▲ 42 r/Falcom
Falcom, please make status effects good on bosses
I've been wanting to talk about Contractual Boss Immunity in Trails for a while now but genuinely this frustrates me to no end.
For those that don't know, Contractual Boss Immunity is a common trope wherein an enemy will be immune to your strongest stuff just because they are a boss. In JRPGs, including Trails, this often manifests with a very heavy resistance to status effects.
There are 3 games in the series where status effects are good:
- Sky FC
- Trails from Zero
- Trails of Cold Steel 1
Admittedly, they were kinda overpowered in Sky FC and Zero (5 turn randy blind on big aoe go brrr)
They were also very overpowered in Cold Steel 1. Well, I say "they" but it was 90% delay and 10% faint with delay bypassing all resistances since it isn't affected by the duration cap and faint forcing critical hits being a pretty wtf design choice overall. But most of the other effects were genuinely just good. It wouldn't take much to get them even better the next time!
Which is obviously why in Cold Steel 2 they readjusted every single status by reducing boss resistances by about 80-90% compared to Cold Steel 1 and capped out the damage of damage over time effects to pathetic values (they were good but not that good)
And, to put salt in the wound, delay is still overpowered because it turns out 30 flat delay might be a little too much application for any given move.
They were so close to getting it right and then they comically overcorrected an immense amount.
You know what's even more frustrating? They keep making status effects more compatible with bosses.
In Cold Steel 3 they drastically reduced the duration of status effects (down to 2 turns for most effects in most instances) AND reduced the time it takes to recover out of each stun turn by half.
In Daybreak they gave bosses a separate damage over time resistance instead of capping the damage to an asininely low value and overall worked to reduce the impact of the status effects with things like activation chances on top of removing quartz like Bluster.
But regardless status effects are bad and so the only remaining uses of them in modern games are all quite degenerate (like stopping bosses from s-breaking in Horizon so you can keep the Ultimate Wind chain going by inflicting seal/fear on them) or boring (status effect quartz are good in Cold Steel 4... no not for the status effect dummy for the STR boost tacked onto the quartz)
"Status effects are good"
There's always someone to come out and say this and that I'm underestimating the proc chances or whatever.
But we don't need to rant about how fast bosses recover from status effects or anything anymore because Falcom made Sky 1st.
In Sky 1st, it's obvious they were working around the limits of the small arts list and wanted every art to be truly usable and fun. So for the debuff exclusive arts they balanced around their boss resistances and so they did this:
Chaos Brand inflicts poison, 3 sets of stat down, is the only art with 2 stacks of stat down in the game (its stat downs are getting preferential treatment) and confuse which is the best stun effect in the game (since it carries the delay of a basic attack it's twice as long as freeze/seal per turn) all at almost a base 100% rate. And if that wasn't enough its delay is so short that it's over 3 times as fast as a basic attack. It inflicts a ton of effects and is borderline riskless.
With all of that surely now it's actively meta and good against bosses...?
It's okay. I'm not gonna insult it for what it's not but the resistances bosses get are so agressive that even all of this just isn't enough to make it truly worth using the bosses still need a doubling of their regular vulnerabilities from 30 to 60 for me to really ever consider even chucking it out (and a lot of bosses in 1st specifically have an increased vulnerability to confuse for the sole reason of making chaos brand useful)
And against regular enemies chaos brand is unholy levels of good the combination of speed down and 2 turns of confuse stunlocks anything vulerable it's quite comical.
At some point when this is the result the developpers (rightfully btw) deemed correct as a response to the resistances maybe just maybe hanging back on the resistances might be worth it.
Just removing the arbitrarily higher duration reduction bosses get would go a long way. Inflicting them would still be risky and low chance but getting them off would feel powerful. There's only ever a handful of moves that would become overpowered from such a change (Leon 9 turn max stack freeze field wide on his s-craft at max chance lol) that rebalancing them isn't an issue.
u/SoftBrilliant — 12 days ago
▲ 67 r/Falcom
Trails in the Sky the 3rd - More Detailed Skill Descriptions Mod (Steam PC)
There is no actual dedicated Trails in the Sky the 3rd modding space so I'm kinda gonna post here for search engines. Should be of interest and a little bit of fun for some watching as well!
Anyways, Falcom rarely gives out exact numbers when it comes to skill descriptions. Wikis like the Falcom Wiki document the numbers on skills but I thought it'd be nice to have those numbers show up in-game instead.
Download:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YZwEOU7OHyJLzdDVjmmTp6c6o38HsQpe/view?usp=sharing
The install instructions are provided with the mod inside the readme text file (you can just drag the dll and the data folder into your game folder/next to your game executable)
Credits:
Kyuuhachi - Maker of LB-ARK (the dll provided with the mod)
Akatsu27 - Maker of T_MAGIC_Converter which was used in making
You can now bask in the joys of Sky Damage calculation with negative power attacks
To explain what the numbers mean. The 'POW' (power) number is a number added (or subtracted in this case since it's negative) to your STR/ATS stat when calculating damage that functions as the power of any given move. An attack with 300 POW will calculate your damage as if you had 300 extra STR for example.
The 'AT' number is the time it would take for a move to execute. A move with 60 AT would take twice as long as Dual Strike to complete and a move with 7 AT would be 4 times as fast as Dual Strike.
Find out Fire Arts actually deal good damage at low requirements in 3rd
For arts, the first number (35 here) is the cast time and the second number (20) is the time afterwards. Cast 1/2/Time Gem reduce cast time by 40/70/95% respectively.
Wonder with me why on Earth Black Fang is so slow (I genuinely don't understand it's so slow)
Find out Sniper Shot can't miss (it's the only exception of its kind everything else that can't miss is either a support move, an s-craft or an art)
Or gawk in awe at the Delay on Devastation Blast (I swear no one has ever used this thing but the devs sure had fun making it seemingly)
Find out Zin Distend lasts till the heat death of the universe for no reason (most buffs last 400 AT)
u/SoftBrilliant — 15 days ago
▲ 15 r/Falcom
Fun fact: a certain boss fight in Sky the 3rd is a lot harder in the Japanese PSP/PS3 versions of the game... (chapter 3 spoilers)
u/SoftBrilliant — 1 month ago
▲ 90 r/Falcom
u/SoftBrilliant — 2 months ago