New Nyarlathotep's Dungeon Topic, Updated 10/1/14 with new rules

[Nephrite]

Neph, I note with dismay that Elincia STILL is not a legal pick in the Dungeon.

http://rpgdl.com/wiki/index.php/Full_List_of_Dungeon_Participants#Princess_Elincia_Crimea.2C_Fire_Emblem_10

Your move.

[Nephrite]

I will be officially making the Speed stealstone changes as mentioned earlier and also changing Firefly in the following way:

In addition to its normal effect, all members of the bearer's party (including the bearer) have their effective speed reduced to .9x.

[dude789]

I will be officially making the Speed stealstone changes as mentioned earlier and also changing Firefly in the following way:

In addition to its normal effect, all members of the bearer's party (including the bearer) have their effective speed reduced to .9x.

I really don't like that Firefly change. Speed is the important stat and cutting the team's speed is going to make it so that no one ever uses it. It also seems like a really arbitrary change that doesn't really fit with the sealstone.

[SnowFire]

I would have picked Firefly for my FF13 team even with that change.  Speed is the important stat but basically forcing large parts of the enemy team to skip round 1 is just awesome.  (If you squint a bit, it's the same thing as a speed boost...  it enables your team to do its thing on round 1 without interruption from the opposing team.)

I will grant the drawback starts really hurting on F7-F10 of the dungeon, where there are more haxy enemies who can do something broken that doesn't care about Firefly, but as is Firefly really trivializes F1-F5 almost regardless of the team assuming it's stuck on someone vaguely sane, and is still darn useful on the later floors.

[dude789]

I would have picked Firefly for my FF13 team even with that change.  Speed is the important stat but basically forcing large parts of the enemy team to skip round 1 is just awesome.  (If you squint a bit, it's the same thing as a speed boost...  it enables your team to do its thing on round 1 without interruption from the opposing team.)

I will grant the drawback starts really hurting on F7-F10 of the dungeon, where there are more haxy enemies who can do something broken that doesn't care about Firefly, but as is Firefly really trivializes F1-F5 almost regardless of the team assuming it's stuck on someone vaguely sane, and is still darn useful on the later floors.

I think your team is a special case because of the main character game over gimmick with Lightning which makes Firefly a necessity. It seems like we could come up with a more appropriate and less ridiculously costly solution. Perhaps something that cuts back on elemental resistance a stage for the wearer?

[Nephrite]

Glen had suggested making the other members of the team take extra damage.

I could also get behind a "No healing" version, or... well, if it wasn't complicated, some kind of "Firefly only works above X% HP" or something.

[dude789]

What if we made it so that all ST effects targeted at the team got drawn to the user. So ST healing and buffs would get drawn to the the user and couldn't be used on the rest of the team while the Firefly user was alive. 

[SnowFire]

Re everything ST: That also feels like an arbitrary and non-fun restriction - it won't matter for many teams, but teams it does matter for it does in an awkward and weird way.  (To go into this more...  suppose a team wants to cast an ST buff on someone other than the Firefly user in a particular fight.  You'd get into weird debates about if the FF user could be exactly chipped to the right level in the previous fight so that the enemies kill the FF bearer for the team, but what about using worse armors, etc.  Of course it wouldn't REALLY matter that much since all it'd mean in practice is that you'd use a team with MT healing & MT buffing.)

Re elemental resistance: FF1 Knight is basically the archetypical, standard Firefly bearer.  He's just plain a tank without need for elemental cheesing.  I don't think making Firefly only good on specific types of tanks is particularly interesting.

Re making other team members take more damage: That just makes Firefly even more defined by "have MT sweeping or GTFO."  That's already the disadvantage Firefly has; I find having several potential weak points to be more interesting than having a single critical weakness, since that makes floor selection more interesting.

I like the speed penalty because there's a lot of things that can go wrong when you eat a speed penalty, but you still get the fundamental bonus of the buff.  A speed penalty gives ST-heavy enemy teams a bit more of a fighting chance without making solid MT damage instant wipe material.

