FFXIII-2 Difficulty Enhancement Mod v1.2.1 [BETA]

[Jobs]

Update 1/13/2015: Version 1.2.1 Released
- (Fix) Sell Bonuses: The script SHOULD now increase your Capacity properly, but for the moment, both selling the materials and crafting recipes with the materials will cause the script to trigger.

Update 1/11/2015: Version 1.2 Released
- (New) Enemy Stats: Added difficulty customization options. (See ReadMe for details)
- (New) Sell Bonuses: Adjusted Chronomist to +10 Capacity.
- (New) Sell Bonuses: Added Dark Matter at +1 Capacity.
- (Fix) Sell Bonuses: Improved failsafe code.

Since there seems to be a lot of complaints about the difficulty and requests for some sort of hard mode, I decided to release the project I've been working on for my personal enjoyment.

It's a CheatEngine table with a set of scripts that greatly increases HP, ATK, and MAG for all enemies in combat. Also included is an option to reduce all CP and Gil gained after battle by half if you don't like how easy it is to max everything out.

I've spent a good deal of time refining it and testing it in various situations and have fixed all of the obvious problems that popped up, but there is always the possibility for unforeseen errors, so let me know if you come across any abnormal behavior while using the script.

Core Features:

-Fully customizable Multipliers for enemy HP, ATK, and MAG.
-CP/Gil Rewards after battle reduced to 50% (Optional)

Bonus Features:

Sell Bonus - Capacity: For those who think Capacity is a frustrating limitation but would rather not simply cheat to max Capacity; Selling certain rare Components such as Chronomists directly to the shop will now grant increase your Accessory Capacity by a small amount, up to the maximum limit of 255. (Should work with one minor Caveat, see ReadMe for details)

Optional Features Coming Soon:

-Item Tweaks: To make the Ultimate Weapons actually worth farming for instead of sticking with the +50% ATB weapons for the entire post-game, the ATK and MAG values of Saggitarius, Arcus Chronica, Mac an Luin, and In Paradisium will be greatly increased (Probably to at least 400 or so, which is the minimum required for them to have comparable DPS to the +50% ATB weapons... FFXIII-2 Designers WTF were you thinking?).

-Price Tweaks: The 4 weapons listed above, plus many accessories that become very powerful when stacked (such as General's Belts) will have their buying price greatly increased. I may also add a multiplier to increase all prices across the board to account for the fact that you can still sell certain pieces of loot for an excessive amount or exploit the casino to get rich, which the "Reduced Gil from Battle" component of the mod does not cover.

-Reduced Fragments CP: Currently collecting all 160 fragments gives you nearly half the CP required to completely max out your characters. That's definitely too much if you want to actually have to put in a bit of effort to max your characters. I haven't looked at this part of the code yet, but hopefully I'll be able to find a way to reduce it a bit in an elegant manner.

-Specific Monster Tweaks: Once I have had a chance to test a bit more I will add custom stat modifiers for specific monsters that still need some balance tweaking after the base stat multiplication.

Download Link - Version 1.2.1 (Experimental)[mega.co.nz]

Download Link - Version 1.1[mega.co.nz]

[sammykneen]

Manual adjustements would be awesome! 4x HP seems a little steep for the coliseum battles. I think ideally I would just like 2x HP, Strength etc.

Hope this can be done :)

[darksteelhyren]

To answer your question. I'm doing this without the battle results modifier.

My use of the word eight times power takes into account the 2x damage and 4x health. Multiplying the two is 8. Difficulty of some monster groups is strongly dependant on on their health, as well as their attack, since if I can't kill them, they maintain their extremely high group DPS for long enough that my members start to die, or I need to heal, which is simply unsustainable.

[BadLootSensei]

Never used CheatEngine before, so how do i get this running? Just running the CT-file doesn't work

[darksteelhyren]

Run the game, select it with the first button, then load up the cheat table.

[Kebess]

Some feedback on the Chronomist Sell Bonus. I can confirm it doesn't work. I tried with both versions v1.1 and v1.1-x4HP, but I can't get my capacity to increase anymore. If anyone can check and confirm this as well, it'd be awesome.

