Expert Sphere grid numbers ( for ffxed)

[Mikasa Ackerman]

i calculated all of them (was ALOT Work)
http://s1154.photobucket.com/user/deaththekid19/media/Expert_sphere_grid_1.jpg.html
have fun editing the Expert Grid ^^

[rodrigo_vda]

This is awesome man. People won't be able to know the amount of work this must have taken.

Thank you a lot, I added it to my FFXED guide.

Again, this is awesome.

[Mikasa Ackerman]

Originally posted by rodrigo_vda:

This is awesome man. People won't be able to know the amount of work this must have taken.

Thank you a lot, I added it to my FFXED guide.

Again, this is awesome.

it didnt take that long ( i did it over a few days / weeks but i mostly watched Movies while doing it )

[blinkigo]

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS. Even if it took 2 years after you uploaded it for someone to actually get motivated enough to tweak the sphere grid. My main thinking is removing all luck nodes on the grid since earlygame they have no relevance. Lategame str won't come in bursts of 4, it will be a smoother transition into 9999s. The Sin Unleashed mod is great fun, but low agi characters suffer especially from this. I might buff a couple characters stats to give incentive new play. Bribe is accessible to Rikku fairly early in her grid, Tidus gets slowga later. Just a different take on how the Expert Sphere Grid "should" have been. Again, tysm!

[Mikasa Ackerman]

Originally posted by blinkigo:

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS. Even if it took 2 years after you uploaded it for someone to actually get motivated enough to tweak the sphere grid. My main thinking is removing all luck nodes on the grid since earlygame they have no relevance. Lategame str won't come in bursts of 4, it will be a smoother transition into 9999s. The Sin Unleashed mod is great fun, but low agi characters suffer especially from this. I might buff a couple characters stats to give incentive new play. Bribe is accessible to Rikku fairly early in her grid, Tidus gets slowga later. Just a different take on how the Expert Sphere Grid "should" have been. Again, tysm!

well , i played around with it too , but i just overplayed ffx after i bought it , and now im doing a complete cheat and booster free run ( or not anymore cheat free because after i got the 200 lightning dodges , chocobo race with under 0 seconds , the remium race and even finding a donberry as the 7th encounter in the cave , i rewarded myself with 99 warp spheres , would have grinded for them regardless and if i can cheat , why reload a save for 2-4 hours for nothing

but i already did minor changes with the expert grid before , one thing i thought about was to put everyone in the middle where kimahri starts , put black magic and some strength there and then sort of have a ff13 paradigm system ,have one route be the sentinel , one being the medic , another being the synergist and maybe having them in a way where you can teach two characters some things at crossings like where auron and tidus' path meet around slowga


but since i overplayed the game after release ill look into that at a later point

another problem would be the saboteur , what spells other than bio , death , demi , drain , osmose are there that fit that role ?

[blinkigo]

Thanks for some pointers. Also, Saboteur route seems pretty useful, demi and death are good tools when mobs have more life. If you do a no-save run, osmose will be your only source of MP if you skip Lancet.

[Mikasa Ackerman]

Originally posted by blinkigo:

Thanks for some pointers. Also, Saboteur route seems pretty useful, demi and death are good tools when mobs have more life. If you do a no-save run, osmose will be your only source of MP if you skip Lancet.

also , another thing , from what i heard , kimahri is a blue mage , idk , perhaps theres other blue mage abilities so you could have a blue mage path too

[blinkigo]

I made a prototype Synergist route, though I feel to most effectively make the grid utilize another path would take more remodeling. I can send to you to take a look if you'd like.

[Mikasa Ackerman]

Originally posted by blinkigo:

I made a prototype Synergist route, though I feel to most effectively make the grid utilize another path would take more remodeling. I can send to you to take a look if you'd like.

it would be best if you could link it on the forums so others can see it too , also i cant really use it right now because im not done with my cheat free file and i dont want to accidentally get an achievement

[Chaos Residue]

The one thing I truly regret with Final Fantasy X is that the devs made everybody the same during the endgame. There's literally no difference between Lulu and Auron, which is crazy to me. If I had one request it would be that a third grid get created (Standard, Expert, and Class - or something like that). The third grid would be an individual grid for each character (think Final Fantasy XII's license board). Each character would be able to learn their specific abilities, and they would have their own personal stats. Auron, for example, would be able to max his strength at 255 (farming strength spheres of course), but Lulu wouldn't be able to break 100. At the same time, Auron would have a low Magic stat, but Lulu would be at 255. To accomplish this you'd have to say that When you use a Clear Sphere you can only replace the node you deleted with the same node type. Meaning you can't clear a +X Magic node and replace it with +4 Strength. I think it goes without saying, but in this scenario Lulu would be the only one who could cast the black magic spells, Yuna would be the only one who could cast the healing spells, etcetera.

Heck, they could have even left it all one grid, but when you learn stats/abilities with each character the abilities that can only be used by the specific party member (such as Thunder being specific to Lulu) would be greyed out for everyone else who "learned" that ability. And even if Lulu activated 64 +4 Strength nodes she'd still have a capped strength of something much lower instead of it being 255.

Doing this would have really opened the door for some major strategy. But the way it is now you get to a point where you might as well mod the characters to all look like the same person, because literally your entire party can have the exact same stats and abilities. It makes the characters seem less special.

/rant

[Hinnyuu]

Originally posted by Chaos Residue:

Doing this would have really opened the door for some major strategy. But the way it is now you get to a point where you might as well mod the characters to all look like the same person, because literally your entire party can have the exact same stats and abilities. It makes the characters seem less special.

