. You can also see it that way: comparatively, there are 1 orihalcon right after Jupiter lighthouse, 1 in Mars lighthouse and 1 in Anemos sanctum. That's also 3 (2 if I don't take into account the one in Anemos sanctum). That's the same amount as the golem core, and you can get an infinity of them in the same area.

[Caledor]

Guardian Aura: interesting, didn't know that. Well, it doesn't change my answer from before though... cause the only way you can "change target to change psy" is with savestates

Golem Core: Well, I judge materials by equipment, that's why to me the core and S.Tail are roughly equivalent. BTW, another thing i've already planned to do for the new mod is to rearrange those material drops for this very reason. The Tear Stone obtained from a Gillman Lord is probably gonna be useless for example.

[dive_darkness]

Guardian aura: well, yeah. Normally there's no way to know this. I find it interesting that only 1 single enemy and ability doesn't work "normally".

Forging material: yeah, now that you're talking about it, the tear stone, star dust and sylph feather all have pretty weak items considering that you cannot obtain an infinity of them before much later in the game. I remember having used the aero gloves for the agility, the mercury based tiara and te planet armor (not for long). All the other items were basically useless.

[Salanewt]

I guess it's worth a mention since this has been brought up, but how the enemy AI works is that Guard Aura and Earnest Ply are coded to have fixed targets (whichever enemy has x80 as their battle ID) regardless of the enemy that uses the ability. So if you were to switch Star Magician with Storm Ball in battle, then it's likely those abilities would target Storm Ball instead. Pretty sure anyway, unless I missed something when I looked into it before.

[dive_darkness]

Nah, guardian aura never target the other balls. Its only target is star magician. Dunno for earnest ply, the air ball dies too quickly to cast it anyway.

[Caledor]

That's what squirtle said and he's right. It's pretty well know that those 2 abilities are coded to always target SM if present.

[dive_darkness]

Sorry, my bad. I haven't fully understood the post ><

[dive_darkness]

Ker's weight & cursed mage:

- why is Ker's weight earth based ? There's no earth based character able to equip it.
- the dark robe could benefit from a pp regen boost in order to prefer it to non-cursed end game robes. The elemental boost is nice, but for a mage, pp regen is vital in your hack, as psynergy cost more pp than in vanilla (unless you want me to use aroma/ether on every boss)
- demon circlet is basically the best dark equipment alongside stealth armor. Nothing to say against it.

Sheba equipped with ker's weight + dark robe + demon circlet + angel ring + riot gloves + ninja sandals get to 162 Venus power. Jenna & Mia would be ~ the same if I'm right.
Right now, I have no reason to use Ker's weight or Dark robe over the Atropos robe & Lachesis rule for Jenna and Sheba. Mia already have the almighty rising mace for her mercury psynergy.

[Caledor]

- why is Ker's weight earth based ? There's no earth based character able to equip it.

Atropos, Lachesis and Clotho (and Nebula) already existed as endgame staves. The only element left out was Earth.

- the dark robe could benefit from a pp regen boost in order to prefer it to non-cursed end game robes.

I want to avoid spreading PP regen boost to other piece of equipments as much as possible to avoid potential broken combinations. Longer explanation here

Sheba equipped with ker's weight + dark robe + demon circlet + angel ring + riot gloves + ninja sandals get to 162 Venus power. Jenna & Mia would be ~ the same if I'm right.

Why would you prefer riot gloves to mythril armlet or a power boosting bracelet for a mage?

[dive_darkness]

Riot gloves as the best defense, a bonus to attack and a bonus to criticals.
I don't prefer elemental boosting gloves because most have lower stats than this one, and my characters have already a high elemental power with their other equipments. I do still use some when playing around with elemental powers. But for long bosses, I prefer to have a +crit as backup in case I get low on pp. That way, I still have a way to inflict damage without using pp or my djinns. For exemple, Atropos' rod's unleash with my current setup does a massive 600 damage. Apocalypse from Lachesis' rule too. So yeah, I prefer to use the riot gloves over most others.


Atropos & Lachesis are alright. Clotho has no unleash. Why not give Ker's weight a +20 atk to every element AND move the Venus boost to the nebula wand. That way, I'll ALWAYS pick Ker's weight if I make a cursed mage. And if I want to do a Venus based mage, I still have the nebula wand. Because right now, unless I make a Venus based mage, the cursed equipments aren't that interesting at all.


The dark robe is still too weak. Aeolian cassock is better if I spec for air, ardargh robe for fire, triton's ward for water. It's only boost that I can't get from another end game equipment is Venus.
You want to avoid broken combinations, what about the mysterious robe then ? If I want to actually cast a lot of psynergies, pp regen is more valuable than +maxpp, as the difference in damage is really small compared with the difference of numbers of cast. So again: a bit more elemental power ? Or +10ppregen ? Between the two, I'll nearly always pick the second one, because I can cast more spells that way.
So giving the Dark robe a +6-10 ppregen, or a +maxpp boost, will make it THE robe for cursed caster.

[Caledor]

Riot gloves as the best defense, a bonus to attack and a bonus to criticals.

Myhtril Bracelet has higher defense and MUCH higher crit bonus (that's why keep saying use the editor). About attack... i don't think someone equipped with a staff cares about that. Still, It's not like i want to force you to use one over the other, i just want to understand your way of thinking, and i really can't see why would a mage favour the riot gloves over the mythril bracelet.

