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[RELEASE] Golden Sun Reloaded

Started by Caledor, 22, December, 2016, 03:56:07 PM

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Dark Mits

Final notes, based on v1.74 of the Reloaded mod. I don't know if I should warn for spoilers, but I expect that everyone on these forums already knows all secrets of the games by heart  :happy:

Yep, this is an amazing modification. The last time I remember that I had such a long and endurance-based final boss was for The Last Remnant, over 10 years ago. I finally beat Doom Dragon, on the first try, with a lvl41-lvl40 team. The battle lasted around 1 hour and 30mins, and was surely over 80 rounds. I did not attempt Star Magician, Valukar, Sentinel, and I did not step foot into Anemos Sanctum. These will be done with v1.75 (or even newer?) and with dual-element classes.

The Double Dragons were in fact the hardest part of the mod for me, and mostly due to two abilities: Rolling Fire and Meteor Blow. Not even Doom Dragon's Cruel Ruin was dealing as much damage percentage-wise as Meteor Blow.

The random battles in the part after Jupiter Lighthouse are relatively easier than the ones in TBS and TLA up to JL, exactly because of the reasons I explained in my previous post; because we no longer need to be conservative with our PP. After getting Isaac and co. you can spend the entirety of your front party's PP for offense, while the back party heals after each battle. In combination with the occasional use of Aroma and Ember, and with PP-regen equipment, this means infinite PP. In fact all fights in Mars Lighthouse, except the Fire birds which I was killing 1-by-1 to prevent them escaping, were a 1-turn deal.

Regarding Doom Dragon:
- His last form uses Mother Gaia instead of Grand Gaia. Is this intended? Especially since his second form uses Grand Gaia.
- What's the success rate of Condemn? Doom Dragon used it at least 10 times and it didn't work a single one of them. Was it a stroke of luck?
- Earth Force never did anything, it was like a wasted action. Was it again luck that it never worked?
- Did you really change Doom Dragon's AI to make it use Guard Aura when unleashing more than 1 summon at a turn?  :happy:   All times, without exception, that I used 2 summons in one round, Doom Dragon always casted Guard Aura. If this was indeed not just a random occurence but something that you implemented, it was amazing!
- His Jupiter weakness is kind of exploitable. Eclipse, Thor, Flora and Scourge/Spark Plasma were my main damage sources. Even Megiddo was dealing barely breaking 200 damage, while Spark Plasma was dealing ~350 even right after Djinn Blast/Storm.
- His first form is actually his most dangerous one, due to 4 turns. Since Cruel Ruin was dealing approximately 40%-60% of my party's HP, then the only time it can turn lethal was when combined with another dangerous attack (like Darksol Gasp, or True Collide). On the other hand, during 1st phase he could cast Gravel Blow, Desert Gasp, Inferno and Supernova in the same turn.
- Doom Dragon lost Break and Potent Cure after 1st phase, was this intentional? I think he retained these Psynergies in vanilla. I was allowed to have near 100% uptime on Defense/Resistance due to him losing break.


One question regarding Hard mode; do enemies have their +25% ATK and +50% HP in hard mode with the mod too? Will it be hell to complete it on hard mode?

Caledor

#701
- Mother Gaia is totally a mistake.
- Earth Force was bugged in vanilla (supposed to force the skip of a turn like petra/ulysses but fails cause doesn't act first), i changed it's effect to turn HP to 1 but won't work outside of physical strikes (added damage or mul) and it's basically a death sentence on a 4 turn boss with multiple AOEs, so i'm changing it again into a base damage spells that stuns.
- Fun Fact: Guard Aura is picked only as part of the sequential pattern of its attack. It's not even bad RNG, you just picked the wrong turn everytime lol
- Every weakness is exploitable, Elemental res matters much more now that base damage spells are actually useful. But Jupiter has been designed on purpose to have the best overall offense in the game, no question. Monoelemental Sheba basically nukes with Scrouge. Only Necromancer's Call Dullahan comes close to that.
- Doom Dragon never had break in vanilla. But i might readd it to it's later stages.

