PnP Greater Malison

[Dakk]

I'd prefer PnP/IWD/IWDII/BG1 Malison over BG2 Malison even without SR save penalties

That's the clincher for me.

 

OT: Good to see you signed up amanasleep, welcome. More voices in the debate are almost always a good thing!

[Ardanis]

the power balance of the whole game takes a more caster-friendly shift.

I find it appealing. In vanilla no caster was a real match to WWing Hardened Storm Giant strong tank, cutting through the lines like they were nothing.

[Guest paul]

Does GM bypass MR in vanilla ?

[amanasleep]

I'd prefer PnP/IWD/IWDII/BG1 Malison over BG2 Malison even without SR save penalties

That's the clincher for me.

 

OT: Good to see you signed up amanasleep, welcome. More voices in the debate are almost always a good thing!

 

Thanks! Probably should have done it earlier.

 

To be clear: I am not opposed to nerfing or rebalancing Malison necessarily. Clearly it is within the purview of SR to make such changes. Rather I take issue with the idea that vanilla Malison is so obviously OP that it justifies rebalancing the entire save environment. The result of SR currently is that save penalties are overall worse than they were before, casters are more powerful, and item/ability on hit effects are less powerful. This is purely a matter of taste.

 

Ghasts are normal creatures, not uber powerful SR additions (BG developers planned to add them to 3rd level Animate Dead spell), Vorpal Swords and Celestial Fury are vanilla weapons which become brokenly overpowered with -4 additional penalty, and I may give you tons of additional examples which have nothing to do with SR:

- fighter's Power Attack + GM = stun for 2 rounds on each hit with a -8 penalty;

- monk's stunning blow + GM = stun for 1 rounds on each hit with a -4 penalty and 4.5 attacks per round;

- monk's Quivering Palm + GM = on hit 100% chance target must save at -4 or die;

- vanilla's Spook + GM = target must save at -10 penalty or be disabled; (with SR the total is -6)

- vanilla's Web + GM = each round everyone within 30 feet must save at -6 or be paralyzed; (with SR the total is -3)

- more?

 

Summoned creatures with powerful on-hit abilities are difficult to balance--I'll take your word for it that the designers intended to include them but didn't (was it because they were too powerful?). In any event the designer's choice not to include Ghasts in the game is just as valid as their choice to buff GM. As has been stated many times: BG != PnP.

 

Silver Sword and Celestial Fury are already very powerful, but do not become significantly more powerful with an extra -4 to saves than they do with SR's -2. This is a very slight extra chance (10%) per hit that a particular target is affected. In any event they are designed to be uber already, and are so uber that I design entire party builds around getting them as early as possible.

 

Keep in mind that all on-hit effects are dependant upon actually hitting the target--PfMW means that Malison is not helping.

 

Power Attack and other HLA's are HLA's. Enemies in ToB are either immune to stun or would get stunned by this anyway. Monk Stun is balanced by requiring a monk to deliver, and affects a single combat round per use. Quivering Palm is even more limited: 1 attack per day and must hit or be wasted. Spook and Web are OP in vanilla. Malison intensifies this, but the problem is Spook and Web.

 

Here's the deal:

 

GM at -2 in vanilla would make me rarely memorize it. The benefit isn't good enough to counter II save bonus, which makes some enemies auto-save.

GM at -2 in SR I would memorize even less: The SR spells are so powerful without it that it's a waste. In general I am opposed to instituting save penalties strictly according to spell level. Higher level spells already have more powerful effects--they should not also automatically have tougher saves. Some should, some shouldn't.

 

I agree that current GM in vanilla helps out on-hit effects a bit too much. The solution is to reduce GM duration (I suggest 3 rounds, enough for a few rounds of combat or several spells). I have not heard a single good argument why this would be a bad fix.

[Icendoan]

the power balance of the whole game takes a more caster-friendly shift.

