Demon summonings, Wish and double standards

[Guest!]

Okay, so I've just been to Qilue's house in Ust Natha. Only my Monk made it out alive, thanks to his speed and magic resistance. In part because of the five mages, in part because at any time there always were at least two or three Bone Fiends breathing down my neck, casting Remove Magic with a close to 100% dispelling chance and shooting Cones of Cold left and right. I must have killed like a dozen of those. Now, I also have Amber in the party, whom I can't resurrect because when I do she leaves for good. I hope it's a bug in Amber, because I really don't feel like reloading my autosave and going through Shit Valley all over again.

Anyway, my point is that the gap between the player's version of demon summoning spells, which are useless, and the enemy's version, which is very powerful, is HUGE. Basically the player can't summon demons: they'll routinely turn on the party (as soon as PfE is dispelled, which is always very soon); on the other hand, enemies make massive use of the same summons, with all the perks and none of the hassles. And those demons are strong, even in the late game.

I don't like being an ass when commenting on someone's work, but this sucks. It really sucks.

The party and the enemies should play by the same rules. Either enemies should have the same limitations as the player, or party-summoned demons should be treated like normal, green-circled summons - which I think is the best solution (and would actually make the spells usable).

 

On a sidenote, this is the same issue I have with Wish, though not as drastic. Enemies don't actually cast Wish, they cast a double lenght Time Stop or a Breach Everyone Ahoy, while I'm stuck with "Party members become intoxicated". I make a fairly heavy use of Wish, but even with maxed Wisdom, I rarely get those options. I wouldn't mind enemies actually choosing from a pool of random choices based on Wisdom.

[the bigg]

In both cases, this is done because scripting it 'fairly' would make it too random to be useful.

 

Re Demons, you can SetGlobal("DMWWReduceDemonSummoning","GLOBAL",1) to avoid enemy mages summoning Glabrezus (which should lower their number).

 

Re: Wish, you can not install the 'SoA mages get HLA' component, or give yourself a similarly reliable Wish spell by installing Cheesy Wish from tb#tweaks, which makes you get all Wish options with each casting (independent of Wisdom).

[DavidW]

Anyway, my point is that the gap between the player's version of demon summoning spells, which are useless, and the enemy's version, which is very powerful, is HUGE. Basically the player can't summon demons: they'll routinely turn on the party (as soon as PfE is dispelled, which is always very soon); on the other hand, enemies make massive use of the same summons, with all the perks and none of the hassles. And those demons are strong, even in the late game.

I agree, there's a definite gap here. And the readme is very explicit about it. Under improved fiends:

This component also makes a substantial change to the way fiend-summoning magic works (this is one of the few places where SCS II breaks the rule that players and NPCs should be treated equally). I assume that enemy spellcasters (who, after all, have been learning high-level magic far longer than the party) summon demons with whom they have a pre-existing pact. These demons won't attack their summoner - and, crucially, will attack the party even if they are protected by Protection from Evil. The practical upshot is that the only demons in the game now kept at bay by a Pro/Evil are the ones that your party summons. This makes summoned demons rather more useful, and you'll see more of them being summoned.

 

You're welcome not to like it, but it's not kept secret.

 

The party and the enemies should play by the same rules. Either enemies should have the same limitations as the player, or party-summoned demons should be treated like normal, green-circled summons - which I think is the best solution (and would actually make the spells usable).

If you want to implement the first solution, don't install Smarter Fiends (it's too impractical to code enemy wizards to cope with the protection-from-evil restriction). I'm not really keen to implement the second restriction as it's way outside SCS's remit and probably unbalanced, but if you want it, add the following to the end of the setup-scsii file:

 

BEGIN ~probably-unbalanced, untested component to give players NPC-style demon summoning~

COPY_EXISTING ~dw#sumgl.spl~ ~override/spwi807.spl~
COPY_EXISTING ~dw#cacof.spl~ ~override/spwi707.spl~
COPY_EXISTING ~dw#gatem.spl~ ~override/spwi905.spl~
COPY_EXISTING ~dw#gatep.spl~ ~override/sppr703.spl~

If you want something intermediate, you can reduce the extent to which enemies use demon summoning by this (documented) console override:

 

CLUAConsole:SetGlobal("DMWWReduceDemonSummoning","GLOBAL",1)

 

On a sidenote, this is the same issue I have with Wish, though not as drastic. Enemies don't actually cast Wish, they cast a double lenght Time Stop or a Breach Everyone Ahoy, while I'm stuck with "Party members become intoxicated". I make a fairly heavy use of Wish, but even with maxed Wisdom, I rarely get those options. I wouldn't mind enemies actually choosing from a pool of random choices based on Wisdom.

