IR V3 - List of changes from V2 to V3

[Lawlight]

I have a little suggestion. Since Water's Edge is an unique Weapon (in IR V3 even named Water Edge and with a better backround) it should really be obtainable only once. Its really nice that a pirate in Brynnlaw sells it now but the following creatures should be given a plain Scimiter + 3 instead of Water's Edge: alufie1.cre (alu-fiend), amsaemon.cre (Saemon Havarian), icimarili.cre (Marilith), yaga03.cre (Yaga-Shura's Leutnants) and telalu1.cre (alu-fiend).

 

Here is a Quote from another Forum:

Actually, funny thing, but TOB adds unlimited 'Water Edge' scimitars in the game. Go to lvl 3 of Watcher's keep, defeat Tahazar, and rest in his room. On occasions, your sleep will be interrupted by demons, and there is one particular group (I think 5*Alu-fiends) which have +2 chainmails, +3 Scimitars "Water's Edge" and 10 Darts of Wounding each.

 

And there are other ways.

[Demivrgvs]

Ok, I have 1-2 hours this evening to work and test a few things (hopefully divided between IR and KR if the former doesn't take too much). I've fixed the few more issues reported by JBeau and DrAzTiK, applied few tweaks/fixes (some green scrolls had their targeting behaviour slightly messed up, but while fixing it I also made them self-center only) and then I've started to look into those things that I completely forgot to do back then (aka rods, and a bunch of miscellaneous items).

 

Rod of Smiting: am I the only one who thinks this should be a club and not a staff? A rod can be either a club or a light mace in PnP, but surely not a 2handed staff (unless becoming twice as long is part of its magical effect).

 

Rod of Resurrection: we discussed this quite a lot with Ardanis but we are on opposite sides regarding this. The user-friendly tweak would be to simply change its effect from "revive + full heal" to simply "revive" in order to avoid the silly exploit of using it as a ranged instantaneous Heal spell. The thing we cannot decide instead regards its usability, as I'd probably like to restrict it to clerics or priests in general. The roleplayer in me finds hard to accept even the mere existence of a multi-charged stick able to raise a dead character, let alone having it usable by a dumb barbarian, but Ardanis correctly points out this was clearly designed to be a convenient user-friendly item (aka its beyond salvation) and suggests a less radical WIS requirement. What do you think?

 

P.S On a side note, priest's scrolls of Raise Dead and Restoration are usable by anyone in vanilla, shouldn't them be restricted to cleric only? Again, Ardanis thinks they were made usable by anyone on purpose, but on a supposedly priest-only scroll I really cannot accept that, do you?

 

Rod of Terror: as above, staff or club? Other than that I'd simply remove its unplayable drawback and turn it into a Fearsome weapon. If anyone has a better suggestion than just adding an on hit fear/horror effect upon it let me know.

 

Rod of Absorption: this currently is a Wand of Spell Deflection, which is neither useful nor true to its PnP version. Even turning it into a Wand of Spell Trap wouldn't be so great imo considering the way the AI reacts to it (aka it will never cast spells at it), but that's how this item works in PnP. My solution would be to make it work as a "short lasting but quick to cast Spell Trap". With instant casting time it can be activated right before the opponent's spell is going to reach the wielder (making it really effective unlike the original spell) and to balance it the effect would last only 1 round and absorb just that one incoming spell. What do you think?

 

Rod of Reversal: now, this is giving me an headache. Vanilla game has always been full of inconsistencies, but in this case it's really hilarious as it says "It is particularly prized by Wizard Slayers". Really? WS can't use a single magical item but he can use this wand-like item? Then such item actually isn't going to help a WS against a mage at all, as RRoR removes one spell protection (e.g. Spell Deflection) and a warrior cannot care less of those protections!!! If they wanted to make a convenient user-friendly item then they should have made the Wand of Spell Striking usable by warriors, because Breach is the spell every warrior dream of in BG. Long story short, what should I do? And what about the above mentioned Wand of Spell Striking? Aren't these two items overlapping each other?

 

Book of Infinite Spells: a small thing first, Fixpack adds a lore requirement to identify it, but that is actually a problem because any time you get the Fireball page you have to identify the book again. The easiest way to fix that is to move this item in store (Lazarus Libraries would be perfect but it's really late ), else I could make the first page a once-only page like the last one, but I'd probably prefer it to not be an easy free loot anyway considering its huge potential (amongst other things it lets any class, including a true warrior, cast things such a True Seeing!). That being said, I'd replace some spells with "better ones" (e.g. Spell Deflection -> Globe of Invulnerability, Wyvern Call -> Invisible Stalker) but while PnP allows cleric spells too I'm not sure about it. What do you think? Which spell selection would you suggest? Would you instead lower the threshold and use lower lvl spells (e.g. only spells of 5th or lower level instead of 6th-)?

