[FF8PC-Steam] Ragnarok Rebalancing Mod (v1.2.3 & v1.1b)

[Kurne]

Turn all mods off/remove all mods.   Rush past scene to next save point.    Turn mods back on/place mods back in folder.  I believe it's a demaster issue.   Should be the only issue like this throughout the game.

 

[Xela20]

Thoroughly enjoying the mod so far.

You can tell it's been modded by someone who's observed the inherent broken-ness of the vanilla game and has take great pains to fix it.

I think Zell's limit is over nerfed but I am enjoying that casting spells is better than punching things.

On the Ragnarok - half way through the Propogators, loving the changes made to those.

The Edea fights that cap off both Disc 1 and Disc 2 are so tough and properly punctuate the end of a disc, well done there.

Thanks.

 

[iL03t]

I've been trying to install this on remaster and have not been able to do it. It say's there is a exe file to open to create a folder but there isn't anything inside the mod folder or the folder directed to download. I've created DEMASTER folder and put the mod files in there and did everything else. Mod still isn't installed. Am i doing it wrong? The 2013 will no longer recognise my controller so i swapped over to this one. Sorry so short heading to dinner. I'll put more info if needed. Thank you!

 

[Ayoyo]

This mod was a huge letdown. Easily the "worst" gameplay mod I played for a FF title (balance wise). It's not downright bad but it doesn't really fix vanilla game issues and adds a few more glaring balance problems.

Seeing as I'm partially to blame for some of the changes & developments that this mod has seen over the years, I care about it a lot and reading through your post made me want to comment as there's a lot of valid points you're making that I happen to agree with, despite the clearly hyperbolic & frankly ridiculous assertions intermixed throughout.   

First of all, character balance strictly speaking, well there is simply no balance at all. Zell is pure trash, Quistis / Selphie / are okayish. Irvine is trash early / mid (due to lack of STR / MAG, his SPD doesn't compensate due to how damage formula works in FF VIII) and good at late game if you make use of his limit break, I don't think he can reach 255 mag without stat farming and a single mag ability which also makes him inferior to other mages.

Not off to a great start here - "no balance at all" followed by "most characters are okayish". Seems like the opposite of no balance, you'd kind of expect most characters in a challenging environment to be okay instead of skewing weak/strong. Zell is strong early on due to physicals being the primary method of punishment before getting access to better stuff, and overall he's a bit of a high skill floor & ceiling character with his limit break - with fast enough inputs, the damage potential is the highest of the bunch, as it should be. Irvine isn't a mage.

So I feel like it needs to be asked, did you playtest properly your mod or did you just test segments with artifically leveled characters ? Roughly during the whole game Rinoa (and Selphie to some extent) can keep up their MAG stat to close enough the same value Zell / Squall  have in STR with proper junctions and upgraded weapons. Why does it matter ? Because under any circumstance an equal value in MAG to STR will make decent spells deal more damage than a normal attack. Which is hilarious with late game spells and various buffs.

At 255 MAG a high tier spell (flare, meteor, ultima ; which are easy to farm since you can draw them from mobs in esthar excepted ultima you have to refine from a fixed encounter in esthar which is slightly more annoying but still pretty easy) will deal more damage than an attack with 255 STR. Except that well ... you can triple cast. Which means your mage now deals roughly 4 times the damage of your STR character. But it doesn't stop there. A single GF has auto haste and I haven't found a single source of Accelerator since card refining was also changed. There might be a convoluted way to farm it via mugging a vysage and refining lightweights excepted I couldn't get any vysage to spawn, all fights were hands only so idk. Which means you'll obviously set the auto haste on your mage which deepens the gap between a MAG and STR character even more. (Self casting haste is often a waste of time between slows / stops and missed damage opportunity + the oppression of some bosses).

Now we're getting somewhere: the issue of magic being overpowered, or rather becoming OP through multicasting. I made a BIG stink of double & triple casting magic being consistently the optimal approach to pretty much any given fight a few pages back.