They actually also use "give everyone Hardiness" and some other party buff I can't remember. My experiments with Wish from some time ago suggest that a spellcaster with ultra-high Wisdom fairly reliably gets access to some very powerful Wish ability, and these are the only ones that I can straightforwardly implement in-game (something like a Wish rest, for instance, isn't really implementable without a lot of fuss). So I don't think it's terribly unreasonable. I agree that realism ought to give some small chance of the wish not actually doing anything very useful, but randomness like this actually is less valuable than you think: all it does, in practice, is give a small random chance of some given battle being uninteresting because the spellcaster just got unlucky. Overall, things like that don't increase the quality of the experience.

 

Incidentally, I don't check Wisdom. I assume that any NPC casting Wish has taken steps to obtain a very high Wisdom before doing so; not implementing this in game is just a reflection of the fact that I don't have infinite time and the time benefit-to-time-cost ratio isn't terribly favourable on this one.

 

I don't like being an ass when commenting on someone's work, but this sucks. It really sucks.

I'm mildly curious as to why you think this sentence adds anything to your argument.

 

EDIT: theBigg beat me to the console command, and he's right about the randomness factor too.

[the bigg]

Incidentally, I don't check Wisdom. I assume that any NPC casting Wish has taken steps to obtain a very high Wisdom before doing so; not implementing this in game is just a reflection of the fact that I don't have infinite time and the time benefit-to-time-cost ratio isn't terribly favourable on this one.

It'd be an one-liner:

 

SET ~haswish~=0

PATCH_IF BYTE_AT 0x23b < 17 THEN BEGIN SET ~haswish~=1 END

 

But yes, I agree that this doesn't really add anything noticeable to players. All it could do is avoid the case of an unwise mage casting Wish (which would only work assuming that the unwise-in-dialog mage actually has low Wis *and* the player paying attention to this sort of thing).

[Guest!]

Anyway, my point is that the gap between the player's version of demon summoning spells, which are useless, and the enemy's version, which is very powerful, is HUGE. Basically the player can't summon demons: they'll routinely turn on the party (as soon as PfE is dispelled, which is always very soon); on the other hand, enemies make massive use of the same summons, with all the perks and none of the hassles. And those demons are strong, even in the late game.

I agree, there's a definite gap here. And the readme is very explicit about it. Under improved fiends:

 

You're welcome not to like it, but it's not kept secret.

 

I know. I read the readmes. This is really about mages, though, not fiends.

I just don't understand the motivation behind it. It's outrageously unfair to the player and it makes mages even more overpowered - something they are already.

What about "playing by the rules"? From the very same readme:

 

've made a fairly sustained effort to ensure that SCS II opponents fight by the rules and don't use powers denied to the player (other than obvious things like dragons' breath weapons, liches' ability to see through invisibility, etc!) This is probably most notable for spellcasters - SCS II mages don't randomly get uninterruptible spells, improved casting time, free Alacrity, or the like. (In fact, I've removed these powers from creatures in the vanilla game occasionally, though I haven't done so systematically.)

 

Alas, in this case spellcasters do precisely that.

 

The party and the enemies should play by the same rules. Either enemies should have the same limitations as the player, or party-summoned demons should be treated like normal, green-circled summons - which I think is the best solution (and would actually make the spells usable).

If you want to implement the first solution, don't install Smarter Fiends (it's too impractical to code enemy wizards to cope with the protection-from-evil restriction). I'm not really keen to implement the second restriction as it's way outside SCS's remit and probably unbalanced, but if you want it, add the following to the end of the setup-scsii file:

 

Why would it be unbalanced? That's precisely how enemies play it. Why would this be true only for demons and not for, say, Mordenkainen's Swords or Planetars?

Your mod, your call, of course. I just don't see how streamlining demon summonings would be a more "out of the scope" solution than drastically changing the way enemy-summoned demons behave. This component goes already out of its way in breaking SCS2's premises of non-intrusiveness and fair-play by heavily altering an aspect of the game mechanics. It's not like it makes enemies smarter. It just lets them cheat themselves a few demons.

