[FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v2.0.999992)

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Like LCP says, some of his playthrough stuff is from 1.1 which had a few differences:
-) No level cap
-) Plus Materia available (HP Plus, etc.)
-) Sources available (actually easier to get)
-) Different Monster strength (some weaker, some stronger)

The goal of 1.2 was to make a challenging curve that holds from the start to the bottom of the Crater, but I also took out the Plus Materia (save for MP Plus) and Sources so I could introduce them later if needed. Same thing with certain pieces of armor; the Shinra Alpha, Ziedrich, Imperial Guard, and Aegis Armlet were pushed back so there'd be something to nab for either NG+ or the lengthier sidequests I want to make.

Here's the drop list for the Extra Battle and some other roulettes; mind that the way item drops work is that it checks each one in ascending order, so the lower down ones are less likely as the items above them have to 'fail' to drop first:

Proud Clod/Asimov
-) Ragnarok (16)
-) God's Hand (16)
-) Spirit Lance (16)

Hojo Lifeform/Calamity
-) Umbrella 8
-) Behemoth Horn 8
-) Starlight Phone 8
-) Oritsuru 8

Variablis
-) Fire Ring (16)
-) Ice Ring (16)
-) Bolt Ring (16)
-) Guardian Ring (16)

Love Buster
-) Curse Ring (16)
-) Reflect Ring (16)
-) Protect Ring (16)
-) Relic Ring (16)
Morph: Pile Banger

Abyss
-) Ribbon (32)
Morph: Oversoul Shard

Nycta Dragon
-) SS-Mine (16)
-) Magic Shuriken (16)
-) Outsider (16)
Morph: Oversoul Shard

Tyrant
-) Gospel Spark (16)
-) Spring Gun Clip (16)
-) Wizard Staff (16)
Morph: Oversoul Shard

Seems like you've killed pretty much everything; there's still the Junon League to try out though, that's accessed from the Beginner's Hall in Junon by talking to the two soldiers in black down there. It's only one bracket and should be fairly easy to sweep through with enough firepower (I think they all only have about roughly 10kHP each), but it rewards some of the new attack items like SS-Mines and Fletch Rockets.

As far as the NG+ goes, I'm going to re-do every enemy in the game with a different colour, name, and move-set but besides that I'm setting up a pared down scenario for progressing through the game that cuts out most of the story; the player starts in the Sector 7 bar, Meteor has been summoned, and you have to get from there to the Crater is the basic gist. The first goal of that would be finding the 'Key to Sector 5' key-item to get out of that door close to the Church and leave Midgar. This would be the last addition to the mod, though; I've a bunch of other stuff to do first. That said, the prototype for Midgar is currently working; maybe a demo soon? :p

But yeah, for the secret fight all you need is one Hero Medal in the inventory; these'll have a consumable effect in NG+ so having more than one isn't a waste. I'll actually need to set up a save point for AFTER the last boss fight (both versions) so that it transitions easier into the NG+; I think teleporting to a repurposed Debug room might be the key, makes it much easier for the two flevels to pass the baton if the player has to be on one particular field to transition across. That room + save will be in the next update, I'll try and get that done quick.
 
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Ugh, I'm definitely going to need to buff my secondary party members... I've ever done this whole thing with Bizarro Sephiroth and while I was able to kill some parts of him, I didn't know the strategy to it until I looked it up. Killing both Arm Parts and then the Core Parts  isn't easy and means my Level 50 other teams around for a while and none of them can survive anything. Well maybe one attack, barely....


I didn't want to grind Limits. It's boring as shit. But it doesn't look like I have much choice. The only way any of them are going to be able to win is with Level 4 Limits. I have some Mastered Comet and Ultima too but, again, they're all weak as hell.

Do you know how much HP you gave the Core Parts?
 
It's a surprisingly tough fight when all three parties have to get involved; perfect template for a future super-boss, eh?  :wink:

Anyways, this is the low-down on Bizarro/Pinnacle:

-) Torso: 80,000HP + 60,000HP if KOTR was used during Jenova-SYNTHESIS fight.
-) Head: 16,000HP
-) Core: 35,000HP
-) Arms: 20,000HP

That's consistent across all forms and variants. The way it goes is usually this:

Starts off with centre party. They have to kill a part to move to the other two teams, generally best to go for either an Arm or the Head and focusing damage. Game then prompts to transition to another party (careful not to pick the wrong option!)

