http://www.mediafire.com/?ffpvs71ki9aak5f
BtB is a tedious run, so I'm putting it on hold. BOF 4 should be more itneresting. From what I gathered, is it still possible to get super combo! Let's see if it's stronger than dragon powers...
I jsut finished the intro, near the first village
From what I've seen on youtube the Super Combo is pretty much still the strongest ability in the game, especially if you combo into it from something else, I think if you abuse elemental weaknesses you should be able to demolish most things in pretty short order.
http://www.mediafire.com/?lewc4anp4617mdc
jsut finished my first boss fight with Nina. I have yet to figure how the battle system works; running/walking doesn't seem to help
Super Combo isn't quite as straightforward as it is in BoF3. It takes longer to execute, as each slash is animated, and does less damage than the previous one.
Super Combo isn't quite as straightforward as it is in BoF3. It takes longer to execute, as each slash is animated, and does less damage than the previous one.
I still reckon it's faster for the damage than the dragon abilities personally, even if you skip what you can the breath attack animations are really quite long...
ryu's attack is pretty weak, and transforming into a dragon takes too long. Unless I can manipulate ershin to attack harder, she will only need to attack once
Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought, I'm not sure if I expect to see the Dragons at all in this run or not, I guess they could be useful for some of the bosses later in the run but before Super Combo turns up.
http://www.mediafire.com/?9v9z09ii6s0hb6a
ready to inflitrate the empire. Mini-games are fun during a TAS. I will see later if it's worth it (the more points, the stronger the dragons)
http://www.mediafire.com/?t2g651ugxxtw8w7
on my way to windia, ready to cross a swamp. I suppose there would be a way to cross the plain without walking in triangles. Also, I wonder if I will keep cray alive
I'm loving these WIPS (the fact that this is one of my favorite RPGs doesn't hurt). Out of curiosity though, do you plan on going for the good ending or the fast aka. bad ending? For what it's worth, I think I'll actually prefer the bad ending. I just like the boss fight (well technically it's one) in that scenario. :)
I'm loving these WIPS (the fact that this is one of my favorite RPGs doesn't hurt). Out of curiosity though, do you plan on going for the good ending or the fast aka. bad ending? For what it's worth, I think I'll actually prefer the bad ending. I just like the boss fight (well technically it's one) in that scenario. :)
Nahhhh, good ending all the way, I want to see the boss taken down at TAS speeds, that jerk always gave me problems, haha
http://www.mediafire.com/?t2g651ugxxtw8w7
on my way to windia, ready to cross a swamp. I suppose there would be a way to cross the plain without walking in triangles. Also, I wonder if I will keep cray alive
it always remains to be seen. I might restart soon - pretty busy these days - and so far, low experience was OK. PLus, with the mimi games, I can get a maximum points for my dragons
I've spent a lot of time the last few weeks trying to break this game somehow and I finally did it. I know that it was noticed a very long time ago that the damage done from Aura DragonBreath attack can be preposterously high in certain conditions. It was not before Forte in his damage formula thread that it was exposed that a interesting condition was checked:
If TargetDef / 2 is greater than AttackerLevel * 20:
BaseDamage = 65536 + (AttackerLevel * 20 - [ TargetDef / 2 ])
Basically, if Ryu level times 20 is less than half the enemy defense, the damage is big, very big. Well, it turns out that this is actually very hard to satisfy. I am not sure why it was never exploited (as far as I know), but you have to be really determined to deprive Ryu of any exp, specially when fighting Ight, when Ryu transforms into Kaiser, remember? You have to kill Ryu (twice!) to prevent him gaining exp and thus transform what would be a free fight into a very tricky one. Why make such a effort?
Anyway, this is a video of me one shooting the toughest enemy in the game, Rider (defense: 210), with a level 6 Ryu:
Link to video
Keep in mind I am not using any GS code and played the game start to finish to verify and test this.
Ruy gains xp from Fou-lu battles so I made a excel sheet to track the party levels from each boss fight. I then concluded that... you level simply never gets low enough compare to the bosses stats (by far...). We need a few tricks:
First, we can raise the enemy defense ourselves with Cray's Protect ability or the King Sword. However, since this buff is limited to +100%, the condition is still too demanding making it useful only for the latter three bosses and enemies with enormous defense, like the Rider.
Second, you probably realized that if the enemy is defeated with the Breath attack, Ryu will be alive and gain xp making this only usefull once. Or it would be if not for the Monopolize skill (caster appropriates all xp) which is learned from the master Marlok.
Third, when the breath is used within a combo, somehow, and it bothers me a lot I don't know why, the condition is evaluated differently, making it easier too fulfill it so that we are able to kill EVERY boss in the game if just a single hit (we still have to buff its defense one or two times most of the time)
A few notes:
- If you want to try it out, Ryu level is in address 0x8011A956. Must be set before the battle begins.
- The dice I and II are a exception, their move Stasis blocks all combos for 3 turns. You have kill one of them "normally" I assume.
- I checked all others breath attacks and seems DragonBreath is special in this regard.
- We get access to the DragonBreath attack only after fighting Ight.
- If you don't miss the treasure in Ludia at night, Monopolize is made available right when you need it.
- The bot xp grind is no longer needed (hooray!) and Treans can be killed in the Abandoned Village for a very early Nunchaku weapon for Cray. If a TAS was to be made, I believe this would be useful for the dice I and II. (see this video )
- I don't think a RTA is feasible, but maybe Ershin's Stand Out skill may be useful to prevent your frail Dragon being killed?
After looking at the damage formula thread, it's an underflow issue where the devs didn't expect Ryu to stay at a very low level. In a similar fashion, if TargetDef / 2 is exactly equal to AttackerLevel * 20, the attack should always deal 0 damage.
For combos, I would assume either the "20" in the formula is changed to a lower value, or the TargetDef is increased, leading to easier to fulfill underflow. You may probably be able to get a better understanding of the combo formula by manipulating TargetDef and AttackerLevel in the RAM and see in which cases you get an underflow (or even better, 0 damage).
Finally I had some time to look it up.
Indeed, it's just a case of a unsigned integer overflow, the game doesn't not check if the subtraction (AttackerLevel * 20 - [ TargetDef / 2 ]) goes negative. Following Forte's lead it looked like it was deliberate, oh well. About the combo thing:
When used in a combo, the amount of hits the breath attack does (8011E0B9) depends on the "combo level" (8011DF50)
IF COMBO_LEVEL == 0, HITS == 6
IF COMBO_LEVEL == 1, HITS == 9
IF COMBO_LEVEL == 2, HITS == 12
The formula itself is a loop (0 ... HITS) whose iterator is stored at 8011E0B8, and, as you know, the damage of each hit is increasingly weaker. The game achieves that by the reducing the first term of the subtraction, therefore incidentally increasing the chances of our overflow. Being the MODIFIER stored at 801EAA90 and later at 801C6E58 with the value of 6, the first term is:
IF ITERADOR < MODIFIER+3
IF ITERADOR < MODIFIER
(AttackerLevel * 20)
ELSE
(AttackerLevel * 10)
ELSE
(AttackerLevel * 5)
The MODIFIER is 6 in case of the DragonBreath Attack, but each breath attack seems to have its own value and but I didn't look further than that. The formula could be quite different anyway.