My suggestion was always to severely limit how many Doubles and Triples you can get in the game. For instance for disc 1 I advocated for having a single-use draw point of Double, and no ways to get more. I believe the same should be done for Triple but for the entirety of the game - for instance, 1 draw point or a single-use item refine to get ~10 Triples and that's all you can get, ever.
Another "nerf" could be that Triple only lasts for a single spellcast, which would make it too inefficient to keep recasting Triple all the time so that would make it more of a precise tactical tool rather than a constant, default must-have status. Overall that would introduce some crucial decision making and circumvent the problem of triple casting magic being the optimal strategy for pretty much every fight in one fell swoop. And yes, some of the high level magics are way too easy to acquire as well.
In a vacuum, it's fine for high level magic to be stronger that a normal attack because if it wasn't, why would you ever use them? But there needs to be an actual cost to doing that, and right now, there really isn't any.

So what tools do STR characters have to compete with MAG ? Cheese strats with auras / crisis limit break which is stupid imo. The whole limit break system should be reworked but w/e I get it it's not easy and not the point of the mod. Though Zell limit break downright sucks compared to Squall / Irvine. So what's left ? Darkside ? Yeah it could be decent since it triples your attack damage. Except it was nerfed in several ways. It consumes 1/3 of your hp which is not a risk you want to take at any point due to boss patterns. The fact that almost every boss that isn't human can't be drained (thus you can't regen with drain linked to status attack with physical attacks) doesn't help darkside case. Second nerf is that there's only one GF that now learns it. Meaning your second STR character won't even that option.

This is just nonsense. Limit breaks are a core feature and one of the game's main draws is that they're more of a consistent tool in the player's arsenal, adding a vital layer of character identity as well. You're free to not like that, but you don't get to fault the game, much less the mod, for your own weird predilections. There's nothing that qualifies them as "cheese". Zell's limit break, as stated earlier, has the highest damage potential, so you're just incorrect there.
As for Darkside, there needs to be an appropriate cost to using it, obviously. It can deal a metric ton of damage hitting an elemental weakness and its ease of use is tantalizing, so if it didn't drain a chunk of your health, it would become disproportionately effective.

There's literally no upside to not have 2 MAG character on your team with Squall. The fact that they can output 4 times the damage of a STR character while having an easier time to heal through Shell and maintaining buffs cause you want triple anyway just completly destroys the balance. There is also not a single boss that has a high enough SPR to make STR characters more viable. Not one. There's 2 bosses in the whole game that has the ability to alternate between immunity to magic and physical damage. One can be cheesed with Diablos and the other one can be killed before the magical ward with a single MAG character (or worst case scenario can be stalled).

The balance between MAG and STR is so terrible that my Squall against end game bosses with 255 STR and 122 MAG was dealing more damage with a triple flare than with a physical attack .. which is completly stupid.

Yea, this is pretty much on point, unfortunately. Triple spamming magic is just too strong & easy of a strategy without harsh limitations on Triple or strong spell availability. As for Diablos, I urged Callisto to make all bosses immune to that because it's such a stupid oversight in what is by-and-large a pretty robust challenge mod, to be able to just sidestep entire boss battles like that. I believe at least Cerberus & the Iguions were susceptible to Diablos, probably others as well. 

It causes many issues such as :
- Some bosses have crazy high ATB (which is the case of Ifrit, supposed to be a tutorial boss, literally impossible to kill without abuse if you go straight there without grinding in Lionheart)
- Higher ATB speed in general leads to two problem. When single target damage is high you can be unlucky and the same character will be focused twice before you can leading to his death. There's nothing you can do to prevent that scenario and I suspect a general AI script was changed or implemented because bosses tends much more to focus a single character for several turns. When it's high damage AOE sometimes you'll just get wiped before you can act because that AoE will be used twice in 3 seconds.
- In the remastered version (unsure if it was that bad in the 2013 one) the battle menu is also in 15 FPS which is sluggish. So much that sometimes it skips inputs and leads to the wrong targeting. But the real issue is that "Wait" mode doesn't freeze ATB while targeting (was already the case in Vanilla) but since the menu lags you need time to properly target and with high ATB speed, bosses will often cut your turn to attack while you're targeting spells.
- Some scripts changes leads to frustating situation, not necesseraly hard but overall annoying such as Ultimate weapon fight. The fight isn't hard but tedious when you buff and the boss immediatly goes Dispelga -> Pillar (one chaacter die, fixed 9999 damage) -> Pillar (same) -> Pillar -> Dispelga. I had it happens a few times, you just waste time buffing / using full-life for no challenge at all.

