This is a mod mostly made for myself for my own playthrough with English patch, I’m sharing it if anyone wants it. Install at your own discretion, because if a fight is too hard it probably will be for me too lol (or just turn down the difficulty to hard mode that I also implemented in this mod)
Install instructions
1.	Install the English patch before installing this mod
2.	Put all the ".tbl" files featured inside this directory into the tc/f/table directory found inside the game’s directory.
3.	To check if the install was successful, head to the title screen and look on the bottom right, if instead of either the normal version number or “/fg/ English patch” you see “Difficulty Mod” then the install was successful.
4.  This mod can be installed and uninstalled at any time during a playthrough with no issues.

	General outline and introduction to the mod
This difficulty mod is designed to be a basic difficulty mod with few changes made to it to keep it as a relatively vanilla experience and to keep it in line with something made in a couple of days (if it’s going to be packaged with a translation patch, it should feel relatively vanilla). This mod will more aim as a result to nerf dumb and overpowered strategies rather than aim to necessarily improve the game as a whole. As a result, issues I would like to address such as:
-	Certain enemies having uninteresting gimmicks
-	Entirely rebalancing the whole cast and their kits
-	Adding new arts and shard skills
-	Rebalancing ailments to work on bosses
-	Adressing certain meta problems and problematic quartz (this game is an arts and s-craft fest and the mod most likely won’t change that)
-	Rebalancing most of the Hollow Cores (while a few cores with other defensive applications may pop up, the meta probably won’t change in that regard)
-	Having actual custom balancing for enemies based on the testing of like 4+ guys
-	Actually fully balancing how truly OP Grendel is relative to its comrades
-	Relatively uninteresting and non-varied shard skill setups on several lines
These things will not be addressed (or at least fully…). While this is designed to be comprehensive in its objectives and tries to aim for good design in what it is, it is not meant to be fully comprehensive of every potential issue Kuro’s gameplay may possess in any way shape or form.
The lack of playtesting this mod will go through will also be to its detriment most likely despite having a few fail safes in place, it’s entirely possible many bosses will feature a ton of difficulty spikes constantly.
Now then, after this lengthy intro, onto the actual changes the mod makes

	Difficulty multipliers
Turn-based
Hard:
HP: x1.1->x1.2
SPD: x1.1->x1.5
Player Damage: x0.9->x0.9
Enemy Damage: x1.1->x1.75

Nightmare:
HP: x1.2->1.4
SPD: x1.1->x1.8
Player Damage: x0.8->x0.8
Enemy Daage: x1.2->x2.5

Field Combat
Normal:
Enemy Damage: x1->x1.2

Hard:
Enemy Damage: x1.3->x1.6
Player Stun Damage: x0.7->x0.9

Let’s start with Field Combat since it’s the shorter of the two:
Enemy damage higher to make staying in field combat more punishing
Stun gauge damage increased on Hard mode to make stunning enemies from field faster and safer.
It’s mostly just meant to push you to turn-based combat slightly faster really and that’s it.
Now, for turn-combat, the main change is designed to target more the enemy threat level and their damage output. The enemy damage output is so low in vanilla that enemies can barely pierce through low delay HP shields the player can easily spam on repeat without several hits. Quite a decent portion of the player base thinks that these shields are OP when in fact it’s just that the enemy damage output is so low that they become OP by proxy since they’re easy to setup and outclass most enemy damage output that doesn’t consist of an s-craft.
As for their HP, the survivability of most enemies is fine tbh, especially since a few crucial damage quartz will be getting nerfed by this patch. 
The addition of a Hard mode is designed as a fail safe to make sure the game remains playable at all times despite lack of testing and the player can switch whenever they like.

	Shard Skills
Cover Shield I/II:
Capped activation chance at 60%
Reduced damage resistance from -50/75% to -35/50%
Under certain (easily met) conditions, cover shield could easily attain a 100% activation rate, which when combined with Van in the other corner and his 90% hate up aggro rate led to a very dumb combo where one character would have a constant 75% damage resistance with 3 casters backing them up with damage.

Executioner:
Increased power from 150% to 210%
A bit of personal preference, but this ability is hard to pull off in the mod and it feels good to execute.

