LFT: An FFT mod (The final release is a lie. Download here!)

[Laggy]

Biggest drawback:

All affected classes have a non-insignificant chance to equip daggers instead of their intended weapons on enemy generics. (Very relevant for Lancers, Wizards, etc.) I can't stop this without making the weapon completely unusable by enemy generics, which would screw over classes that actually rely on daggers, so... yeah.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Oh, right.

You can largely avoid that for Lancers by giving them Swords and not Knives, and I guess you could drop the Wizard flavour thing entirely.

Or if you're really ambitious/there's space for this, you lock down a heck of a lot more enemies' weapons to preset things you want them to have.

Less ambitious is to make the first lance/katana/etc. available earlier, though Asura would probably need to be nerfed as a Draw Out if you did that at the very least.

[Magetastic]

I actually think that would make it quite interesting, if some lancers/wizards/what-have-you were to randomly have knives. Also, with Wizards, that would sometimes give them a less wimpy physical, and it might, y'know, get seen every now and then. (I'm also thinking it'll make the C1 Wizards MORE frightening, as it doesn't do anything but add to choices, and when they run out of MP, as is generally the case in, say, Dorter, then they have something to do other than be pathetic)

[Luther Lansfeld]

KNIVING WIZARDS

[Laggy]

Ehhh making Lancers with Swords makes them 1 range instead of 2 and Jump less viable for them. I dunno. I could get around it by presetting every enemy Lancer, I guess, but ... blah. I'd probably be more inclined to make a spear available in C1. Samurai is hard enough to unlock that C2 Start for it feels fine to me. The only reason to do it would to cater to the SCC, which I'm not sure is a train of thought I'd want to carry far enough to start making both skillset and item changes for (would have to nerf Asura, there'd be a huge gap between it and Koutetsu, etc.)

I really don't like knocking on Wizards with random dagger equip, though, and the damage will still blow even in C1. They're, in all likelihood, better off using elemental rods for the 25% autocast (plus of course much more importantly strengthening their spells).

Bards using daggers is fine, of course, since harps are pretty late, and they can actually effectively use them.

I can't think of other classes where this would matter.

[Magetastic]

But it would make their physical be LESS ass!

Also: Would it be possible to give Monks hats or ribbons or some sort of headgear? I gotta say that it feels a little counter-intuitive, IMHO, to look at Monks, especially male ones, and be able to equip nothing but Clothes and accessories.

[Laggy]

Monks not being able to equip Hats is a large part of balancing them as a carrier.

Again, I find the philosophy that making wizard physicals suck slightly less in C1 at the pros of giving PC wizards a near-worthless weapon option and nerfing all enemy wizards... not all that agreeable with. >_>

[Dark Holy Elf]

(Forewarning: Most of this is just my throwing thoughts out as they occur; don't take anything too seriously as a criticism or anything.)

Enemy Lancers have trouble getting Jump off, frequently have terrible Jump range, and generally suck anyway, is my feeling. (Granted, LFT may have changed this, but... IIRC in the older version we played we steamrolled the 3? battles that had Lancers badly, so eh, can't comment.) I'd put performance of the PC version higher. That said, yeah, earlygame lance (after Zeklaus at the latest) would solve my complaint here.

Enemy Samurais you don't worry about for their physical anyway (random Brave doesn't help them), and they are few enough you could lock their weapons without mega headaches if the idea of seeing one with an Air Knife bothers you. This strikes me as better than bringing Asura too early for reasons you already brought up.

Calculators with Staves (or whatever) seems like it has no drawback at all.

A Wizard with a Mithril Knife does 16 damage, which is bad but a hell of a lot better than 6 damage, which is what a female Wizard currently does. (Males do 9.) By the time elemental Rods show up, Blind Knife shows up and it's 20 damage. I don't agree that a 25% randocast is better than this at all, though of course the element strengthening is indeed far more important. If you're worried about some enemy Wizards losing strengthening (never mind all the ones with Rods/Poison Rods have nothing to lose), though, you can compensate for this by making more of them female or improve them in other ways. (JLevels, fixed Faith, fixed equipment, fixed support ability, etc.)