Well, the first points indicate that you found some of the battles challenging, so the mod is performing as it should there. Good to hear.

Time passing while targeting is a major problem though which I've brought up before as well. Sometimes fights really are down to fractions of a second and you need to be a god at quickly moving the cursor. IIRC Callisto replied that it's a technical limitation and beyond his ability to fix, unfortunately, so the best we can do is pull up the "list view" of targets and use that instead of trying to target the character models.
Pillar of Light spam starts happening with Ultima after a certain amount of time has passed. It's been a while so I don't remember exactly but it may have been something like 2 full cycles of a specific script and then it devolves to spam, indicating your "time is up", as it were. Yea I thought it pretty lame as well, but then again it's a legit design choice to have it be somewhat time-limited like that. This is assuming it hasn't been changed significantly since I last experimented with the boss.

I also don't get the removal of a few endgame stuff.
Aura spell :  There's still aura stone farming for the same result (except you can't triple cast it but it doesn't really matter to begin with)
Heroes / Team invicibility : still exists but is more convoluted to obtain, meaning if someone really want these he'll get them, just need more time
And all of that to add a new hyper broken spell called Renew that cast regen, protect and shell at the same time.

Like you reduce the sources of broken endgame stuff but add another one farmable in 5 minutes. You can literally get 30 Renews every minute or so stealing behemoths. The whole endgame was clearly balanced around Renew and 9999 HP since almost everything towards end of disc 3 and disc 4 has high ATB speed and requires protect + shell while still dishing 5k+ damage in some cases if you don't farm stat ups and devour (which shouldn't be mandatory, it should only ease fight, not be mandatory).

-Aura Stones: Once again, I advocated for having a limited quantity of them available in the game, and I still strongly believe they shouldn't be farmable.
-Heroes/Holy Wars: What, you can farm these? No way, Callisto wouldn't do that. I was under the impression there's only 1 Holy War in the entire game. Maybe I shut their existence out of my mind. I never used them personally, though I think it's okay to have 1 in the game, for example against Omega or Ultimecia.
-Renew is a fine addition for endgame, however its availability is once again the issue, as with other high tier spells.

Well, the endgame should be balanced around optimal setups and buffs. It is a hard mode of a rebalance mod, after all. Devour was left in as an endgame option for people who enjoy maxing their builds. I of course objected to it, but was ultimately convinced that that too is core to the game's identity for a lot of players. Stat ups shouldn't be farmable - if they are, it's definitely a mistake. In any case these most certainly aren't mandatory - I've completed Lionheart mode as a LLG challenge without much difficulty.

Then comes Omega. Clearly wasn't tested properly. Every AoE hit for a few thousand. Then he has Megido Flame which was roughly 9k damage on characters level 100 with best junction possible in VIT / SPR and a DEF / SPR +30% in their weaker stat (and that ignores protect / shell). And then there's Terra break, a meteor like spell hitting many times random characters, each hit being 4k+ under shell protect. Literally impossible to survive with lvl 100 characters, Renew, best junction for SPR/ VIT and +30% in SPR/VIT. The whole team get wiped. Omega also has a high ATB speed, meaning often Megido Flame will result in a wipe because he'll do an AoE (often ultima) right before or after it.

If you don't farm VIT/SPR up or don't devour mobs, you simply can't survive Omega unless you abuse invincibility or have a character dedicated to use Defend and spam Mega phoenix (which makes the fight ultra boring). This is bad design. Farming stas up should make fights easier, and shouldn't be mandatory. There is a convoluted way to survive by casting zombie but since you absolutely need renew, it means you'll degen + you'll have issue healing and considering his ATB you won't have time to remedy+ or triple esuna before the next AoE.

So yea the ultimate boss fight in the game should force you to use everything at your disposal, including the (hopefully) singular Holy War and whatnot, because if you won't use the strongest tools available to you here, then where exactly? And you call that bad design? Give me a break. Again, it's fine if you'd like to play it a certain way and not use X or Y, but that's a you problem, not a "balance" problem.

Regrettable to hear it's possible to farm stat-ups though, definitely should be removed for the hard mode at least. I didn't remember it being a thing.

