I’m playing a hack right now where the luck cap is 20 and so by extension the devil backfire chance is allegedly 21% - the wielder’s luck stat. Problem is, there’s no way that’s accurate with how often the devil axe is backfiring on on a character with 20 luck. So I open up FEBuilder and there is an editor to change the backfire rate that is currently set to 21, and by looking in a hex editor I can see that the value has indeed been changed from 1F to 15 (so 31 to 21) in the spot that is allegedly the location in the ROM of the devil effect calculations. From my testing in the romhack however, it seems that no matter what value I use for the editor, the normal 31% backfire rate is in effect. I have no idea what the deal is. Is this related to the devil effect skills that come with the skill patch somehow? This is the hack in question:
[FE8] FE1 Shadow Dragon Faithful Remaster V1.9
If you have been loading the same savestate over and over again when the devil axe backfired, then it tells you nothing, as the savestate will have the same RNG loaded each time.
Otherwise, I don’t really know. One way is to edit the game to create a unit with say, 25 LCK that can’t backfire on 21-LCK but can on 31-LCK, then have them attack over and over again to see if they can backfire at all. Would probably have to do so exhaustively, but in theory it can be done.
So I initially noticed how often the backfire was occurring over the course of a normal playthrough. For testing purposes I did recreate a scenario that causes a backfire over and over with different luck values and while I didn’t do it enough to land on an exact number, a luck of 20 or 21 would backfire consistently when playing the same way in the same spot, but a luck of 31 did not seem to backfire ever as I continued to play with it for a few chapters.
Based on testing I’ve done with the Devil’s Luck skill that’s supposed to make the backfire affect the enemy, I think skill system moves the Devil affect check somewhere else so the editor that’s supposed to adjust the Devil affect doesn’t actually do anything. I had tried to set it so that there was a 100% chance of backfire to see how the skill worked, but it wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t do enough digging to see how to actually change the backfire chance, but I’m pretty sure that editor only works without skill system.
Darn this pretty tragic I was planing to have max luck units avoid devil backfire entirely, maybe it’s only an issue with newer versions of skill system, I am using a pretty old version…
I hope this is fixed.
This is correct, the actual location of devil backfire rate would be here:
Is there anything I can do to edit this?
You could find this code in the ROM (one approach would be searching for the hex matching the file proc_devil.dmp in the github) and edit it using hex editor/dissassembler.