I am just recently moved over to here as I am just here making a post on a new difficulty hack for FE8, at least in the sense of restarting a project I started on Serenes Forest a few years back and never actually finished due to a lot of stuff going on in my life and me getting too mentally into things in an unhealthy manner. I am renaming that rom hack from back when I started it to not overlap with any other hacks that have been worked on since then as it did overlap with one here. I however will keep the vision that I have now for the project that I got after watching FE8 Lunatic Mode. It will use this rom hack as a base.
Now to start things off, here is what I won’t be changing about the game:
Weapon types that a class can use
No new items, but there will be adjustments made to the current ones
No skills
Map Layouts
What will be changed or may be changed:
Character Base Classes
Character & Enemy Growths
Enemy & Character Equipment
Character & Enemy Levels
Promotion Bonuses
Class Caps
Hard Mode Bonuses
Equipment Stats
Potentially Promotion Level and Level Cap
This alone doesn’t mean much, but if done right I feel this itself will make an interesting challenge for those looking for a significantly different game for FE8. Anything not mentioned may change in the future to be different like if an objective is changed by me it is to make the map more interesting.
I plan to make FE8 at least as hard as Shadow Dragon Hard 5. Though the first 3 chapters won’t turn into Shadow Dragon Hard 5 because those bosses are awful to kill. I was also thinking about finding a way to make easy and normal mode gain hard mode bonuses if it is at all possible. It would allow for 3 difficulties that feel harder than Lunatic Mode offers normally with what Mekkah gave us.
I was looking at some stuff on the patches I could do and did find that I can in fact change penalties in Easy and Normal mode into bonuses. Here is the minimum bonus levels you will see on each difficulty:
(Names of difficulties are being adjusted first, I will see about redoing the graphics and text on them when I can)
Maniac 2
Savage: 5
Merciless: 9
Also, I will not be changing the defense and resistance growths of the enemies to make suffering from success more likely in the same vain that mekkah did for Lunatic Mode unlike what I had planned initially. I hadn’t adjusted the growths in the rom yet, though I was about to when I changed my mind on what growths would be adjusted as FE 11 doesn’t adjust defense and resistance as much for the enemies in that game and it makes the game harder in an interesting way.
This adjustment will make enemies have around 224% higher than normal growths in the stats effected compared to vanilla FE8.
as for how growths will be done for player units each unit may have their growths increased from their original growth total to improve the unit, some units will receive more growth increases than others, and bases will be handled similarly.
Some units may have their weapon ranks adjusted too if I think it will make them better without giving the unit levels to make them good offhand. L’Arachel probably will have her weapon ranks improved to make here better as she ends up as a bad unit because of her low level and D Rank Staves.
Easy mode will also not have any tutorials to prevent issues with it after the game has been adjusted.
This should show the difficulty bonuses on O’Niell after I increased the growths of Fighters and have tweaked the bonuses to what I stated above. I may tweak some stats if I find that it is too difficult to survive on Merciless itself. I have already tweaked Eirika’s bases a little to make her at least able to survive at least one hit from the normal enemies in the prologue, but I will have to see how soldiers would perform against her in Chp 1 to know for certain if she needs more than what I have done right now or if other units can make up for what she lacks.
Also, just looked at this O’Niell doubles Eirika on Merciless with the stats in the screenshot.
I have decided to make thieves more useful to the player, door keys and chest keys will be removed from all main chapters and the shops that have them.
I will post adjustments to some enemy types bases later once I get them done. It will probably be Soldiers and Archers getting the adjustments first. Niemi will have the new bases added with her original stat line first before I do anything to her personals
Edit: On a second thought, all droppable keys will be stealable instead unless it creates a softlock. Though buyable keys will be removed
