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Speaking of Slumber.................
I am going to nerf it down a bit, to 20%. Right now is almost a cheat mode since works also on bosses! However I don't want to remove the possibility to work on them, but at least I must reduce it to 20% which is still a lot, because defense/speed are very important stats. When testing act4 with fabula team, using slumber on several single bosses was making the fight really too easy even in Nightmare mode!!

yayswords wrote:It's not even a multiplier cap. Redo with the Triple S of Pain please: Slumber, Shattered and Scared.

Here ya go. :D Vaelis hasn't quite reached those figures for a single hit yet*), but his advantage is that once he's buffed up, he's really low-maintenance (provided that you have the legend axes) and can hit several consecutive killer-blows without "wasting" turns into boosting between them. So if we'd count the dmg sum over multiple turns, he's still in the lead.

*)excluding Final Blow dmg predictions

Just played the Deceit battle on Normal, and what can I say...

Ugh. Way too easy.

Deceit starts up with Mirror Damage. Well, no problem, have just
everybody weakly hit him (normal ranged attack, except for Krimm, who
cannot hit weakly, Riley, who uses Slumber, Jariel, who slows him
down,and Vaelis, who uses Dirty Fighting instead. Then Mirror Damage is
out, and everybody can chop on Deceit with their best moves. He's down
for the count (i.e. Vaelis's Final Blow) in three turns or so.

That's not how I imagine a demon lord. (Besides, when talking about him,
they should always be talking about a demon LORD, not just a demon!)
Deceit needs the ability to paralyze two people standing behind one
another in one single move, and for at least two turns. Deceit needs an
ability that (for tons of Mana and at really long delay) kills anybody
who's Staggered, regardless of HP left. Deceit needs the ability to make
the entire party Scared and do minor magical damage, for little to no
Mana. Deceit needs the ability to drain life from the entire party and
heal himself by the amount he drained (something like ~40 damage to
everybody and ~240 heal to himself). Also, he needs WAY more defense
than he has now; it feels wrong that he takes more damage from one of
Vaelis's attacks than a single Kraken tentacle does.

Can you amp it up, like, a lot? After all, I want people to EARN their
good ending!

That's the email Taleweaver sent me tonight, but I remember some players in Nightmare mode saying that both the demons fights (Deceit/Jul) were hard enough. From Normal to Nightmare is a big jump (there's Hard in the middle) but still seems strange that in Normal is so easy?
I'm going to add a few more skills based on those suggestions so that the difficulty more than just in the stats is also in the AI (won't be easy of course, with this engine fights of a team against a single boss enemies are always very very hard to balance).

I did many testing this morning and some tweaks
In the latest version 0.8.35 the Deceit/Jul fights are now much harder, but I was still able to win using potions and some combo tricks (like Vaelis Rally to clear paralysis and so on). I had to try several times but eventually managed to do it. I was using Taleweaver's save, so I don't even know if he spent a lot of time building up the gear like many Nightmare players do but I suspect not. So definitely before was too easy. This time I added special skill instead of just adding more stats and worked well I think, those two battles are quite fun

I tried to remember what made the Final Fantasy boss fights memorable, and it was mostly the fact that all the bosses have abilites you never get; over-the-top-strong moves that hit and almost kill the entire party ("reduce everybody to 1 HP" stuff), combined with single-person-instakills that force you to have enough ways to resurrect your guys back from the dead, or you're losing the fight. If you're in a boss fight against a demon lord and you're not constantly forced to heal and/or remove debuffs from your guys, something's wrong.

Of course fabula just sent this screenshot to me by email...

fair enough, I don't want it to be impossible but at least tougher than before yes!

I'm unsure about the skills for the Hunter. Is there any justification for taking both Critical Hit or Double Attack? Double attack uses less SP and has a shorter delay time. However, paralyze from Critical Hit is a nice debuff, although it doesn't work on bosses.

Also, has anybody found use for the stagger skills (Ice Flask, Backstab, etc)?

Jaeger wrote:Also, has anybody found use for the stagger skills (Ice Flask, Backstab, etc)?

Combo with other characters' skills that require Stagger to work.

Yes is true that those two skills are similar (Critical Hit & Double Attack), I should probably make them more different... as for the stagger skills, I think maybe they should do more base damage,even if they do also DoT and condition (so for example Frozen also reduces speed).

edit: I had an idea, what if Critical Hit required Stagger too? this way Double Attack would make more sense (otherwise everyone would just use Critical Hit indeed).