Back from Finland & EBF5: New Difficulty Options

Hey guys, we’re back from Finland!
The trip back was a nightmare – I was really sick, got almost no sleep, and when we got home, the internet was broken, and our electricity somehow turned off, creating a swamp in our fridge.

A technician fixed our internet now, but in the 2 days it was down, I still managed to get some work done.

Epic Battle Fantasy 5 will get some new difficulty options in the version 2 update.
Like other difficulty settings, these can be changed at any time, and you can play around with them to make whatever challenges you think will be fun.
Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Resistant Foes: Foes have more resistance to elements and status effects.
(this makes it less likely that all enemies will be weak against the same element, and gives bosses immunity to some cheap status effects)

Evasive Foes: Foes have 10% more evade.
(very simple one, you’ll have to work accuracy into your strategy)

Bulky Foes: Foes have 20% more HP.
(if for some reason you just wanted battles to last longer)

Status Antibody: Foes gain resistance to a status effect after being inflicted with it.
(+10% resistance each time, this will make bosses very hard if you don’t kill them quickly)

Combo Shield: Total damage multiplier from critical hits, buffs and status effects is capped at 5x normal damage. (with elemental multipliers added, this cap is still quite high (around 15x) – but it stops bosses being killed in one hit)

Nerfed Resistance: Equipment gives less elemental and status resistance.
(About 40% less, good luck resisting everything)

Nerfed Revive: Revived players cannot take a turn immediately.
(I don’t know if you can even recover from this…)

Time Limit: You have 30 seconds to take your turn in battle.
(not a lot of time to use Haste – animations don’t count)

Food Ban: Rare food items are banned in battle.
(some people already play like this)

No HP Bars: Foe HP bars are hidden in battle.
(if you want to pretend you’re playing a very old RPG)

Let me know if you can think of anything else that might sound like a fun challenge and isn’t a nightmare to implement!

Also here’s a video of Linnanmäki in Helsinki.
I spent two days alone in the park. It’s actually kind of nice going to theme parks alone, as you get to skip the queues to fill the last seat. And you can talk to random tourists! But I didn’t get any good clips of myself, since I look like a dumbass trying to do a selfie video. Anyway, Linnanmäki has some top-notch rides, with my favourites being: Taiga, Ukko and Kingi. Taiga’s my favourite rollercoaster so far – it’s a long, smooth ride, and the speed is perfect – it throws you out of your seat constantly, and leaves you hanging upside down for what feels like a very long time.

22 thoughts on “Back from Finland & EBF5: New Difficulty Options

  1. Pianos

    A mode where cooldown timers on skills take twice as long as they normally would, making it even more difficult to rely on single actions.

    A mode where summons have a slight chance of backfiring, turning against you, becoming a foe in the current battle, something along those lines.

    A mode where each character can only use a single Limit Break once per battle (or wave).

    Reply
  2. Myself

    The final boss would be impossible with all of those on, wouldn’t it? I mean, if you even try you’ve gotta be a masochist.

    On another note, did anyone find that the secret final boss was much easier than the main boss? The secret one didn’t really inflict many status effects, whereas the regular final boss had 4 relatively strong minions that all inflicted very painful effects.

    If I didn’t explain which I mean, ❗ spolier alert ❗ I mean God (Secret final) and The Devourer.

    Reply
    1. Drake

      Response to the ❗ Spoiler Alert ❗ God Still took a beat and he got stronger as his HP dropped lower. With all those mods he might really become terrifying and I don’t know why he felt easier for you, but the harder the game gets the crazier he’ll become. Quickly killing before he gets threatening might not work, which is especially true for low difficulties. Only one thing worries me to cheese this whole stuff, Catching.

      Reply
      1. Myself

        He definitely became stronger later in the fight (multiple attacks), but since you don’t need to worry about buffs you can just use stat heavy equips. The only real thing you need to worry about is placing characters who have just been revived onto the bench (The buffs from epic reset). If you can keep matt and natz alive you can use revenge for heavy damage and then the mass revive.

        It took me 3 tries to beat ❗ Spoiler alert ❗ God on epic. I’ve tried the Devourer on epic 6+ times, but I can never cover all of the nasty status effects his ‘minions’ inflict. Still haven’t actually beaten him, but then again, I haven’t played in 2 months or so.

        Reply
        1. SpaceX

          The only reason I beat the Devourer was because that was the same run I got bored and pumped the PCs full of steroids :scared:

          Reply
  3. 100% Glitch Resistance

    Entropy: ×0.99 maxHP / turn.
    Raged foes: if a foe is losing 1% of its HP, the foe gets 1% plus attack power.
    Vengeful foes: if a foe dies, the other foes get 5% plus attack power.
    Doomed Revive: Revived players get doom status with 3 turn left.
    Nightmare: Every foes have 50% chance of reviving with 1/2 of MaxHP after their every death.

    Reply
  4. CoffeeUser

    Permanent Evil Effects: You get one of the evil player effects for the entire game. Or more than one even. (Brimstone+Epic=???)

