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

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Well must admit that the lost in power after Drawing GF is kinda weird, I mean that's a thing that already exist in Vanilla (Fujin was losing her ability to cast Wind Magic once you draw Pandemona), and by the fact that regardless of if you draw or not you'll still get the GF this mechanic become basically the player choosing if he want to fight the bosses at full strength or a downgrade version of them, but unless challenging yourself I don't see any reasons to not draw, as apparently there is no special reward for beating bosses at their best.

Junction defense lowered natural growth increased is probably to encourage the player to LVUP as you can see on previous post I spend a good part of the mod with barely any Leveling at all and I was still fine despite being LV18 facing LV45 monsters XD, since then Callisto make every ennemies even random mobs at fix LV IIRC, so it has (or at least it should have) become more important to keep you LV up to date.
 
Yea, be interesting to hear if there's something more than meets the eye to this update, everything Callisto's done and the direction the mod's been going has been perfect until now - this is the first head-scratcher that I remember.

I did a low level run too, in fact. If memory serves, everyone was around lv20 for the final boss, whom I beat with only 2 characters alive for the whole thing. Keeping low levels was way harder back then with an out-of-control Odin coming to kill enemies every now and then, forcing a reset. Good times, haha. But I was calling for buffs for bosses then as well because I was able to faceroll many of them even with low levels+other restrictions such as no card modding, as a way to ensure they're certainly not overtuned. With some strategic thinking, which is the main point of these excellent mods anyhow, the bosses were always reasonably easy.
 
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@Ayoyo: The main reason behind the boss nerfs especially in the early and mid-game is the overall difficulty progression, which can be quite wonky in earlier versions of the mod. Some players felt that the early and mid-game are actually harder than the late-game, so I wanted to improve on difficulty perception, aiming for a steady increase in difficulty, no matter the Junction setup and party levels.

As for the possibility of weakening bosses by drawing their GF: I would say the effects are rather minor in most cases. After drawing Siren from Elvoret, its magic power becomes only slightly weaker than in earlier versions, as its actual magic stat has been increased. And Edea's Spirit stat is naturally very high, so -20% after drawing Alexander still doesn't allow rushing her down with spells quickly.

All in all, these nerfs won't have that much of an impact as you might think. All they do is making things more fair for players that currently don't have the best spells equipped, or don't use the optimal GF distribution, which I think should not be expected at all times. I guess a real difficulty version of this mod should be released separately at some point.

Also note that most late-game bosses are noticably harder than in versions from over a year ago. With a little luck, you could just rush them without ever seeing their special moves at all. For example, Nesouk won the last Seifer battle without Bloodfest being used, because there were way too many random checks in his AI script. Many of these have been removed, and now most of the bosses are balanced around having them use their special attacks at least once, no matter how strong your party is.

@Nesouk: The changes in defensive junctions are as follows:

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Code: 
 Spell  Vit/Spr v1.1.5  Vit/Spr v1.2Regen   50/50   46/46Meltdown  60/60   52/52Curaga   75/75   56/56Holy   70/70   60/60Full-life  85/85   66/66Renew   80/80   72/72Ultima   90/95   80/80
The new gains in natural stat growth do not soak this up completely. Some characters didn't even get gains on certain stats at all, such as Selphie or Rinoa on Vitality, or Zell and Ward on Magic - so only a character's natural strengths have been increased (HP growth is even completely untouched from the previous version).
 
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OH Yeah I remember end of Disc 3/beginning of Disc 4 to be the most disappointing part, in that every bosses except Adel which was fine was way to easy. Glad to hear this has been corrected. I expect Griever and Ultimecia/Griever are better to, last time I beat Griever he only did 2 or 3 actions, same for Ultimecia/Griever.

Will do another playthrough in the next days see how it goes compare to last time.
 