[Jarno Mikkola]

As a general, the rods to me should be clubs, power clubs, with on hit abilities and a few per day abilities. They may not hit as accurately and hard, as the Club of Detonation +4, but their enchantment level which determines what they can hit should be 5(6).

It could actually be a weapon category of it's own without a set proficiency. So the warriors get most benefits from them as their Thac0 is high.

 

Rod of Smiting: am I the only one who thinks this should be a club and not a staff? A rod can be either a club ... (unless becoming twice as long is part of its magical effect).

Agreed... though, have you ever seen the Minbari Staff(Denn'bok) in Babylon 5 ?

 

Rod of Resurrection:... and suggests a less radical WIS requirement. What do you think?

I agree with the WIS requirement, as there are cross over classes that cannot be strictly set by the class req's, and the WIS is underused for Paladins for example.

 

Rod of Terror: as above, staff or club? Other than that I'd simply remove its unplayable drawback and turn it into a Fearsome weapon. If anyone has a better suggestion than just adding an on hit fear/horror effect upon it let me know.

Well, how about it having a few fear spells casts per day with either one casted on every hit made by the weapon... or a major one(via Penalty to save) cast at every so percent of hits.

 

Rod of Absorption: ...What do you think?

Better than good. But it doesn't suit for the rod category above... Don't know, but how about making this to be a helm/ioun stone ?

 

Rod of Reversal: now, this is giving me an headache. Vanilla game has always been full of inconsistencies, but in this case it's really hilarious as it says "It is particularly prized by Wizard Slayers". Really? WS can't use a single magical item but it can use a this wand-like item? Then such item actually isn't going to help a WS against a mage at all, as RRoR removes one spell protection (e.g. Spell Deflection) and a warrior cannot care less of those protections!!! If they wanted to make a convenient user-friendly item then they should have made the Wand of Spell Striking usable by warriors, because Breach is the spell every warrior dream of in BG. Long story short, what should I do? And what about the above mentioned Wand of Spell Striking? Aren't these two items overlapping each other?

Well, perhaps make one as a wand(of Spell Striking) and the other rod, so the other has a few charges of Spell Striking and dies, while the other has infinite Spell Striking ability but only once per 8 hours, while also being a club, with Ray of Reversal as on hit ability.

 

... and if you make the rods able to recharge themselves once per 8 hour even without the sleeping, it would be perfect.

 

Book of Infinite Spells ...

Which spell selection would you suggest?

How about making the book randomly infinite so that it can cast a spell that then switches to another one from the spell selection.

[Lawlight]

Rod of Smiting: am I the only one who thinks this should be a club and not a staff? A rod can be either a club or a light mace in PnP, but surely not a 2handed staff (unless becoming twice as long is part of its magical effect).

 

In IWD it actually was a club, called Debian's Rod of Smiting and was also an outer planar creatures bane / slaying weapon (besides golem bane / slaying). So yes I think a club would fit much better then a staff. There is also nice background lore for this item in IWD:

 

Rods of Smiting are extremely uncommon weapons, though they can be very useful against some foes. This particular rod was last in the possession of a priest of Gond named Debian of Urmlaspyr. Debian was an eccentric adventurer, who took it upon himself to investigate every type of golem that had been reported in the realms. In many cases, the creator of the golem would send his or her creations after Debian for his snooping. Debian usually escaped without much personal harm. Unfortunately for Debian, his luck ran out when he investigated the lair of the Machinery Man, a bizarre lich who happened to be the creator of golems and other animated constructs. The Machinery Man's lab full of iron golems proved to be too much for Debian to overcome.

 

Maybe you want to add it. =)

 

Rod of Resurrection: we discussed this quite a lot with Ardanis but we are on opposite sides regarding this. The user-friendly tweak would be to simply change its effect from "revive + full heal" to simply "revive" in order to avoid the silly exploit of using it as a ranged instantaneous Heal spell. The thing we cannot decide instead regards its usability, as I'd probably like to restrict it to clerics or priests in general. The roleplayer in me finds hard to accept even the mere existence of a multi-charged stick able to raise a dead character, let alone having it usable by a dumb barbarian, but Ardanis correctly points out this was clearly designed to be a convenient user-friendly item (aka its beyond salvation) and suggests a less radical WIS requirement. What do you think?