    Random Resistances: Foe resistances are scrambled and scanning is banned. (Gigalith is now impossible wtf.)

    Biohazard: All players get -100% bio resistance while all foes get +100% bio resistance. Everyone gets a stack of poison per turn. Poison does not degrade and can’t be cleansed. Virus behaves normally. (Hopefully that makes the final boss hard enough.)

    Mirror’s Curse: Everything now reflects damage like mirrors do. (Damage is additionally multiplied by 50/Hit2HP) Actual mirrors now have double stats and can no longer be broken. They also now all reflect all types of damage.

    Voodoo’s Curse: All foes are now disguised voodoo dolls. You don’t know who they are cursing until you hit them. (Damage is additionally multiplied by 33/Hit2HP) Oh, and syphon won’t work on them anymore. Actual voodoo dolls now have triple stats.

    Pixel Rampage: Randomly some foes would gain +5 levels or more (and get bizarre changes in sizes). Also they randomly turn into pixels until you clear them in their portals. Gallery and bosses are immune. (Or should they be?)

    Death Sentence: One member of your team gets permanent target status. He/she can’t be invisible or enchanted. And can’t defend or be switched to backup. The status can’t be cleansed. He/She also gets -100 resistance to all elements and statuses. That member can’t be revived once killed until the end of the battle (However you can still drag that member to backup). A new target will appear once the old one dies.

    Negative Attack: You have negative attack stats. Cats are now immortal. (Probably.)

    Evil Bunnies: Slime Bunnies now have -999 attack and 540 health on level 0 and 4 catch score. They also get 100% resistance to all statuses and 80% resistance to all debuffs. An additional wave of 3 slime bunnies is added after each battle.

    Pokemon Master: Debuffs now do nothing to catch score. Capture gears and good luck are also ineffective. Only one negative status count and it’s always x2. Capture rdf is now 200% instead of 10%. Yeah, good luck with Snowflake.

    Reply
  5. Emerald

    I’m liking some of these suggestions. Let me add one too.

    Spam Happy: You can use some skills while on cooldown, but they have negative effects in addition to extending the cooldown. (Eg. Lance’s gun could jam after 3-5 shots from unload, Healmore only hits one ally and hurts the user, Anna’s combo shot gets an accuracy penalty, etc.)

    You could also expand on Time Limit mode, where the amount of time enemies take scales off their evade. Would probably makes bats more annoying.

    Reply
  6. Notyet yez

    Top order- You cannot call in backup party members and change turn order in the midst of battle.
    Quick catch- All enemies have higher catch percentages but they decrease every turn by 2%. The percentage does not go below 3%.

    Reply
  7. Thrynity

    Yeah I already play those two

    Time Limit: You have 30 seconds to take your turn in battle.
    (not a lot of time to use Haste – animations don’t count)

    Food Ban: Rare food items are banned in battle.
    (some people already play like this)

    But I would like to get a catastrophic meteo impact that would be quite random and adding some rogue like experience to each encounter if that make sense :wut:

    Reply
  8. SpaceX

    All these ideas are pretty cool! Well, other then mine XD

    Maybe a challenge where you can only use the attack and limit break functions, so no spells, summons, or items???

    Reply
  9. Drake

    Welcome back and take your time to recover! To the topic, here two suggestions:

    Trump-Card:
    You can use only a single summon which cost 40 SP or more per battle. (anything below can be spammed as usual) 40 is just a suggested value, whatever value feels more appropiate here. If you could save it till wave 3 or so, you’re lucky to be able to use it against the boss or final wave.

    Difficult Retreat:
    You can’t retreat from battles where your evade average of your party is lower than the enemies evade average (enemies being faster than you, not allowing you to retreat unless you debuff enemies or buff yourself). If feeling like it, defeated allies makes it more difficult in addition while defeated enemies makes it easier.

    But still, someday maybe, I hope there will be some modifiers in money earning, experience gain or item drop chances if you’re playing challenges which greatly increase battle length. Speedfarming is always boring, though comfortable. Boss drops having higher chances might be very appealing when using challenge modifiers.

    Reply
  10. Erik K.

    :hurray: Welcome Back! :yay:

    I hope you have enjoyed your stay here in Finland and had fun deciphering our unique dialect. Anyways, I’m quite joyful about this difficulty feature you’re adding. Many more games should have it in such a way where you get to decide which parts of the game you need to fine-tune to have the best experience suited to you. Looking over what options you and the others have suggested, I made a little attempt in creating my own difficulty toggles and here are the results:

    Numerophobia

    HP and SP for both mobs and party members are displayed without any numeric properties during combat. This means that you have to solely rely on the display bars for any information regarding the relevant field. This setting would relay a more oldish RPG vibe and slightly increase the overall difficulty.
    Imagine this scenario: You’re fighting a difficult boss enemy, both your health pools are at the brink of depletion and you have one last trick up your sleeve before you fall. You look at the boss’s health, adrenaline flowing and think to yourself: Is this enough to be fatal? Will this actually be enough to kill him?! You proceed with the plan and once you hit the button, your heart skips a beat…

    I Choose You!
    Whenever a party member receives damage (not caused by DOT), they get the chance of a random captured foe to lash out and aid after the enemy attack. This will consume the amount of SP that’s equivalent to the captured foe but not waste anyone’s turn (note: you still require to have the amount of SP or else that pet won’t show up). This setting could either be a blessing or a curse:
    Say you’re fighting a boss and once it attacks, your pet lashes out. If you have great luck and need any help you can get then you would be overjoyed on the rare occurrence. However, if you have horrible luck and need almost perfect setup then you will pretty much be salty all day about it.