Arc Feather:
Reduced activation chance from 40/80/100% to 30/45/60%

Arc Feather EX:
Reduced activation chance from 50/90/100% to 40/55/70%
Arc Feather is a fundamentally broken ability. Its activation conditions and capabilities are so good, versatile and powerful that this isn’t really a real nerf. It’s an ability that needs a real fundamental rework because of this and one I feel is outside the scope of this mod at this point in time.
This nerf exists more to acknowledge its existence and (hopefully) mildly reign it in rather than to be a satisfactory nerf of any kind to its capabilities imo.

Recover Guard:
Increased HP healed from Tear (500 power heal) to 25% flat

Rise Guard:
Increased CP regen from 10 to 20
These 2 changes above are just to match these 2 changes with another, different, general change to abilities.

All “Starter” abilities:
Boosted activation chance from 25/50% to 50/100%
This is to mostly make starter abilities actually consistent in any way.

Phantom Starter II:
Reduced stealth duration from 2 to 1 turn
Phantom Starter serves a very crucial purpose in this mod at stopping potential one-shots on opening moves before you can act, but having 2 turns of stealth at 100% chance at start of combat is super abusable so we’re removing that.

HP Charger:
Increased HP healed from 5/20% to 25/50%

EP Charger:
Increased EP healed from 5/40% to 20/40%
No, I don’t have an explanation for why these two are so weak.
Okay, after getting a bit sidetracked with smaller things we can move on to other changes.

Crisis Force:
Increased buff duration from 1 to 4 turns
Increased buff stacks from 1 to 3

	Abilities
All S-Crafts:
Increased CP cost from 100 to 125

All Grendel crafts:
Reduced damage by one rank
Grendel chase attack:
Reduced SGM (Stun Gauge Multiplier) from 20 to 12
Will this reign Grendel in correctly? No, not even close lol
When Van is Grendel, you basically gain an approximate extra 4 party members on the field off of the sheer damage Grendel singlehandedly does. While this helps, it’s not a clean fix to the problem at all and… neither should it totally be that way if I’m trying to keep things relatively vanilla. Grendel should feel badass when it happens, so we’re going to keep it badass even if this is still super unbalanced.
Grendel’s SCLM chase attack, on top of being usable off of ally crafts and arts, also dealt a gigantic 20 stun damage multiplier on an extremely weak attack which is… a lot to say the least and is identical to regular Van’s s-craft which is one of the best stun gauge abilities in the whole game to begin with.

Coin Bullet:
Reduced Hate Up activation chance from 90% to 70%

Howling Roar:
Reduced Hate Up activation chance from 90% to 70%
It’s still meant to be a reliable form of aggro mind you, just not nearly 100% foolproof like the vanilla version is.

All HP/CP Regen effects:
Increased effectiveness by 10%/10
HP and CP regen is so bad in Kuro 1 that it’s almost comical. This won’t make either of the effects really insane, it’ll just make them notable rather than just a foot note in the game in all cases that it exists since 10% HP regen is only good… not even in vanilla actually lol

Jibreel Guard:
Removed HP Shield (2000)
Added Attack Guard (1)
Increased CP cost from 70 to 90
This change is being implemented:
1.	As a safety net against “big attack too stronk” in the mod that could happen due to the highe enemy damage bonus.
2.	To make this ability not be a buggy mess as this is clearly what they intended to do originally but then had a rule of “no guards” and changed it… and then reverted none of its original properties that were originally meant to balance it.
To put into perspective how bad Jibreel Guard is, let’s look at this table:
Property	Jibreel Guard	Cobalt Curtain
Delay			135			65
Shield Amount	2000		2000
Cost			70			30
Radius			Area (3)	Area (6) (Set)
Effect			10% HP Regen (4 turns)	PDF/MDF Up (S) (3 turns)
Yeah, Jibreel Guard loses by a landslide in delay, cost and radius size relative to Cobalt Curtain and is arguably equal or worse in both other categories.
The way the ability is balanced only makes sense if they originally intended to add a guard effect to the ability.

Dynast's Honor:
Increased HP scaling from max 100% to max 150%
Reduced delay from 65 to 35
Increased duration from 3 to 4 turns
Now it might actually be usable.

Obsidian Ray:
Reduced delay inflicted from 12 to 6
This amount of delay is beyond ridiculous.