Granted, this doesn't matter for Wizards tooo much, since it's purely flavour. In general, though, my kneejerk would be that it makes more sense to balance things for the PC end first and worry about fallout on the enemy end as a secondary, especially for more rarely-used jobs because it's easier to do manual fixes if need be. Heck, you don't even have to fix every enemy - enemies were nowhere near optimised in original FFT (male 45 Faith Poison Rod/Headgear Wizard!) and a little thing like the odd sword Lancer (which, incidentally, is still better than a vanilla FFT enemy Knight) isn't going to bother anyone.

[Laggy]

Coming fresh off a stream where UBS2 Lancers nearly OHKOed Tonfa's units, I'm not inclined to say they suck when comparing to Knights. (And spears do random Armor Break now, and still have the 2 range dynamic, which matters more when they're terrible at Jumping and thus they have to fall back to their physical anyway.) And frequently they have Defense UP learned, so they're not even less durable than Knights against physicals.

Enemy Samurais have innate Two Hands. Katana formula sucks, especially with random Brave, but it's still double damage compared to what it used to be. And they have Concentrate. And several katanas actually have unique traits now. Making it knives instead, which can't be 2-handed? That is a massive drop in damage. Now, sure, this depends largely on which DOs they have learned, but... male Samurai exist, physicals murdering charging units matter, etc. Saying that the physical is irrelevant is pretty off the mark, in my opinion.

I'd let mc feedback more on Calcs, but... I brought this up with her before, and the general feeling there is that it's intentional that you can't use any of the MA boosting weapons on it (to emphasize their stat suckage). It also gives P Bag an actual purpose on female Calcs.

Lategame Wizards would almost certainly never have Wizard Rod set, since it's a C3 weapon and knives get scattered around far more. And I'd argue that random elemental rods and Toad Rods (which replaced Poison Rods) totally own daggers as far as "random sucky physical" goes in terms of aesthetics, but that's just opinion >_>

[VySaika]

I'm definately in favor of making a spear available in C1. As well as giving Bards knives since...really, why not. Samurai though...yeah, agreeing with Laggy on that one. As well as Wizard. They already get rods in Ch1, they don't need daggers.

[Luther Lansfeld]

I feel like making a class unusable for a period to "reward" you for opening them too early is pretty goofy myself, so I think making Katanas and Lances earlier is a good idea. I like the idea of Sword Lancers in particular of course since Jump is so rarely seen.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Coming fresh off a stream where UBS2 Lancers nearly OHKOed Tonfa's units, I'm not inclined to say they suck when comparing to Knights. (And spears do random Armor Break now, and still have the 2 range dynamic, which matters more when they're terrible at Jumping and thus they have to fall back to their physical anyway.) And frequently they have Defense UP learned, so they're not even less durable than Knights against physicals.

Can't comment on Tonfa's experience, and it's not too relevant anyway. All I can say is seeing less enemy Armour Break seems like a positive rather than a negative. <_< Again, not that it really matters, Lancers have C1 spears = problem solved.

Samurais are the focus here. Unlocking them in C1 is actually reasonable, and it's annoying that they have nothing whatsoever then. This strikes me as much more important than the enemy Samurai of which there are... *checks* nine in the game now, three of which are split path, and five of which are boss support who will be circumvented as often as not, and all of which should be emphasising Draw Out over physicals out of pure battle design (Samurais using regular physicals are a rehash of Knights with a different look). And again, any ones you really want to have katanas can have them set.

[Laggy]

Wait, unlocking Samurai in C1 is suddenly much more reasonable now? Because their Thief prereq dropped from 3 to 2? o_O

Again, barring the SCC, I can't possibly see someone beelining straight to Samurai and somehow have enough of C1 left that they'll sit with their hands beneath them and have nothing to do or no other classes to pursue. Just getting to Samurai means unlocking Chemist, Knight, Archer, Monk, Thief, Geomancer, and Lancer. Unless you are absolutely dead set on doing NOTHING but Draw Out or grind on a ton of randoms, I basically disagree that this is somehow a likely occurrence, or at least likely enough to do the work involved. Assuming you don't start Samurai training until C2 start, you'll get more than enough JP to pick up every DO ability before its corresponding katana becomes storebought, so it's not like you're missing out because you can't get them in C1.

