Who's that guy who can't focus on one thing at a time?
...Oh, right, it's me. Let's see, in order...
Mewn wrote:Agra and co feel free to jump in and correct me if I'm jumping the gun, but I think that's what's loosely been suggested or agreed so far.
Largely accurate. Part of it depends on what I can coerce the game into doing (if I can get it to randomize drop element/% in a sane way, I can entirely remove dropped weapon boards, for instance).
The current goal (whenever I go through and do the tedious "fill in the drop tables" step) is something resembling the following:
1. Remove most synthmat drops from the area drop lists.
2. Add standard 1-9* (maybe 1-8*, haven't decided) weapons to the area drop tables, manufacturer selected by planet (so if you go to Moatoob, you'll find Tenora stuff; HIVE will be considered "Parum", Rykros and Linear Line will be a random selection of everything). This will open up a
huge number of monster drops for more interesting things (as of right now, there are
865 post-supplemental update weapons, and that's not even including the various armor/units/pre-supplemental weapons that don't drop offline).
3. Rework all the monster drops. If you want an example of what I'd like, look at Booma's offline drops (standard drop charts
here), just obviously with the higher tiers differentiated. Going to add a couple more drop tiers (probably 125, 150, 175, 190, 200, to let me be lazy about converting the online free missions).
Synthesis would be constrained to changing weapon elements (this is one of those things I _really_ need to test) and certain item combinations (again pending testing; Sange + Yasha + Jou'un Soul + (desired elemental photon) = Sangeyasha, Flowen's Sword + Parasitic Gene:Flow + (desired elemental photon) = Dark Flow, etc). If it works out, they'll all be 100% success rate (because the triple-dice-roll thing was dumb; fail to get the board, fail to synthesize, get shitty percent), so the production values will just be used to determine which PM you get (I'll probably lower the requirements for those, too).
If you haven't played on JP online recently, bosses will have similar drops to what you've experienced--one or two status resist units (mainly just two for the bosses that have two innate SEs--Ragnus and Alteraz are the most obvious-- or two forms), any item that's obviously directly associated with them (quick! guess which boss
Brain Spiral belongs to!), and probably a couple other rare weapons/armor/(units?) from a tier above where they were fought, so your level 100 De Ragan will drop a better sword than your level 100 Go Vahra, in addition to the obvious Ragan Head, Dragon Slayer, etc.
A few items will be given by partner characters. Generally these will be ones that are thematically appropriately (e.g Kireek would give out Soul Eater) and preferably are the weaker one in a given set (Soul Eater vs Soul Banisher, maybe a couple of the Ice Swords, etc). I'll do what I can to make the actual partner characters useful, so you won't be gimping yourself by taking them in your party.
ZethN64 wrote:Really looking forward to this! :3
Are you going to translate the Japanese text from the supplemental?(like for weapons, clothing, PA's, etc)
Items and PAs will be translated; item descriptions may be a bit later than everything else, on the grounds "holy shit so tedious". Side story missions (...and by that, I mean Door to Subspace because everything else was available on US) will, as well. Free missions... may or may not be, depending on motivation. Having "Block 1" or "Block 3" still be in Japanese never killed anyone, although I'll still try to get (read: shamelessly steal from psupedia THANKS ESPIOKAOS) the name/description so people know what's going on.
Most recent things done:
* Tracked down where level tiers are handled. There are 10 of them, but consecutive ones are combined for monster/box drops, as follows: 1-9 - 10-24, 25-35 - 36-49, 50-60 - 61-74, 75-85 - 86-100, 100-124 - 125-200.
* Figured out most of the unknown data in weapons. Turns out they
do natively support variable attack ranges offline (like how online, Crea Doubles has a longer range than Sweet Death), but none are configured to actually use it. Still two 16-bit values unaccounted for (ATP modifier, DFP modifier, ATA modifier, EVP modifier, ?, ?, MST modifier); I checked, none of them seem to affect technic or RCSM damage, so I'm not sure what they are (STA would be a
pain to confirm experimentally, and I didn't notice a difference in terms of critical hit rate on either). It's worth noting that all TCSMs and RCSMs have the first ? value set to 1, so it may be a "fires independently" thing.
* Fixed a few text bugs in the JP client that... none of you would probably know about because as far as I know I'm the first to do this.
* It turns out that the JP client will natively support the new slot unit appearance values if they're added to units (this isn't a surprise, but confirmation is nice). They did something to how extra units in general work (all of a sudden all the B and S rank extra units aren't equippable by humans...?), so more effort is needed.
* A couple of the new PAs: still bugged, annoying. Seems restricted to those that don't attach their hitbox to the weapon (Cyclone Dance, Vivi Dezza, Grand Crusher don't do damage, the ranged hits on Bogga Ranpa don't work), so I'm going to need to do... something. They work online (which, reminder, this is an online client forced into offline mode), so I guess that's a lead on figuring out what's wrong.
Wrote up a small thing explaining how the monster drops work, it's available
here, if anyone's interested.
...That was a longer post than I intended, whoops.