Your Left and Right parties are uneven, as one party only has two people. The two-man team should be beefier than the three-party team to try and compensate for that. The goal of the Left and Right teams is to expose their side of the Core and destroy it; to do that, they have to kill the Arm which protects it. However, the Head will revive the Arm so the sequence for Left/Right Party is:
1) Head
2) Arm parts
3) Core

When their Core-side is destroyed, try to swap to your other team and do the same thing there. The Two-Party team is fighting less targets if memory serves. When both Core Sides were destroyed, try and swap over to the centre team. If the game swaps you to the wrong team (I'm not sure how it decides, might be a cycle or set-pattern) then usually the Head will revive for you to destroy and get the swap prompt again.

Finally, Centre Team has to destroy both Arms to reveal the Core. The head will revive at intervals in this one, so it's best to ignore it and focus on getting that Core wrecked. Once it's gone, you're on the home straight to wreck the Torso.

...or alternatively start Centre team with Aeris, she uses Planet Protector or Great Gospel for the Peerless/Invincible status, then let rip with KOTR+MP Turbo on W-Summon. That works too.
 
I actually tried that KOTR strategy but my game kept freezing every time it tried to complete the summon animation. Dunno why.

But anyway....

PROOF OF SUCCESS!!!!
http://i.imgur.com/kDkcJfw.png

I didn't need to go grind Limits or anything! That was what was really killing me. i was SO CLOSE to finishing the game and I didn't want to head all the way back just to grind for an entire day.

But with some creative use of my Materia, I pulled it off. For one thing, I now have a new appreciation for Quadra Magic. I mastered it once but it didn't seem very useful. Ultima is massively depowered per use so maybe you come away with a 1000 extra damage but so what? HOWEVER, even when it was equipped to a weakling like Cait Sith or Tifa, Quadra Magic Ultima did 1500 a shot. So even they could not do almost 8000 damage a turn.  Yet this led to more anxiety on my part. Since I had dismissed it as useless, I only had one mastered QM. For a time I tried using it on Team 2 but that wasn't working. I ended up just giving Cait Sith Ultima to do a pitiful 2000 or so a turn while Cid did at least some damage with his Rocket Jump Limit Break - about 3000 or so. He was nice enough to get it all the time thugh so that helped. Then I gave Vincent a Circlet and one of my Mastered Comet Materias to be the main damage dealer in Team 2 and once you get every other part out of the way, Comet2 will wreck the Core.

For my two person team I kept trying with Barret because he has more HP than Tifa but theN i recalled Tifa also had one of her Defense Weapons, God's Hand.  I ended up giving Tifa my Mastered QM while Red got a W-SUmmon. That way he can start the fight with Bahamut ZERO and Typhon. Together they pretty much kill all the parts. At most it takes one more attack. I used those Magical Ashes or something I got from the Mammon Machine.  Once all the parts were down, I repeated my strategy from Team 2 and used Comet2 to obliterate the Core when it was unprotected.

It sounds so simple and easy yet it sure wasn't. So many failures and rearranging of materia to figure out this....

I was worried about Safer because none of us had Barrier Materia to protect against Mega Nova and I DID NOT want to have to go through that previous fight again.  I ended up using one of my Gospel Sparks on Aerith just to be safe. Needn't have worried though, it did only about 2K, maybe 3K damage. And he died immediately after using it.

Phew....I did it! I'm very happy.
 
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Sounds great! One of the things I want from this mod is for it to encourage people to get more into the game's mechanics and try different things; it sounds like Comet2 is a bit OP seeing as I have it 6 hits instead of 4 but seeing as it loses a lot of it's effectiveness against multiple targets/groups I think I can live with that. A problem with Safer is that it would really suck to lose there after going through Bizarro, but it's one of those things where a save point between them would utterly break the tension.

KOTR (and other multi-hit spells) can freeze the game when used against a multi-target enemy with I think HP/MP Drain attached to it. Or was it only when it was attached to Quadra and HP/MP Drain? I forget.

No refund.
 
So found a few interesting things last night to report in:
 - Peace Rings from the first version of the Battle Arena are listed at 4,000 points but actually cost 8,000.
 - Those goblin dudes at Gongaga are little bastards. >_>
 - Lambda Calcule is confusing. I imagine this is by design, but I'm worried I screwed up and missed out on something.
 - Vincent... Well... http://www.twitch.tv/potatohandle/c/5394779 (Warning: Nibelheim spoilers.)
 - I believe the new items I mentioned last time are still un-useable. (If you just haven't had time yet, that's cool, just a reminder.)

