SCS balance discussion

[DavidW]

Also I noticed that although Basillus was hit 4 times while casting Flame Strike (3 melee and 1 from Magic Missile), his casting was not interrupted.

 

Vanilla-game issue, hitting NPC spellcasters (especially clerics) doesn't reliably disrupt them. (I actually wouldn't be surprised if this is a deliberate cheat by the game designers to make it viable for clerics to get spells off.)

 

Although being overall happy with and grateful for SCS implementations, would remark, that I also experience much more frequent - if not exceptional - occurences of uninterruptable NPC spellcastings with this fine Mod.

 

In that case, I'm doing it by magic - there's nothing in SCS to do this (actually, I think there's about two specific exceptions, where spell interruption would break a script - usually teleportation sequences).

 

If you're seeing it more with SCS, I'd guess it's just because you see more spellcasting, period. But since it's some glitch of the engine that makes it happen, for all I know it's correlated with script length or some other weirdness.

 

@Saros: I'm not disputing the general principle of not over-using high levels. But I don't really see the significance of the TOTSC cap. Also, iirc every time SCS raises someone's level it's in a separate component and flagged fairly clearly in the readme. So if you want to enforce the TOTSC cap yourself, you can do so just by choice of components.

[Guest Krazy]

Been testing with Spell Thrust, it does indeed work at removing Globe, but as I suspected trying to hit an enemy mage with it is too reliant on luck.

 

For one, they will almost certainly be hasted and they use hit and run tactics - cast and dash or cast and attack. They are well away from where I point the spell by the time the casting is finished in reference to the "wait for them to start casting and then try" advice suggested earlier. Also if I get my mage close enough to be able to cast Spell Thrust they usually get a mouthful of melf's minute meteors for their efforts.

 

They seem highly efficient at dispelling before anyone says put protections on first AND they seem to have an undeserved infallible sixth sense about stealthed and invisible characters.

 

Oh and giant spiders, their web ability is too powerful especially when they come in groups of three or more. You have to be extremely lucky not to die if 3 giant spiders catch you simultaneously in their web. I think they need a toned done custom version of this spell - more like entangle that gives you a chance to fight back - it seems stupid to me a person that can lift insane weights can't break the strands of a web.

[DavidW]

Oh and giant spiders, their web ability is too powerful especially when they come in groups of three or more. You have to be extremely lucky not to die if 3 giant spiders catch you simultaneously in their web. I think they need a toned done custom version of this spell - more like entangle that gives you a chance to fight back - it seems stupid to me a person that can lift insane weights can't break the strands of a web.

 

With this component, I think my advice is just uninstall it if it doesn't suit. Some people like it, some don't. If you do want to play with it, then scattering and potions are useful. It's survivable (I've done it).

 

As for Spell Thrust, it's going to depend on the duration of the spell they cast. Spell Thrust has casting time 3, so you can get them while they're casting if they're casting a high enough level spell. And if they are indeed casting, they can't also hit you with Melf.

[Saros]

The Giant spiders are indeed tough for a party I'd guess. Even one Web is very powerful, let alone five. Only those wearing Free Action Ring and Sword may hope to survive and kill the spiders. However, for a solo or 2-person party, the improvement of Giant spiders is useless: since these both characters can be at will protected via permanent Free Action. I am currently having no trouble at all with spiders in my solo no-reload SCS run.

 

You may easily make a third person in the party immune to Webs, by stacking protective items. Even better if that character is a shorty with bonus saving throws vs spells.

 

I suggest keeping the rest of your party Invisible and out of Spider fights. This is doable. Even in between area travel. Pretty annoying, but doable.

 

Don't rely on items which grant great AC or AC modifier vs Piercing attacks to protect your characters when webbed. Webbed characters are attacked with great additional bonuses.

 

As for Spell Thrust...indeed, the game changes favour enemy spellcasters more. Example: if a PC casts Remove Magic, targeting an Improved Invisible enemy, the spell takes effect on the terrain point where was the Improved Invisible enemy at the start of casting (i.e. if the enemy walks away sufficiently or casts Dimension Door, the spell will not affect him at all). If an enemy targets Improved Invisible character with Remove Magic, the Remove Magic always takes effect upon the character himself, no matter of his position (even if the character runs half a screen in some direction). I guess it's the same with Spell Thrust.

 

As for enemies with 'sixth sense', in my run they usually very late detect the presence of PC around them - PC usually has to make some action, like casting a spell invisible or activating an item, for enemies to guess his presence and start to cast Detect Illusion. However, there are the spell Non-Detection, as well as the Cloak of Non-Detection, which can be of help in these cases. Walking quickly out of the area of effect of the 'Detect Invisbility' spell also works fine.