Why not give Ker's weight a +20 atk to every element AND move the Venus boost to the nebula wand. That way, I'll ALWAYS pick Ker's weight if I make a cursed mage. And if I want to do a Venus based mage, I still have the nebula wand. Because right now, unless I make a Venus based mage, the cursed equipments aren't that interesting at all.

I always thought Nebula Wand to be just perfect for Water, due to its effect and power.
About Ker's Weight bonuses, +power to all isn't viable due to how staves are built. Also... why would that make Ker's Weight an instant pick while Dark Robe is automatically dismissed even though it does the exact same thing?
As for Venus Mages... they'll become much more viable with the new mod, thanks to the new Heal psy and certain classes.

The dark robe is still too weak. Aeolian cassock is better if I spec for air, ardargh robe for fire, triton's ward for water. It's only boost that I can't get from another end game equipment is Venus.

I think that's cause the current release is still centred on single element builds. The new mod, more focused on 2-elements builds will make the Dark Robe a lot more useful. Plus, the boosts from the dark robe got raised to +25.

You want to avoid broken combinations, what about the mysterious robe then?

IIRC MRobe used to regen both HP and MP, right? Still, nobody cared about it cause it lacked a power boost.
Anyway... i tinkered a lot with those robes and now they're a lot different from the current release: MRobe boosts earth, Muni robe sort of reverted to vanilla and Iris Robe is now a MRobe that also boosts Luck

pp regen is more valuable than +maxpp, as the difference in damage is really small compared with the difference of numbers of cast

Interesting and funny, considering i recently found myself thinking the exact opposite of that. As in "big pp boosts might overshadow pp regen even for healers"

[dive_darkness]

Well, now that I know Mythril bracelet has a higher unleash rate, I might use it more on my casters ^^

Ker's weight comparison with dark robe: because staves give an elemental bonus and a +maxpp boost. And because I'm one of the people that favors a ppregen over a +maxpp, the 15-20 +maxpp on a staff isn't that interesting. On the other hand, having a nice elemental boost on all elements (30 for exemple) ensure that all other staves have a lower elemental boost, thus making them a weaker choice for the cursed mage.

Dark robe: I'll play your next mod too.

Mysterious robe: I actually use it on Mia, as she's my healer for dungeons and I sometimes need to swap jenna out and bring mia in. The +10ppregen is actually good.
But I must say that unless the hp regen is totally indecent, I find it mostly useless, because on most hard fights, I'm nearly always gonna cast aura or wish.

And about ppregen and +maxpp, I think we play the game differently. I really like to play with unleashes (because I love some of the animations, like apocalypse or the one on Atropos' rod) whenever I can. And I prefer to have more casts thanks to ppregen than a bigger pp pool. It also allows me to attack with psynergies when I can afford not to heal, or use unleashes and get back some of my pp. I liked to do it against sentinel and Balrog, and I plan to take down Dullahan like this too (even though I don't think I'll unleash much with Jenna).
I guess it depends on your play style.

[Caledor]

Little progress report:

I'm still updating stats for TLA enemies cause I'm really busy with exams ATM and cause i keep adding new stuff to do like:

- Rearrangement of enemy levels from the Eastern Sea till Trial Road: everything will be 0-3 levels lower.
- Completely new batch of enemies for the Northern Reaches' overworld area.
- Rearrangement of enemy groups here and there. This might add new enemies in certain places. Enemy groups changed from Eastern Sea to Magma Rock. This added new enemies and brought back other ones from GS that were missing in TLA.
- Treasure Isle's encounters fixed.

So, basically... it's gonna take a while.

[JustBeKrillin]

In golden sun 1 seems to be a glutch where if i set all my djinn into standby to summon rush (curre tly at 3 djinn on each character) i can o ly summon things like atlantica, etc. No 3 djinn summons at all. However if i properly use the djinn in battle i can?

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Doesn't sound like a glitch to me.

Quote from first post:

Summons that require more than 2 djinn won't appear right at the start of a battle. After the first turn, 3-djinn summons become available; after the second, 4-djinn summons become available and so on, with Iris available after the 7th turn has passed.

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Off-topic:  Wondering about a patch idea: Skip all battles..? (I do not expect any real hacks to use it... definitely not this one..., but I'm sure there could be some uses for it. And if I'm right, it's possible this can be done by editing only two bytes?)

[Caledor]

It's like Fox said.

Also, about the off-topic, that looks like something you'd want as a gameshark/codebreaker cheat rather than a permanent patch.

[JustBeKrillin]

Ok, thanks. Was afraid it was a bugged rom i was using or something. Btw is your golden sun 1 patch fully complete?

[Caledor]

Golden Sun: The Balance Age is technically finished. There won't be a version 1.35 or something.
On the other side i'm porting everything from here in a new mod. I decided to make a new mod instead of a v1.35 cause new changes will force you to start over. Read the few last pages of discussion here for further details.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Also, about the off-topic, that looks like something you'd want as a gameshark/codebreaker cheat rather than a permanent patch.

Likely.... but you never know when there might be that one person that wants to do something differently? (i.e. Get rid of battles and have direct combat on the map similar to Zelda?)

Or even something similar to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney... which doesn't even do battles... More just a linear novel.... where you have to pick the right answers and stuff.

--
Of course, it might be better to just clear out all the battle content.... For GS2: 0x08118000 - 0x081A0000, and some files in the MFT, I think. But that could complicate some things...