I'm fine with a C1 spear, fine with bard getting daggers, just... yeah, harps don't come until mid C2 and have a grand total of 2 storeboughts, and Lancers take all of two jobs at JLV2 to unlock. They're different situations.

[Grefter]

Weapon allowance is by weapon class and not on an individual weapon by weapon basis?  (I... think I am thinking of FFTA there, so whatever)  I was kind of under the impression that the situations that it comes up sometimes Bare Hands was better than Daggers available in SCCs anyway thanks to the whole SCC twinking always have high Brave thing anyway, but obviously misunderstanding SCCs there.

If it is weapon by weapon, see no reason the first 1 or 2 daggers (or maaaaybe swords) couldn't be made fairly universal.  Still, personally?  I see little reason to be tweaking the game more for SCCs.  Challenges are meant to be just that and they have to suck it up when things suck a little.

[Fuzzypickles]

I'm adamant against sword-lancers. It's just silly and will accomplish nothing but screw with the AI's equipment (which is already pretty terrible).

Even dagger-Bards I'm eh on. How many Bards do you guys have in the ENTD files? Would setting all of their equipment be a pain? Since the main thing Bards have going for them in LFT is their harps and if the enemy equips a dagger you're going to have a pretty pathetic unit.

I was kind of under the impression that the situations that it comes up sometimes Bare Hands was better than Daggers available in SCCs anyway thanks to the whole SCC twinking always have high Brave thing anyway, but obviously misunderstanding SCCs there.

Yes and no.
Bare-hands is [PA * (Br/100)] * PA
Daggers are [(PA + Sp)/2] * WP

For a class like Bard who has god awful PA the daggers are going to be dealing more damage. Don't Bards usually have a fairly easy Chapter 1 just since Sing is more effective earlier on (due to lower stats and lower effective charge times)? I don't think they really need a buff directed at them just for the sake of SCCs.

[Laggy]

Following on this train of thought:

Suppose you are an extreme badass and unlock Samurai by Sand Rat. (This involves lots of randoms). Let's assume that you're even more badass, and that you somehow are still Level 1, and you're playing a female Samurai to boot (worse off in C1 due to 1 less PA). To unlock Samurai, you are guaranteed to have Knight (at JLV3) and Archer unlocked. This means that you can 100% learn Equip Sword or Bow, no questions asked.

With an Iron Sword and innate Two Hands, a Samurai with those specs deals 60 damage on a physical. With innate Concentrate. Knights, in comparison (Male Knights!) deal 36. Granted, with shields (...C1 shields), far more durability, and 1 more move (but 1 less speed). Inferior, yes, but hardly unworkable or unusable in C1. With Ramza or a male, this goes up to 72.

The more likely scenario is that you unlock Samurai by Miluda 2. By virtue of all the JP you have gained, being Level 6 at this point is not unlikely. Damage from Samurai at this point is 98 damage with a Mythril Sword.

Yeah, in all honesty I am not worried about Samurai in C1 even without normal class weapons. They're not good, per say, but they're not liabilities either. And of course once C2 starts they get access to MA*8 unevadable AoE damage with a 25% chance of adding Dead. It really should only ever matter for the SCC, which, again, I'm not too keen of going to this extent to pander for.

[metroid composite]

To add: Lancers in Chapter 1 tend to do just fine with Equip Axe.  Battle Axe is buyable at Sand Rat, and deals 88 damage from a level 1 Lancer (99 with Power Wrist).

Yes, Calculator is not meant to get stat bonuses from Staves.  I'm cool with Calculator weapons that let them hit things hard, because I'm fine with buffing Teleport 2->Physical, but I'm not hot on weapons that boost speed/MA; let bags do that.  (Come to think of it, calcs could have their PA mult doubled and be able to equip Chaos Blade and I wouldn't care in terms of game mechanics.  That would be WTF in terms of theme, though).

