Using Zeg's Character Simulator

[Zegridathes]

I've been delaying and delaying posting this because I really wanted to figure out an efficient way of being able to save/load characters (without needing a 200page url.) I'm going to go ahead without it for the time being (unless someone has a good suggestion?) I will get to it eventually even if it ends up needing a 200page url.

So, without further ado:

Using Zeg's Character Simulator

V1.2

Table of Contents
0. Introduction
1. Main Screen and Menu
2. Bonus Point
3. Point Total
4. Equipment
5. Monster
6. Skill
7. Saving and Loading
8. Grand Finale



0. Introduction

To start, you can get to it here: http://fungaah.awardspace.com/

Some of you may already be familiar with this as it's been in my sig for a number of months now.

This started out as a little calculator I wrote to help me calculate various things in the game and rapidly grew as I came up with more and more things to calculate. Chances are I'll eventually come up with other thing's I'll want to add also.

The Calculator is broken down into different parts to organize all the different information views and to hopefully keep the entire page on one screen (the Equipment page and some classes' skills pages are exceptions to this (durn you sheeps and all your spells!)

The primary functions of these parts are to
1. Predefine a new character
2. Project the growth of an existing character (1 & 2 are essentially the same)
3. Project the effects of changes in Eq or character on skills
4. Project the effects of skills on characters and monsters
5. Determine the ideal targets for leveling

What this is NOT:
1. An image source (no images at all)
2. Guaranteed to be completely correct or bug-free.

The entire thing runs in JavaScript so if you have Medium or higher security settings in IE or the NoScript Firefox extension, you will need to enable scripting for the site to work. Most of the fields automatically update themselves on a 500ms (half a second) interval so you may see a little delay between changing one value and viewing it's result. In the future this will probably change this so that things only update when you update them.

Revision History:
07-10-2007: 1.0 Original Version
07-11-2007: 1.1 Update for Debuff button.
07-22-2007: 1.2 Update for Saving & Loading

1. Main Screen & Menu

Once you are in, you will be presented with the following screen

1. Class Selector Box
2. Build Graph Selector
3. Level Selector
4. Overall Character Display
5. Menu Bar

Note: Throughout this guide I will be using the Quote box to point out little tips.

You begin by picking a class from the Class Selector Box at #1. When you pick a base class or a second job, the list of classes automatically expands to include the 2nd or 3rd job options in that class subtree. In addition, the Build Graph Selector (#2) will update to the base build for that class when creating a new character and will lock the primary stat for that class. The above image displays it a little wrong because I composited multiple images, but options in the build graph are also blocked off as long as the total equals 10 points, in order to adjust another stat higher, you will need to adjust another to be lower first.

Note: If you change classes after customizing the Build Graph Selector, it will reset to the default for that class.

Attached to the end of the Build Graph Selector is the Level Selector (#3) You can pick a level directly from the scroll box or you can use the button right next to the scroll box to move 1, 10 or 50 levels at a time up to Level 400. Your stats will automatically increase to match your level.

Following the Level selector is the Overall Character Display (#4) this displays the overall stats of your character including all equipment and applied buffs and contains the numbers used in skill calculations.

At the top of this box is the 'Use Calculated Character' checkbox. If this is checked, it will update with changes made to the character. If it is unchecked, these fields can be edited to allow for quick checks on skill effect.

Note: For quick skill calculations with 'use calc. Char.' off, after you pick a class, you can skip having to set your character the correct level and setting your bonus points/equips right and just type in your important stats

The 'Clear' button clears the contents of these boxes when use calculated character is unchecked.

The last part that will always be in view is the Menu Bar (#5). This works like tabs to the other screens. Simply click on a tab to bring it up. The currently selected tab will be shown in grey.

2. Bonus Point


This part is pretty straightforward. There is a row for each stat, it's level, it's display as it would be in-game and then two user-editable columns.

The first column can be reached by clicking the 'Raw' button at the top, this will allow you to distribute absolute amounts of points

The second column allows you to distribute a % of available points to that stat.

Note: Remember that 4 points = 1 level and that you can't spend more points than you have! Extra points will be immediately subtracted!

At any given time, you can only edit one column or the other, whichever column you are not editing will be updated with the changes you make to the editable column.
Since percents can be in decimals and raw points cannot, switching the active column from percent to raw can result in some rounding errors.

Note: When changing level, the percent column becomes active and bonus points are automatically distributed based on the entered percentages. I have plans to change the way this works in the future so changing level with the raw column selected does not automatically distribute points.

3. Point Total


This screen only displays information, none of it is currently editable.
There are a number of columns each for displaying different values:

• Stat: The stat row
• Base: The base stat based only on level
• Equip: The amount added by equipment
• Flat: Skills with a constant bonus (see that Gun Booster is active in this instance). This may be used to allow characters to test the effects of debuffs against themselves.
• B+E%: This vaguely titled column contains skill effects which provide an additive % bonus (Lucky 7 is on in this case)
• Cumu%: This is currently unused but applies it's bonus multiplicatively. It may become a user-editable field depending on how the bunny AC party buff stacks with gun booster. Or it could be removed altogether.
• Sum Skill: The stat-point sum of all bonuses from skills
• Total: The total stats (the Overall Character Display reads from these values.)

