first degree black belt

[twelwe]

yeah, i got one, what about you?

[gammafunk]

what is your fighting style and signature move?

[Sprucery]

I have lots of black belts.

[Baldu3]

I once was in a martial arts club where you could get half levels with little ribbons of tape on your belt to show it off. Everyone was a winner!!

[lobf]

I once was in a martial arts club where you could get half levels with little ribbons of tape on your belt to show it off. Everyone was a winner!!

That's standard in Kyokushin Karate.

[tasonir]

Fun story: while most of the classes in final fantasy one are reasonably balanced for normal play, the black belt class is far and away the strongest class if you're familiar with exploiting one bug, and willing to level them up a bit past the requirement to win the game (generally around level 27).

The bug you can exploit is that their armor is set equal to their level when they level up, but then if you change their equipment it reverts to that item's absorb value. So the goal is to basically never change their armor - they don't really need much armor at any point, to be fair. Eventually, you get the ribbon (protection against most/all? status effects), equip that, level them up one more time, and now have armor + status immunity. I'm not entirely sure if this was supposed to be intended gameplay, but I've usually heard it referred to as a bug, so...

The other balance issue doesn't really kick in too much until the end game, but all classes get additional attacks as they level up past certain levels. Black belts are the same, but they get 2 attacks at these points, so the more you pass, the more they pull ahead of everyone else. I'd argue they're overpowered through most of the last 1/3 of the game, but it becomes absurd when you pass level 32 (I'm going off memory here - I think that's another one of the breakpoint levels where they get +2 attacks).

In short, the best party is either 4x black belt, or 3x black belt 1x white mage, if you'd like to have easier access to healing. It is entirely possible to beat all dungeons with just your x99 cure potions, however. A suitably over leveled black belt party can kill the final boss before it ever attacks you. I believe it may be possible to truly one shot him; I don't recall if I did it in one round or just a single black belt's attack.

I think this counts for me having a black belt. My interest in unarmed combat may be more of a lifelong thing than I thought.

[edgefigaro]

Lvl 34 IIRC, but I could be wrong. A black belt can only 1shot the final boss with fast, and a fasted lvl 50 black belt generally will generally do significantly less damage to the tune of 500-1000 as opposed to the requisite 2000.

In the course of normal play, Fighters are better than blackbelts in near all situations. When the black belt hits 34 to get his #of hits breakpoint, he begins to do damage roughly equal to fighter w/ a sun sword or defense (defense is a sword) and surpass a fighter with the ice sword. A fighter with excalibur or masamune will still out-damage the black belt until their final breakpoint at lvl ~46.

The black belt armor bug is similarly underwhelming. A topline fighter will have 67 absorb from equipment, though it goes up to 74 if you choose to use the opal helm rather than the ribbon (non-optimal). A second line fighter will also have 67. 3rd and 4th line fighters will have 60 and 55 absorb. Note that these characters have better defenses finishing the game normally ~lvl 25 as opposed to the black belt. A black belt's absorb is better from equipment until level 43 for one black belt and 33 for all other black belts.

HP is similarly favored toward fighters. While Black Belts are gauranteed to reach 999 HP and fighters do not, fighters frequently do hit 999 HP as well. On average, black belts only overtake fighters in max HP in the 40s. Fighters will have better HP values for the rest of the game, and will usually have more HP than the black belt. This is compounded by the fact the black belts are significantly more likely to die, putting them behind in XP as a class who's power is totally dependant on level.

In all of this talking about high level characters, please note that fighters are better than black belts -for the entire game.- Black belts pull ahead on damage very slightly only at ridiculous levels. Fighters will -always- have better defenses. And magic.

The best party is generally considered to be 3x Fighter and 1x Red Mage. Fi Fi (xx) RM is a solid setup for all choices for the 4th member. 4x Fighter is also very powerful, and certainly more powerful than either 4x BB or 3x BB 1xWM.

White mages are bad, and Fi Fi BM BM is my favorite party.

[Siegurt]

yeah, i got one, what about you?