Had a lot of fun yesterday, was very surprised a number of times, hehe. \o/
 
That Peace Ring price must have been a nasty shock; it's easy to fix but I'll double-check them all again. I revised the prizes recently, was the thing. I've been working on an extensive patch to fix up a big list of problems, issues, and stuff that was just no good, including a quite serious one regarding variables (I had to test for new variables and change them all) which is why I'm running a bit late on it. Very nearly done though.

Battle Square 1 & 2 is just about done; and because I can't do much about the roulette, I decided to do away with the random groups and make it the same eight fights every time (like how Special Battle works) and hand-picked which fights would appear. I also added AI to deal with the auto-buff so monsters that appear now have their original HP, STR, and MAG rather than a %-boost (which tends to become unmanageable in mods where stats are adjusted). I also changed the one-time Keystone Battle Square event prize to some things that'll be much more useful, including another new item.

Ultimate strats on Vincent, eh? :p

In 1.1 I was using a weird set-up to get around a glitch where character-models used as enemies soft-lock the game when struck by attacks. I had an invisible 'hit-box' the player would attack while the player-model enemy would use attacks, so two enemies to make one. Thing is, I since found a way to make it so that these guys could be attacked directly but I've likely forgotten to update their status defence info. I better give them all a quick check to make sure their elemental weaknesses and the like are all what they should be.

Lambda's only gimmick is that if he's killed before he can transform into one of his two forms, the fight will repeat. The only way to end it is to trigger his transformation and then kill him, at which point he'll eject the player party from the battle and end it properly. A lot of people have said they found him confusing, though; I reckon it might be time to get rid of this and make him just like Lost Number but with the different attacks. Boxer in Gongaga, however, will remain his usual bastard self.

I'm gonna watch that big ol' highlight for notes, etc. though judging from the title it seems like I better get this battle square fixed up pronto  :-X
 
Haha, the battle arena is alright, but it takes a very particular setup which took a while to nail down, including the Wall Ring from the speed square which itself needs some not-well-known-strats (Or actual skill, I guess. >_>) to get the maximum reward from, hehe.

With the extra levels and materia from getting up to Nibel I've got a setup which works quite reasonably now, gunna grind away for those reflect rings over the next couple of days, hehe. Something to consider would be adding in a 'nicer' way of getting GP at this point in the game. Not that playing Super Dunk with a metronome isn't extremely exciting or anything. :P

EDIT: And yeah the actual fight against Lambda seemed basically the same as normal, it was just the eject and the dialogue which made me think I missed something.
 
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I was thinking that actually; one of the biggest obstacles to actually doing anything in the Gold Saucer in Disc 1 & 2 is getting GP (Most people wait for Chocobo Racing for a big supply of GP from trading in rare items/Materia for 3-500GP).

What I'll do is up the GP awards from the machines, and have Cait Sith give the party a 'present' of 100GP or so to start when he joins. That should fix her up.

I'm up to Gongaga in your highlight, saw a puzzling glitch with the music there but I think I've found the cause so that'll hopefully be fixed up too. It looks like I left components in there to handle music after the Reno fight and got distracted before I finished it. Might tune the fight up to make it more interesting, and give them stuff to steal.

Patch will be up tomorrow it seems like, should make grinding those Reflect Rings a fair bit easier. The eight encounters will be the same every time (might expand it later but I reckon it'll be better that way, easier to prepare and kills some of the RNG already in the Battle Square). I also put different music in for each iteration of Battle Square, ease that inevitable Aseri2 headache ._.
 
Them there new patches are up. 15 days worth of bug fixin' and wrangling, featuring:

-) Cleaned up variables used by the NT Mod, as there was a risk that some variables were already in use by the game. This is largely harmless for current players, but has the side-effect of making Lv.4 Limit Sidequests available for completion again if they were finished prior. The only real consequence of this is that you can now get a second copy of every Lv.4 Limit Book and another O. Shard (maybe some more EXP too, Extra Bosses don't have the level cap AI).

-) Battle Square rebalanced with a static eight encounters for each variant, with the first two (pre-Bronco and post-Bronco) having enemies with AI to prevent the auto-buff that Battle Square (which shortens to BS, interestingly) gives it's enemies. GP rewards were also boosted for the Basketball and Wonder-Catcher minigame (the others will be boosted soon), and Cait Sith gives the party 100GP when he joins the party to encourage folk to stick around the Disc 1 Gold Saucer and try stuff out, like, uh, Battle Square...