[dude789]

If you're using the Firefly sealstone, then your team probably isn't that durable in the first place and lowering speed just compounds the problem. Bad durability and speed is a death sentence in the dungeon and most of the other sealstones that reduced speed have had their side effects changed. (I believe status symbol dropped the speed reduction because no on was using it). The most common trait of the Godlike picks is good speed. Cecilia, Celes, and Shania are the only picks who don't have a method of getting good first turn speed and they make up for it with ridiculous skillsets.

Personally, when I think of Firefly users I think of Worker 8, and cutting his elemental or status resistences would cut down on the amount of attacks he can absorb. You mentioned Knight, but I think that he also at least has a couple of good resist options. One other idea I had is making attacks that targeted the wearer have perfect accuracy, but that would cut down on evasion Firely setups and I kind of like those.

 

[DjinnAndTonic]

When I think of Firefly, I think of Rody from Suiko3, with his awesome Firefly/Wall combo. Maybe a fair tradeoff for Firefly might be making the bearer unable to act for as long as Firefly is in effect?

[dude789]

That could be interesting but still sounds a little harsh, maybe change it so that they could make no offensive action so they could still support the team with healing and buffs. It fits in a bit more of a Paladin role that way and at least most of the better walls (Worker 8 aside) would still have something to do even if it might not be their best option.

[SnowFire]

dude, Firefly doesn't need to be designed around; it's not a disadvantage at all.  It really does need SOME kind of nerf, and a notable nerf, and even then it's still a big advantage.  Consider that the Dungeon does not really have MT OHKOs until F6 or so, and enemy ST offense that ramps over 2 PCHP in round 1 is fairly unusual.  While by default it should go on a low-value yet moderately tanky member of your party, it's absolutely fine to stick it on DW1 Hero or whatever.  So suppose it is on DW1 Hero - that's still 1 PCHP of durability to chew through, and THEN the enemy can worry about going for the reviver.  And if there's 2 revivers they may need even more offense to actually get anywhere.

I'm not arguing that a speed hit won't hurt, because it will.  But Firefly is still totally awesome because the Dungeon is rocket tag with most fights having turned by the end of round 1, and you're forcing the enemy team to spend round 1 very inefficiently.  That is still amazing, and frankly would not make THAT many fights in Firefly teams that have already gone through the Dungeon change all that much.  (Your old team, for example, would still require the extremely specific spoiler to W8 in badass MT physicals to really lose - speed is just not a huge concern so long as an MT OHKO or MT status can be avoided.)

[dude789]

dude, Firefly doesn't need to be designed around; it's not a disadvantage at all.  It really does need SOME kind of nerf, and a notable nerf, and even then it's still a big advantage.  Consider that the Dungeon does not really have MT OHKOs until F6 or so, and enemy ST offense that ramps over 2 PCHP in round 1 is fairly unusual.  While by default it should go on a low-value yet moderately tanky member of your party, it's absolutely fine to stick it on DW1 Hero or whatever.  So suppose it is on DW1 Hero - that's still 1 PCHP of durability to chew through, and THEN the enemy can worry about going for the reviver.  And if there's 2 revivers they may need even more offense to actually get anywhere.

I'm not arguing that a speed hit won't hurt, because it will.  But Firefly is still totally awesome because the Dungeon is rocket tag with most fights having turned by the end of round 1, and you're forcing the enemy team to spend round 1 very inefficiently.  That is still amazing, and frankly would not make THAT many fights in Firefly teams that have already gone through the Dungeon change all that much.  (Your old team, for example, would still require the extremely specific spoiler to W8 in badass MT physicals to really lose - speed is just not a huge concern so long as an MT OHKO or MT status can be avoided.)

With some of the recent changes, some of the fights actually have MT OHKO damage now. The Shadow Yukiko/Wendigo fight hits a MT OHKO between the two and the Zog/Leopold fight on the Ribbon floor also combine for a OHKO with Char/Freezing Breath. I think Neph needs to look over some of the new fights. A lot of the middle floors have had a fairly decent balance of weeding out weak teams but not being overly difficult. Both of the floor 3 versions have gotten a lot harder and the new floor 5s are getting ridiculous. 

I don't disagree that Firefly needs a nerf, but an all around team speed nerf is a bad and unoriginal nerf that has proven in the past to be a usage killer. I'm sure we can think of something more creative and more in line with the sealstone.