 

My advice against mages - I see you play with a party. Hope you have 2 thieves in it (multi or dual-class of course, who needs crap). Have one thief raise his Detect Illusion skill to 100, give him Cloak of Non-Detection and the Ring of Invisibility (or Invisibility potions), keep him Invisible with spells as well, and he alone may serve as a great scout, mage-provoker, and illusion-dispeller. Your main problems aren't the Minor Globes - it's the enemy Improved Invisibility and Mirror Image. Then you may calmly target the mage with Spell Thrust, if you want.

[Guest Guest]

Hey, just wanted to thank you for all you've done to improve the fun in this game.

Actually, giant spiders are not a problem if you've got a cleric in your party.

Just use Command (lvl 1 Cleric spell) as soon as you see one and focus it, it'll die in less than a round.

 

On the other hand, I've got ONE thing that i really think is unbalanced.

Sometimes, when travelling in Cloakwood forest, you will encounter 3 giant spiders and 2 wyverns.

In a non-improved spiders game, it's not really dangerous... but with SCS, 3xWeb + 2xWyverns when your party is level 5-6, and doesn't have access to Free Action (except maybe one or two items) = a forced reload, unless you quaff potions.

Problem is, unless i'm mistaken, there's a total three potions of free action untill you've got access to Baldur's Gate... and you need at least one to clear the spider's den.

 

Is there any way you can change this ?

[DavidW]

Hey, just wanted to thank you for all you've done to improve the fun in this game.

Actually, giant spiders are not a problem if you've got a cleric in your party.

Just use Command (lvl 1 Cleric spell) as soon as you see one and focus it, it'll die in less than a round.

 

On the other hand, I've got ONE thing that i really think is unbalanced.

Sometimes, when travelling in Cloakwood forest, you will encounter 3 giant spiders and 2 wyverns.

In a non-improved spiders game, it's not really dangerous... but with SCS, 3xWeb + 2xWyverns when your party is level 5-6, and doesn't have access to Free Action (except maybe one or two items) = a forced reload, unless you quaff potions.

Problem is, unless i'm mistaken, there's a total three potions of free action untill you've got access to Baldur's Gate... and you need at least one to clear the spider's den.

 

Is there any way you can change this ?

 

I'll consider it. I've survived that encounter, though - I agree it's pretty horrible until you get Spider's Bane. Running away often works out okay. Probably using one potion of free action per time is a good idea if you can afford it.

[Guest Guest]

I'll consider it. I've survived that encounter, though - I agree it's pretty horrible until you get Spider's Bane. Running away often works out okay. Probably using one potion of free action per time is a good idea if you can afford it.

Problem is that the fight starts like this :

Your party is in the center, the spiders are around you. As soon as the fight starts (I use the "pause when you see ennemy" option) after 3 seconds (approx 1 round) the three spiders will cast web on your party... even at high level i had some trouble fighting this (unless my priest had the ring of free action to free the other members, or got lucky on the save rolls - 3 rolls per round is a high chance of failure).

I found no way of escaping the stockpiled webs in this encounter (While i do agree that you just need to spread out your troops, it's not a viable option here - only potions can reliably save your ass if you don't want to have 4+ dead companions and a lot of items left on the field when you fled.

 

Another thing that gets on my nerves sometimes, is the fact that i can't really dispell anything that gets thrown at me untill the end of BG1 (When my caracters are lvl 8-9). Since there's no way to protect / remove chaos / sleep spells beside dispelling, and the fact that ennemies are miuch higher level than my PC (Giving dispell magic less than 30% chance to remove buffs/debuffs cast by the ennemies) that makes for some really troublesome fights sometimes... now all i do is to summon 4-5 skelettons to keep the ennemy mages amused (Seems like they still try to confuse them, even if they're immune to these effects - might be a bug from your AI there -, giving me some time to breathe while i deal with the melee ennemies).

 

Oh, and there seems to be a bug with the lvl 3 remove illusions mage spell : It can be targetted, but its range seems to be 0 (Can only cast it on myself) making it troublesome to use in a fight situation.

Not sure if you mod modifies this spell, but since i know you do modify some of the debuffing spells to give them a small AoE, i figured it could be a bug in your modification scripts

 

Oh, and last thing, there seems to be a problem with the spells description updates (French translated) :

The spells descriptions reads like this

<Original spell description>

<Acid Arrow Description, or something like this..>

<Additional AoE SCS description>

 

Not sure if it's also a problem due to your mod, but i didn't install any other mod that modifies spells.

Mabe it's caused by the component that sets the missile damage of Acid/Frost/Fire arrows to the values in ToB instead of the original values of BG1.