EDIT: Y'know what, screw it: mechanically I wouldn't be hugely bothered by giving Calculators Knight Swords.  Yeah, they get Excalibur, but at the same time as H-Bag, and due to their very low speed Excal is only a +2 speed bonus compared to H-Bag's +1 speed bonus (even with Flash Hat and Sprint Shoes calcs only reach sp 5 at normal levels).  But on top of that now you can't haste them, and you may be denying Excalibur to someone who can use it better.  Granted, this is purely considering mechanics, not thematics.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Yeah, the cheaper Equip Sword/Bow reduces most of my concerns with Samurais, honestly. It still feels inelegant to have zero innate weapon options for a class at any point in the game, but with Asura at least moved to Dorter 2 it's not so bad.

[metroid composite]

Yeah, the cheaper Equip Sword/Bow reduces most of my concerns with Samurais, honestly. It still feels inelegant to have zero innate weapon options for a class at any point in the game, but with Asura at least moved to Dorter 2 it's not so bad.

Archers have 0 innate weapons at Mandalia Plains, save Algus.  Can definitely come up with starting generics, Delita, or Ramza.

I mean, I guess we could give them daggers...although now every enemy Archer would need to be hand-edited, and if it's hand-edited you now get different functionality since you'll never get the "will it be a longbow or crossbow" question.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Mandalia Plains is intuitively before the game begins, to me. Wizards and Priests don't have weapons there either, and I don't really care. Doubt I'm the only one.

[Mo]

So, I've run into a problem with Nelveska Temple.   It seems whenever I win the battle and get a faith warning, the game hard locks with WARNING on the screen (before the dialogue box pops up).    I've managed to work around it by reducing my unit's faith so I don't get a warning, but it's something you might want to look into.

Here's the testing steps I've taken:

I'm playing LFT 10/11/2009 on real psx hardware.
First, I passed the stage without a faith warning but didn't get all the items.  No Freeze.
Did some random battles to get skills for my item finder, raising a caster's faith in some battle downtime.
Beat Nelveska map and got all items, game froze on warning screen.
Tried again, same basic actions and same result: game froze on warning screen.
Patched a fresh FFT image, burned it and tried again, same result.
Tested a random battle, faith warning displayed ok with no freeze.
Tested original FFT disc on Nelveska fight, displayed ok, no freeze (didn't get all the items though).  This is the disc I made my image from.
Lowered my mage's faith to 84 and tried again on LFT, no warning and no freeze.

I never did try a previous version to see if it's just in this most recent one, but as you might imagine I'm pretty sick of that fight now.     I'll let you know if I run into any problems on later fights, but I'm somewhat wary of getting my faith back up to the warning range at the moment.

[Laggy]

o_O

That is a remarkably obscure way to crash the game. Huh. Unfortunately I don't even have the slightest clue what would cause that, as there's no changes that have been done with the warning sign for high Faith. I'm guessing it may be a stray bit being changed through some of the ASM edits causing it but.... yeah. That sucks, I apologize that you got screwed out of Nelveska like that.

[metroid composite]

Mandalia Plains is intuitively before the game begins, to me. Wizards and Priests don't have weapons there either, and I don't really care. Doubt I'm the only one.

Well...actually no, not according to the Miscellaneous Info Guide...

Checkpoint 1: Gariland Magic City
Broad Sword, Dagger, Oak Staff, Rod, Clothes, Leather Hat, Potion,
Antidote, Eye Drop, Phoenix Down

Gariland Magic City: sells knives, rods, staffs, sticks, bags, clothes,
robes, hats, shuriken, balls and Broad Swords

So...Wizards and Priests have weapons.  (Well...assuming you consider Rod a weapon at all, but if you don't then wizards have no weapon for several fights).  Good upgrade for Priest, though--for female that's 6 damage -> 15 damage.

Regardless, Priest/Wizard are a lot less relevant in that fight, because (barring ridiculous spillover shenanigans) they can't come up for Ramza or Delita, the two characters you're forced to continue using.

[Dark Holy Elf]

See, the fact that I, a 30-time player of the game, didn't even know that fact shows how little Mandalia Plains matters. It's little more than an extended prologue. Not really comparable to the whole first chapter.

(And for the record, Knight is similarly missing equipment for that battle: no armour.)

[superaielman]

Yeah, I'll agree with that. The game doesn't really start until Sweegy woods.

Similiar note to that, charm on red panthers can get seriously annoying. Oh well.