Granted, in vanilla BG2 demon summoning was silly.

Long story short, what I would suggest is expanding the component to include a more balanced solution - not necessarily the one I pointed out, just one that doesn't so blatantly apply double standards.

 

I don't like being an ass when commenting on someone's work, but this sucks. It really sucks.

I'm mildly curious as to why you think this sentence adds anything to your argument.

 

EDIT: theBigg beat me to the console command, and he's right about the randomness factor too.

 

I had no intention of being insulting. If I had, I wouldn't have added the first clause (and I probably wouldn't be commenting in the first place). It was meant to succintly convey the thought that to me this component comes off as "really wrong, illogical and unreasonable". Besides, I'm sure that "component X sucks" is fairly mild-mannered.

 

I have no problem with the difficulty or with the number of demons enemy mages summon, I have a problem with not being able to do the same and getting the crap end of the stick for no justifiable reason.

 

I agree that realism ought to give some small chance of the wish not actually doing anything very useful, but randomness like this actually is less valuable than you think: all it does, in practice, is give a small random chance of some given battle being uninteresting because the spellcaster just got unlucky. Overall, things like that don't increase the quality of the experience.

 

Even if the mage doesn't get the best choices, there are many options that can affect the battle in a number of ways, making it no less interesting. Personally, I think I'd appreciate it. I don't think "interesting" necessarily equates with "as hard as it gets".

Just in case, if you ever want to test it, I volunteer for the job.

[DavidW]

Anyway, my point is that the gap between the player's version of demon summoning spells, which are useless, and the enemy's version, which is very powerful, is HUGE. Basically the player can't summon demons: they'll routinely turn on the party (as soon as PfE is dispelled, which is always very soon); on the other hand, enemies make massive use of the same summons, with all the perks and none of the hassles. And those demons are strong, even in the late game.

I agree, there's a definite gap here. And the readme is very explicit about it. Under improved fiends:

 

You're welcome not to like it, but it's not kept secret.

 

I know. I read the readmes.

 

In that case, I'm a little unsure why you installed the relevant component, given that you don't want mages to behave differently from the party in any circumstances and the readme is very clear that they will do in one circumstance if you install Smarter Fiends.

 

I just don't understand the motivation behind it. It's outrageously unfair to the player and it makes mages even more overpowered - something they are already.

What about "playing by the rules"?

 

The motivation for letting NPC summons work this way is basically that

(a) mages summoning demons fits very naturally into the flavour of the game, and (in my opinion) makes battles more interesting

(b) personally speaking I found the improved fiends one of the more interesting aspects of SCS and I was keen to put them into the game more often

© My experience from testing is that giving wizards this version of Summon Fiend doesn't make them net more powerful, it just makes them a bit more interesting (i.e. I now have an extra kind of attack strategy to deploy - in particular, it's nice to have something that's competitive with Horrid Wilting

(d) In my judgement, it's not viable to get NPC spellcasters to use mages effectively (within the other SCS design constraints) without the spell being modified so that Pro/Evil isn't needed.

 

The motivation for not extending it to PCs is

 

(a) it gives PCs a significant new resource, which has the potential to have quite substantial implications in various bits of the game (PCs have much greater latitude to use new resources than NPCs do) which might have unbalancing consequences somewhere else. (Note that this isn't the case with Mordenkainen's Sword and Planetars (which you mention) as there's no significant change there from a vanilla resource.)

(b) it changes the flavour of PC spell resources, something which I don't regard as part of SCS's remit except where it's part of the overall structure of the mod

© I didn't have any particular trouble, personally, justifying it in-game as a consequence of NPC spellcasters' much longer experience and of the in-canon-established fact that it's possible to arrange long-term pacts with fiends.

(d) it would have required significant amounts of coding and testing.

 

Look: ultimately this is a judgement call. Personally, I think the SCS fiend summoning fits the flavour of the mod and improves it, that mage battles with it are better (specifically: more varied) than without it, and that all in all this is a justified exception from the usual parity-of-resources design principle. But if you don't agree, that's completely fine: that's why SCS is modular. You have the ability to install it such that this mage behaviour doesn't occur.

 

Long story short, what I would suggest is expanding the component to include a more balanced solution - not necessarily the one I pointed out, just one that doesn't so blatantly apply double standards.