4. Equipment

This is another fairly straightforward screen, for each equipment location you have access to all 12 stats. To account for other items like sunglasses, there is also the 'Misc.' line where you can also just quickly put the sum of all your equipments.

There are a couple things to note about this page that ARE important.

Note: The character display calculates melee damage unless 'Gun' is selected as the subtype of 'Weapon'. When 'Gun' is selected, the AP from Weapon is not added to the total but the character sheet calculates Gun damage based on AC + gun AP.

Note2: The AP field of Ammunition is not added to the total for AP. This needs to be filled in however as the Shuriken Mastery skill calculates it's damage based on the value in the AP field of Ammo. This may be moved to the special section of the skill at a later time.

The total line at the bottom shows the cumulative effect of all equipment entered in the table. To quickly clear a line of the whole table, click the 'Clear Row' or 'Clear Table' buttons at the end of each line.

5. Monster


The monster tab can be extremely useful for fine-tuning exactly how much damage you need to do to take out monsters or to find your ideal grinding target.

At the top are two drop-down boxes you can use to pick out individual monsters.
The 'Select monster' allows you to pick a specific monster to load into the form and 'sort monster by' allows you to pick a certain stat to sort the monsters by. The stat you chose to sort monsters by is also the value that is displayed next to the monster in the 'select monster' drop-down.

Note: The monsters are sorted by level by default.

To the far left of the sort box is a button marked 'Fulllist'. When you click this button, it will make it's way through the whole list of monsters as they are sorted, calculate the damage and # of hits required and place it all in a report in a new window. The output looks something like this:


L.94 electric snail#####4178.599dmg 0.953 hits
L.94 egg spectre########4178.599dmg 0.953 hits
L.95 mermaid witch######4382.599dmg 0.773 hits
L.95 gentle sting#######4178.599dmg 0.97 hits
L.95 super golden mole##4331.599dmg 1.566 hits
L.97 walking tadpole####4178.599dmg 0.987 hits

Obviously, we need to calculate these from something so you can enter an amount of base damage into the 'Damage' text box in the 'Attacker' side of the table. You can also select the type of damage since different monsters have resistances and vulnerabilities to different types of damage. In addition, the Element% box applies to melee with elemental compounded weapons and will apply the elemental effect to the resulting damage.

Listing the number of hits required with decimals is useful in determining which monster is the best for training. The number of hits it will actually take you to defeat a monster is the number of hits rounded up to the next highest whole number. When training you want to reduce the amount of wasted damage so you want to target monsters whose number of hits is closest to the next highest whole number. In the above example chart. gentle stings and walking tadpoles are very good targets because less than 4% of the attack damage is going to waste. In contrast, almost half (43%) of the second hit on super golden moles goes to waste. You only get exp from damage that takes away a monster's HP, anything extra is ignored, so it's to your benefit to get the most out of it.

Don't worry if you don't know your base damage when calculating from skills, you can directly import skill and spell damage and type right from the skill page.

Note: All magic and sheep elements (and non-elemental galder if you actually want to calculate based on that) are in the main attack damage type drop-down so the Element% section ONLY applies to melee damage.

Most of the time you will want to just load a monster and calculate from that. However, all the monster fields are editable so this can be used to determine the stats of newly released and event monsters more quickly than by hand.

Note: I don't actually know how many hp Spicy Dragon has, anyone know?

6. Skill


The skill screen contains all the skills for your chosen class and additional classes in separate tabs to keep the page from scrolling as far. See in the above image how both 'charm' and 'raccoon' appear as buttons under the menu bar.

At the top of the table is a record of how many TM Points were used in the current configuration. The skill table beneath that contains all the skill information.

• Skill Name: The name of the skill.
• TML: The TM Level required to be able to learn the skill (this is not enforced anywhere)
• Point: The number of points required to learn the skill.
• Gain? Lv. Mast This composite column contains all the controls for learning skills. As the level of the skill changes, the effects listed in the description change along with it.
  • Gain?: Check this box to learn the skill. If the skill can be leveled, the other controls will be enabled. If it is a single level skill, there will only be the option to learn it.
  • Lv.: The level of the skill. Chose the level to learn the skill to from this drop-down box.
  • Mast: Master the skill. Instantly takes the skill to Master Level regardless of what level is currently selected.
• MP: The MP cost for skills with MP costs.
• Special: If the skill relies on some other sort of input (like current HP for final blow or water element % for certain buffalo skills,) these number can be entered here if applicable.
• Description: A description of what the skill does including base damage, cooldown times and any other pertinent information.
• Button Column: If the skill can be activated in some way, it will have a button in this column. Types of buttons include:
  • Apply: For buff skills and eventually debuff skills, this button applies the skill to your character or your enemies. Buffs show their state of activation by color. Green buffs are activates and pink buffs are not activated. Buff skills not learned cannot be permanently applied, they will turn themselves off.
  • Import: Import a base damage amount to the monster page including the damage type. Doesn't handle multi-hit skills correctly yet.
  • Debuf!: Apply a Debuff skill to the current monster in the monster tab. Not all stats are listed on monster so some debuffs won't actually do anything. Note: since monster stats are all editable, clicking the debuff button multiple times will apply the selected debuff multiple times. Only click once per monster for best results.