And in a fit of anti-irony:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=10763&p=148526

[bel]

Reading people discuss games which I don't know about makes me realize how geeky I must sound to someone else when I discuss crawl.

[njvack]

@twelwe: Congratulations, by the way.

[daggaz]

I ran a 4x BB party. It is hard to get off the ground, but once you have the airship around about there, it starts to get pretty stupid easy. One thing about black belts that wasnt mentioned is that they also tend to just dodge every attack completely, so while fighters have a much better absorb, they still have to suffer the assault whereas it just whiffs completely on a BB. You also dont waste money on things like armour, weapons, or spells. So all your cash goes to potions and houses.

While we are on this topic, did anybody ever get to fight that machine on the hallway to Tiamats room? Back in the day there as a big contest in Nintendo Power if you got a picture of it, and me and a friend spent the better part of a day walking back and forth and back and forth on that bridge till it finally loaded. It proceeded to annhilate our lack-luster party in about 1 round.

[twelwe]

@twelwe: Congratulations, by the way.

for real

what is your fighting style and signature move?

when i answer to people i do it with my fists. sure you wanna ask me a question now ??

[tasonir]

I ran a 4x BB party. It is hard to get off the ground, but once you have the airship around about there, it starts to get pretty stupid easy. One thing about black belts that wasnt mentioned is that they also tend to just dodge every attack completely, so while fighters have a much better absorb, they still have to suffer the assault whereas it just whiffs completely on a BB. You also dont waste money on things like armour, weapons, or spells. So all your cash goes to potions and houses.

While we are on this topic, did anybody ever get to fight that machine on the hallway to Tiamats room? Back in the day there as a big contest in Nintendo Power if you got a picture of it, and me and a friend spent the better part of a day walking back and forth and back and forth on that bridge till it finally loaded. It proceeded to annhilate our lack-luster party in about 1 round.

That's warmech, and yeah, he's generally harder than tiamat (the boss of the dungeon you can fight warmech in). Agreed that black belts can be somewhat weak at the start, they actually mirror dungeon crawl's unarmed in this regard. I didn't realize fighters could go over 50 absorb, but I do believe their evasion suffers a lot when you equip armor. That's the 'exploit' of black belts - they can wear armor and still have their full evasion/absorb. Apparently the 1 absorb per level is intended, but you're supposed to wear 0 slots to get it. The bug is that you can wear ribbon (helmet) and pro-ring (hand/ring?) and then level up and the game thinks you're wearing nothing as long as you don't load the equipment screen. There's actually a surprisingly high amount of bugs/game mechanics that flat out don't work at all that a typical player won't notice unless you really dive into the game mechanics.

Another bug that impacts fighter vs black belt: black belts get +4 magic defense per level, whereas fighters get 3. The trick here is to never class change your black belts - if you "upgrade" to master, they only get +1 per level. Magic defense is not displayed in game.

I had to actually look up weapon values for this, which makes me feel dirty (ewwww, weapons!) but the best weapon in the game is masamune, with 56 attack. A level 50 black belt has 100 attack. They pass masamune at level 28 blackbelt, and there's only one masamune. The second best weapon is excaliber, with 45, which a black belt passes at level 23. Then there's crit rate, which is again 100 for a level 50 blackbelt, vs masamune at 40, excaliber at 39, etc. Crit rate for these weapons was supposed to be 10 and 5, but it's bugged and is actually much higher than intended. This gives black belts a 50.5% chance of crit, and since they attack multiple times a round, once they're hitting 6 times a round you'll see just most attacks crit (it displays the crit message if any one of the attacks crits). Fighters will crit a lot too, but not on the same level. Note that their crit rate is lower when they're hitting 6 times a round, but it's still around 20-30% over 6 attacks at that point. Once you get to 8 attacks per round it'll be hard to not crit.