- Hard Mode: Yes

GG on finishing the game with monoelemental classes BTW  :happy:

@KisukeOboro: the wiki has info about the enemies intelligence in their pages. I haven't touched that value in the mod so everything written there about any enemy is still true

VardenSalad

That Elemental Power on base spells bug explains a LOT about the issues I felt like I was having with spellcasters over the years despite doing everything I could to amp their casting ability and watching unleashing be more effective (not wrong on builds that don't run +unleash, mind).

My ideal casters through the overwhelming majority of the game tries to either spike EleP (thanks to +EleP weapons) by syncing a dual class to a +EleP weapon and unleash of my largest EleP element or making up the difference in weapon elements with Djinn flexibility (thank you, Cal, for the endless combos of the item classes) and spreading maximum elemental flexibility. Getting the EleP calculations right bring Dual class casters back into the fold as the game continues since there's quite a few scenarios where equipment combinations result in substantial +EleP spikes in single elements.

Also, I don't remember if I mentioned this over the years, but thank you, thank you, thank you for adding so much power flexibility for the tri-elemental classes by giving them a wide variety of buff/de-buff psynergies instead of raw damaging skills. I have loved the Fateweaver / Divine Mage since the second I saw it. While you've broken my heart by removing a lot of the Psynergy lines I thought had potential (Demon Night/Thorny Grave died for the Wave series(?) which hasn't made the cut), what you've added has been very nice to see.

One last thing, forever ago, when you were creating the Wave series, I think you ended up breaking the animation for Dreamtide, from the Spada Pirata. With the Wave series out of the picture, would you mind bringing the original animation for Dreamtide back in? Unless that slot is already used for something, of course.
Never forget why you started playing.

Caledor

#703
Hi Varden, long time no see!

spiking ePower (and PP) on casters is what i also do as you can see from the psynergy doc, healing math sheet. I used those calculations in balancing the power of classes who can MT heal

As for the power flexibility to tri-elemental they're totally a design choice cause there's only so much offense skills can do and you take a ePower loss going from dual to tri classes, which can only be compensated by higher stats and a better psynergy set. Miko/Incantatrix and Arcanist/Pure Mage are the perfect example. (I also love Divine Mage: it was designed with Sheba in mind and she's had that class from day one).

Wave was quite a loss for me as well but i simply couldn't afford it. 3 icons for a fancy animation to be used only by one class (monoelemental, no less) was too much. It's the only reason Wave didn't make it: i don't like Piers casting Prism either but ATM i think i have 1-2 free ability icon slots.

Demon night and thorny grave were cool but kinda useless in the player's hand and even worse in samurai's hand, lol. I think i reused that animation for a venus unleash somewhere? Mid game mace/staff maybe?

BTW the change to Dreamtide is a well known side effect of the Wave Animation Patch, just to say that i knew it would've been affected. But since i also can't figure the Wave series making it again, Dreamtide's animation will be restored for next release. In the meantime, the attached patch will do ;)

(It's literally the opposite of the Wave Animation Patch in the download section: it restores the values changed by that patch to the vanilla ones)

VardenSalad

Quote from: Caledor on 04, June, 2020, 12:58:38 PM

Demon night and thorny grave were cool but kinda useless in the player's hand and even worse in samurai's hand, lol. I think i reused that animation for a venus unleash somewhere? Mid game mace/staff maybe?


Oh, absolutely. Haunt being so unpredictable and much more damaging for the player than the enemy is just a side effect of the status itself. Still, it felt like something that fit the Necromancer, but ultimately, it's a better monster thing than a player thing. Plus why bother casting when you can rip off EPAs for a trillion damage?

Quote from: Caledor on 04, June, 2020, 12:58:38 PM

BTW the change to Dreamtide is a well known side effect of the Wave Animation Patch, just to say that i knew it would've been affected. But since i also can't figure the Wave series making it again, Dreamtide's animation will be restored for next release. In the meantime, the attached patch will do ;)

(It's literally the opposite of the Wave Animation Patch in the download section: it restores the values changed by that patch to the vanilla ones)


Neat, I'll probably just wait for the next release then. Thanks for the patch though!
Never forget why you started playing.

Caledor

Dunno when it'll be though. Unless some catastrophic bug pops up i'll take my sweet time in releasing v1.77

I recently started a full playthrough so i'll probably refrain from updating until i'm done.