-) Fixed a tonne of issues and made various optimisations to bosses from all over the game. Key attention was paid to end-game bosses where Shield could make them unable to inflict any damage, so a mix of non-elemental attacks was put in there to keep players on their toes.

-) Made Junon Leagues available much earlier, from Disc 1.

-) Adjusted Materia equip effects and fixed the broken Mime Materia.

-) Some spell balances; KOTR was made usable again, Comet2 got a slight nerf, and Ultima was buffed.

-) Umbrella placed back in Speed Square's Disc 1, and is available from Lifeform Hojo as an uncommon drop.

If I've missed anything, then let me know.
 
Was in the Area getting Mythril, and had a few minutes to try the Junon league this morning. I can *almost* beat some of them, haha. I'm impressed by the amount of content there though, all new bosses; I'm excited to get a bit tougher so I can try for reals. \o/

I have run into the big mounted dude in the arena before and beaten him there (Wondered why he had dialogue, now it makes sense, hehe.) but I got berserked before I could slow him this time, so he kicked my butt, hehe. A few were way too hard though so I'll prolly try again after Rocket Town. Gunna try and smash some battle arena tonight, but I snagged 2 reflect rings with my remaining GP so I was getting the old version sussed out, but some encounters were nearly unbeatable so it's good to see a change, might be inclined to grab some Curse Rings now as well.

Thanks again for all your work on the mod Sega, it's a really fun experience. \o/
 
No prob, thanks for playing it and going through the headache of streaming it. Next thing is Dark Summons (like FFX's Dark Aeons) but I've been thinking it'd be a good idea to add stuff for Disc 1/2 as well. A few new things for earlier on couldn't hurt. I've been looking at Kattan and Sample G0512's mechanics as well, to see how viable it is to transplant Kattan's mechanic to Sample (which would be a better fit, and solves that boss being too flat and uninteresting at present) but I'll need to come up with a replacement for Kattan.
 
Well if anyone wants to see absolutely how NOT to fight Nemesis, here's my third Hero Medal vid:

It takes way too long I figure but, well, I suck. Also it's not the best quality because my computer can't really handle the game and Fraps running at the same time too well.


Can I just say I hate the Limit Break system in this game? "Oh yes we'll make it so you can't use any more physical attacks until after you use your Limit. Or you die, either or." Maybe I don't want to use my Limit because the boss counters with Ultima!

My favorite part is when you use a Limit on Nemesis, he counters with Ultima, but that doesn't count as his turn so his actual next turn is Armageddon. Coming right on the heels of Ultima. This video is 100% Good Luck on my part with both of those missing Aerith. But yeah, if not for that thing I got from thE Mammon Machine, this would have been another failure video. Again, it's more of a guide how NOT to fight Nemesis.

 I find the smartest strategy of dealing with the counter-Ultima is to have a W-Magic/W-Item lined up and ready to go. If you need some last second healing to ensure you survive the counter, use one spell/item to heal, then activate the other character's Limit to interrupt the W-Magic/Item, and then immediately after the Limit and Ultima the healer will complete the W-Magic/Item turn, restoring your party  to decent levels, if not full.

Still, I love that fight. I might have to retry it now Comet2 is weaker.  I'll def have to think of a new strategy.

Honestly I'd rather have made a video of the new Jenova WAR encounter where you get some backup because that was awesome. But I'd have to get back to the fight and it just be a bit of a pain. Besides, PH is spreading the good word about the NT mod so I don't need to make any more bad videos.
 
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I hadn't thought about that for Nemesis; in FFX, Overdrives don't replace the attack command like they do here. There are a few ways around it, like equipping Mug, but it's always been a pain no matter how you slice it.

FF7 PC is a bit dodgy for recording/frame-rates because of the way it limits frames; I've seen a lot of beefy machines be unable to record smoothly whenever graphical mods are installed. A quad-core seems to help though, my old entry-level PC doesn't have a dedicated Graphics card but it can get fights down with Fraps without any real frame-loss (except for field screens when ran in a window)

Make videos of whatever you want to; there's plenty of footage around the place but there's always stuff that gets missed out either due to RNG or because the player party was too strong for it to have a chance to trigger. If FPS is a problem, you could always try speeding the footage up by 1.5x; I tried watching your video with that setting and it more or less moved at the speed it was supposed to, even the audio (although speeding it up in Windows MovieMaker means that the audio is lost; to get around that, make a separate file by converting the video to audio and speed that up in something like Audacity, then lay your sped-up audio track over the muted sped-up footage in movie-maker as a 'music track'; just need to make sure it's synched correctly).
 