[BadLootSensei]

Originally posted by darksteelhyren:

Run the game, select it with the first button, then load up the cheat table.

Well thanks, but i'm just to dumb or somewhat, it still won't work. What do you mean with select first button? Selecting ffxiii2img in "Open Process" or what? And where to load the cheat table? If i do so, nothing happens in program. Sorry for too much asking

[Kebess]

Originally posted by sammykneen:

Manual adjustements would be awesome! 4x HP seems a little steep for the coliseum battles. I think ideally I would just like 2x HP, Strength etc.

Hope this can be done :)

You can DL the 1.1 version from the main post. HP is x2 in that one.
Personally, I do like long boss battles, so I don't want this to change. Yiazmat is my favorite boss for a reason, :)

EDIT
How are you doing survivability-wise?

[Kebess]

Originally posted by BaMas:

Originally posted by darksteelhyren:

Run the game, select it with the first button, then load up the cheat table.

Well thanks, but i'm just to dumb or somewhat, it still won't work. What do you mean with select first button? Selecting ffxiii2img in "Open Process" or what? And where to load the cheat table? If i do so, nothing happens in program. Sorry for too much asking

Once you've selected the ffxiii2img app, click on the button next to it "open file", then open your .cf file from there. Check the boxes in the table that appears below, then return to the game.

[BadLootSensei]

Originally posted by Kebess:

Originally posted by BaMas:

Well thanks, but i'm just to dumb or somewhat, it still won't work. What do you mean with select first button? Selecting ffxiii2img in "Open Process" or what? And where to load the cheat table? If i do so, nothing happens in program. Sorry for too much asking

Once you've selected the ffxiii2img app, click on the button next to it "open file", then open your .cf file from there. Check the boxes in the table that appears below, then return to the game.

As soon as i Open the .cf file, nothing happens. No checkboxes showing up.
Edit: Ok, forget that, found my mistake. Thanks for helping :)

Just one question: So there's any way to save the .cf-file along with the selected ffxiiiimg, so i just have to load up XIII-2 and don't have to set all again?

[Kebess]

Hope this helps :)
http://postimg.org/image/tye045nbv/full/

[BadLootSensei]

Originally posted by Kebess:

Hope this helps :)
http://postimg.org/image/tye045nbv/full/

Yep, figured it out afterwards. The way you show in the picture has the problem, that if i opened the Enhanced v1_1, it looked like it wouldn't load it, because no checkboxes where able to see. But still Thanks a lot for the effort :)
Still, can i save the settings somehow? Everytime i have to select ffxiii2img again, even if i used "save as" and saved this .ct seperate. Just out of curiosity :)

[darksteelhyren]

10AF. portal man boss. Took me 13:58 (par 5:58). Com+Syn+Med and Sen+Sen+Sen was the order of the day. Keeping the buffs up was critical though, landshatter hits like a truck otherwise. I think I had to stagger him 6 or 7 times, but he fell in the end. Was still chugging normal and wound potions though. Paywall to beat a boss FTL.

I think I appreciated the increase in boss damage. It forces you to play correctly. I didn't appreciate the 16 minute fight but whatever.

Bamas, as far as I can tell you have to load the cheat table every time you open FF13-2. It's fast, so it's not a big deal. This is because (as far as I can tell) you're editing the FF13-2 values on the fly, not the hard-coded health and damage values. So there's nothing for it to save.

[Kebess]

Originally posted by darksteelhyren:

10AF. portal man boss. Took me 13:58 (par 5:58). Com+Syn+Med and Sen+Sen+Sen was the order of the day. Keeping the buffs up was critical though, landshatter hits like a truck otherwise. I think I had to stagger him 6 or 7 times, but he fell in the end. Was still chugging normal and wound potions though. Paywall to beat a boss FTL.

I think I appreciated the increase in boss damage. It forces you to play correctly. I didn't appreciate the 16 minute fight but whatever.

I'm glad you were able to keep progressing, :)
It seems you had fun with that fight too, so all is well. Things should start smoothing up nicely once you get more options.