I do have to confess that I didn't complete my last playthrough because of some of these issues, the biggest being multicasting always being the most efficient strategy, making gameplay repetitive, that and the fact that in all honesty I do still find Lionheart mode too easy. Last time I played I even used a custom no-experience patch Callisto gave me but in the long run it just doesn't feel right to try and intentionally make things harder. It also apparently made physical attackers even weaker by comparison due to how stats affect damage output, but since you had a similar issue, I imagine it doesn't matter as much as I thought. I remember Callisto talking about fixing some of this stuff, but it's been a long time. I do hope he returns to this someday, and maybe further tailors the hard mode to be a genuine challenge by removing some of the exploits and quirks that make it easy or repetitive.

 

[aquecoucou]

..

I won't make a point by point answer since it's been awhile and I don't remember everything but I'll try to address most of your arguments. First of all I must admit I was a bit salty when I posted that since I was really disappointed at how my experience turned out and I was expecting something else I guess.

First of all I'm unsure when was the last time you actually did complete the game with the mod and if it was on Remaster or 2013 version since there has been patches to up difficulty and Remastered at first wasn't as hard (ATB changes, nerf damage to some abilities etc).

Irvine really is bad till mid-late game because all he has over Squall & Zell is SPD. His STR is too low and as such suffers from the damage calculation formula. Even if in a given duration he inputs more attacks, he'll end with a lower "DPS".

I don't remember the exact numbers regarding Zell & Squall LB but with both at 255 STR, Zell LB damage was not close to Squall with fast inputs. For some reason his normal attack damage was also lower than Squall which led me to question if Squall's weapons had a different formula.

Regarding of the difficulty argument, I'd argue having a hard time on certains bosses due to RNG because of high ATB and certain attack combinations resulting a wipe isn't difficulty. It's artificial difficulty. If for example a boss would be dealing 15k damage to the whole party every 3 turns consistently it'd be fine cause there's a pattern you can adapt. When in 3 turns a boss can either deal 5k damage to the whole party or 50k damage if you're unlucky, that's a fucked up design. The problem being exacerbated with sluggish targeting that doesn't freeze ATB is tedious, not difficult. Even the very first boss - Ifrit - suffers from that problem. I don't remember his attacks name but I had tries where he'll cast 3 times in a row his big party damage spell while on some other tries I'd see it only once whole fight. Same with his healing (or was his AoE also healing him ? Too far to remember). The variance is currently way too high.

We both agree with magic being way too imbalanced, sadly I don't have a proper solution because of how magic overall works. Even if you'd balance it to have roughly the same impact as STR chars, there's still benefits to MAG chars such as healing through shells. And you can't balance it to being less powerful than STR because it relies on limited ressources. So it's kinda hard, but in any case triple needs to go away or only works on support spells (berserk, shell, protect, esuna, haste, renew, etc).

I won't change my mind on how limit breaks are a cheese in FFVIII and how much they break both the vanilla game and this mod. Honestly there are many bosses (if not all) you still can just solo with Squall LB and any other two characters that keep healing and protecting themselves / reviving Squall. I really don't see the appeal and it removes all strategy notion. That's the most brain dead strat, it has the lowest variance on your inputs and you can hardly fail at it. It also implies you always have 2 characters ready to react to what happens while still inputing high damage.

In my opinion Darkside is held back by the high speed of bosses and since you can't really self heal from it, it means you need another character ready to immediatly heal. It means you basically use 2 characters for a single stronger attack which leaves you more vulnerable and still doesn't compete with magic anyway. In the current balance there's no benefit to it and even if MAG was nerfed, it still would be too risky in many scenarios. I honestly think the 10% HP was a fine price to pay considering Darkside also requires a command slot. I could see a compromise at 15% HP and slightly lower damage. 33% is just a no go in Lionheart.

I'll quickly address the broken stuff, I'm not exactly sure to remember how to get all of these but I think Heroes / Holy Wars could be farmed via cards (but there might have been another step needed, such as cards -> items -> items through the various means of transmutation). You can still farm character cards against the CC club in the Ragnarok.

For stat ups, if I recall correctly it had to do with the Magic Lamp. You can get it randomly by sleeping in Deling City inn (1/8 iirc) and then can trade it to some NPC though I don't remember where.