Hey Sega Chief,

After finally building my new pc i have got round to playing your mod, well sort of ha. I have mainly been trying it with 7H and loading other mods on top and going through which ones break it and which ones don't and so far the one i really want to work just totally breaks it which is the Menu Overhaul Mod, is there any reason why this would break it?

Also any chance you are close to releasing a 7H version so we can combine it with the HD stuff?
 
I'm not sure why the Menu Overhaul would break it, I know very little about that mod and only used it once for a test-play of Kuugen's Nightmare7 mod. It might be that it's not set up properly, but if it's working with the default game/other mods then there's likely a conflict somewhere. What I do know is that MO interacts with things like the kernel for text, etc. so that might be where the conflict arises.

I can't actually build a 7H version because of the way a game converter is needed to get the program running properly, and my PC doesn't work with it for some reason (which would make it very difficult to test if it works). Also, the scene.bin and some other files need to be coded into some kind of special patch rather than just being placed into folders (that's my understanding of it anyway) and I wouldn't know where to begin with that. Alyza had volunteered to put one together for me as part of the catalog, but she's not been in touch about it for a few weeks now so I don't know what's happening with that at present.

I could have a shot at tinkering with the NT files and an installation of Menu Overhaul (using the non-7H installer for Menu Overhaul) and then the models could be patched in through 7H after that? I'm not sure how it would all go together as I can't run the current 7H properly without the Game-Converter patch.
 
You always reply so fast you never cease to amaze me.

Ok I have done loads of testing and pretty much every mod works with your mod in 7H that I have tested, that being all the graphic increasing mods such as spell effect, models, weapons, world map textures, field textures, battle textures, sound effects and avatars so menu overhaul must be messing with something and you know it messes up pretty early on. The first battle with the two soldiers will be a battle with a high level enemy in a forest who kicks your butt in two seconds. loading a previous saying and ending up in a battle just causes a crash.

If we can crack this down maybe you won't need a 7H version? I'd be happy to help you test idea's if you want to work together on this?

BTW I had trouble with the game converter as well, specially if i FF7 installed in any form of program folder, even on my secondary drive but sticking it in \Games\Final Fantasy 7\ got it to behave and run properly
 
Thanks for that info; wrong encounters loading sounds a lot like a kernel synching issue that can happen when either the kernel or scene.bin have been edited which means the Menu Overhaul is likely making adjustments to the kernel which leaves it unsynched with the scene.bin. That means the kernel and scene.bin have to be re-synched once Menu Overhaul has been installed.

Have you tried installing Menu Overhaul from it's separate installer? I think it's part of the Reunion installer but everything else can be left unticked so that only Menu Overhaul installs. With that in, you could then manually re-synch the scene + kernel using the Proud Clod tool. Basically, all you'd have to do is give PrClod admin permissions, open up the scene.bin, and then select create/save scene.bin. The tool would then ask if you want to check the kernel and if yes, it'll offer to synch them if they don't match up. Then you could run 7H to apply the graphical mods, etc.

One thing I'm wondering about is if I can make a special hotfix patch made using a Menu Overhaul modified kernel, and if it would be usable with 7H Menu Overhaul. I could maybe try it if the Reunion installer is temporarily unavailable (I think it was taken down pending the R02 update; if so, I'll have a shot at it; the special patch would be 700KB or so, but no guarantees it'll work).

Edit: I got the Menu Overhaul working with the NT Mod, but the kernel-scene seemed to be fine. I reckon a NT Mod installation, then the Menu Overhaul (just the Menu Overhaul part of the Reunion installation), followed by running 7H for graphical mods could do the trick.
 
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well in 7H you have limited options concerning the menu overhaul mod but the main part is doing something :/ If i choose no change but do choose to have no command box, no battle box and the 9999 break limit applied it will run fine... so not sure what menu overhaul itself is doing as this isn't my field, I don't mind trying your idea unless you already have a patch for me to try?

seems you were right, as they are working on RO2 they have took RO1 down :(
 
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'Ello Chief; quick bug report. The Sea Worms near Mideel seem to have a move which softlocks the game. Really enjoyed the new Battle Arena 2 boss btw. \o/
 
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