[Yoshiken]

Just throwing in support for either "Character cannot move while Firefly is active" or "Draws in all attacks that would potentially target them" (by which I mean, draws in enemy attacks and ally healing/buffs)

[Nephrite]

Aren't Zog and Leopold exceptionally slow, though? Or maybe Leopold is faster, I don't remember.

I'm removing Wendigo from 3b with a sad face. I might put him on 3a, though.

[dude789]

Zog is slow, Leopold is slightly below average (and since he double acts breath + desperate attack results in one very dead character), but they're both durable enough to take a round of attacks and it's on the ribbon floor so buffing to mitigate damage isn't an option.

[Nephrite]

As for that Crisis stone, another interpretation might be "The character in question is treated as if they are at 1 HP for the purposes of health-related effects. However, this character cannot be healed."

[dude789]

Hmm, that could be an interesting interpretation. The only problem is that I'd really like the sealstone's effect to be party wide because I think it could create some neat synergy, but  a whole party without healing would probably be bad.

[Nephrite]

Oh, I also just removed the healing debuff from Life.

dude, maybe make the effect party wide, but make it so that the healing for the team is reduced by some amount?

[Pyro]

I brought it up in chat, but Benjamin's section should probably mention that his Guard command enables him to cover another party member and take their hits. FFMQ's Defend is bugged and doesn't reduce damage... But the guarding makes Benjamin take the hit for MT damage too, and it does not focus damage (even if it normally would).

This seems like a pretty gosh darn nice trait considering his plethora of later status and elemental resists/immunities. Should probably remind folks that his MT is all split damage though (so sucks arse vs. large teams)

[dude789]

So do you think we could add a No Guard pokemon like Machamp or would that be a bit too overpowered? No Guard makes it so that all attacks have perfect accuracy while the pokemon is on the field.

Something like
Machamp (3.0)
Pros: No Guard is pretty cool and can have some devastating effects on the right team. He has great damage and the some of the usual Pokemon buffs and debuffs. Strong start as well.
Cons: No Guard can screw over a team just as easily as it can help. Very slow and No Guard's effect disappears if he's KOed.

[Dark Holy Elf]

3 feels a bit high since, glancing at a level-up list, Machamp doesn't get anything especially interesting skillset-wise outside Leer (which, to be fair, is pretty cool) until endgame, and slow ST 2HKOs are pretty unimpressive for a dungeon PC. It really depends what the available options are to abuse No Guard with.

[hinode]

No Guard only affects moves that are either used on or by Machamp; it doesn't have any impact on teammates' moves.

Honestly I suspect it's more of a liability than a benefit in the dungeon considering Machamp's speed, it makes every single status 100% on him even if the accuracy is crap normally.

[dude789]

No Guard only affects moves that are either used on or by Machamp; it doesn't have any impact on teammates' moves.

Honestly I suspect it's more of a liability than a benefit in the dungeon considering Machamp's speed, it makes every single status 100% on him even if the accuracy is crap normally.

Yeah, I was mistaken and since it only affects Machamp it's probably not that exciting. Maybe make it into a sealstone or something?

[Pyro]

Sure. I'll give it a shot.

FF5 Bartz (4): Can do anything ridiculously well. Lacks speed though.
RH Marco (Body Charge) (2): But hey here's 130% speed to anyone who needs it. Also has an awesome support skillset of his own. Marco is RH's MVP for a fucking reason.
SH3 Hilda (2): 100% ID along with lots of buffing magics and such. Also Entrance. Later on gets MT full healing and the nutty awesome SH3 revival (revives with CT)
FF9 Eiko (1.5): MT healing, damage, and revival. Later on that's MT revival at that. Also Carbuncle twinking silliness is a possibility.
L2EBC Jean (1.5): Fast status and physical damage. *Shrug*

A fairly weak team because it has no "RAR MT OHKO BEFORE AVERAGE SPEED MOVES" nonsense that seems like a requirement in the dungeon. At least not for a few floors. Turn Shifting and Bartz were a lot better than I thought. Especially Chemist, which can do so many ridiculous things.