 

P.S On a side note, priest's scrolls of Raise Dead and Restoration are usable by anyone in vanilla, shouldn't them be restricted to cleric only? Again, Ardanis thinks they were made usable by anyone on purpose, but on a supposedly priest-only scroll I really cannot accept that, do you?

 

In my opinion: Yes, restrict both Rod of Resurrection and scrolls of Raise Dead and Restoration to priests in general (single-/dual-/multi- cleric, ranger, paladin, druid & monk) like most of the priest scrolls in Vanilla. And yes, get rid of the heal effect from Rod of Resurrection.

 

Rod of Terror: as above, staff or club? Other than that I'd simply remove its unplayable drawback and turn it into a Fearsome weapon. If anyone has a better suggestion than just adding an on hit fear/horror effect upon it let me know.

 

Maybe replace it with something like Sceptre of Tyranny from IWD, which was also a club (on use effect: cloak of fear / domination). Anyway, its lore is much better then that of Rod of Terror:

 

Owned and enchanted by an archetypical priest of Bane, the Sceptre of Tyranny was at the forefront of many terrible battles. Archendros of Bane was a snide, malicious man of almost perfect mental and physical abilities. He could be found leading groups of impressionable young fighters, rogues, and other assorted thugs in press gangs wandering Waterdeep. Faced with opposition, Archendros would simply employ the power of the black and red sceptre and urge his minions into the retreating crowds. The charismatic Banite was eventually killed in battle by a priest of Torm and his paladin comrades.

 

Many possible Abilities:

- fear on hit

- cloak of fear / domination (one per day)

- cloak of fear like aura

- moral bonus for allies

 

Rod of Absorption: this currently is a Wand of Spell Deflection, which is neither useful nor true to its PnP version. Even turning it into a Wand of Spell Trap wouldn't be so great imo considering the way the AI reacts to it (aka it will never cast spells at it), but that's how this item works in PnP. My solution would be to make it work as a "short lasting but quick to cast Spell Trap". With instant casting time it can be activated right before the opponent's spell is going to reach the wielder (making it really effective unlike the original spell) and to balance it the effect would last only 1 round and absorb just that one incoming spell. What do you think?

 

Really like your idea, but I really start thinking that all rod's should be powerfull clubs, with on hit / on use abilities (enchantment level 3 and higher).

 

Rod of Reversal: now, this is giving me an headache. Vanilla game has always been full of inconsistencies, but in this case it's really hilarious as it says "It is particularly prized by Wizard Slayers". Really? WS can't use a single magical item but he can use this wand-like item? Then such item actually isn't going to help a WS against a mage at all, as RRoR removes one spell protection (e.g. Spell Deflection) and a warrior cannot care less of those protections!!! If they wanted to make a convenient user-friendly item then they should have made the Wand of Spell Striking usable by warriors, because Breach is the spell every warrior dream of in BG. Long story short, what should I do? And what about the above mentioned Wand of Spell Striking? Aren't these two items overlapping each other?

 

I just don't understand the whole rod system. Some rods are used as weapons and others like Rod of Reversal are one to one copies of wands; useable by those classes normaly don't have access to them. As mentioned above: kill the bad wand copies please. As for this rod: Maybe a club with a "carsomyr like dispell magic on hit" and a once per day breach ability.

 

Book of Infinite Spells: a small thing first, Fixpack adds a lore requirement to identify it, but that is actually a problem because any time you get the Fireball page you have to identify the book again. The easiest way to fix that is to move this item in store (Lazarus Libraries would be perfect but it's really late ), else I could make the first page a once-only page like the last one, but I'd probably prefer it to not be an easy free loot anyway considering its huge potential (amongst other things it lets any class, including a true warrior, cast things such a True Seeing!). That being said, I'd replace some spells with "better ones" (e.g. Spell Deflection -> Globe of Invulnerability, Wyvern Call -> Invisible Stalker) but while PnP allows cleric spells too I'm not sure about it. What do you think? Which spell selection would you suggest? Would you instead lower the threshold and use lower lvl spells (e.g. only spells of 5th or lower level instead of 6th-)?

 

I need more time to think about this one.

[Lawlight]

As a general, the rods to me should be clubs, power clubs, with on hit abilities and a few per day abilities. They may not hit as accurately and hard, as the Club of Detonation +4, but their enchantment level which determines what they can hit should be 5(6).

 

100% agree here. =)

 

Rod of Resurrection:

Maybe one should change this one into a wand useable by priests, like Wand of the Heavens.

