Description
Steiner’s Thunder Slash is near useless: it only damages a small percentage of the Enemy’s HP as Thunder elemental, and it always misses unless if certain enemies are hit. Beatrix’s Thunder Slash is a completely different ability and doesn’t behave like this (in fact, it’s a straight magical attack), so this is obviously in error.
The culprit isn’t the power or accuracy, but in fact the assigned damage formula. Somewhere down the line, a programmer had accidentally assigned Thunder Slash to Gravity Magic (Demi for example) as opposed to what it should be according to the rest of Steiner’s plain damage skills: Magic Weapon. All of his other skills run off of similar damage numbers and 0 added accuracy by default (weapon attacks run off of the accuracy of your normal attack and are therefore 0 themselves), explaining why it almost never hit.
This patch fixes this small error by changing Thunder Slash’s assigned damage formula and nothing else. Using this change, Thunder Slash now does Thunder elemental damage to one target that is more than Stock Break, but slightly less than Climhazzard and much less than Shock. It hits Magic Defense with physical attack.
These come in PPF format, so just use PPF-O-Matic or similar to apply them to the corresponding disc and that’s it! If you get a report of the checksum not matching even though you’re using the reported ISO, if you ignore it things still apply fine. A big thanks to Hades Workshop, which was pretty well invaluable in making this one go.
This will not work on Beetle PSX for whatever reason (goes to a black screen in battle), but every other emulator is confirmed to work.
Staff Credits
- Chronosplit for the Hacking.:
Gallery
This patch identifies the mistaken attribute on Steiner's Thunder Slash that made it a useless ability. It now works correctly, with good utility for its availability in the game (end of Disc 3) before you can make use of Shock; in fact, it can still be a useful ability in Disc 4 if you're already hitting the 9999 damage cap with Shock and want a more MP-efficient alternative.
The patch author states "This will not work on Beetle PSX for whatever reason (goes to a black screen in battle), but every other emulator is confirmed to work." This is because Beetle PSX is an accurate emulator that requires matching EDC/ECC data on the ROM; the game will get stuck on a black screen because it is attempting to regenerate the original data from the ECC checksum due to a mismatch. To make this patch work on Beetle PSX or Mednafen, you can use error_recalc.exe or EDCRE on the patched ROM.