Omega wise, I'm not even exaggerating in my first reply. It's straight up bad even with a really strong defensive setup you'll get destroyed if you don't farm stats and/or devour. I've only seen 2 strats viable, either a character always defending and spamming mega phoenix to get the other 2 characters to spam their LB, or just spamming invincibility items. I haven't seen a legit clear done, and in fact even scouring youtube I only found a single person killing Omega in Lionheart difficulty (in the current version, apparently in the previous versions you could VIT-0 him which is impossible now). And guess what ? They spam mega phoenixes + LB. I don't mind people with the "use everything at my disposal" mentality especially for the hardest content, but when said strategy actually requires 0 brain and removes any difficulty, once again it's a bad design.

It means the fight is binary : straight up hell, nearing impossibility unless you get a really lucky try with a insanely generous pattern or just cheese and make it extremely easy.

A well balanced mod would be constantly pushing you to react at what the boss is doing and act accordingly. Here they are many bosses where at the exact same point in the fight you can :
- either wipe in 2 (ATB) seconds (stupidly fast ATB + a deadly pattern)
- can afk 15 seconds and still have your whole team alive.

This is the only Lionheart Omega on youtube. 18 minutes of straight boring mega phoenix. Sorry I don't see the difficulty there. You can also see the pitiful damage of his Zell LB despite being at 255 STR. For reference Squall LB there at 255 STR is about 4.5k per hit plus the potential bonus (Lionheart being over 10k iirc). Rinoa LB Flare is 30 to 40k ish damage ? The Tera break is hitting Irvine for 4k, Zell for 2k and there's 15 (? not exactly sure since there's a few overlaps). Yes he doesn't have the most defensive setup but it means two things :

- You need to sacrifice a lot of damage if you want to survive it legit, which makes the fight 30+ minutes
- You still can get screwed by a Megido Flame right before / after which still hits for 7-8k+ on the party with a high defensive setup. His Squall is eating 4.4k under defend with solid defensive junctions.

Also you can see some pretty unbalanced stuff if you scour the video, a good example is at 12:37 where basically there's 3 consecutive light pillar attacks, with 0 delay between the second and the third. After Shockwave Pulsar the boss has a chance to follow up any attack with a Light Pillar.

If shockwave Pulsar is supposed to be an enrage then something is definitely off balance. It happens around 11:30 and this strat has a decent damage output. Yet there's still 7 minutes of fight after that. I refuse to call that fight "difficult" or "balanced". It's just a mess.


Edit : When you think about it, all the tools STR character are supposed to have to compete with MAG are unusable.
Elemental damage via junction : Hardest content doesn't have an elemental weakness
Status-ATK via junction : Does this one needs an explanation ?
Berserk : Doesn't provide a big enough boost in Lionheart to the downside of only have 2 controllable characters left to handle support / healing

A few good options could be :
- To add an elemental weakness to all bosses while lowering the bonus damage done by spells targeting the elemental weakness.
- To buff considerably berserk to be a high risk / reward strat.
- To add a new status that reduces the DEF stat (that isn't VIT-0) so the STR char can make use of it (with a cap so you can't bring a boss DEF to 1).
- To give characters that currently have a higher STR stat compared to MAG a SPD buff. That would also balance healing (MAG can heal through shell, STR char have faster turns so healing through items is a considerable option, though it'd require a bit of balancing on certain items healing power)

All four don't need to impleted together, but some could seriously tighten the cap between STR & MAG in combination of the Triple spell nerf.

 

[Nesouk]

HA I see my video of Omega being used, so I'm gonna quickly answer to that part :

-For Zell : I want to say my video is a terrible display of his damage potential, I was terrible with him that day, I hadn't played him for a very long time and was very rusty, not mentionning I got terribly unlucky and only got Low Crisis Level (aka short timers) not only that but in this video but I also forgot to junction his Luck stat, which was a stupid mistake on my part as I had the mean to Junction both him and Irvine, in contrary to Squall Zell and Irvine's Limit Breaks damage gains a lot from high Luck and therefore High Crit Rate as a Crit means Double Damage.

