S-Ranks

[Aleron Ives]

Now that I've finished the drops, I'm going to move into my next project of improving the stats on various items, mainly weapons. Right now, S-Rank weapons are quite valuable because since nothing drops, the only way to get certain weapon types is to obtain an S-Rank weapon. If you want to use a Twin, Mechgun, Shot, Sword and other types of weapons, you must obtain S-Ranks since the standard rares either don't drop or suck. Now that the drops are fixed, standard rares will be obtainable, and S-Ranks won't be as useful.

The other problem is that standard weapons are much stronger than S-Ranks, due to their ability to have percents. As such, I'm making Ultimate mode harder so that the enemies put up more of a fight. Unfortunately, this means that only weapons with percents will be truly effective in the Ruins, since the enemies there have high DFP. To prevent S-Rank weapons from becoming garbage (and indeed, for classes like HUnewearl, S-Ranks are barely usable as it is without a Force to help), I think they could use a boost in power to make up for their lack of percentages. The point of this topic, then, is to decide how to power them up, as there are actually two ways to do it.

The first is the most obvious, and that is to simply boost their base ATP (and ATA, for the weapons that have bad ATA). If enemy DFP in the Ruins were to rise by 200 points, then S-Rank ATP could also be increased by 200 points to compensate, or it could be increased even more, since weapons with percents easily have more ATP than that. S-Ranks would, then, be immediately more powerful once obtained.

The second way is to tweak grind values. Weapons can actually be ground as high as +255. Since grinding gives +2 ATP, S-Ranks currently have +198 ATP more than their base. If the grind was increased, their ATP could increase by a maximum of 312 points without altering their base power. As some of you may know, most S-Ranks in GC grind past 100, and many go up to +250. This would have the advantage of not making S-Ranks stronger right off the bat; players would have to boost their items many times to unlock their S-Rank's full potential. Plus, it just looks cool to have grinds of 200 or more.

I thought I'd bring this up to see what people think; I like the idea of increasing grind as well as base power to balance the S-Ranks a bit.

To illustrate, an Imperial Pick has a base ATP of 620, with a +20 grind for a total of 660 ATP. On a HUnewearl, that's 1810 ATP base, and with Shifta 15 2320 ATP. If you add in 45%, the ATP increases to 3365.

If you take an S-Rank Sword, one of the most powerful S-Ranks, on the other hand, it gives 936 ATP and +99 grind, for 2284 before Shifta, and 2928 after. Even though the Sword gives far more base ATP than the Pick, it's no match for percentages in its current state. S-Rank Partisan is even less evenly matched, since it gives only 672 ATP.

If, however, the Sword's grind was increased to +250, it would give 2586 ATP before Shifta, and 3315 after. This would make it far more evenly matched with the Imperial Pick, but Swords are supposed to be more powerful than Partisans, and we are talking about S-Ranks. An additional +100 ATP to the Sword's base would ensure that using it would actually have an advantage over using something as common as an Imperial Pick, though it would take a while to gather up enough grinders to reach that kind of power. This is merely one possible scenario; there's many ways that the S-Ranks could be beefed up.

[MuCast]

give them steroids

i like the atp powerup idea, percents screw s ranks up anyway namewise, this seems like the best alternative

[Aleron Ives]

...Nobody has any opinions?

[Wing]

...Nobody has any opinions?

give them steroids

EDIT: In all seriousness, most of us haven't completed C-Mode even once, so there's not much of an opinion to be made due to lack of experience.

[Aleron Ives]

I suppose so. I'll just have to do whatever I think is best.

The other thing I'm contemplating is whether I should tweak Battle units. It would be nice if they were a bit faster, especially since Sega was willing to speed them up for BB. Sega used a system of double speeds for each unit upgrade, like so:

General: 5%
Devil: 10%
God: 20%
Heavenly: 40%

If I wanted to import Heavenly/Battle into the game, I could merely shift the values:

General: 10%
Devil: 20%
God: 40%

Heavenly/Battle has pros and cons... certain weapons that are slow are nice to have sped up, especially on SLOWmarl. On the other hand, the speed can cause you to have trouble making the enemies flinch because you attack so rapidly. If I wanted to be more conservative, I could do a more Ver.2 styled curve:

General: 10%
Devil: 20%
God: 30%

To prove to people that my goal is not actually to break the game, I made a little video of what I could do if that was really my goal:

http://files.filefront.com/13610533

The God/Battle speed is set to 80%, which is what the next unit would have been, if Sega had made one that broken.

[Aleron Ives]

DOUBLE POST WHEE!!

OK, in all seriousness now. This is what a Heavenly/Battle does:

http://www.filesavr.com/psoh-ba

This is a 40% speed increase, as opposed to the 20% increase from God/Battle.

I think I may use this; I did some tests, and it does help some, but not a massive amount. With G/BA, you can't do a N/N/N combo with a Partisan on Arlans; you'll get hit after attack #2. With H/BA, you can do the whole combo. It doesn't make you fast enough to be invincible, though; you'll still get raped if you try to use Twins, Daggers, or Swords in the Mine. xD In Forest, you can pull off 3 hit combos with Swords using either G/BA or H/BA; with G/BA you can run away fast enough to not get hit after your combo sometimes, and with H/BA it's easier to do so. Since I'm going to power up the enemies, I don't think this would be too fast, and it is nice to be faster. It'll be especially nice for FOmarl...

[MuCast]

neato

[LKA]

.. holy hell, what kind of rate did you give those restorative units? o_o

[Aleron Ives]

It's the same as a healing ring, actually. That's what the maximum speed does. xD

[LKA]

thinking about it, i'm rather curious

would it be possible to make a weapon attack so fast that the animation isn't really visible? me and a friend thought that 100% speed would do that to you but I realized that'd just be around 2x speed so..

just how high CAN it go before it breaks things?

/loltopichijackplzdunbanmeFROWNYFACE

[Aleron Ives]

http://www.filesavr.com/psomaxspeed

[LKA]

that's

um

wow

that's just so fast it's not even practical rofl

mechguns.. x_x i'm sure there's plenty of TOTAL PRO BB PLAYAZ who would want that just for their charge vulcs to rape more

.. wouldn't attacks that fast be damage canceling themselves? gsdhghg

and i'm sure that the timing windows are hilariously small so you couldn't really effectively fight with them, right?

[Aleron Ives]

You saw how long it took me to get the unarmed combo right. It's very difficult to combo at that speed, and some weapons can't even attack anymore.

[Flash T.H.]

o_O

TOO... FAST... *pants and dies*

[darkgod201292]

how i can get a heavenly/battle and how i can get that speed in your video

[Aleron Ives]

You can't until I release the patch.

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