 

Got, by install order,

Ascension

BG2Fixpack

BGT

BGTTweaks

BG2Tweaks

Oversight

UB1

UB2

SCSI

SCSII (French version, to be uploaded here, from the french translation website la couronne de cuivre, that i'm sure you're aware of)

1PP

Widescreen

 

Sorry for the wall of text

[Saros]

I think that these things you stated cannot be called 'unbalanced' - your characters are way under-leveled if you're hitting xp cap at the end of BG1. Play solo a bit, assemble your party when your PC hits 50-60 k xp (all will come with 32 000 initial xp). I think that since SCS is pretty challenging, your party needs to assemble higher levels sooner. Another tip: if you play on Insane difficulty, you will have much more tougher random monster spawns or ambushes and thus level up quickly.

 

Another option is Durlag's tower, catacombs level 1 - not that tough, besides Phase spiders (who can be very annoying), and here your spellcasters can periodically destroy groups of Battle Horrors, earning you a lot of xp.

 

Concerning Webbing Giant spiders: There IS an alternative other than consuming potions of Free Action, in fact there are some alternatives:

 

Equip a shorty in your party (bonus save vs spells) - Montaron, Qualye or Tiax - with Claw of Kazgaroth, a protective item +1, Helmet of Defense, and let him use Horn of Kazgaroth. This way, that particular character will always save vs multiple webs (unless too low on levels).

 

If you don't like that one (and I don't blame you, the Claw makes your character susceptible to poisoning), then use your Cleric with Dispel Magic. I doubt that this will work for a long time, but provided that all enemy webs make their check in a very short interval (since they're shot and take effect almost simultaneously), there would be sufficient time for your un-webbed characters to quickly escape the webbed area.

 

Use Wand of Fear or Wand of Sleep with your Free action character. As far as I remember, Giant Spiders can be put to sleep. If they cannot, then Fear should do the trick. Moreover, ALL of your character can use wands of Sleep&Fear in the start of battle (right before Web shooting). When the spiders stop running in fear, their webs will be gone as well. This surely seems like a big waste of resources, but fortunately in BG1 money are no problem.

 

Travel in between Cloakwood areas is 8-16 hours max. Use Invisibility on all characters to travel undisturbed (or alternatively, to lure the spiders to fight on your terms).

 

Concerning enemy spellcaster levels and your party spellcaster levels, indeed even when capped, your casters will be able to dispel few effects. But don't be afraid. Vs enemy Sleep, simply apply the 'solo level-up then assemble party' tactic. This way, your characters will come at minimum levels 5/5 or 6, and thus be immune to Sleep and Cloudkill's instankill effect (yes, some unique enemies use this spell as well). Against enemy Chaos, use Chaotic Commands, but since I doubt that you'll have that many Chaotic Commands, either split your party, or use extensively the Greenstone Amulet (sell/buy for recharging).

 

Yes, enemy mages tend to waste spells like Chaos or Hold Person on monsters who are immune to the effect (skeletons), but that's only if they cannot see a legal target for their spells. Enemies IMHO act smartly enough - for example, from a player's perspective in a similar situation, an enemy mage/cleric can be invisible/sanctuaried close to the skeletons, and thus Chaos/Hold person might have some effect after all.

 

As for Detect Illusions - the spell works fine. There is the fact that, when an enemy triggers a sequencer with Invisibility in it, that same enemy usually runs as far away as he/she can from your party. Again - nice AI, since any player would suggest that after he hides in front of the enemy, that enemy's most likely next move is to cast a detection spell of some sort. Detect Invisibility works better in these cases, first because it's only a 2nd level spell, and second, because it has shorter casting time than Detect Illusions or the clerical Invisibility Purge.

 

There can be applied various monster strategies to lure enemy spellcasters to exaust their most precious spells (and not throw them against the party). For example, all except the mightiest spellcasters have and use 1 Remove/Dispel magic only, and they will gladly target a single Hasted summoned monster with it.

[Guest Guest]

Unfortunatly

1 - I'm not playing on insane, but on "core".

2 - I think DavidW intended his mod to improve the feeling of immersion by having your ennemies beeing smart about their spell selection and targeting, hence one of the reasons why i think that ennemy mages should not try to cast hold / chaos and the like at skelettons.

3 - I do think that levelling solo and then recruiting your party is a bit cheesy, breaking the "immersion factor" that was one of the main point of this mod.

4 - The only fight with spiders i think is imbalanced is 3xSpiders + 2xWyverns.

Anything else is fine.

5 - You misunderstood what i said about detect illusion.

Detect illusion lets you choose a target. BUT the range of the spell (not the radius) seems to be 0, effectively making it so that you HAVE to move the character that will cast detect illusion near your ennemies. Maybe it's intended for the spell to be a "no target spell", kinda like True Seeing, in this case, why can we try to target the spell in the first place ?

 

Sure, you can always use clever tricks to improve your chance at survival, but from my own experience, one of the main objective of the mod is to increase difficulty by having smart oponents. Not by forcing you to get 60k xp, or farm Durlag Tower level 1.

 

Kinda like you can also use a chain containgency with project image or wait for your ennemies protections to fade before engaging.. that's not that fun, i would say.