Furthermore back when I wasn't rusty I had done some testing with Zell with the loop I had I could do :

-9 Hits at 3.66s
-12 Hits at 5.66s
-18 Hits at 7.66s
-26 Hits  at 9.33s

My loop was :

If timer is 3.66 of 5.66 (start with Punch Rush) then :
1-Dolphin Blow
2-Mach Kick
3-Dolphin Blow
4-Heel Drop
5-Meteor Strike
6-Dolphin Blow
7-Heel Drop
8-Meteor Strike
Back to number 6 (Dolphin Blow) just chain Dolphin Blow, Heel Drop and Meteor Strike as much as you can from there.

If timer is 7.66 or 9.33 (start with Booya) then :
1-Meteor Strike
2-Dolphin Blow
3-Mach Kick
4-Dolphin Blow
5-Mach Kick
6-Dolphin Blow
7-Heel Drop
8-Meteor Strike
9-Dolphin Blow
10-Heel Drop
11-Meteor Strike
Back to number 9 (Dolphin Blow) keep chaining Dolphin Blow, Heel Drop and Meteor Strike as much as you can from there.

So base on that and damage done Omega in my video which are :

-Punch Rush : about 1000
-Dolphin Blow : About 2800
-Mach Kick : About 2100
-Heel Drop : About 1800
-Meteor Strike : About 3400

In my best day damage on Omega would have been with Crit excluded :

-3.66s : 21100
-5.66s : 29100
-7.66s (dunno Booya Damage gonna assume it should be about 1300 between Punch Rush and Heel Drop) : 46500
-9.33s : 67100

If we compare to your number with Squall which is 4500 per hits then :

-4 Hits : 18000
-5 Hits : 22500
-6 Hits : 27000
-7 Hits : 31500
-8 Hits : 36000

So adding that the number of Zell are without taking any Crit into account and every crit with deal Double Damage only adding to the damage even with the assumed 10k from Lion Heart Zell has still the highest damage potential, assuming you have a really good execution of course.
I'd argue for 3.66s and 5.66s throwing a My Final Heaven could be better since My Final Heaven can deal 10000 (20k if it crit) straight away.

As an all I think you are underestimating Zell's Limit Break potential even in my video if we compare the first Limit Break round for Irvine and Zell :

-Irvine get 4 Shots so Good Crisis Level and 2 Crit for 34979 damage
-Zell get the Lowest Crisis Level with 3.66 seconds, I pull off 6 hits + My Final Heaven which is pretty poor performance on my part for 23579 damage

So Zell is actually not to far off and he will outdamage Irvine if Irvine get the same Crisis Level as him, and again this is a basically No Crit Zell here, so the potential is here my video is just a terrible showcase ^^. Also I think LV take part in Physical Damage Calculation so Zell being LV47 probably means I wasn't at the most optimal damage possible.

TLDR : This fight could have gone faster really.

As for the boss itself, well you're statement are sadly true Omega has some issues, I think making him immune to Vit0 (he is susceptible to it in the Normal Ragnarok mod) makes him last longer than he should, and the main problem with him is that Terra Break completly ignores your Vitality, it will always deal 4k no matter what and 2k with Protect, Defend is pretty much the only way to survive it and it pretty much forces you to have someone constantly in Defend in case he throws it since unlike Vanilla he doesn't have a specific pattern and you dunno when he'll throw it, only other mean to survive it almost consistantly is having your all team in Zombie but then that forces you to rely on Low Spirit with AoE Elemental option.

Adding to that Light Pillar is pretty much impossible to survive without Defend unless you have max Vitality and Megido Flame which I honnestly don't know if Shell and high Spr matter against it and yeah, Defend strat is pretty much the safest option, all you need is your Defend character to have a Spd high enough to be able to throw an item then get an action right after before Omega acts again, and a high enough Vit and Spr for the few attacks that can hit through Defend and enough items.

That being said I considere Limit Break a core mechanic of the game, it's actually pretty fun to learn how to increase your Crisis Level without Aura with stuff like keeping Statut Effect on your character to increase it, and surviving with said Statut Effect can't be done in the Omega Fight sadly.

EDIT : Also I totally second the removal of some late game bosses Elemental Weakness like Griever (is still has it technically but at one point cast a spell that makes him immune for the remaining of the fight) and Ultimecia + Griever phase being a terrible decision, physical damage dealer get really impacted by this in Normal Ragnarok Squall with Darkside and Junction Water to attack could actually outdamage even a Triple Meteor for the Ulmecia + Griever phase for instance, but since the weakness have been remove, have to resort to good old non-elemental spells.