But in your version you have no real choice, since every character's role is predetermined by their grid. It's pretty fun to, say, make Lulu into a clobberess or have Auron be a healurai. Not to mention what Yuna does when you beefcake her, since her aeons scale off her stats - nothing like putting Belgemine in her place by oneshotting her little poodles into next week.

FF endgame has always been pretty degenerate, really. FFX isn't all that different from other titles in the series in that respect. To change that paradigm would require MASSIVE changes to the entire combat/character system.

[Chaos Residue]

Originally posted by Hinnyuu:

But in your version you have no real choice, since every character's role is predetermined by their grid. It's pretty fun to, say, make Lulu into a clobberess or have Auron be a healurai. Not to mention what Yuna does when you beefcake her, since her aeons scale off her stats - nothing like putting Belgemine in her place by oneshotting her little poodles into next week.

How would a third sphere grid option, or a class-based option with the existing standard and expert grids limit choice? In my version there are three sphere grids (or two sphere grids and the ability to make them class-based or not), so if you want what you described you would be able to select the first or second sphere grid still (or say no to the class-based grid). I didn't say everyone would want that sphere grid. I'm saying that it provides a fresh new way to play the game for those who want to try something different. And it provides more opportunity to strategize with your party versus everyone being able to do the same things.

Originally posted by Hinnyuu:

FF endgame has always been pretty degenerate, really. FFX isn't all that different from other titles in the series in that respect. To change that paradigm would require MASSIVE changes to the entire combat/character system.

My post was to point out a regret from early development, and to state that I wish this could be done. It had nothing to do with how easy or difficult it would be to implement this.

But to be clear, it wouldn't require massive changes to the entire combat/character system. All it requires is code change allow a new option after selecting the standard or expert sphere grid to ask if you want to use the original or the class-based grid, and then for the class-based grid option, make the following code changes:

• stat cap individually per character instead of 255 for everyone (e.g. Yuna/Lulu can't get to 255 strength no matter how many +4 Strength nodes they activate)
  
• prevent learned abilities from being selected in and out of battle depending on the character (e.g. even if Auron learns Ultima he still can't select that option in/out of battle) - Some abilities could be learned by all characters (such as Bribe and Copycat) while others could be learned by only some characters (e.g. Lulu and Yuna can both use Cure, but nobody else could use it)

That is not a huge undertaking, and is well within the abilities of Square Enix to code for. They won't, and I'm not demanding that they do this. I'm just saying it's extremely possible to be done, and I wish it were an option.

[blinkigo]

Agreed Hinnyuu, massive reworks would be needed. I feel that less-static abilities would be the way to do that. Speaking to some people watching someone stream FFX, they didn't immediately like the idea of chancey abilites, like "On Evade, Counter". Other than equip rework, max sphere level is 100, if the formula that sets how much AP is needed to progress a level was capped at, say 300, you could allow for a much bigger grid, having even +5 stat nodes or +350HP if you really wanted. Perhaps that'd feel against the original spirit for some players, so I wouldn't even be modding that if I got this project off the ground. To have a LVL cap 300 Sphere grid, you'd probably want a grid around x3 as big..
I'm really interested in the data structs that FFX uses for the sphere grid, but idk a good way to access it with what little tools I have (Cheat Engine)

[Hinnyuu]

Originally posted by blinkigo:

I'm really interested in the data structs that FFX uses for the sphere grid, but idk a good way to access it with what little tools I have (Cheat Engine)

I believe one of the modders mentioned that FFX and X-2 seem to have a similar file structure to FFXII, and since we have a lot of modding tools for that by now it's probably reasonable to assume we will at some point have editors ready to help facilitate more comprehensive modding for X/X-2. That being said, it's often difficult to add truly new things - you usually shuffle around existing things and mix them in interesting ways to get to new effects, but something like an entirely new Sphere Grid or new animations, new mechanics, etc. might simply not be possible. But who knows - modders have become incredibly creative and are always discovering new things.

[Mikasa Ackerman]

Originally posted by Hinnyuu:

Originally posted by blinkigo:

I'm really interested in the data structs that FFX uses for the sphere grid, but idk a good way to access it with what little tools I have (Cheat Engine)

I believe one of the modders mentioned that FFX and X-2 seem to have a similar file structure to FFXII, and since we have a lot of modding tools for that by now it's probably reasonable to assume we will at some point have editors ready to help facilitate more comprehensive modding for X/X-2. That being said, it's often difficult to add truly new things - you usually shuffle around existing things and mix them in interesting ways to get to new effects, but something like an entirely new Sphere Grid or new animations, new mechanics, etc. might simply not be possible. But who knows - modders have become incredibly creative and are always discovering new things.

Making your own sphere grid paths would already be more than enough for a ff13 like skill tree

[Ryika]

The sphere grid itself works fine until you reach that point in the post-endgame when you start doing the exp tricks to unlock everything, so I think the problem isn't really the sphere grid. The problem is much more the idea that all characters need to be maxed out or close to being maxed out to beat the post-endgame bosses.

If it were really virtually impossible to unlock the whole tree, and really hard to unlock like... half of it, and if the final bosses were balanced around having unlocked roughly half of it, then you'd automatically be playing with specialized characters, because of how the grid is divided into sections.

This means that the "jump around on the sphere grid"- and "unlock nodes at the other end of the grid"-type of spheres would need to go as well.

Of course then there would still be a lot of other problems, such as the fact that melee is really overpowered, and also has much quicker animation times than spells. With very few exceptions, the higher end enemies in the optional content simply have no weaknesses to exploit, so hacking away at them with defense-ignoring weapons is by far the best and quickest strategy.

Overall, I doubt that we'll ever get an overhaul to fix these problems and turn the FFX-endgame into something that's cohesive. There are just too many parts of the game that would need substantial editing, and getting access to these parts, seems to be quite a pain as far as I understand it.