Over the last few days, I've rapid fire pushed to the live environment some huge changes to the way Skills, Weapons, and Armor present themselves to the player. Last night, I created an in-game tutorial book item to explain most of these changes. At a glance, the book covers most of the new icons introduced this week including how to identify mutli-strike, resistances, and status applications. What's leaving most notably is the in-depth tooltip explanation of what % chance a weapon has to inflict a status which is being replaced only by an icon indicating that the status application is possible. There may come in the future a comprehensive guide here on Steam as to the exact parameter boosts of every individual weapon and armor, but I can't promise anything with that yet. I made this change because I feel that other important information was being left off or had become too difficult to read in the heat of battle.
In place of text eliminated by this change, most skills now display their Mastery Effects. If you haven't noticed this, Mastery is when you use a skill enough times for it to Level Up which changes some important details about it, like how much TP/MP it costs or how much damage/healing it does. I hadn't done too much internal testing before launching this plugin so I don't know how functional stacking flat with percentage damage/healing is, but it's included in the tooltip regardless. These now read like this:
Mastery: +10 & 25% Damage & -10 MP & +2 TP Cost Per Level.
With damage coming first, damage percent second, MP third, TP fourth, and Cooldown fifth if there is space. Any with a value of 0 are omitted from the tooltip. Important to remember that when you level up a skill that reduces its cooldown, the tooltip will not change to reflect the skill's level. Also very important to know is that if you have a very old save file from before the last time I changed the mastery effects, they are only effective moving forward on new level ups. So if a skill had +200 damage per level before but now it has +500 damage per level and you had it at level 1, you keep that +200 but get +500 every level moving forward.
With this update, all player skills up to Halloween (#1100) utilize new Burns, Poisons, Bleeds, Shear, and other effects introduced this week.
Perhaps the most important note to make out of this entire post is: Enemies, Classes, Items, and Characters(Actors) have not yet been updated. Enemies who have a Generation 1 Poison, Burn, Shear, or Bleed as part of their Normal Attack will continue to apply those. All Generation 1 states are cleansed by the application of their Generation 2 counterparts and by the same skills that cleansed them previously (Stitch, Remedy, Regeneration I, etc). The corresponding items however have not yet been updated - this is coming in 8.2.2.1.
8.2.2.0
- Added a tutorial book to Ruby's House/Research. This item can be taken with you to read later. It outlines most important features of Abilities, Items, Weapons, and Armor.
- Changed icons, detail, and related state icon data for Attack Boost, Magick Boost, Shield Boost, Mind Boost, Speed Boost, Luck Boost, Element Boost, Attack Break, Magick Break, Shield Break, Mind Break, Speed Break, Luck Break, Element Break, & Dispel.
- Poisonfear now correctly adds 10% likelihood of inflicting Poisons I-V and adds turns when reapplied instead of resetting them. Until today, Poisonfear incorrectly granted a 90% resistance instead of a 10% weakness (x10% in the database instead of x110%)
- Psycho Shield barrier increased to 2000 from 500, now also applies Barrier I.
- All skills up to #1099 have been updated to the new systems. Halloween and Memoria are left unchanged for now. Skills now display their Mastery effects if there is enough space in the tooltip to do so. Skills with extra space that do not mention Mastery have a max mastery level of 0 - meaning it cannot be leveled up.
This update opens the door for player feedback - there may be things that I missed, mislabeled, or simply just got wrong. If you think you have come across a tooltip or effect that is functioning improperly, please include as much detail as possible and let me know here on the Steam forums. I will include any fixes in the following updates. Just remember that Armor and Weapons from the Generation 1 set (everything up to before last week) will not apply or protect against the new states (Poison, etc) added this week.