    Tis But A Scratch!
    You no longer recover health overtime and fallen party members are only revived by: Abilities, consumables and inteacting with slime bunnies. This setting forces you to hold more maintenance over your characters and actually use consumables outside of combat. This very slightly increases the difficulty and adds more life to the party members. (Level-ups and slime bunnies still recover health).

    Fair Equality
    Giving the option of switching from booping Natalie and Anna’s racks to flicking the buldges on Matt and Lance. This will insanely affect gameplay since all the players will be too focused on repeatedly tapping the guys’ glorious forbidden fruits rather then actually advancing through the game “normally”.

    Reply
  11. Omega Sentinel

    Ideas:

    -Shield minions: Boss minions protect the boss by reducing the damage taken by the boss.
    -Steroid Cap: you have a limit on the number of steroids you can use (5 or 10 of each).
    -Level Cap: you can’t level up past the level of the next main boss. (for example, you can’t reach level 11 if you haven’t beaten level 10 Jotun) (Exp is stored)
    -Weather: takes less time for weather to change back (Based on a suggestion by NetherResonant on discord)
    -New minions: Bosses / mini bosses summon different foes.
    -200 IQ: bosses have even smarter behavior.

    Reply
  12. Kitt

    Masochist modes where every enemy gets one or more of those status effects that appear during the dark players fights. Or the one the players get when fighting NoLegs’ counterpart.

    No retreat mode: You win or you die.

    Matt mode: Puzzles already completed and can use 1 item per (party) turn without using an action. Cannot otherwise use items, cannot use powerful items, can use each item only once per battle.

    Natalie mode: Bugs and other such enemies immediately take infinite fire damage. Deal half damage to cute enemies.

    Lance mode: Random indiscriminate bombing.

    Hippie Anna Mode: increased damage to non-natural enemies. Take damage every time you damage natural enemies.

    NoLegs mode: NPCs heal you but the weather is always raining and you take increased water damage.

    Reply
  13. long

    -natural disaster:
    every weather effects have a chance to cast each turn, if lucky enough every one of them in a turn
    -unfavorable weathers:
    because of how we treat the environment, good weathers only affect foes, bad weathers are more deadly for bothside
    -schrodinger’s cooldown:
    you will either get 0 or up to 5 cooldown after using skill
    -overloading limit:
    if the limit break bar is filled, and the players dont use it in 2 or 3 turns. they will use a random limit break on the 3 or 4th turn and skip the next turn

    Reply
  14. SpaceX

    Maybe a “only use a skill/attack once per battle” challenge? Doing a challenge run of this and I am kinda reliant on Lance’s MOAB and NoLegs’ Warp Star attack. I never realized how powerful those throw able bombs are though ;-;

    I tried to do a pacifist run, it ended inside Lance’s castle because of the turrets 😐

    Reply
  15. Kayla

    I like the idea of these toggleable challenges! Reminds me a lot of skulls from Halo. Perhaps as a reward, maybe foes defeated with challenges on could award more exp/gold/items? This could also be toggleable for those that want the same loot, just harder to get.

    Hidden HP bars might make capturing a lot harder, think I’ll catch the new monsters on my 100% file, then do a new game+ with as many challenges as I can handle :3
    Here’s a few I came up with:

    Deadshot Foes: Foes have more accuracy, making it less likely to luck out via evasion.

    Anti Grind: EVERYTHING scales to your level. Can’t really overlevel now, aside from getting stat boosts. This might make the final boss incredibly luck based. (You patched the thing where scaling foes start to outscale you at level 36, right?)

    Fast Foes: Monsters attack immediately when a battle starts. Hope you healed before the fight! This can make getting buffs set up more challenging.

    Nerfed Skills: Some skills have longer cooldowns, and some zero turn skills (like cataclysm) have a cooldown of 1, forcing you to mix it up and not just spam the foe’s weak element every round. (This might prove too debilitating for a certain regenning boss…)

    Mix those challenges up with more challenging weather effects planned for new game+ and I think we’ll have one of those “Developer doesn’t even know if it’s possible” type runs! Already trying to think of strats, feel like it’s gonna be very defensive and maybe some HP absorb. Superbosses are gonna be hell.

    Maybe an option for solo character runs, or removing certain characters from the fight? I did EBF4 solo Natalie once, was quite a fun challenge with many close calls until I got to the bonus dungeon, where things scaled to the party’s average level.

    Reply

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