@Ayoyo: The main reason behind the boss nerfs especially in the early and mid-game is the overall difficulty progression, which can be quite wonky in earlier versions of the mod. Some players felt that the early and mid-game are actually harder than the late-game, so I wanted to improve on difficulty perception, aiming for a steady increase in difficulty
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Well I mean, alternatively the later bosses could've been buffed to sort of achieve the same thing  :-P /jk... unless?

No but it's good that the mod's playerbase is getting what it wants, then - I suppose people like me & Nesouk are in the minority. You did alleviate my anxiousness somewhat though, maybe it's not so bad in practice, especially if lategame bosses are tougher. But now that it's on the table, it's destiny bro - hard mode, that is. It needs to happen... Doesn't even necessarily need to be all that fine-tuned or robust, just throw like a universal + modifier on enemies and see how it goes. I just got done playing a FFXIII mod that literally just applied modifiers like +50% on every enemy's HP, speed and +35% for other stats or something like that. It worked out fine, considering the amount of effort put into it and pretty much no testing whatsoever.

OH Yeah I remember end of Disc 3/beginning of Disc 4 to be the most disappointing part, in that every bosses except Adel which was fine was way to easy. Glad to hear this has been corrected.
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Corrected as in...? Are you referencing the random check fix that Callisto mentioned just now, or are there other prior changes to later bosses to make them less easy?
 
Well I mean, alternatively the later bosses could've been buffed to sort of achieve the same thing  :-P /jk... unless?
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Actually a good point, I thought about that too. But some players on stream in the past few months showed me that some of the earlier bosses are a bit overtuned (mostly damage-wise). They were using suboptimal Junction setups and didn't try to use status effects a lot, and I felt they were punished too severely for that. So I've tried to find a middle ground between "accessible to all players" and "not too easy". Whether it worked or not remains to be seen.

But now that it's on the table, it's destiny bro - hard mode, that is.
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If it's only a stat-increase you'd like to see in a harder version for now, then I could probably set that up in a month or so. Would be helpful if you tried the latest version first though, too see if it indeed became too easy for you after all.

Corrected as in...? Are you referencing the random check fix that Callisto mentioned just now, or are there other prior changes to later bosses to make them less easy?
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If the last version you played is indeed from a year ago, then a lot has changed in addition to reduced random checks, ranging from higher stats, new moves used, complete removal of turn skips etc.
 
Actually a good point, I thought about that too. But some players on stream in the past few months showed me that some of the earlier bosses are a bit overtuned (mostly damage-wise). They were using suboptimal Junction setups and didn't try to use status effects a lot, and I felt they were punished too severely for that.
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Yea, that seems to be how many modders end up making changes, streams tend to draw stronger reactions when you actually see someone struggling with the game. Then if you see someone just walking over everything it'd likely net the opposite reaction. It's understandable, although personally I always thought it was counterintuitive to balance around players who don't feel like trying stuff out or use the breadth of tools & options offered to them, considering mods like this exist & are needed in the first place precisely because the original game was so unbalanced that you didn't need to use those tools or be strategic about it. Vanilla already exists for people wanting to play casually.

If it's only a stat-increase you'd like to see in a harder version for now, then I could probably set that up in a month or so. Would be helpful if you tried the latest version first though, too see if it indeed became too easy for you after all.
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Really? I think that would be a literal dream-come-true if you ever did that. Yes, I'm positive it would work out well enough since the system you have in place is already so good and robust. I swear I'll be your tester for that. In the meantime, you don't need to tell me twice; I'm pretty stoked to have another go at this despite my bitching. Although not sure if I should go for a low level run again. What do you think? I mean you did make it easier to maintain with the Odin changes, and I haven't had a chance to see those yet.

f the last version you played is indeed from a year ago, then a lot has changed in addition to reduced random checks, ranging from higher stats, new moves used, complete removal of turn skips etc.
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Looks to have been around February of last year. But sounds awesome indeed. I remember checking this thread out some months ago and shedding an epic tear upon reading the newest changelog, it was so freaking good.
 
This mod is awesome !!!