I find it appealing. In vanilla no caster was a real match to WWing Hardened Storm Giant strong tank, cutting through the lines like they were nothing.

 

Nonsense! You use PfMW/Stoneskin (you'll have to refresh pretty much constantly) and a Fireshield and he kills himself!

 

EDIT: Hardiness is only Physical Damage and not Elemental, right?

 

Icen

[Aranthys]

the power balance of the whole game takes a more caster-friendly shift.

I find it appealing. In vanilla no caster was a real match to WWing Hardened Storm Giant strong tank, cutting through the lines like they were nothing.

Actually, if you use SCSII, casters are way more dangerous than melee ennemies, even with vanilla spells..

[Ardanis]

Who said I was dueling a fighter against a caster? I was comparing the usefulness of an offensive caster to that of a fighter, both in the party. Without enemies failing their saves at least once in a while, many vanilla spells are useless, to the point of wizards being useless in offense. Unlike fighters.

 

PS unless you consider constantly dumping AoE and MMs/Arrows to be an interesting tactic.

[Aranthys]

Who said I was dueling a fighter against a caster? I was comparing the usefulness of an offensive caster to that of a fighter, both in the party. Without enemies failing their saves at least once in a while, many vanilla spells are useless, to the point of wizards being useless in offense. Unlike fighters.

 

PS unless you consider dumping massively damaging AoE an interesting tactic.

Well they don't serve the same purpose actually.

 

Wizards are supporting characters :

They buff the party

They deal great AoE / good single target damage

They debuff the enemies

 

With SCS, my mages are memorizing a ton of different spells, even without SR.

 

Melee are single target damagers & tanks. I've never looked at wizards as good single target damage dealer, due to one reason : there's a finite number of spells you can memorize & cast each day.

 

Edit.: And there's a lot of them that are dedicated to protecting yourself / dispelling the enemy protections / boosting the party.

[Demivrgvs]

Summoned creatures with powerful on-hit abilities are difficult to balance--I'll take your word for it that the designers intended to include them but didn't (was it because they were too powerful?).

I don't know, Animate Dead was supposed to cast ghasts at higher levels but then they put skeletons on the very ghastsu.cre resource, I suppose they were just "lazy" or not enough interested or they simply didn't have the time to work on everything as they "should/would", but in keep in mind they had to release BG (we're modding it for 10 years and we still haven't finished polishing it!), and they did it for work not as hobby! You can easily notice unfinished quests, error, bugs, and the like, as well as noticeable balance issues that may be due to time constrains.

 

Silver Sword and Celestial Fury are already very powerful, but do not become significantly more powerful with an extra -4 to saves than they do with SR's -2. This is a very slight extra chance (10%) per hit that a particular target is affected. In any event they are designed to be uber already, and are so uber that I design entire party builds around getting them as early as possible.

Ehmm, why a 10% extra chance isn't significant, and 10% less is an intolerable nerf? Anyway, those weapons weren't "designed to be uber" they were "badly designed", and some of them are utterly cheesy (Carsomyr and Staff of the Magi for example are simply ridiculous in vanilla). The vey fact that many players build parties arounds those few weapons is a clear sign of bad design imo, but this is not the appropriate topic to talk about uber weapons.

 

P.S I actually think that one of the main reasons DavidW can't have mages rely on combat defences without PfMW is exactly this, because for example against Carsomyr MI+Stonekin+II+2x Fireshields+"whatever you like" are all gone in a single hit without PfMW. Cool eh? Very great design!!

 

Keep in mind that all on-hit effects are dependant upon actually hitting the target--PfMW means that Malison is not helping.

Yeah, but I also keep in mind that 80% of my enemies won't have PfMW, and mages can be breached.

 

I agree that current GM in vanilla helps out on-hit effects a bit too much. The solution is to reduce GM duration (I suggest 3 rounds, enough for a few rounds of combat or several spells). I have not heard a single good argument why this would be a bad fix.

