I'm not sure if this is the place for non boss feedback, but I figured it would be better to put all my feedback into one place.


I just finished a runthrough of all the fights and I figured since the mod is early in development some feedback could be useful!

I generally thought this was pretty good! The game doesn't do gauntlet style fights outside of Discipline Hollow, so it was a nice to see that being done elsewhere and not nearly as long. I also thought the boss fights were pretty good, but I had a few issues with some of them. I'll list all the cups and bosses in the order I fought them. For clarity, all this was done on hard with no other gameplay mods.

The bunny sprites are also cute, I felt that was important to note.


Beginner Cup:

I thought this was fine as an introduction to the areas, it's pretty easy, but early game parties don't have much sustain so I think it's fitting.


Knight Round 2:

This was also a fine tutorial boss. However Mass Cover doesn't check if any allies are alive, so if you use AoE to get around it, the Knight will just spam it and do nothing else.


Novice Cup:

I think this cup could change the recommended level to 25+? From the double quintar fight onwards, most enemies are designed for teams that are more mid 20s rather than low 20s, and the PtsdBun's physical form in particular can slaughter a low 20s team.


PtsdBun:

This boss I felt had a drastically different threat level between its physical and magical forms. The physical form being able to spam cleave with no cooldown was drastically more dangerous than anything the magical form could do.

If you wanna keep the cup at lvl 20, I think giving the physical form a 1 turn delay between cleaves would be good. Meanwhile if you wanna increase it to a lvl 25 cup, I think the magical form could use some more dangerous spells, Cure does basically nothing, and Bio does low damage and inflicts a buff that doesn't meaningfully harm tanks. I think upgrading these two to a more powerful healing spell and a more dangerous debuff would help make it less of a pushover compared to its physical side.


Bun Fight 1:

I couldn't find this quest for a bit so I ended up doing it somewhat overleveled. I think this is a nice bit of variety for early game, since most early game bosses have fairly low HP, but deal relatively high damage, meanwhile Bun does the opposite with decent damage but high HP. So it's more a test of endurance than a burst.


Bun Fight 2:

I think this fight is actually easier than the first one? The lack of a proper AI for Bun's time moves mean that Time Break can hit Bun as well if Time Immunity isn't used first. Since you can remove debuffs and the boss can't, it ends up benefiting you more than harming. Time Passage is also basically a skipped turn, since it takes time for the effect to actually get bad, and you can easily cure it before then. The huge CTs on many of Bun's spells also make Daze extremely strong here.

I think this fight needs some proper move priority so the boss doesn't cripple itself with Time Break, and could maybe have the effect of its spells enhanced. Although since the boss's skills seem to be a mirror the class itself, I'm not sure how much can be changed here.

All of this is assuming that your meant to fight this quest around like lvl 20-25, which I'm guessing is correct since the boss has 9001 HP? Although it's also lvl 15 so I'm not really sure when you're supposed to do this fight. If it is intended to be done at lvl 15, 9001 HP is really high.


Advanced Cup:

I don't have much to say for this one. All the fights felt appropriate for the recommended level so it seems fine as is.


X-ATM092:

I thought this was a nice little boss. It wasn't very complicated, but it was fun to fight and I liked how it encouraged you to not to slack to outpace the repairs, and gave you an opening to deal lots of damage right before it healed.


Expert Cup:

This was the cup I found the hardest. Undercity and volcano enemies can put up quite the fight, and the boss was also a step up from the previous ones. I think this is perfectly fine since at this point in the game your party is also quite strong, so makes sense for cups to get harder too.


Bubble:

I think this boss was fine as a mid game magical boss strength wise, however I had issues with actually interacting with the intended mechanic of hitting its elemental weakness. Since the status effect doesn't list what element its weak to, and it changes it every turn, you can't really predict around it. I ended up ignoring it and using non elemental spells to damage it along with DoT from my physical attacker who couldn't really do much damage. I think having the status effect list what its elemental weakness currently is would make it a bit easier to actually interact with it and not just ignore it.

Also each Elemental Swap being a different move makes it kind of clunky to scroll through the move list. I think it might be better to combine them into a single move like Anubis' Wall Change with RandomStatusTarget.


Ruby Weapon:

So I like this fight conceptually, however this boss could use a redo of how the tentacles are handled. Since they seem to be the big gimmick of the fight, having the boss be unable to revive them until 50% HP, and it being random if it revives them, or orders them to attack, doesn't really make for a particularly engaging fight. The boss' colossal HP, high def/res, and immunity to 5/6 elements doesn't help, since the first half of the fight is just the boss using various damaging abilities with no status effects or anything else.

I think this fight could be improved if the boss could always revive its tentacles, as well as having the tentacle respawn be guaranteed to happen every X turns if one is dead (or it could wait for both to be dead like Spirit Cage), rather than rely on random chance, and maybe letting them use a weak supportive attack when they haven't been ordered to attack, rather than doing nothing. I think the boss could also have a lower max HP in return for the tentacles having more max HP, since their currently pretty easy to burst down and ignore.

I'm not sure if you intended for the tentacles to be the big gimmick of the fight or not, but they seemed like the most interesting part to me. You could also expand its spell arsenal to have more spells with some interesting debuffs or other effects at lower HP if you wanna focus more on that instead. I just think currently the boss is kinda dull as it's a ton of HP without much going on.