Chrono Drive:
Increased EP cost from 20 to 50
Buff stacks from 3 to 2

Forte/Crest:
Increased buff duration from 3 to 4 turns
Reduced radius to single target

La Forte/La Crest/Earth Guard/Aegis ShieldChrono Drive/Ideal Force/Zodiac Sign/Crescent Eye:
Made radius set
La Forte/La Crest/Ideal Force:
Reduced buff stacks from 2 to 1

Mirage Raid:
Reduced stealth duration to 1 turn
Stealth loops are dumb, this move is still good and cheap anyways.

All S-Crafts:
Reduced radius size by 25%
While this mod isn’t going to attempt to fix all the double s-craft spam shenanigans, this mod is against the player just spamming out large radiuses against packs of small enemies with low health who normally rely on being spread out to survive they may encounter.
Quartz

Impede:
Increased impede chance from 15/30/45% to 40/55/70%
Removed delay effect
The delay effect on this thing allows for boss stunlocks when stacked hard enough and… I’m just done with balancing delay at this point lol
At this point I don’t care that this is a bad nerf I’m just going to throw this in the garbage.
And now, some damage bonus changes to quartz in a lightning round with little to no explanation:

Wolf Glyph:
50%->40%
Agnagarn:
50%->40%
Haze Rune:
100%->50%
Talos:
50%->60%

	Hollow Cores
Bathym:
Removed “Extend duration of stun on enemies when attacking” effect
Increased Bonus damage against stunned enemies from +30/32/34/36/40% to +45/48/51/54/60%
Bathym instantly stunlocks any stunned opponent as long as you keep doing SCLM links. I’m not going to be rebalancing most of the OP Hollow Cores but this one really needs it. 

Mare (Law):
Increased CP recovery after action effect by 10

Aim:
Increased arts effect range bonus from +1 to +2
Doubled HP recovery bonus
What really irks me about Aim is that it only needs better numbers to be a good HC.

Sallos:
Increased HP recovery by 25% (flat)

	Buffs/debuffs
Buffs and debuffs in Kuro are janky, to the point that even if it is optional for a mod like this, I’m going to bother reworking them for this mod and make them at least useful from the player’s perspective.
Buffs are (mostly) useless in Kuro 1 because they just do so little and have such a low effect time. While I won’t be buffing the effect time of the buffs I will be buffing the effectiveness of many of them (the only valuable buff you might want to go out of your way to use in vanilla is Chrono Drive)
Do note that the following changes also apply to enemies which can be… nasty at times.

ATK/MAT Up:
Increased effectiveness from +10/20/30% to +40/60/80%

PDF/MDF Down:
Increased effectiveness from +10/20/30% to +29/37/45%

ATK/PDF/MAT/MDF Down:
Increased effectiveness from -10/20/30% to -17/29/37%
Note: the weird numbers are to make them match buffs mostly

Quick:
Increased delay reduction from -10/20/30% to -13/23/31%

Slow:
Increased delay increase from +10/20/30% to +15/30/45%

STR/ATS/SPD Up:
Increased effectiveness from +10/20/30% to +15/30/45%

DEF/ADF Up:
Increased effectiveness from +10/20/30% to +25/50/75%

MOV Up:
Increased effectiveness from +1/2/3/4 to +2/3/4/5

STR/ATS/SPD Down:
Effectiveness from -15/30/45% to -13/23/31%

DEF/ADF Down:
Effectiveness from -15/30/45% to -20/33/43%

MOV Down:
Effectiveness from -1/2/3/5 to -2/3/4/5

Status resistance Up:
Increased effect power from 50% to 25%

Status resistance down:
Increased effect power from 150% to 200%

Critical Up:
Increased critical rate bonus from +10/20/30/40% to +25/50/75/100%

	General
Halved all slot unlock costs
This is more a personal preference thing but grinding sucks and not having slots open limits options which sucks and opening slots in kuro 1 is expensive af.

	Enemies
Reduced HP/STR of first Grendel boss fight
This is the only enemy change in the whole mod (I’m serious when I say we’re releasing this with basically no testing and made in like 15 hours of dev time lol). The reason this fight is getting nerfed is because it should be a Grendel stomp fest for one, and for two this fight basically gives you no options so it has a chance to softlock you if I make too many modifications. This fight was tested… for a previous version of the mod where the HP multiplier for nightmare wasn’t implemented.