One shotting chaos (last boss): chaos has 100 defense, with 100 attack the game rolls 100-200, then subtracts defense, so you do 0-100 damage per hit. But for criticals it adds your damage to damage*2 roll again, so on a max roll you'd deal 300 per crit hit. You'd then need to hit chaos 7 times to kill him, and I believe a level 50 BB does 10 hits per round. So I think it is possible to one shot him without fast, however that's assuming your 50.5% crit rate succeeds 7+ times out of 10, and that you roll in the upper 95% or so of the damage range 7+ times as well, so that works out to being very, very unlikely. But 3-4 blackbelts can certainly one round chaos very practically. If you cast fast on your BB before attacking it'd definitely up the odds, but I don't really feel like trying to calculate what they are; if you know, let me know. (fast will double your attacks from 10 to 20)

In short, I think we both agree that blackbelts get absurd, you're just saying it takes until around level 45 or so, and I think it's more around level 25. Damnit, now I'm going to have to beat FF1 again....

[edgefigaro]

Damage is (weapon damage + str/2) for non unarmed bb attacks. Fighters start with 20 str and are guaranteed a str every level up. Thus, you are shortchanging the lvl 25 fighter 22.5 base damage.

We should twich play FF1 at double speed.

[tasonir]

Ah true, I forgot about strength - I haven't looked at these formulas for a few years now. Fighters start at 20, have 44 at 25, and 69 at 50 (max level). Blackbelts go 5, 20, 35 on average, but you can just ignore that since it isn't used for unarmed attacks. I have never set up a twitch account but maybe it'd be worthwhile for doing a FF run, and double speed does sound like it would save time. Do you know if there's a way to have twitch/the recording software record the game audio directly rather than picking it up through a microphone? Would make it easier to record as my house is usually pretty noisy and trying to enforce quiet time would be difficult.

Also another fun thing to note for people who aren't familiar with high level parties: like nearly all RPG's, level 2 takes very little experience to reach, and each level takes more than the previous because you're fighting higher level monsters. That is, until level 30, when all future levels are capped at taking ~32k exp, so the final 20 levels take the same amount of time to get. You can get that experience pretty quickly by repeatedly fighting guaranteed spawns like the eye, which give good experience.

Edit: I wonder how practical it would be to save state right before chaos and try to roll 2000+ damage without fast. How far back do you have to go to get a new random roll? I'm not sure what you would have to do to change the RNG state before attacking.

[twelwe]

What the frig is a warmech

[tasonir]

I have come to obliterate your dreams.

On a related note, anyone know how to play at double speed? I'm using openEmu, and there's a turbo button that you can hold down, but there doesn't seem to be any way to set it to just always be double speed.

[tasonir]

Be afraid, be very afraid. Dunno about streaming this, I could try though. Level 1 is a pain because you're weak, but level 2 makes a huge difference already. Now it's just slow grinding exp. Turbo button helps.

[archaeo]

On a related note, anyone know how to play at double speed? I'm using openEmu, and there's a turbo button that you can hold down, but there doesn't seem to be any way to set it to just always be double speed.

OpenEmu is pretty dumb, honestly; it's a slick rom organizer, but the actual emulators' settings are all hidden behind an equally slick interface. SNES9X, for example, has a number of ways to control the speed of emulation, but none of them can be accessed through the version in OpenEmu. You should download a standalone NES emulator instead.

[twelwe]

I have come to obliterate your dreams.

If this what is a marmech is then gtf out of here. this is a for real thread. please for real discussions only here, thank you....

[treerex5]

Playing FFs 5-7 right now, if you spoil them I will bring back old nemelex.

[tasonir]

Don't worry, we've moved the excessive screenshotting of games that are over 20 years old to its own thread. On topic, congrats on your black belt. I used to take tae kwan do classes as a teen, I managed to work my way all the way up to yellow belt, I was totally badass.

For those that don't know, you start at white belt; yellow is the second belt after that.

[Croases]

For those that don't know, you start at white belt; yellow is the second belt after that.

Think about it that way: You've gotten to the Lair of martial arts, you should be able to get black belt and 10 dans with no problems after that

[Zooty]

You've gotten to the Lair of martial arts

More commonly referred to as Hong Kong.