 

I can't judge this request without a specific suggestion. I promise you that I didn't casually wake up one morning and think, "hell, it's boring keeping NPCs to PC constraints, let's break those constraints for fun". This is the best way to incorporate demon summoning that I was able to come up with after a certain amount of consideration and testing. Almost certainly there's a better way, but I don't myself have one in mind.

 

(And, although I don't actually think your originally-suggested solution is sensible, I did still code it for you - above - so you've got the option of playing that way if you want.)

 

 

[on wishes]

Even if the mage doesn't get the best choices, there are many options that can affect the battle in a number of ways, making it no less interesting. Personally, I think I'd appreciate it. I don't think "interesting" necessarily equates with "as hard as it gets".

Just in case, if you ever want to test it, I volunteer for the job.

 

Testing really isn't the issue here: design is. As with demons, the wish design is the best I was able to come up with after thinking about it. That doesn't mean it's the best possibility there is - I'm sure it isn't. It means that just being told to improve the component doesn't help much. If you have specific ideas - where "specific" means "they should cast X 30% of the time, Y 25% of the time, Z 45% of the time" - I'm listening.

[Guest Guest_Loz_*]

The main problem isn't what the enemies are doing. It's that no effort has been made to make sure the party can do anything comparable. I can live with the double standard pro. evil, but why if I summon more than one demon do they fight eachother? Even demons of the same type will attack eachother. Why are they a red circle, making them almost impossible to use. Even an uncontrollable green circle(where it gives you the talk icon as you mouse over/same as ascension demons you control) would be far more useful.

 

I'd much rather see a system like PnP fiends from aTweaks for the player where a check is made on summon to see whether the caster is protected from evil or not - if they are they become an uncontrollable green circle and generally act as if they were on the casters team, otherwise they go hostile. Sadly the scs mages aren't really compatible with those summons, in fact if you don't install scs' demon summons I don't think they summon any demons at all.

 

Basically more usable demon summoning spells is a cool idea, but it is less cool if only the enemies get them.

[DavidW]

I'm clearly failing to communicate what the logic here is, so let's have one more go. Here are the premises:

 

(a) If demon summoning is to be a part of SCS2, then it needs to work differently from the standard PC spell.

 

(b) Modifying the demon-summoning behaviour of NPCs so that it bypasses Protection from Evil checks seems to work well in terms of overall game balance (vis-a-vis difficulty of enemy mages, and balance of demon-summoning strategies versus other strategies) according to my playtesting and the consensus playtesting of others.

 

© Extending that NPC behaviour to players would, in my judgement, be unbalancing and change PC abilities in a way that goes beyond SCS's design remit and beyond what I can reasonably playtest, given that SCS is not intended as a revising of PC spell resources.

 

(d) I cannot myself think of a better arrangement for NPC demon summoning, nor has anyone suggested one that I find satisfactory.

 

Now, if you don't agree with me, you have lots of options!

 

- if you don't think mages should be able to summon demons in the way they do, just don't install the Smarter Fiends component.

- if you don't think mages should be able to summon demons as much in the way they do, use the console code I suggested above.

- if you want the same summons as PCs that the NPCs get, I wrote some code for you, above (not tested, to be sure).

 

So I'm kind of unsure why Guest! and Loz are so agitated about this. You don't have to play it this way if you don't want to. SCS contains a demon-summoning option which is basically detachable from the rest of the mod. It's completely up-front about being an exception to the mod's usual rules of treating NPCs and PCs equally. If you don't like that demon-summoning option, don't use it. You can, if you like, suggest alternative or better demon-summoning options that I might want to code, and if I think they're interesting enough, I might see if I can find time. But in the meantime, surely the whole point of the - not inconsiderable - effort put into making SCS(II) modular is that you just use the bits you like, and skip the bits you don't like.

[Ardanis]

I don't like the entire idea of keeping demons at bay with 1st level spell ProEvil. It's too powerful and too easily removable, to be a balanced feature. Using it to lessen the chance of summon going hostile, that's much better approach imo.

Spell Revisions v4 is gonna rework the entire demon summoning process to something hopefully a lot more believable, so wait for it

 

I also agree that NPC casters, willing to summon fiends, ought to be intelligent enough to not count on such unreliable protection as dispellable ProEvil, so in RP terms it makes perfect sense to me that they may carry an amulet with blood ties to it's owner that allows them control fiends with more ease. Or, as SCS readme states, they may have much more experience in dealing with demons. Point is, it's not immersion breaking.