I´m enjoying it a lot, congatulations :)

But, is there any chance to use it in another language, like spanish? Maybe in the future?

Thanks
 
OK I have no idea what is going on, haven't play the game since my las playthrough of this mod, but for some reason Rose and Wines W07 doesn't work anymore, no idea why I tried, to uninstall and reinstall it no good, I tried to redowloaded it to reinstall doesn't work either, weird enough the W06 version still works with no problems.
So basically back to my problem of playing with no music.

EDIT : OK what the heck happen, but by searching I found the very first RaW W07 Torrent I downloaded, for some reasons downloading from this torrent and it works perfectly fine, downloading a new torrent and the RaW doesn't weird stuff here, but hey at least it work.
 
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@Ayoyo: I would recommend keeping levels low so you have a more direct comparison to your first playthrough. Keep in mind that this time, the boss battle against the G-Soldiers at Missile Base drop tons of EXP though. To keep the this amount to minimum, you'd need to use the Gaia Drum item (can be stolen from Sacred, for example) to set the Petrifying countdown on them. The success rate isn't particularly high, but can be increased by having a high Magic stat character use it.

Otherwise I agree with what you said above. There's not much point in making a mod that still allows breezing through the game, barely using the tools given to the player. And in the particular case of FFVIII, some players tend to forget or not realize that junctioning spells is comparable to equipping armor in more traditional RPGs, and should thus be updated every once in a while. Still, I felt that the required minimum to beat certain bosses without frustration was set a little too high, which is why some of them have been slightly toned down. Not so much that they become ridiculously easy, just so much that they feel more fair when facing them with less than ideal Junction setups, as said above.

@Rikku: One should never say never, but at the moment, it's rather unlikely that there will multi-language support anytime soon. The fact that every language version uses different executables in the 2013 version hinders this by quite a bit, and some of the additional dialogue in Field.fs would need to be translated to Spanish, which I am not able to. Doing it for Remastered would probably be easier, but at the moment, I can't promise anything.

@Nesouk: Hard to say what the problem is, seems different from last time for sure. What I would do first is making sure that all the .ogg files are present in RaW/Global/Music folder, accessible from FFVIII root directory. If they are not there, you might have picked the wrong destination folder in the RaW installer. If they are there, then I'm quite clueless. Hope you're getting the issue solved.
 
HAHA You posted while I was editing XD.

Anyway don't know why but for some reasons downloading RaW W07 from a new torrent and it wasn't working, but redownloading RaW W07 from the very first torrent I downloaded a few month ago and it worked, don't have any ideas why this is the case or why RaW glitch out in the first place but hey a least it worked.

EDIT : And now it doesn't work again. Now I'm really confuse.
 
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So, seems like every other aspect of the mod is working, damage, spell availability at start, character stats etc. But the draw point in the library is still Esuna. Was this changed in an update or am I missing something here?
 
@Nesouk: I've sent you a PM.

@Vayne95: No, this hasn't been changed.

If you are playing the 2013 version, make sure Roses and Wine W07 has been installed correctly. Then a folder called "RaW" should appear in your FFVIII root directory (Steam/steampps/common/FINAL FANTASY VIII). Open it, click GLOBAL, then Hext and put the Ragnarok_mod.txt file from the DL there. All the exe changes including Draw points contents should become active then.

If you are playing Remastered, then it's enough to merge the two DEMASTER_XP folders.
 
There's many ways of being able to make a much harder version for the Ragnarok mod. I'm all for a hard difficulty!
You could call it the "Griever" mode, simply made for those who want to suffer lol.
I'd definitely play it. :)

Enemies and especially bosses could have new attack patterns (extra random), have more hp, deal more damage, and maybe throw in some special attacks that aren't in the normal version. Things that would make players go "WTF, i didn't see that coming" while having their asses handed to them lol! You could even add special super bosses just for the "Griever" mode alone. And if all of that wasn't enough, you could nerf certain things on the players side to make sure you can never be a bit too strong, only strong enough to have a chance of winning.