VardenSalad

Hey Cal, maybe you already answered this elsewhere in the thread, but what's up with Tisiphone Edge's and Excalibur's unleashes on the Equipment Google doc?

Is that Base+5 x1, 2, or 3 on the Excalibur and Base+8 x1, 2, or 3 on the Tisiphone Edge?
Never forget why you started playing.

Caledor

Yes. BTW for doc specific stuff you can also leave a comment on the doc itself

KisukeOboro

Heyo, so I used the updated patch and now I'm going through the games again and recording my experience for feedback. So here they are so far:
https://youtu.be/kdWXnx5xBVI
https://youtu.be/IqeOdVvY_Hw
https://youtu.be/w7B3mac8tZA
https://youtu.be/Ojc-VPm04fw

Currently, I'm up to Tolbi and I need to edit those streams so once I've gotten those up I'll share them in this thread

Caledor

#709
Unleashes were all based on the Attack stat originally. Staff unleashes becoming base damage type means that they're basically spells now, so they ignore the attack stat completely AND use the PP multiplier i introduced for psynergies.

Casters in vanilla endgame were basically useless. Unleashing and summoning did way more damage than casting would ever do. This mod was born with the PP multipier, aka turning PP into an offensive stat. Base damage psynergies (aka spells) deal more damage as maxPP grows

Vulnerabilities_25: this is unchanged from the vanilla game. Each class is actually weak to a specific status: that status has a 25% higher chance to affect its target. Vulnerabilities_25 is supposed to be read as "Vulnerabilities' 25%". Which means: "if target is weak to this status add 25% to chance to inflict, else do nothing". Again, this is completely unchanged from vanilla game, it's always been there.

Hp Gain from djinn halved: NO. i'm talking about the HP stat bonus granted by setting djinn. I moved a good chunk of that bonus from Djinn to characters, so when you have all djinn set it's unchanged, but as you standby djinn, you lose less HP cause the djinn's impact on your HP is lowered: for example if X djinn granted 30 HP to your chara on average, they now grant 15. The remaining 15 is now hardcoded on character growth so setting X djinn makes you lose less hp than before cause it won't be lost as you unleash djinn and/or summon.

Shake things up: YES. Something like 80% of enemies were either weak to Jupiter or Mars with the remaining 20% being weak to Mercury or Venus in the original game. This creates imbalance on the offensive weigth of each element so i rearranged that. My goal was to make it as close as possible to having weaknesses distributed equally among elements. Long story short i replaced a lot of J/Ma weaknesses with Ve/Me ones, just cause the latter had less.

"this mod is intended for people who know the game already": big YES. I say this all the time to newcomers. DON'T use the mod right away unless you're in for a big challenge. The mod is supposed to give more value to a second/third/nth playthrough. If you go in blind youre up for a harsh challenge.

"dual and tri classes are leaps and bounds better than mono elemental, and they're needed for this mod cause everything is more difficult". YES/NO. Yes cause base game was just so easy that you never needed to change from mono element classes, NO cause they've always been better, it's not something i changed. Mono elemental classes are BAD and they've always been so. Setting aside Angel and Incendiary, which had huge benefits in vanilla due to the healing mechanic, everything else was just catastrophically bad. BUT it was still good enough. Through equipment and whatnot i tried to greatly encourage multi-elemental classes from some point onwards.

Poison: erm... Tret is immune. 40 Luck.

Buffs: how long? -> Vanilla has all buff last for 7 turns. I changed the stronger buffs (those usually attached to single targets spells) to last for 5 turns. Reasoning: take impact. You usually don't have 4 physical attackers in a team, so it's much more effective to just cast impact for 25% on your heavy hitter than high impact for 12.5% overall on your entire team, which includes people who are not supposed to use the attack command ever. How do i make High impact relevant? -> By making it last for longer. Intended usage is Impact for the immediate big boost then HImp to reset turn counter with a longer duration.

Classes: For A LOT of them, only the name changed, cause i didn't want to repeat them. The ENTIRE Herbalist -> Druid line is a carbon copy of the original Seer (Mercury) -> Oracle line (except Growth -> Gaia). It's just that most of those names have been retained by the Jupiter counterpart, so i had to make up new ones for the mercury variant.