 

This mod is great because you have to use potions to successfully pass some of the encounters, making the game something else than "kill the guy with the robe using arrows, and then let's just whack at the fighters".

 

See what I mean ?

[Guest Guest]

Honestly, i do think that spiders should be improved by having (all spiders, starting with Giant Spiders up to Phasing / Sword Spider) a single target web spell that can be cast every other round or so and that lasts 2-3 rounds (maybe depending on ennemy strengh ? making casters the evident target... might be too complicated to implement).

They would obviously cast it only on characters that are not immune to it.

 

That would make it more intersting, don't you think ?

I believe the spider you can summon using a figurine in BG2 has a spell that looks like this (except the stregth part), so no need to implement a whole new spell.

 

Just trying to give some advices

[DavidW]

Quick thoughts:

 

1) Of course if you want to solo or level-farm SCS, you're welcome to. But you shouldn't need to. It's playable (on core difficulty at any rate) without doing either

2) Saros is right that there might be reasons to cast Chaos/Hold Person on undead. Usually there won't be, though - and it's unintended behaviour in any case. (SCS is relatively vulnerable to summoned undead, because it's not a tactic I ever use (it struck me as Evil and I always play Good parties) and so I'd underestimated how much other people use it and how much attention I should pay to it.)

3) I might code the single-target web as an option. But I'm reluctant to remove the multi-target web - I at least have fun playing against it, and the "don't install if you don't want to" option remains.

4) I continue to have some sympathy for objections to the 3 spiders + 2 wyverns encounter.

[Guest Guest]

3) I might code the single-target web as an option. But I'm reluctant to remove the multi-target web - I at least have fun playing against it, and the "don't install if you don't want to" option remains.

I do agree, but the way i see a "good" single target web beeing intersting (more intersting that, say, regular web by Giant spiders, would be by giving all spiders (Giant and higher level) a few insta-cast single target web that lasts for 2-3 rounds.

Main problem at the moment is that if there's no Giant Spider in a group of spiders, you can still consider them freekill. If there's giant spiders, you may have trouble if a few situations.

 

The advantage of the single target web is also that it makes phasing spiders much more dangerous... if there's one of your characters that's a bit far away from the group, they'll directly teleport upon it, web it for 3 rounds and start whacking at it.

With something like 3/4xsingle target web per day, that would make higher level spiders a fight that's worth planning for.

Maybe even give the single target web a save penality that depends on their level.

 

I my eyes (but i do understand that it's quite a bit of work for you to do, so i can't blame you ), it's a better way to improve all spiders while leaving the game intersting.. you can even give some of the high level spiders both a single target web and a regular web spell.

 

Thanks for your answers and putting up with my crap ( ) , that's really nice

[Saros]

I have a couple of issues/suggestions:

 

Durlag's tower. All enemies on level 1 may be eliminated by luring them towards Fireball traps. In this area, there are several Fireball, Lightning, Cloudkill and other traps which are not disarmed by triggering them. Leading even the most dangerous enemies found on this floor (Skeleton Warriors, massive groups of Phase spiders, final guardians) with a fire-protected and invisible character ensures easy victory. Maybe something can be done so that these traps are 'disarmed' the usual way (walking over them once)?

 

Similar tactic may be applied on level 2, although to a little more limited degree. And on level 3 as well, with the permanent central room fireball.

 

Battle vs various mages: enemy mages who possess (and are supposed to drop) scrolls of Fireball or Lightning tend to use them in combat. Kinda frustrating - after battling a powerful mage, there is almost no reward for the party (after he reads the scrolls).

 

Aside from that, I'd say that I liked very much the improvements in Ulcaster (Icharud and the Wolf guardian), and also the improved mages in Gullykin/Firewine bridge. Especially the wolf was a big surprise, with many hit points, summoning howl and Greater malison + Horror + paralyzing melee attack(I guess that vs a party this would be devastating).

[Guest Guest]

I discovered something with the ease of use AI, not sure if it's intended.

If you use the "B" button to buff your whole groupe with Fire Protection (Been using a lot of AoE damage lately in dangerous fights), you have ~4 seconds after buffing to cast all of your other spells instantly.

Now i use this to buff my whole party quite fast before a fight.

 

I didn't try to abuse it, but can't someone use this feature to also cast damage spells ?

 

Oh, and i absolutely LOVE the AI Great job there.. there's only one thing that gets on my nerves, when your caster runs out of Melf Missiles, they'll try to punch your ennemies bare-handed.

[melkor_morgoth75]

The 3 Spiders + 2 Wyvern is a random, possible encounter so i don't think it's a big deal, but i agree it's a tough fight (impossible in some cases).

 

I'd like to have some free time to create a mod improving/changing the random encounters between areas ... it would change that definitely ;-)

 

mm75