Omega:

This was my favorite fight in the mod, as it felt like there was a lot going on and Omega had some very impressive defenses. I like that this fight has a specific order it does things, rather than being totally random, as it gave the fight a nice rhythm of attacking during the weak attacks, then staying defensive as it starts to use its stronger attacks, and repeating the cycle. The boss having somewhat low HP for an end game boss but being a puzzle to figure out how to damage was also neat, since Thunder can absolute devastate it with its electric element and 50% res ignoring, but you have to figure out how to remove Reflect first. Physical attackers also have to deal with its staggering 450 evasion, which again, there are ways around that and the Stone of Jordan means you can easily hit its weakness once you do.

My only issue is that turn 5 is really inconsistent? The boss has a bunch of free attacks, but it has no guarantee to use any of them, and the combination of Wave Cannon 2 -> Delta Attack 2 -> Earthshaker or some variation of that is wildly more dangerous than anything else it can do, and basically mandates 2 Float Shoes + Hermes Shoes + Levigel to not risk losing on the spot. I don't think it's bad for it to have a super dangerous turn, but the boss not doing it consistently means it can just suddenly spring it on you if you don't know its coming in advance. I think it might be better to have this turn have a random chance to do specific powerful combos, like a 50/50 chance use either Wave Cannon 2 -> Earthshaker, or Blaster 2 -> Delta Attack 2 -> Maelstrom, rather than every move being RNG. As currently turn 5 can either be the most dangerous turn, or simply have Omega use Rainbow Wind on a tank that is immune to Silence and Blind. And personally I liked the super dangerous turns a lot more, it was fun to play around them and helped the fight's rhythm.

The boss also had a bunch of counter attacks, but they looked pretty dangerous so I just sidestepped them with Unreactable. No idea how they impact the fight if you don't do that.


In general I think my biggest issue with most of the fights is generally the same as Omega's 5th turn, SOMETIMES they can do these really cool move combos, other times they just randomly spam weak moves or do effectively nothing. I think making sure each boss has an interesting order they use their moves, rather than 90% of attacks just being pure RNG would be more engaging design.

I don't think the fights are bad at all, they all tend to have fairly interesting designs and are generally at a proper difficulty for when they show up. Some just need some fine tuning so that they more consistently show off that design, instead of sometimes randomly showing it off, and other times just wiffing.

Ruby is probably the one that I think most needs work. The boss has basically no gimmick other than "durable" most of the time, and it's move use was wildly inconsistent. It can just as easily spam Attack multiple times in a row, as use Ultima right into Meteor 2.


Anyways, that's all my feedback! I thought this was a fun little addon with a particularly good final fight. I'm definitely interested to see what other fights are added, and how Bun's quest continues.

this was the first time that I read a "wall of text comment" without thinking "uh, wall of text" XD
I found every bit of info here exciting and helpful :)

I thought I fixed the Knight fight, but I may have forgotten to upload that version since :o but since I am working on a bunch of extra stuff for this mod, that has to wait for a little.

Double Quintar Fight (is terrifying in FF mod btw) and onwards huh, I'll have to look at the levels and difficulties on them.

PtsdBun, it was my proof of concept boss, I'm happy that it actually works, and having cooldowns on things is a great idea actually, I may have buffed the attack power a little because the magic side felt more dangerous to my team back then xD Will have to look at that again

Bubble, as this game does show what the enemy is healed by etc, and me originally wanting to create a boss where you have to guess what to use, I think this is the closest possible to that. It has 2 attacks for each of the elements, therefore the moveset grew a little more :o it's intended to make you wait a little or strategize around the elemental attacks. And yes, non-elemental is a very good strategy too :)

Ruby Weapon, having less chance of it using physical is probably a good idea, as it has really bad physical stats. The tentacles are an extension of it, so they don't move independently :) It has cooldowns on the stronger moves, I think I could add a "if ultima was used 1 turn ago, do not use meteor 2", other than that, it's not supposed to have a pattern, just generally meant to be a hard boss.

Omega, oh I worked long on that one, I had to nerf it a million times because no one could beat it LOL turn 5 is the double move, it being the scary part of the fight where you fear it could use earth shaker or not, is intended, it should never use 3 moves in a row also, I made sure to add a failsafe for that with the AP cost etc. Also yes, any way you defeat it, I am proud of you for doing so, as it's a crazy boss that gave the modding discord a LOT of attempts XD

Bun story, it's true, I have to add less randomness to it, give cooldowns and priorities etc. Timebreak is supposed to hit everything except the user, maybe I did something wrong there :o


The entire thing is great, thank you for the feedback, it makes my day :)

Glad my feedback could help! This was a fun mod and there are a surprisingly low number of mods that focus mainly on new battles, so it's nice to see one that not only does that but is high quality too.


For Ruby that makes sense if the tenatcles can't move on their own if they are part of Ruby. I never actually fought it in any FF game so I thought they were just like, random evil tentacles it summons.


That's interesting that Omega has a limit for turn 5. I think I just didn't notice that since on that turn I was so prepared for Wave Canon 2 -> Earthshaker that my brain just somehow assumed there would be a third attack in there that I also had to be prepared for.

This doubly impressive, because I looked in crystal edit to check its AI before fighting it. So I missed it both in and out of game. Good job me.

Also I'm curious what the old Omega was like. Was it like 2x as fast or something absurd like that?


Also for Bun I looked it over and I think I just got confused what status effect was active at the time and thought it hit itself. Time Break EX does seem to correctly not target Bun, so sorry about that one.

og Omega before nerf had 65k health instead of it's current ~30k, it had 2 counters for every attack, it was slightly faster, instead of sap it had burn debuff, which just killed you on the maelstrom turn XD it was fun

Oof, yeah that sounds a bit excessive. Probably for the best it was nerfed so you have more freedom what team you wanna use and not "Pick Valkyrie or die".