KisukeOboro

Yeah, my memory isn't very good in remembering specific details in base game, such as what classes were specifically named nor which Psynergies they really had. This is also compounded due to me streaming and I have a hard time remembering things on the fly despite me running my mouth. I know what you meant on the Djinn HP thing I just did terribly in explaining it.

Okay, it says on your first post that above 40 has immune to stun and sleep so I didn't know if that also applied to poison or the other status ailments. Also again I don't have an editor to see these values and so I'm testing the only way I can with what I have and that's trying to brute force these status ailments on these bosses

Caledor

#711
Big update to the first post

Added "Reasoning" paragraphs where I explain why I made the changes described there. Also if you think i've forgot something i should've mentioned or you have further questions tell/ask me and i'll add it.

Oh and @KisukeOboro if you have some kind of schedule for the next stream I'll see if i can join and answer some questions live.

KisukeOboro

I'm planning on going this Wednesday, which might be your Thursday if I'm understanding correctly that you're in Italy?
But yeah you can catch me at twitch.tv/kisukeoboro and get notified when I go live. Gonna plan to get through the rest of GS and make those save states for more testing

Caledor

#713
Ok hopefully i'll manage some time. 100% sure i won't be able to follow the whole stream since it'll be after midnight.

For the record, my TBS playthrough is over. Whole game was such a smooth sail that i lost a few times only again Deadbeard and Fusion Dragon cause i underestimated them at first. Picking the right team comp/strategy allowed me to easily clear them as well. Perfectly in line with what i'd expect after all this time.

Usual password copypasted, TLA begins. Changelog for next release is building up. Zero urgent balance changes so far, only improvements and fixes.

UPDATE: checked your stream after, 4AM to 8AM is the time when i'm 100% asleep sadly.

Also i'm at Naribwe in TLA. Just how it was predictable the "no-changes" tag in TBS, i'm having quite a few instead in TLA. The infamous Yampi-Kibombo section strikes again (by far the hardest portion in TLA to do right, as i said many times) and i'm mainly nerfing some enemies.

VardenSalad

Cal, I do have one question since it's not something I can find looking at the editor:

Does the "Restore X% of damage dealt as HP/PP" effect on unleashes like Psynergy Leech have a Luck calculation as well? I swear I can't get the "Restore PP" effect to occur on anything at Air's Rock with the Blessed Ankh no matter how many times I get the unleash.

If it does have some Luck calculation attached to it, I'm wondering why it wouldn't restore every time the unleash went off. It doesn't seem like something that should be affected by luck since it's not a debuff; I already did the damage, I should get the restore. I don't think any sane person is attack-spamming at base unleash rate to get 5 PP back while their team gets AOE'd every turn, so it's not like it would be game-breaking if the restore chance is 100%.
Never forget why you started playing.

Caledor

Quote from: VardenSalad on 12, June, 2020, 10:22:43 PM
Cal, I do have one question since it's not something I can find looking at the editor:

Does the "Restore X% of damage dealt as HP/PP" effect on unleashes like Psynergy Leech have a Luck calculation as well? I swear I can't get the "Restore PP" effect to occur on anything at Air's Rock with the Blessed Ankh no matter how many times I get the unleash.

If it does have some Luck calculation attached to it, I'm wondering why it wouldn't restore every time the unleash went off. It doesn't seem like something that should be affected by luck since it's not a debuff; I already did the damage, I should get the restore. I don't think any sane person is attack-spamming at base unleash rate to get 5 PP back while their team gets AOE'd every turn, so it's not like it would be game-breaking if the restore chance is 100%.

This is something i noticed as well during my last TBS and even in TLA now so thanks for reminding me. As expected i've set both effect to always occour regardless of luck, but for the PP variant, it simply won't happen if the enemy doesn't have PP to steal. And all enemies without psynergies have 0 PP.

