[FE8] A handful of bugs/oversights, feature suggestion

[AstraCrits]

These bugs were found over the course of multiple runs, but if you need the changelog for any specific one of these issues I'd be happy to provide it.

-Promoted generic enemies seem to have disproportionately low stats, to the point where unpromoted units are often more threatening than them.

-If Eirika and Ephraim are given tomes as Prf weapons, said weapons will crash the game if you try to use them with animations on.

-The boss of Chapter 18, when randomized into a Cyclops, retains the inventory it had as a Gorgon (even though the class it randomized into can't use Dark Magic.) This doesn't completely break the boss since it can still use Demon Surge and Stone even without a dark magic rank, but I thought I'd put it out there.

-Moreso an oversight than a bug, but in chapter 5x, if you have a random chance for extra droppable items activated, the enemy that would normally drop a Door Key can be randomized to drop another item (making the chests inside the room behind him inaccessible.)

-The Runesword can be randomized to have an increased critical rate despite being completely incapable of critical hits.

-For whatever reason, the Gorgon class seems to be unable to get any higher than an A rank in Dark Magic.

Finally, two feature suggestions for FE8 in particular: random effects plus a proper in-game description for all monster weapons, and an option to allow split/alternative promotions for monster classes (where it makes sense.) Specifically, I could see the Mogalls having an alternate promotion into Gorgon, Tar'vos having the option to promote into Cyclops, and Revenants having the option to become Draco Zombies. This would probably mostly just be for fun since monster classes don't get promotion bonuses (and in some cases, these alternate promotions could be worse due to less movement), but it would allow the tier 2 monster classes that don't promote from anything (Cyclops, Gorgon, and Draco Zombie) to be a little more accessible. (This would also give players an actual reward for bothering to train Revenants.)

[lushen124]

I think I just need to check out the generics logic again. I don't change any of their stats, so it's kind of weird they would have terrible stats. Are you playing with enemy buffs? It's possible that the autoleveling unpromoted enemies with inflated growths scale faster than their promoted ones because the promoted class bases are disproportionately low to the unpromoted class growths.

I'll have to double check the animations on those weapons. I thought I tested them, but I'll check again.

The Cyclops getting Gorgon magic is good to know, because that definitely is not intentional.

Maybe it's worth making sure that door keys that are dropped will always remain dropped and random drops go to characters that don't normally drop things (or at the very least don't drop door keys).

I actually wasn't aware the runesword wasn't capable of crits. Good to know.

I'll have to double check the Gorgon's max ranks. There's no use in the base game to have S rank on Gorgons, but if it's a playable Gorgon, you'll want to have that ability.

I'd like to have monster weapons show their stats, but I've yet to figure out the flag that controls this (or I just missed it in the nightmare files). I would like to see split promotion options for monster classes, but I haven't had a good way of deciding what monster should get what promotion, since it's pretty subjective and it's not immediately clear what makes for obvious promotions options. If you can define what you'd like to see, we can try to make it happen. 🙂

[AstraCrits]

I am playing with enemy buffs, yes. Still, when I say promoted units' stats are disproportionately low, I mean all stats less than ten, sometimes with zero in several stats. Which I'm pretty sure isn't even the case in vanilla FE8, despite how weak generics are in vanilla. The Runesword thing only applies to FE7 and FE8, by the way--in FE6, they can land critical hits. Not sure why they changed this between games, but yeah, that's a thing. The monster weapon stats thing sounds troublesome, but I guess for the time being I can always check the changelog, even if it's a bit clunky. I imagine alternate monster promotions would probably be based on having the same/similar weapon types? Some promotions would probably be odd in terms of in-universe logic (for whatever that's worth in a randomizer where your characters can randomly just be monsters and everyone's fine with it), but gameplay-wise they'd at least be fairly consistent. If I were doing it myself, under the rule that I can't add any new classes or change their promo bonuses (to keep things relatively "vanilla") I'd probably want to see something like this: Mogall > Arch Mogall or Gorgon Tar'vos > Maelduin or Cyclops Bow Bonewalker > Bow Wight or Maelduin Lance/Sword Bonewalker > Lance/Sword Wight or Deathgoyle (losing their sword rank if they choose the latter) Gargoyle > Deathgoyle or Lance/Sword Wight Mauthe Doog > Gwyllgi or Elder Bael Bael > Elder Bael or Gwyllgi. Revenant > Entombed or Draco Zombie The Mauthe Doog and Bael classes generally stand on their own just fine and probably don't really need secondary promotions, but I've put them down as promoting into each other just for good measure since their weapon types don't conflict with each other. Still, I feel like most of these promotions (aside from Draco Zombie, obviously) would have enough advantages and disadvantages in terms of Con bonuses, movement options, and weapon types that they wouldn't be TOO one-sided, and would generally give players reason to experiment with both.