In my opinion Triple should definitly be removed from the game, Double is fine but Triple Cast really indeed give an edge for Magic, and I also think Defend should be nerf in regard to physical damage making it nullify physical damage is kinda OP not gonna lie, especially when you take into account it works with Cover.

EDIT 2 : For the lol reopen the game and try to practice back Zell's Duel trying to get better results on Omega, well due to the strat Zell is pretty much guaranteed to get a low Crisis Level but manage to pull off much better combos with a 3.66s timer, can pull off 8 hits + My Final Heaven that chain got a Crit on Punch Rush and 2 Dolphin Blows as well as a Crit on My Final Heaven for a total of 44454 damage, so even higher than what I was expected, in comparaison Irvine with 3 Shot of Pulse Ammo shot can at best reach about 40k assuming all 3 shots crit.

Of course this depend of Crit, the highest Luck I can reach with Zell at LV47 is 100, if I remember the Crit Rate formula correctly that means he has about 39.2% Crit Rate (excluding potential ability multiplier which I don't have the data for).

I'll try to get the best chain for his highest damage potential.

 

[Aynath]

Hello there, I've been playing FF VIII 2013 with standard Ragnarok mod mixed with Martial Law (with compatibiity) and Succession.
I'm enjoying it so far, despite the difficulty being at times unfair to me. I've reached the Ruins of Centra, where you get Odin, it was a surprise when he started to attack with Heaven's Wrath but I still got it after a few tries.

Now, I get soft locked against Tonberry King, he tries to do an attack called Arm Slash but he gets stuck with his casting animation, the game doesn't crash, but the battle doesn't continue. I don't know what's happening but my guess is that the Arm Slash doesn't exist so he won't move on. I wonder if anyone had that bug before ?

Thank you

 

[Callisto]

@Aynath: A quick file check showed that the Tonberry King battle seems to be in order. The Arm Slash attack does not exist in the current version and is replaced by an attack called Scourge, which is also used by Tonberry King. So your issue likely stems from the Martial Law compatibility version. If you extracted the kernel.bin file from main.fs archive via the Deling tool and sent it to me, I could fix it for you.

Also thanks a lot for all the feedback lately. The Triple spell is scheduled to be removed in the next version and Renew will be nerfed with Protect and Shell reducing damage by only 25% each. Darkside will be left as it is, as it stacks will critical hits, damage to the back and elemental attack damage, making it a very potent command that can compete with multi-cast spells easily (damage penalty is 20% of users max HP by the way, not 33%).

As for enemies attacking too fast, I don't really see the issue as long as ATB speed isn't set to max in the Config menu. Looking at Nesouk Kefka's video above, you can see that he manages to perform most of his actions in time, even against the strongest enemy in the game. Ifrit using his AoE multiple times in a row should be no problem either as it deals considerably less damage than his single-target attacks at that point.

Sadly, I don't have the time to address all the other arguments made, but everything has been noted and evalutated for inclusion in the next version of the mod. I can't come up with a release window, but it will come sooner or later.

 

[forkst]

I am always having trouble installing this mod myself, it always crashes on me so what am i doing wrong then

 

[Aynath]

@Aynath: A quick file check showed that the Tonberry King battle seems to be in order. The Arm Slash attack does not exist in the current version and is replaced by an attack called Scourge, which is also used by Tonberry King. So your issue likely stems from the Martial Law compatibility version. If you extracted the kernel.bin file from main.fs archive via the Deling tool and sent it to me, I could fix it for you.

Also thanks a lot for all the feedback lately. The Triple spell is scheduled to be removed in the next version and Renew will be nerfed with Protect and Shell reducing damage by only 25% each. Darkside will be left as it is, as it stacks will critical hits, damage to the back and elemental attack damage, making it a very potent command that can compete with multi-cast spells easily (damage penalty is 20% of users max HP by the way, not 33%).

As for enemies attacking too fast, I don't really see the issue as long as ATB speed isn't set to max in the Config menu. Looking at Nesouk Kefka's video above, you can see that he manages to perform most of his actions in time, even against the strongest enemy in the game. Ifrit using his AoE multiple times in a row should be no problem either as it deals considerably less damage than his single-target attacks at that point.