[Kebess]

FEEDBACK on the Dark Matter farming:

When gil is not an issue (if one is able to dump in as much as necessary, which is statistically about 830 casino coins per Dark Matter, or 8300 gils) one can farm 1 Dark Matter in about 3:30-4:00 min, if s/he doesn't waste a single sec to do anything else (not even pause to check his race results or winnings, etc.)
It would take about 5-6 min for each Dark Matter if farming is done in a more relaxed manner.

It's safe to assume that one can get all 31 Dark Matters in ~2-3 hours of intense farming. This would cost nothing less than a good 240 000 gils (minus 31x5500 gils, once all Dark Matters are sold, giving a net cost of some 70 000 gils).


Some numbers:
The racing system doesn't allow optimal farming before reaching the last Race class ("Fal'Cie"). At that point, you can expect to get a 5% chance to "spawn" the Havoc Stakes race each time you use a Shuffle item to shuffle the available races, or after the automatic shuffle after running a race.

Note that one can use the Shuffle (Common) item to increase the odds of getting the Havoc Stakes race, but the increase is almost negligible compared to the cost of the item, so it would be a waste. Unless, one is willing to spend 1 million gils (280 000 net) just to reduce the total farming time to 1.5-2 hours.

*1 Shuffle = 50 casino coins (500 gils)
*1 Shuffle (Common) = 200 casino coins (2000 gils)
*About 589 Shuffles are needed to get all 31 Dark Matters
*Each win gives 170 casino coins (if bet on own Chocobo)

*There are a total of 60 races, and 6 available races in each list to choose from. At the Fal'Cie class level, 3 out of those 6 available races will always be Fal'Cie class races, and the 3 remaining has each a 1/57 chance to be any other race, including the Havoc Stakes (which is not Fal'Cie class, but Guardian class) netting a total of ~5.26% per each list of available race. The Shuffle item allows to shuffle the list, and thus gives a ~5.26% chance of getting a Havoc Stakes race after each use.


CONCLUSION:
5-capacity per Dark Matter would be too much, seeing how easier they are to get. 1-capacity seems more reasonable, and thus boosting the Chronomist to 10-capacity each would balance them pretty nicely.

[Jobs]

Originally posted by darksteelhyren:

To answer your question. I'm doing this without the battle results modifier.

My use of the word eight times power takes into account the 2x damage and 4x health. Multiplying the two is 8. Difficulty of some monster groups is strongly dependant on on their health, as well as their attack, since if I can't kill them, they maintain their extremely high group DPS for long enough that my members start to die, or I need to heal, which is simply unsustainable.

Yeah it's true that in situations where you need to be able to burst down the enemies quickly to survive the higher HP definitely contributes to the difficulty as well.

In my playstyle, when I run into enemies like that I typically just do a bit of grinding... but obviously if I want to make a mod that everyone can enjoy I'm going to need to let people adjust it to suit their own way of enjoying the game.

I'll probably just go ahead and add customization options for the 1.2 release since so far Kebess is the only one who seems to be enjoying things entirely on the default settings and it's gonna be awhile before I have time to make manual balance tweaks to individual monsters. xP

Originally posted by Kebess:

Some feedback on the Chronomist Sell Bonus. I can confirm it doesn't work. I tried with both versions v1.1 and v1.1-x4HP, but I can't get my capacity to increase anymore. If anyone can check and confirm this as well, it'd be awesome.

Hmm... I'm at a loss... I've tested it at Chocolina in Bresha Ruins, Archltye Steppe, and the Coliseum and it works perfectly at all locations so I'm pretty sure the game uses the same code for selling items regardless of location. Kinda hard to fix a bug that I can't replicate for myself. :(

Would you be able to upload your savegame for me so I can try to find the bug under the same conditions you currently have?

Originally posted by BaMas:

Just one question: So there's any way to save the .cf-file along with the selected ffxiiiimg, so i just have to load up XIII-2 and don't have to set all again?

Eventually I will convert the table into a stand-alone trainer which will handle that for you automatically and won't require CheatEngine to be installed, but that will need to wait until we're done with initial testing and I'm not having to make changes every single day.

You can always convert the current version yourself though if you care to, it's a pretty simple process and there are plenty of guides for it.