So the decisions you make all lean toward nothing but making the game a challenge. This would give you more leverage for the normal version, of not having to worry if you're making things too easy even if it's for the sake of balancing the game. :D Because then players will have that alternative choice to satisfy their masochistic itch.

Also, maybe you could add rewards for those who defeat specific bosses? A way to show off your accomplishments lol.
 
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@Ayoyo: I would recommend keeping levels low so you have a more direct comparison to your first playthrough. Keep in mind that this time, the boss battle against the G-Soldiers at Missile Base drop tons of EXP though. To keep the this amount to minimum, you'd need to use the Gaia Drum item (can be stolen from Sacred, for example) to set the Petrifying countdown on them. The success rate isn't particularly high, but can be increased by having a high Magic stat character use it.

Otherwise I agree with what you said above. There's not much point in making a mod that still allows breezing through the game, barely using the tools given to the player. And in the particular case of FFVIII, some players tend to forget or not realize that junctioning spells is comparable to equipping armor in more traditional RPGs, and should thus be updated every once in a while. Still, I felt that the required minimum to beat certain bosses without frustration was set a little too high, which is why some of them have been slightly toned down. Not so much that they become ridiculously easy, just so much that they feel more fair when facing them with less than ideal Junction setups, as said above.
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Sounds reasonable, ditto that. And cheers for the tip regarding the soldiers & Gaia drum, I don't think I've ever used such an item before. I hope I can at least have a go at disc1 soonish, looks like some work projects might still be breathing down my neck for now.

So the decisions you make all lean toward nothing but making the game a challenge. This would give you more leverage for the normal version, of not having to worry if you're making things too easy even if it's for the sake of balancing the game. :D Because then players will have that alternative choice to satisfy their masochistic itch.
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Good point about hard mode development being potentially a liberating experience as you'd be unencumbered by elusive middle ground & accessibility requirements, instead being able to just have fun with it & kind of let loose. That said, it's still a lot of work and expecting an elaborate new mode right off the bat is unreasonable, which is why I lobbied for a more simple stat boosted version to start off with and get in the weeds with it later on. Not to mention, I still think it's logically sound to assume a big chunk of the people seeking out these mods are either veterans or looking for a challenge so I'm sure a hard mode would garner popularity.
 
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Just wanted to chime in that I'd love to see a hard mode version for this mod as well. I feel like with all the balance changes you've done so far, the game's gameplay and systems are in such a good place now that a proper challenging difficulty would be the logical next step.

And as always, thank you for all the work you put into this for the rest of us to enjoy.
 
Am I right that I should start a new save file? I had actually just gotten to the SeeD exam in Dollet when I saw a new update had dropped
 
Ok, there seems to be a high demand for a real hard mod, so I'll try to come up with something in around a month. Increasing stats shouldn't take long, could also make some minor AI changes while at it, such as removing Elvoret's delay / turn skip before using its Storm Breath attack. But definitely not more than that, at least for now.

@setafd: There's no need to start a new game because of the new version. The changed base stats for the characters will update automatically after putting the new files in lang-en, and there shouldn't be any conflicts with GF Abilities at this point of the game. If Heal appears in Siren's Ability list (instead of Absorb), then all is good.
 
@setafd: There's no need to start a new game because of the new version. The changed base stats for the characters will update automatically after putting the new files in lang-en, and there shouldn't be any conflicts with GF Abilities at this point of the game. If Heal appears in Siren's Ability list (instead of Absorb), then all is good.
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Okay, great, thanks!
 
Hi Callisto,

I've purchased FF8:Remastered with the hopes I could play it with Ragnarok. I've follow your guide on the original post but for the life of me I cant get it to work. Could you give me a step-by-step guide on the installation process, especially in regards to the demaster mod. I consider myself tech savvy but I'm having trouble even confirming that the demaster has even installed correctly.

I've been really looking forward to giving ragnarok a go, it would be amazing if you could lend me a hand with it. Thank you ahead of time!
 
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