 

Same goes for Wish, I don't like the random choice (install Wish-fixing mods) and I think NPC wizards may have slight bonus to it if they wish so. They can detect party's items at will, blindly teleport to PCs across the whole location, cast infinite Oracles to reveal hidden thieves, etc. It is unfair towards player, but it is a necessary (and very mild, compared to certain vanilla things) measure to compensate for the lack of real intelligence.

 

Anyway, my point is that the gap between the player's version of demon summoning spells, which are useless, and the enemy's version, which is very powerful, is HUGE.

This is not correct, because SCS upgrades both PC and NPC summons. If in your game PC version is significantly weaker, then it is a bug, probably related to compatibility with other mods.

[Demivrgvs]

David, I'm a litte confused, doesn't Improved Fiends improve in-game fiends too? From your words (and the readme) I get the impression you only tweak summoned fiends, but last time I played I'm pretty sure at least underdark's unique Balor was correctly affected.

 

On topic, I do second your decision regarding ProEvil and AI summoned fiends, and more or less all you said, but I don't like "double standards" too, and I'm trying to "fix" that within SR (more details here).

 

Another thing that may "upset" some players is that such powerful summons have no "counter" (e.g. PnP Dismissal), but it's probably not within SCS scope to provide it to players. As you know I thought to make (Un)Holy Word banish summoned demons/celestials, but I never understood if you would be against it or not (obviously with a save to avoid the efect).

 

P.S For SR V4 I also planned to turn Death Spell into a more appropriate Banishment spell, but I'm not sure about it affecting demons. It does in other settings like PnP and NWN, but it's obviously a huge boost within BG, especially with SCS fiends.

[Guest Guest_Loz_*]

Ah, I don't want to be a pain. In fact the demon summoning component of the improved mages is one of my favourite parts of the mod. Seeing enemy mages summoning hordes of demons to help them feels really cool and immerses you in the setting. The first time I saw a high level mage doing this was when I knew I was playing a great mod!

 

The only thing was that I feel the player demon summons are a little too hard to make any use of. In mods such as ascension and aTweaks i've seen some cool implementation of allied demons. It IS preferable however, to have all the demons scripted from the same mod or the inconsistency is jarring. As you say though, this is perhaps not really something scs needs to worry about as it is a mod focusing on enemy ai.

 

Anyway, I will of course continue to play with the scs demons as it makes mages much more varied and fun to fight.

[phordicus]

really, demon summoning is being treated too much like any other summoning, which is "far too lightly". that's the immersion break.

 

perhaps restricting it to selected mages rather than any and all mages of a high-enough level? and pacts/blood ties or not, demons aren't willing servants. if 5 allied mages summon 5 glabrezu, i promise you there's no justification possible for those glabrezu to not act their genius level INT and "let" their summoners die, thereby freeing them from slavery.

[DavidW]

David, I'm a litte confused, doesn't Improved Fiends improve in-game fiends too?

 

It does. I'll concede that the player who wants Improved Fiends, wants Smarter Mages, but doesn't want the latter to summon the former, is out of luck. I'm happy to add that option if there's demand.

 

On topic, I do second your decision regarding ProEvil and AI summoned fiends, and more or less all you said, but I don't like "double standards" too, and I'm trying to "fix" that within SR

... which is cool, because SR is a better place for that kind of shift. (It's probably worth noting that SCS inevitably skews towards my play style, and since I don't really play evil parties and so don't summon fiends, the theoretical double standard is not something I notice in game. I'm happy to concede that it's more visible for players who tend to summon fiends themselves.)

 

Another thing that may "upset" some players is that such powerful summons have no "counter" (e.g. PnP Dismissal)

Sure they do: four feet of enchanted steel. Actually, my testing suggests that in practice summoned fiends fulfil the useful purpose of giving the party fighters something to do while the party mages are debuffing enemy wizards. (Though again, adding a Banishment type spell in SR sounds a perfectly good idea, but as you say, it's outside the scope of SCS.)

 

but it's probably not within SCS scope to provide it to players. As you know I thought to make (Un)Holy Word banish summoned demons/celestials, but I never understood if you would be against it or not (obviously with a save to avoid the efect).

I don't think it makes a major difference to me. My hunch would be it's broadly balanced, probably erring towards overpowered rather than underpowered, but in any case it won't break anything in SCS.