[deducter]

About the Rod of Resurrection, while ideally it should be Cleric only, the problem is what happens if the cleric in your party dies in a battle? Or if your party doesn't have a ranger or Paladin to use the rod? In many places, there's no choice except reloading, which is hardly ideal. The way I see it, this item is a way to recover a party even if the healers are taken out. The main problem most people have with this Rod of course is that it instantaneously bring dead party members back to full hp in the middle of combat. So I propose that the Rod simply does a Raise Dead AND apply a serious debuff that lasts say 1 turn. The debuff would be like -75% hp, -75% Thac0/DAMAGE, +20 AC, +20 to all saves, all spellcasting is automatically failed, etc. etc. so crippling that the resurrected party member is useless in combat. The Rod will still be useful as a way to resurrect party members after battle if clerics cannot do it.

 

How "instantaneous" would the Rod of Absorption be? Most activated effect of items do have like a 1s delay. If you can make the item truly instantaneous to activate somehow, sure, this Rod would be awesome. However, if there's a 1s delay, your idea is impractical, since most spells have a very very short travel time after casting.

 

Not sure what to do about Rod of Reversal, but we do not need more "dispel on hit" items, which crushes spellcasters too ruthlessly. Bala's Axe and Carsomyr are enough. I'd be in favor of changing to a wand with like 3 charges of Ruby Ray. I see this item more as an emergency measure against spellcasters, should you be out of Ruby Rays and some mage pops up with Spelltrap, then you're pretty screwed fighting against him, unless you have a charge left on this item.

 

Personally I think, regarding these rods, if you can't come up with a good idea, just remove it from the game. There are already so many items and consumables that I hardly see why we need more.

[Shaitan]

About the Rod of Resurrection, while ideally it should be Cleric only, the problem is what happens if the cleric in your party dies in a battle? Or if your party doesn't have a ranger or Paladin to use the rod? In many places, there's no choice except reloading, which is hardly ideal. The way I see it, this item is a way to recover a party even if the healers are taken out. The main problem most people have with this Rod of course is that it instantaneously bring dead party members back to full hp in the middle of combat. So I propose that the Rod simply does a Raise Dead AND apply a serious debuff that lasts say 1 turn. The debuff would be like -75% hp, -75% Thac0/DAMAGE, +20 AC, +20 to all saves, all spellcasting is automatically failed, etc. etc. so crippling that the resurrected party member is useless in combat. The Rod will still be useful as a way to resurrect party members after battle if clerics cannot do it.

Much like Harpers Recall does, Ok with me.

[Ardanis]

Rod of Resurrection

I'd prefer to see this item priest/paladin only, with WIS requirement, not healing.

Scroll of Raise Dead - make it usable by anyone, add WIS req, resurrect rather than raise. Recolour to green, if needed.

 

If the only cleric falls in battle, there'll be someone to raise her. Otherwise I see no point in buying a (hugely expensive atm) scroll.

 

Book of Infinite Spells

Useless item, if you ask me. Some thoughts - make it a proper book, not the russian roulette it currently is.

 

Say, let it cast from SI-like submenu.

[Jarno Mikkola]

So I propose that the Rod simply does a Raise Dead AND apply a serious debuff that lasts say 1 turn. The debuff would be like -75% hp, -75% Thac0/DAMAGE, +20 AC, +20 to all saves, all spellcasting is automatically failed, etc. etc. so crippling that the resurrected party member is useless in combat. The Rod will still be useful as a way to resurrect party members after battle if clerics cannot do it.

I like this idea somewhat... but the -75% HP... why not just make the HP to 1(via raise dead) and then regenerate it back quickly, like 30 HP/s for 4 seconds. The damage, AC and thac0 should be insignificant as the character has no items, but yes the spell casting should be failed automatically for a short time, say 20-40 seconds.

This way the rod can still be used to alive party members too, and it's not too under or over powered.

[deducter]

Rod of Resurrection

I'd prefer to see this item priest/paladin only, with WIS requirement, not healing.

Scroll of Raise Dead - make it usable by anyone, add WIS req, resurrect rather than raise. Recolour to green, if needed.

 

If the only cleric falls in battle, there'll be someone to raise her. Otherwise I see no point in buying a (hugely expensive atm) scroll.

 

I think this is an excellent idea, make the scrolls the general use item. The Rod can then be paladin/priest/druid (since druids can also resurrect) only. Still, it needs some sort of crippling debuff on the healed target to make the item useless in combat. Even raising to 1 hp isn't enough, there are ways of getting more hp quite quickly. This would also make the spell Resurrection worth memorizing, since it can function as a combat resurrection now.