So this is mostly a design / flavor choice... i'll think about it

KisukeOboro

Heya I almost forgot to post it here, but I made a simple playlist on my playthrough and testing so far. Any new videos will be uploaded to that playlist

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5H7ksn_gzwC2sp_ytgl7iV_gTRP1uEVZ

So quick note about some of the last videos. I do realize that I am mistaken about status ailments. This was streamed before I realized that I conflated debuffs and status ailments together. So ignore what I'm talking about for status ailments. However now I am more interested in the debuffing and how that works now and how viable a strategy it can be against bosses. So I'll be testing that a bunch in my future testing

VardenSalad

Quote from: Caledor on 13, June, 2020, 02:52:17 PM
This is something i noticed as well during my last TBS and even in TLA now so thanks for reminding me. As expected i've set both effect to always occour regardless of luck, but for the PP variant, it simply won't happen if the enemy doesn't have PP to steal. And all enemies without psynergies have 0 PP.

Ahhhhhhh, yeah, that makes sense. I knew you gave enemies PP values to boost their psynergy, but hadn't realized all non-psynergy-using enemies had their base psynergy set to 0 and I didn't realize that the "restored" HP/PP was actually literally drained from the enemy, I figured it was just a calculation based on the damage done and the PP was pulled from thin air i.e. Enemy HP damaged became PP restored.
Never forget why you started playing.

Caledor

#718
Quote from: VardenSalad on 13, June, 2020, 06:56:04 PM
Ahhhhhhh, yeah, that makes sense. I knew you gave enemies PP values to boost their psynergy, but hadn't realized all non-psynergy-using enemies had their base psynergy set to 0 and I didn't realize that the "restored" HP/PP was actually literally drained from the enemy, I figured it was just a calculation based on the damage done and the PP was pulled from thin air i.e. Enemy HP damaged became PP restored.

It is, at least for a while. The game does literally damage / 10 but then caps that number at the enemy's current PP. Then it damages both HP and PP and restores your PP only. For the record, restore 50% of damage to HP does the same thing. Damage / 2 (the restore part) is capped at the enemy's current HP.

It took me only a few minutes to tweak the PP regen formula so it'd be capped by enemy's HP rather than PP but then i noticed the battle messages and the fact that those PP are actually drained from the enemy. It looks like a very specific design choice, also all relevant enemies do have PP so i'll probably keep it as it is in the end.

@Kisuke
Thanks for the link. I think i already watched the current episodes uploaded until now through twitch btw. Also if you have some questions about game mechanics do write them here so i can address them properly. There's likely a ton of stuff i take for granted by now, like why i made all those changes or (de)buff turn duration, but this mod is 5.5 years old now (!!!) and most people haven't been here from the beginning. If i can improve the first post i'll definitively do it.

PS: Oh, forgot to address it before. Ivan lacking growth for the first round of colosso is something i've implicitly accepted. But i also made a point on never sacrificing anything of the original experience so i might add a "Growth Seed" item just to address this.

As a last note, here's one line from the ever-growing changelog:
[spoiler]Every non-overworld Djinn can't escape anymore.

Reasoning: Some rooms are simply horrible to reset after an escape and resorting to save/reload is even worse since it grants a preemptive strike.
Also in some rooms the puzzle involves cornering that djinn in a place where he can't possibly escape so it doesn't make much sense for it to escape in battle. Like the first Mars from TLA, the one with Pound.
Overworld djinn are way more "free" instead and i feel like they should know their environment so it makes sense to me that they'd want (and are able) to escape if things get ugly.[/spoiler]

Caledor

#719
What's the general opinion with level progression?

I just finished Tundaria at 27.5 but i feel like I had to run away more than I intended to just for the sake of not overleveling.

Those are the intended levels for each area after the ship is obtained (= average enemy level of the area)

Taopo = 20-21
Aqua Rock = 22-23
Gaia Rock = 24-25
Ankhol = 26
Tundaria = 27-28
Poseidon = 28
Treasure Isle = 28-29

Eastern Sea = 29
Jupiter Lighthouse = 30-31
Reunion = 31-32

Magma Rock = 32-33
Northern Reaches = 34
Mars Lighthouse = 35-36

Optional Dungeons = 37-42+

Does this match with your playthroughs? Or do your happen to under/overlevel easily?

I'm asking cause this is a delicate matter. There might be an issue at all and it's my playstyle that leads to overleveling (didn't happen in TBS though... maybe it's due to the lower linearity in eastern sea), while if it's an issue it can be addressed in different ways... if difficulty is also a problem i can reduce the average number of enemies encountered, while if the difficulty is right i'd just reduce exp.