Ideas:
> Have certain rages overwrite others, and structure them so they are strict upgrades. So a fire 2 rage replaces a fire 1 rage, and the upgrade has better element affinities, better statuses, a better weapon, etc.
> Make all aspects of rage previewable in battle and the field.
> Expand the number of usable attacks? Kinda conflicts with idea at top.
> Make Gau controllable in battle, and replace the Leap skill with the complete skill set of whatever monster he's pretending to be.
> Allow Gau to learn the rages of any monster he fights anywhere.

I never really bothered to use him.

>>3806711 (OP)
Uh, none of that stops Gau from being completely fucking OP. You didn't fix him.
If you're trying to make him more balanced, step 1 is get rid of Nightshade/Rafflesia rage, which is completely broken.

>>3806772
>get rid of Nightshade/Rafflesia rage
Or give bosses resistance to Charm.

>>3806749
Kek, fpbp

>>3806772
Even with perfect veldt encounter manipulation, by the time you've learned rafflesia every other sapient player has already finished the game.
Gau is OP in the same sense that grinding your ass to 50 with perfect stat boosts is OP.

>>3806772
>Uh, none of that stops Gau from being completely fucking OP. You didn't fix him.
>If you're trying to make him more balanced, step 1 is get rid of Nightshade/Rafflesia rage, which is completely broken.
Assume that the player doesn't have a guide open at all times, that I'm sane about rebalancing everything else, and that the goal is to make rage intuitive & fun rather than another irritating mechanic to minmax.

>>3806749
Because he sucks to use unless you are an autistic power gamer.

>>3806711 (OP)
>Make Gau controllable in battle, and replace the Leap skill with the complete skill set of whatever monster he's pretending to be.
This. Although monster skills aren't really that strong, this at least makes it fun than an underwhelming, autobattling party member.
>>3806749
No shit, that's the reason this thread was made.

In the remaster it’s fucking stupid. he just gets every ability after the first time he leaves. They fucked him up worse than the original. There’s no fixing him. The character himself is trash in concept and execution. Fucking Gogo is more fun. He should be deleted from the game

>>3807310
Mog and Strago both use some of Gau's skills anyways.

I think that a SaGa Frontier style monster, only with a complete list of skills and forms you can change into plus info about them, would work best. It requires a rebalance to remove broken shit though.

>>3807320
Like I agree you could rebalance him, but story wise he’s the weakest one anyways. I bet more people like the random Yeti more than some jungle book rip off mowgli. There’s a ton of classes from FF5 they could have added instead. Even just a random geomancer would be more fun than a autistic rage baby

>>3807450
... But we already have a geomancer: Mog. Not sure what to do with dance. The battlefield change effect is largely cosmetic, and the skills should be different & scale better. Maybe if each battlefield had element affinities? There's also the uncontrollable problem, which if battles are fast & Dance is better can be a benefit.

I'd still like mog to have an actual FFV dancer skill set.

I think this set of changes puts him up there:
> Have certain rages overwrite others, and structure them so they are strict upgrades. So a fire 2 rage replaces a fire 1 rage, and the upgrade has better element affinities, better statuses, a better weapon, etc.
> Make all aspects of rage previewable in battle and the field.
> Make Gau controllable in battle, and replace the Leap skill with the complete skill set of whatever monster he's pretending to be.
> Allow Gau to learn the rages of any monster he fights anywhere.

Then I make the palette swap monsters into tiered upgrades and I'm set.

I still need to unfuck all the other broken shit in the game to make you try Gau, but most of those are easy.
> Limit 1 offering, economizer, etc broken equipment per game.
> Reduce the number of characters who can use magic.
> Remove various exploit strategies (wind slash bug, sketch).
> Reduce power of ultima to compensate for ignore mdef, possibly limit to 1 character via natural magic, and/or make it a strict choice between it and ragnarok great sword.
> Increase spell learning requirement to 255 magic points (and make fights dangerous even if you are OP so grinding is risky) so you don't grind out spells on everyone. Many spells get increased learn rate to compensate.
> Create a level and base stats reset event on airship so LLG is no longer optimal.
> Add immunity to charm for most bosses.
> Give everyone a chance to shake off debuffs each turn based on their stats.
> Change what stats power many skills so magic is no longer optimal.
> Unfuck stamina, rename to & treat like luck.

>>3807264
Gau has a lot of OP rages but it requires you to either experiment or have a friend tell you what the good ones are. Except for Stray Cat where you'd probably stumble into that one by accident since its one of the few rages he gets very early and scales well for an extremely long time.
The only fixing that Gau needs is to make learning his rages less annoying.

Here are some ideas that could balance him:
>give him access to abilities that are stronger than what the rest of your team can use at a given point.
>give him access to rare monster abilities that have unique niches
>let him gain beneficial status effects and/or elemental immunities while using certain rages
>give him high base statistics so he can fight effectively with magic/espers when you don't use rage
Ultimately my idea is to make him into a character that is mediocre if you don't go out of your way to power him up, but is very strong once you've figured out what some useful rages are. And the process of discovering those rages is fun in itself.

>>3806711 (OP)
BNW fixed him.

>>3807813
>>give him access to abilities that are stronger than what the rest of your team can use at a given point.
>>give him access to rare monster abilities that have unique niches
>>let him gain beneficial status effects and/or elemental immunities while using certain rages

Doesn't he already have all of that? Is that the joke?

He just needs to learn like 5 bonus rages he doesn't know already every time you send him off in the veldt so it's a 10 minute grind a couple of times a game. His rages need to be much, much better than normal actions because they're uncontrollable and that's mostly true.

I had reasonable fun using him in a "challenge" (it's not hard) FF6 game where I was not allowed to equip espers or magic-teaching items and his ability to do elemental magic was useful after I put the game in 20x speed fast forward to collect rages.

>>3808015
That would be better than vanilla, but I want something that is as close to ideal as I can reasonably get while keeping to the spirit of the system.

Grinding for rages is a pain in the ass. Here are the two ideas I posted earlier which would address that:
> Have certain rages overwrite others, and structure them so they are strict upgrades. So a fire 2 rage replaces a fire 1 rage, and the upgrade has better element affinities, better statuses, a better weapon, etc.
> Allow Gau to learn the rages of any monster he fights anywhere.

The first reduces the number of rages to gather, which also makes it easier to mentally track them all and select a relevant one. The second just plain lets simplifies the process of gathering rages, especially if none of the monsters he can use are missable.

>>3806711 (OP)
How could Gau's story & characterization be improved?

I think the only thing he's missing are a few temporary/mercenary monster type characters, similar to Sylvan & Brau from Romancing SaGa. These two could be his childhood companions, similar to Baloo, Bagheera, Akela, Raksha, Rama, Hathi, and Winifred in the Jungle Book.

If his home village or family trading caravan were killed or experimented on by the empire,that would be additional motivation to join the party. He's a bit too much of a mystery in the original game.