Note: if you change classes, all the skill setting from each class are saved and do not impact the total TM point count so you can experiment on all classes simultaneously and only have to change stats around.

Since not all skills are immediately available, skills is prerequisites will be grayed out until their prerequisite conditions are met (See Shield All in the image) If you don't know what skills a certain other skill requires, you can find them out by hovering over the name of the skill.

Note: Skills with prerequisites will be underlined with a dotted line.

In addition to prerequisites, some skills have prohibitions against other skills and cannot be learned by people possessing other skills. Notable examples of this are the light and dark pact of 2nd job dragons and the individual elemental seals of sheep.

Note: Knowing Team Bolster as a Cat prevents you from learning Team Bolster as a 3rd job Raccoon hybrid and vice versa. This is to prevent internal calculator conflicts where the manually entered value for number of party members in range of the wrong skill is used.

7. Saving and Loading

Saving a character is pretty straightforward. Loading is only slightly more complicated.

To save a character, simply click the "Create Saved Character Link"

After you click it, a link appears:

To truly "save" your character, you need to either click the link and bookmark the page after it reloads or to simply copy the link location and save it somewhere:

This link will work for anyone so you can use it to construct a character for others to view easily by posting the link in a thread or in your signature.

Note: Only builds, bonus points and equipment are saved currently. You will need to re-add all your skills for the time being.

8. Grand Finale

That's all there is to it so far. Feel free to link to this thread anywhere, but please PM me if you want to link to it directly. Feel free to tinker around with the code if you'd like. It's all in JavaScript and it's all right in the webpage when you go to it. I did design it with an eye toward making it semi-portable to other games. Mostly you'd just need to change around the internal data tables and Trickster Specific things like damage calculations. Just don't think you can put a stylesheet on it and call it your own though ^_^.

Like I said earlier, I don't guarantee nor do I assume that everything is correct or anywhere near it. Most of the formula I've gotten off jWiki or MyTrickster Wiki or various threads here in the forums but in practice some of these seem to not be 100% correct. I'd safely say they are 95% correct though. Stone Strike and Shuriken mastery are routinely 1-2 damage off in my calculations and other things like that (uppercut is a couple hundred off, lol)

Since I'm not completely sure about all the various things (or that I even transcribed them correctly) I'd more than appreciate any corrections/bug reports anyone reading this can offer, tests they can run with skill on L1 (no defense) monsters and whatnot. It doesn't hurt to test on other monsters, it could always be that the monsters stats are entered wrong. I'd also appreciate it if you could post them directly in this thread for two reasons:
1. because my PM box is almost full and I can't bear to part with any of my precious messages O.o
2. So that other people are aware of errors/bugs and whatnot and I can keep track of them easier.

I'm also open to feature requests!

So, now that all that is said and all mysteries are uncovered, Go nuts!

<3 Zeg

PS Mods: I asked Baikin if I could be exempt from the rule about advertising for this, so this is not advertising (lol, not that there is anything else on the site)

[StudyPunkRockism]

Check the TM requirements for Pumping Heart and Upper Smash. There are some other skills that have the wrong amount of required TMP.

[Zegridathes]

K, I'll check that out in the morning.

[k0n]

Whoa, finally an in-depth guide. ^0^

[TMM]

Godly character simulator. I wish I had this when I was writing guides. :O

[Zegridathes]

Ok, fixed TM requirements for 3 power-type skills and maybe 2 or 3 others that were wrong.

[KuyaBaka]

THIS IS SO COOL.

330 something CT's to kill a Spicy. o3o"

Bump


it needs 1 hasn't been given enough respect for the hard work

[Catharsis]

Awesome, Zeg. Now if only there was a way to save your data or export it into your hard drive... *prays*

[Zegridathes]

Originally Posted by Sephael

Awesome, Zeg. Now if only there was a way to save your data or export it into your hard drive... *prays*

You've encouraged me to work on this right now.

I'm going to start off by trying to make it store everything in the url so you can either a. bookmark your data or b. post a link for other people to see.

For the time being, i'm only going to save work with build and equipment data.

I'll work on saving skills later, I want to get the basic functionality done first.

[Zegridathes]

Lol, I finished this a couple hours after my last post, but I forgot to upload it lol.

If you go to the save/load tab there's a button that will create a link to the current character setup sans skills.

Just either right click and "save link location" or click it and bookmark it to save your current layout.

I'll update the guide too

[Catharsis]

OMG a save function! I love you Zeg. <3

[PlayerKiller]

Nice, this is pretty useful

[Mukumuku]

indeed, pretty good :) Are you going for improvements graphically? Like adding icons and such for skills? xD hehe