 

P.S For SR V4 I also planned to turn Death Spell into a more appropriate Banishment spell, but I'm not sure about it affecting demons. It does in other settings like PnP and NWN, but it's obviously a huge boost within BG, especially with SCS fiends.

 

That probably would be overpowered in an SCS environment. (Note that I removed genies from the scope of Death Spell precisely because that was already working out as a bit overpowered.)

 

Ah, I don't want to be a pain.

You're not being, don't worry.

 

really, demon summoning is being treated too much like any other summoning, which is "far too lightly". that's the immersion break.

Immersion-breakingness is in the eye of the beholder, it seems; Ardanis more-or-less summarised my own view.

 

perhaps restricting it to selected mages rather than any and all mages of a high-enough level?

 

To some extent it is: it's restricted by speciality type. (IIRC only conjurers and liches summon fiends.) In my judgement, restricting it further would just detract from the variety of battles.

 

if 5 allied mages summon 5 glabrezu, i promise you there's no justification possible for those glabrezu to not act their genius level INT and "let" their summoners die, thereby freeing them from slavery.

 

There's plenty of precedent within both fantasy in general and Realms-lore in particular for mages to summon significant numbers of fiends and successfully control them in battle. (And, as I recall, glabrezu don't serve their masters because they're enslaved: they specifically respond to summons to enter into appropriate trades with the summoner.)

[Shaitan]

To some extent it is: it's restricted by speciality type. (IIRC only conjurers and liches summon fiends.) In my judgement, restricting it further would just detract from the variety of battles.

This is one of many very cool aspects in SCS. I'm just saying.

[Guest!]

In that case, I'm a little unsure why you installed the relevant component, given that you don't want mages to behave differently from the party in any circumstances and the readme is very clear that they will do in one circumstance if you install Smarter Fiends.

 

I like Improved Fiends, especially their new abilities. It certainy makes battles more interesting; enemies summoning demons is a big plus for me. It just felt kinda like I was being cheated by not being able to do the same.

 

The motivation for letting NPC summons work this way is basically that

(a) mages summoning demons fits very naturally into the flavour of the game, and (in my opinion) makes battles more interesting

(b) personally speaking I found the improved fiends one of the more interesting aspects of SCS and I was keen to put them into the game more often

© My experience from testing is that giving wizards this version of Summon Fiend doesn't make them net more powerful, it just makes them a bit more interesting (i.e. I now have an extra kind of attack strategy to deploy - in particular, it's nice to have something that's competitive with Horrid Wilting

(d) In my judgement, it's not viable to get NPC spellcasters to use mages effectively (within the other SCS design constraints) without the spell being modified so that Pro/Evil isn't needed.

 

I agree with all but c). In my experience (admittedly limited, I've had I think no more than 5 or 6 runs with the last couple versions), Summon (Caco)Fiend is palpably stronger than HW until late SoA/ToB, when demons get easier to deal with.

 

(And, although I don't actually think your originally-suggested solution is sensible, I did still code it for you - above - so you've got the option of playing that way if you want.)

 

That's nice, thanks. I'll use it in my next playthrough. If you're actually interested in feedback on how well it works, just let me know.

 

Testing really isn't the issue here: design is. As with demons, the wish design is the best I was able to come up with after thinking about it. That doesn't mean it's the best possibility there is - I'm sure it isn't. It means that just being told to improve the component doesn't help much. If you have specific ideas - where "specific" means "they should cast X 30% of the time, Y 25% of the time, Z 45% of the time" - I'm listening.

 

What I had in mind was giving mages the same choices the player would get with maxed Wisdom, and having them choose the best. All the possible options would be ranked from best to worst, with a few caveats depending on the circumstances: "HW on all creatures in the area" may be a decent choice if enemies are magic-resistant (so it would be ranked higher), "Improved Haste on all party members" wouldn't be very useful if the mage is alone (so it would be ranked lower), etc.

If this sounds any good, I can list the rankings and the relative shifts.

 

On a sidenote:

1. Pit Fiends are significantly weaker than Cornugons, Bone Fiends and Glabrezus, not to mention Baalors. What about giving them a little more juice?

2. In NI/SK I've seen several creatures which I've never actually met in the game: Matron Mother Ellaviir, Matron Mother Finadryl and Drow Archmage. Are these part of the Ust Natha defenders?