Sadly, I don't have the time to address all the other arguments made, but everything has been noted and evalutated for inclusion in the next version of the mod. I can't come up with a release window, but it will come sooner or later.

Hello Callisto, thank you for your reply, I did get Tonberry but reinstalling the game and defeat it, then reinstall the mods to unlock myself. I may need to do the same against Abadon (the boss in The Great Salt Lake) as when he's standing up; he also tries to do the same attack Arm Slash in vain ! I'll take a look with the Deling Tool. How can I send the kernel file to you ?

I am always having trouble installing this mod myself, it always crashes on me so what am i doing wrong then

I've also had that problem, my game kept crashing. What I did is :
1) do a clean install of the game (delete the Final Fantasy VIII folder from steam)
2) install the FFNx driver https://github.com/julianxhokaxhiu/FFNx, it's compatible to FF VIII Steam 2013
3) install the mod Ragnarok by following the documentation

Unfortunately, I can't seem to install graphical mods so the game looks like the original, at least I don't have crashes and the mod is functional most of the time.

 

[Callisto]

@Aynath: You could upload the kernel to a file sharing site and then send me a PM with the link. Alternatively, I could extract the kernel from the download source and then send it to you. I presume you downloaded it from nexusmods, is that correct?

 

[Aynath]

@Callisto Yes indeed , I downloaded the mods (Succession, Ragnarok and Martial Law) from nexusmods. I uploaded the kernel into my drive, can you try the link I've PM and see if you can download it from there ? Thank you ! Also, I've managed to defeat Abadon before he tries to cast Arm Slash, I'm wondering if they are other enemies that have this attack.

 

[Callisto]

There are a few more enemies that use this attack, so sent a PM with a corrected kernel.bin. Thank you.

 

[Aynath]

Okay, so I've managed to finish the game, and beat both Weapons... What an adventure ! Thank you for that rebalance mod, it made the game a lot more challenging ! A bit frustrating early on because attacks miss a lot ! I've also played with the Martial Law and Succession mod so I believe the sidequests content weren't there but that's fine.

I'll redo it soon enough, FF 8 has an addicting battle system and the mod feels like each battle can be the last.

 

[Aedolon]

I've just had a really strange thing occur. I had just finished the concert at FH. Squall was called up to the bridge and was congratulated on his promotion. I mashed through all this dialogue, talked to Nida, and mashed some more. I apparently got the option to head to the White Seed Ship and immediately clicked it during mashing. At this point I had just Rinoa and Squall in my party. I talked to Zone who went off on Squall for not protecting Rinoa despite the fact she was standing behind him. At this point I realized I was accidentally sequence breaking so I reloaded my save as to not mess anything up. During my second time mashing through the dialogue, I wasn't presented with the White Seed Ship option and the game continued as normal.

 

[Callisto]

Hm, this seems weird. Triggering the White SeeD option in the library actually requires talking to Rinoa as Squall, which is not possible during the scene you mentioned, because Squall is physically not present at this moment, just on the mic.

Anyway, it is no problem to prevent this from ever happening before the intended point with a little tweak to the script. Thanks for the info.

 

[NissyHime]

Hey just a heads up, ruby dragon flashback on lionheart mode, wards in battle texture is all messed up and glitched, fight still works and no issues other than that from it

 

[Deckiller]

What did you do to the Abadon encounter? It one-shot two characters with what seemed to be instadeath moves, and then got to move like 5 times in a row against Squall. I'm not playing the Lionheart mode so such cheap tactics shouldn't exist...

 

[Tomahawk]

Hi, is there a Devour list somewhere please? Docs say more enemies now increase character's stats by munching them. Thanks

 

[MrMadakey]

So, I wanna ask something.. Are you aware of how Damage Per Second works?

I've seen that there is limitations on how much you can manipulate a mob to do however, me getting one shot in a menu before I can even decide what to do because every single mob has aoe at the start of a fight is not exactly what I would call... "Balanced."

Now you've mentioned that there is limitations to this.. Why is there limitations? Just reduce the amount of damage that the mobs do across the board.. It's literally that simple, you've got mobs doing 6 attacks to my entire party before I've even got 2 attacks off and they're doing nearly a 3rd of my life in one hit. If they're doing this many attacks, tone it down a bit maybe?