Actually I've commented it: I don't like it at all. Malison wasn't designed (by PnP designers I mean) to make the next single spell uber powerful before expiring in a matter of seconds! You have to take advantage of GM over the entire encounter, and that's why it has always been -2. I do think BG2 raised it to -4 for the same reasons they introduced uber weapons (bonus merchants are the most evident example):

- most players aren't great tacticians and don't like too tough challanges (I'm speaking of most purchasers, those who still play BG like us are clearly an elite)

- most players don't have the patience to discover how a spell can be effective and prefer spells that look great at first sight

- designers simply didn't do an awesome work in terms of balance/challange (how many spells/items/creatures were poorly designed? how many of them were utterly useless/weak? why some of them were instead incredibly overpowered? )

 

I don't want to sound rude to them though, without them we wouldn't have such a great game, but I cannot deny the truth: many things could have been done 100 times better (with endless time, and infinity money to pay designers and testers for ages! ).

[DavidW]

P.S I actually think that one of the main reasons DavidW can't have mages rely on combat defences without PfMW is exactly this, because for example against Carsomyr MI+Stonekin+II+2x Fireshields+"whatever you like" are all gone in a single hit without PfMW. Cool eh? Very great design!!

There's something to this.

 

However, even without uber weapons like Carsomyr, any weapon that does some kind of elemental damage is pretty effective at spell disruption, and any fighter who can do multiple attacks per round (to say nothing of GWW) goes through Stoneskin alarmingly fast. Actually in the design phase of SCS I didn't really consider Carsomyr. Then I did a playthrough with a paladin protagonist and noticed the striking shift in efficacy once Carsomyr came along. It certainly makes a sizable difference, but it's not everything.

 

(As an aside, in some ways I actually don't know this game that well! - I've played through it a total of 3 times, and each has taken me 6-12 months. Part of the reason SCS is very algorithmic is that I don't actually want to spoil the game for myself.)

 

 

I don't want to sound rude to them though, without them we wouldn't have such a great game, but I cannot deny the truth: many things could have been done 100 times better (with endless time, and infinity money to pay designers and testers for ages! ).

Waxing philosophical, I think the other thing to bear in mind is that spells, items and AI are fairly low-budget, timewise, in writing something like BG2. It's no accident that there are quite a few AI mods, loads of NPC mods, lots of spell and item and kit mods, but very few properly developed quest mods: quests of any complexity are incredibly time-consuming to write and test. (I found this to my cost with Wheels of Prophecy.)

[Ardanis]

I don't want to sound rude to them though, without them we wouldn't have such a great game, but I cannot deny the truth: many things could have been done 100 times better (with endless time, and infinity money to pay designers and testers for ages! ).

They weren't going to make BG moddable in the first place. And by the look of it, weren't especially experienced by that point. Else we wouldn't have got the ugliest scripting language, unable even of brackets. And stacking spells. And so on.

 

At least IE can teach how you should not develop engine for your game.

[amanasleep]

Summoned creatures with powerful on-hit abilities are difficult to balance--I'll take your word for it that the designers intended to include them but didn't (was it because they were too powerful?).

I don't know, Animate Dead was supposed to cast ghasts at higher levels but then they put skeletons on the very ghastsu.cre resource, I suppose they were just "lazy" or not enough interested or they simply didn't have the time to work on everything as they "should/would", but in keep in mind they had to release BG (we're modding it for 10 years and we still haven't finished polishing it!), and they did it for work not as hobby! You can easily notice unfinished quests, error, bugs, and the like, as well as noticeable balance issues that may be due to time constrains.

 

Good point. Ghasts would have been pretty awesome in vanilla, perhaps even better than Skeleton Warriors if you got them early enough.

 

Silver Sword and Celestial Fury are already very powerful, but do not become significantly more powerful with an extra -4 to saves than they do with SR's -2. This is a very slight extra chance (10%) per hit that a particular target is affected. In any event they are designed to be uber already, and are so uber that I design entire party builds around getting them as early as possible.