[Jarno Mikkola]

The Rod can then be paladin/priest/druid (since druids can also resurrect) only.

Errr Why are you people so hot against non divine characters usage of this item ? And you even consciously dropped out RANGER ! While Ardanis dropped DRUID too.

To me, the item should be usable by anyone with enough WIS. It's not even said in the item description that the item is a divine object... "only usable by a character that believes that the item was made by a divine personification". Maybe it was made by a devil, to not allow the pesty mortals to get up there.

[Salk]

Rods

 

The situation about Rods is messy. The game classifies some of them as Wands and some of them as Quarterstaves. The reason why the combat rods are quarterstaves and not clubs or light maces is because the developers wanted mages to be able to use them. The extra size of the rod can be somewhat justified by its use as weapon and not as wand.

 

So in my opinion things should not be changed in this respect.

 

About their requirements, I tend to agree with Jarno here. I would not like to see them restricted to priests only

 

Rod of Resurrection / Raise Dead, Restoration Scrolls

 

I find myself between you and Ardanis here, Demi. I agree with you that the Scrolls should be restricted to clerics. But not the Rod of Resurrection, for which I would just set a WIS requirement. I am not entirely convinced by its change from "Revive + Full Heal" to only "Revive" though because for one thing, this is an item with limited number of charges and as such its use has always a cost in the long term and for one other, a revived character has so few Hit Points that it might be revived only to be killed one second later. I would rather keep it the way it is and lower the number of charges to 3.

 

Rod of Absorption

 

Sounds good.

 

Rod of Reversal

 

Just eliminate it from the game altogether. As you correctly pointed out, this item has no place nor reason to exist.

 

Book of Infinite Spells

 

I am not sure about this. For one thing, the fact that this is a book makes me instinctively think that the spells within should be of arcane nature. I don't remember (it was such a long time ago) how the identification of this item works (before and after the Fixpack) but I would choose a one time only identification requirement like for every other item. Make the Lore requirement very high, if you will but I don't understand why the same item should require more than one identification to understand how it works.

[Ardanis]

Rod of Resurrection / Raise Dead

1) Balance wise, I think we then will end looting a half-charged wand somewhere and keep it around, never bothering for scrolls.

2) Concept wise, as Demi had pointed out to me, a rod is basically about pressing a button on it and voila, the magic works. Scroll, otoh, has to be read out. I could easier imagine a non-proficient class reciting the prayer, like thieves can read arcane scrolls, and how greens are available to everyone - because it actually is a prayer - than divine (granted by gods, as opposed to harvested from Weave) magic being contained within a metal stick. If prayers can be activated through a button, imo it should really be only the case with a priest, not any random person with high WIS score.

[Jarno Mikkola]

2) Concept wise, as Demi had pointed out to me, a rod is basically about pressing a button on it and voila, the magic works. Scroll, otoh, has to be read out. I could easier imagine a non-proficient class reciting the prayer, like thieves can read arcane scrolls, and how greens are available to everyone - because it actually is a prayer - than divine (granted by gods, as opposed to harvested from Weave) magic being contained within a metal stick. If prayers can be activated through a button, imo it should really be only the case with a priest, not any random person with high WIS score.

Metal items, are far more likely to have been enchanted with a thought reading quality that releases the magic, than there to be an undefined god that will grant anyone the power to raise the dead, especially, if it's not for the gods own purposes. After all, like you said, it's a prayer, a call for a being to raise the dead.

 

The metal object is just the vessel that the real magic is tied to, via another spell. Thus anyone can use it. And it's not just a +1 7th level spell slot item for the priest.

[Salk]

Scroll, otoh, has to be read out. I could easier imagine a non-proficient class reciting the prayer, like thieves can read arcane scrolls, and how greens are available to everyone - because it actually is a prayer - than divine (granted by gods, as opposed to harvested from Weave) magic being contained within a metal stick.

 

The requirement for calling upon divine help can not just be the ability to read or talk. Because otherwise every class could learn the words and could bestow divine help on themselves and their allies. In this respect, I have never really accepted the fact that thieves can read arcane scrolls but that's another matter.

 

The rod, just like a wand, instead is a vessel for an already imbued power and role playing wise is easier to think of it as an item that can be used by non casters. If it was not for balance reasons, I'd welcome the use of magic items only to arcane and divine practitioners but since that's not the case, keeping the rods usable to anyone that meet the WIS requirement and the divine scrolls only to clerics seems to me the best alternative.