Periapt of Proof against Poison: immunity to disease?

[Capt Massacre]

Version of Game: ToB

Mods Installed: Dungeon be gone; fixpack4; tweakpack5

Description of Problem:

 

Periapt of Proof against Poison seems to grant immunity to some diseases.

 

When the hero equipped with this periapt is hit by a Greater Lacedon or a Sea Zombie Lord, and fails his ST vs Poison, he's hurt every second like normal, but takes no damage, and a text says

Greater Lacedon: 'Hero' was immune to my damage.

 

It's strange, because when you don't have the periapt, the disease icon appears, and it's cured by the spell Cure Disease.

[CamDawg]

Both of those creatures cause the 'Disease' opcode. Something new for the IESDP--disease apparently causes damage of type 'poison' because the Periapt protects against the poison opcode and reduces poison damage.

 

A little background first. There are two ways to cause poison damage--the poison opcode, which distributes damage over time is used in items like the Serpent Staff and spells like Dolorous Decay. By default, just about every item that is described as providing protection from poison blocks this type of damage by blocking this opcode.

 

The second method is directly dealing damage of the poison type. Items such as Flail of Ages, Wyvern's Tail, and the Dragon's Breath halberd use his method. BioWare provided sporadic protection against this damage, such that some items would block poison but not direct poison damage (if you follow so far). The Periapt was one such item.

 

Adding protection from poison-type damage was a no-brainer. We did not know at the time that the disease opcode also causes damage of type poison. In other words, we now have another case of choosing which bug is worse--items that are supposed to grant poison immunity allowing poison damage through, or items that grant immunity to poison also providing some protection against disease.

 

I'm sure we'll have some long, vehement discussion, in which whatever decision is reached will be determined to be Yet Another Tweak.

[Nythrun]

I'm fleeing this thread before the long vehement discussion. Torquemada has my number already.

 

Option Three: Change stuff that inflicts poison damage through opcode 0x0c to instead use one second duration poison state effects?

[Guest erik]

Changing "poison type damage items & spells" to use the poison opcode, and remove the poison damage immunity from items not listed as protecting from disease, would seem to be the obvious fix. But I guess there are downsides?

[Nythrun]

Save for half damage can be emulated by forking two poison state effects with a save-or-get-immunity-to-this-spell effect. I've done a lot of this, for evasion as well as not having two chunks of damage on a save for one half spell; it works okay. It might not even be necessary if poison stacks like the other persistent states - I think it does.

 

10% chance of 2d12 poison damage (e.g.) could only be approximated this way - of course, bgmain already can't handle staggered probabilities without disgusting egregious fudgery, so maybe that's less unacceptable.

 

It's still tweakish, and Option Three smells worse the more time it sticks around.

 

"What? No, I'm sorry, I can't come over to look at your "instruments" Friday. I told you, Reverend, I have to wash the dog...."

[devSin]

Nope. If we're preventing disease, it all has to go. Poison damage has a place in the game, and I'm opposed to changing it just to add in cheats that BioWare didn't really appear to intend.

 

Poison damage doesn't really fit any umbrella of poison (which is a persistent contact/inject/ingest "ouch, it still hurts!") in any sense of the word, so I don't think we're really losing anything.

[Nythrun]

Item descriptions in that case pose the usual stumpy questions. When fighting a Poison Mist, why does the Ring of Antivenom prevent both kinds of poison and the Periapt of Proof Against Poison not? If the devs really intended some Whitmanesque wassail among textual contradictions that's super, but I'm not convinced it's all cheatsy to suggest otherwise.

 

Since disease damage through opcode 0x0c is properly irresistible, there's not a whole lot of other options.

 

Nice find on the disease state's damage type though

[CamDawg]

It looks like option 3 may be feasible. I changed Wyvern's Tail to use the poison opcode instead of damage (poison). Instead of permanent, 5 points of poison damage, it did 5 poison damage/second for 1 second (instant/limited). The only difference I can spot in game is that the text window changed from

 

Minsc did 21 damage to Foo
Minsc did 5 damage to Foo

 

to

 

Minsc did 21 damage to Foo
Foo - Poison
Minsc did 5 damage to Foo

[CamDawg]

Looks like Damage (Poison) --> Poison is feasible, with two sticking points:

• Snares. At certain levels they do poison damage over time, but delayed starting one round after the initial missile damage. I can't see a way to do a clean conversion here without shifting out the poison opcodes to a new spell.
  
• Prismatic Spray. The green ray poisons; on a successful save it does 20 damage and kills on a failed save. IESDP and NI disagree on the meaning of the damage field; NI says 100 damage with a save for half damage and IESDP says to use the damage field as a percentage, i.e. 100% of the target's HP total applied as poison damage (kills). I NI is correct, we've got a different bug to fix here anyway. The IESDP is more than likely correct so we've got two options: change to a slay/kill opcode (bad) or set to some ridiculous poison damage total (not quite as bad).
  

The usual cajoling for thoughts and opinions.

[devSin]

Not my NI. IESDP should have incorporated my research by now, and my research was done so I could correct the NI labels. Type 2 is "reduce to % max HP" and Type 3 is "damage % of max HP" (i.e., 100 Type 3 is "do max HP damage").

 

I'm totally against this in any case, but I'm not going to argue.

[Nythrun]

Whatever is done with the snares, shifting over to the poison state would prevent multiple snares' damage from stacking when the damage is applied simultaniously and different damage amounts are rolled - I don't see a way out of that, whether delayed duration .effs or a new spell is used.

 

As unsatisfactory as it is, amending descriptions

"Immunity to Poison" -> "Immunity to Some Poisons"

and

"Immunity to Poison" -> "Immunity to Poison and Disease"

appears to be the only lossless option.

[Caedwyr]

I'd change the first

"Immunity to Poison" -> "Immunity to Some Poisons"

 

to

"Immunity to Poison" -> "Immunity to Common Poisons"

 

Just for that more roleplayingish feel.

[CamDawg]

Immunity to poison opcodes will no longer set reduced damage to poison opcodes, so disease should not longer be arbitrarily prevented.

 

Per Nythrun and Caedwyr's suggestion, these descriptions have been updated n the GTU:

• Periapt of Proof Against Poison
  
• Protection from Poison scroll
  
• Albruin Bastard Sword +1
  

Ring of Anti-Venom, Thieves' Hood, and the Ring of Gaxx all reduce poison damage to zero, giving de facto protection against disease. Gaxx explicitly mentions this and also prevents secondary disease effects (such as portrait icons, display strings, etc.). Should we add the full disease immunity suite to the Ring of Anti-Venom and Thieves' Hood as well?

[devSin]

Possibly, but I don't think it's necessary (who's to say that "disease" isn't just the toxic flu?); it also doesn't seem appropriate to the items.

 

I don't favor adding disease text otherwise, though -- if you get hit by Contagion, you'll still be in for the real shit, "Immunity to Poison and Disease" or no!

[Nythrun]

In the case of Gaxx, "real shit" means colorglow pulse, so I guess we'd best be adding specific spell immunity so you can be safe from the single Roenall guard who casts it.

 

For ToB items, it's tempting to fall back on the usual assumption: slop.