Ehmm, why a 10% extra chance isn't significant, and 10% less is an intolerable nerf?

 

10% extra isn't that significant in that it won't make me more likely to memorize Malison, but 10% less results in me not memorizing the spell. With on hit effects the save chance is largely irrelevent as long as there is no bonus (save bonus can result in many opponents autosaving). Over time you are very likely to get the effect regardless of an extra -2 to save.

 

Anyway, those weapons weren't "designed to be uber" they were "badly designed", and some of them are utterly cheesy (Carsomyr and Staff of the Magi for example are simply ridiculous in vanilla). The vey fact that many players build parties arounds those few weapons is a clear sign of bad design imo, but this is not the appropriate topic to talk about uber weapons.

 

Carsomyr, the Silver Sword (modeled after 1E's original Sword +3, Vorpal Blade rather than the Githyanki Silver Swords which were a bit different) and Staff of the Magi, are all quite close to their PnP versions. I believe the original Holy Avenger dispel effect was not automatic and had a caster level, same for SotM. The Vorpal Blade had a crit table built into it--I don't remember all of the values, though.

 

P.S I actually think that one of the main reasons DavidW can't have mages rely on combat defences without PfMW is exactly this, because for example against Carsomyr MI+Stonekin+II+2x Fireshields+"whatever you like" are all gone in a single hit without PfMW. Cool eh? Very great design!!

 

The weapon design is not the problem here, but rather the Dungeon Master for this particular campaign. By giving the PC access to PnP uber weapons it sort of breaks the overall balance of PnP itself. In a real 2E campaign, the DM can either restrict the use of these weapons, create situations to mitigate their power, or remove them from the player using story elements once their purpose is served (sort of like BG2 does with the Rift Device).

 

Keep in mind that all on-hit effects are dependant upon actually hitting the target--PfMW means that Malison is not helping.

Yeah, but I also keep in mind that 80% of my enemies won't have PfMW, and mages can be breached.

 

True enough, just trying to explain that on-hit isn't everything.

 

I agree that current GM in vanilla helps out on-hit effects a bit too much. The solution is to reduce GM duration (I suggest 3 rounds, enough for a few rounds of combat or several spells). I have not heard a single good argument why this would be a bad fix.

Actually I've commented it: I don't like it at all. Malison wasn't designed (by PnP designers I mean) to make the next single spell uber powerful before expiring in a matter of seconds! You have to take advantage of GM over the entire encounter, and that's why it has always been -2.

 

Now this I just don't understand. You argue that you are serving the intentions of PnP designers by using Malison at -2, but then totally redesign every spell in the game?

 

In any event I don't think it's clear at all that the PnP designers meant anything by giving it a long duration, and I don't think it breaks immersion to reduce it. Of course I also don't think it needs a nerf, but I find it more tactically interesting to lower duration than effect.

 

I do think BG2 raised it to -4 for the same reasons they introduced uber weapons (bonus merchants are the most evident example):

- most players aren't great tacticians and don't like too tough challanges (I'm speaking of most purchasers, those who still play BG like us are clearly an elite)

- most players don't have the patience to discover how a spell can be effective and prefer spells that look great at first sight

- designers simply didn't do an awesome work in terms of balance/challange (how many spells/items/creatures were poorly designed? how many of them were utterly useless/weak? why some of them were instead incredibly overpowered?)

 

Good points, but I think the real reason they buffed GM was to make save or else spells more usable in a low save environment.

 

I don't want to sound rude to them though, without them we wouldn't have such a great game, but I cannot deny the truth: many things could have been done 100 times better (with endless time, and infinity money to pay designers and testers for ages! ).

 

Hear Hear!

[Salk]

The result of SR currently is that save penalties are overall worse than they were before, casters are more powerful, and item/ability on hit effects are less powerful.

 

Demi,

 

this is a crucial point.

 

If what amanasleep says here is proved, then a rework of the Saving Throws system within Spell Revisions is critical!

 

I don't want to see casters even more powerful than they already become with SCS on.

 

We'd better tackle asap the Saving Throws topic opened by Aranthys and take a swift decision about it.

[Demivrgvs]

Anyway, those weapons weren't "designed to be uber" they were "badly designed", and some of them are utterly cheesy (Carsomyr and Staff of the Magi for example are simply ridiculous in vanilla). The vey fact that many players build parties arounds those few weapons is a clear sign of bad design imo, but this is not the appropriate topic to talk about uber weapons.

Carsomyr, the Silver Sword (modeled after 1E's original Sword +3, Vorpal Blade rather than the Githyanki Silver Swords which were a bit different) and Staff of the Magi, are all quite close to their PnP versions. I believe the original Holy Avenger dispel effect was not automatic and had a caster level, same for SotM. The Vorpal Blade had a crit table built into it--I don't remember all of the values, though.

Please, are you trying to defend these cheesy items? If you really want me to comment about them I'll do.

 

Holy Avenger shouldn't have 100% dispel on each hit but rather the AoE Dispel Magic spell cast at paladin's level. What are the difference?

* only once per round instead of up to x times per round (where x is the apr which can even reach 10!! )

* the dispel would have been only AoE, thus a lot less friendly

* the dispel chance wouldn't be 100% but tied to paladin - target's level (against liches you'd need a 25 level paladin to have a 50% chance)

* using Dispel in PnP takes an action instead of being freely incorporated in attacks

* spell protections would have worked against it (this is something I can actually "fix" if DavidW want me to do it)

 

Staff of the Magi's Dispel Magic would have been as above, but also limited by charges. The cheesiest thing of all here is invisibility at will, usable up to 100 times per round!! PnP SotM would have simply had Invisibility as one of the possible spells with charges.

Vorpal Sword has a 10% chance to sever the head on hit in AD&D and a 5% chance in 3rd edition, both are quite less than BG 25%. Furthermore many creatures woul be immune to it (elementals, incorporeal creatures, ...) and you could forget to use it to kill a dragon on a single hit unless the DM allows you to reach the dragon's neck (which may be possible at uber epic levels, but surely not as easy as hitting a dragon in BG!).

 

 

 

The result of SR currently is that save penalties are overall worse than they were before, casters are more powerful, and item/ability on hit effects are less powerful.

Demi,

 

this is a crucial point.

 

If what amanasleep says here is proved, then a rework of the Saving Throws system within Spell Revisions is critical!

 

I don't want to see casters even more powerful than they already become with SCS on.

 

We'd better tackle asap the Saving Throws topic opened by Aranthys and take a swift decision about it.

Yes within SR total save penalty is higher for high level spells, but as I've tried to say various times (only DavidW seems to have understood it) I never thought spells were too powerful with vanilla GM, I simply states that GM was too powerful for a 4th level spell.

 

Now regarding save penalties, I'm open to suggestions on the appropriate topic, but as of now very few players gave me negative feedback, the few who did are those that actually never reached high level environment with SR and simply fear the save penalties by looking at them. Shaitan even use TweakPack to raise even more SR saves, and apparently he don't have problems, Ardanis just said that Irenicus successfully saved against a Disintegrate+GM (-7 penalty) five times in a row. I really don't know what to say, in vanilla most hardcore players simply consider save or else spells pathetic (take a look at forums such as IA), and that's why I implemented save penalties a la 3rd edition, but if most of you want to lower/remove them I really have nothing against it.

[Salk]

Now regarding save penalties...

 

Well, to cut it short, my opinion is this: if the modification to the saving throws makes the casters' spells more effective than vanilla, then I'd rather see this undone.

 

As I said, casters (with SCS) are already an extremely powerful class and I don't think they need the extra help.