Some spell oddities / questions

[minutus]

Simulacrum doesn't really get dispelled by True seeing / True Sight (or thieves Detect Illusions)? Or I'm seeing things. Both Arcane and Divine True Sight/Seeing claim to dispell Simulacrum but I'm getting they don't. Project Image and Mislead clones get dispelled per description. Also Mislead / Simulacrum made from PI gets some kind of generic default character clone avatar, but I assume that's some hardcoded engine stuff.

[ExplosPlankton]

AFAIK Simulacrum is not dispelled by True Seeing or True Sight but it IS dispelled by Detect Illusions. Bug or intended?

 

I have also noticed the strange behavior of Mass Invisibility stripping/bouncing off individual spell protections despite being an AoE. Intended?

 

The workings of protection from fire and cold seem very odd to me. What is the difference between Fire Resistance and "Magical Fire Resistance." The description claims that the spell infers invulnerability to "normal fires like torches and bonfires" (lol? what does this actually mean in terms of gameplay?) but only absorbs 50% of magical damage from sources such as fireballs (it specifically mentions this spell among others). And yet, when I cast a fireball at a character buffed by arcane pro fire (no other buffs or gear equipped), they always take 0 damage regardless of whether they save or not. Seems to me like the description should be updated (or the spell changed I guess).

[Jarno Mikkola]

The workings of protection from fire and cold seem very odd to me. What is the difference between Fire Resistance and "Magical Fire Resistance." The description claims that the spell infers invulnerability to "normal fires like torches and bonfires" (lol? what does this actually mean in terms of gameplay?) but only absorbs 50% of magical damage from sources such as fireballs (it specifically mentions this spell among others). And yet, when I cast a fireball at a character buffed by arcane pro fire (no other buffs or gear equipped), they always take 0 damage regardless of whether they save or not. Seems to me like the description should be updated (or the spell changed I guess).

There is no "magical fire" damage spells other than mod added ones and even those are rare cause the glitch that's present as the vanilla game doesn't have a death animation for magical fire deaths(same is with magical cold), and as such, the game actually crashes if the killing damage is magical fire or magical ice... so essentially the spell gives total protection. Yes, if you go and look the fire damage in most if not all fireball spells it is normal fire, not magical.

[ExplosPlankton]

Ok but isnt that all the more evidence that the description of the spell is wrong? It specifically states that it reduces "magical fire damage" from sources such as fireball (the actual description lists fireball among others) by 50% but thats not what it does in practice. If all sources of fire in the game are "normal fire," why not simply delete all those extra bits about magical fire and remove the meaningless "50 magical fire resist" from the character attribute log?

 

The descriptions of so many spells scream "wall of unnecessary text" to me and could really use some cleaning up but I guess that is all carryover from pnp sources. Reading some of the spell descriptions in this game reminds me of the card texts from Beta edition magic: the gathering cards, walls of text describing something that could have been said in a few words. I know its not within the scope of the fixpack to change any of this but in the case of pro fire/cold where the description is flat out wrong, I think a fix would be appropriate.

[minutus]

I don't really mind the p&p flavourish descriptions, as long as they don't state something absolutely inaccurate or misleading, which is indeed the case with some of the elemental resistance spells (arcane prot from fire (claims 50%, grants 100%), arcane prot from cold (claims 50%, grants 100%), divine prot from fire (claims 80%, grants 100%). The "magical fire/cold" seem practically fluff stats. Anyway, streamlining the texts radically doesn't sound "GTU Light" material.

 

I think the issue is well recognized, but there's again the dilemma of whether to fix it by matching the description or behavior. It probably depends on how the code is implemented and what can be deducted to be the intended behavior. If the behavior would be changed, arcane casters would have much more trouble gaining certain elemental immunities, and would require divine casters to aid them in that. This would be problematic especially for enemy mages - I'm not sure how popular these spells are in vanilla, but at least SCS mages rely on these spells to get immunities to potentially interrupting spells. Of course they can combo protection from elements to get that, but those eat high level slots in comparison, aren't as well available to lower level casters and they don't last very long. On the other hand immunities maybe shouldn't be available so easily as they are now, and one could argue there's nothing wrong with having to combo spells to get there, and having potentially more interrupting options isn't necessarily bad.

 

Are you sure about thiefs Detect dispelling Simus? I use Detect extensively (very handy as big portion of SCS mages rely on SI:Div + Invis combos and are very vulnerable to it) and I could swear I've had the same issue with Simus lingering recardless of scrying method. But I admit I haven't done extensive testing and might very well be wrong about that (and enemy simus tend to die so quickly later in the game regardless).

[ExplosPlankton]

I'm not suggesting to radically streamline texts, I was just making an offhand commentary so ignore that bit. It would be very easy to change the description of Pro fire, etc. while still keeping the pnp "flavor fluff." Take the description of pro fire, for example. Merely delete the words "partial protection from," change "50%" to "100%" then delete "50 magical fire resist" from the character attribute log. Bam, fixed. Why would it be deemed necessary to drastically change the function of a spell to correct an inconsistency when a very simple text update would suffice. That is "going beyond the scope of a fixpack" imo! If players want their spells to function differently from vanilla, that is best left to mods like spell revisions.

 

The effect of detect illusion on simulacrum is not something I can easily test but I'm sure someone here knows the answer already anyway. I think I was mistaken though, simulacrum probably cant be dispelled by true sight or detect illusions. Likely a design choice to increase its usefulness.

[Wisp]

The magical fire/cold stuff is going in, along with some other stuff. It would have been in already, except here I deferred the decision to another time and that time never came (or it is now, take your pick).

[ExplosPlankton]

Good stuff, Wisp. That link now has me wondering about blindness and luck, were those spells ever modified to match their descriptions (I see the game text hasnt been changed)? Those sound like slam dunk inclusions to me.

 

The descriptions of True Sight and True Seeing are also inaccurate as minutus mentioned. They claim to dispel simulacrum but they actually do not. If detect illusions does not dispel simulacrum either I would imagine the designers intended it to be this way but I could see an argument for changing the effect of true sight, true seeing, and detect illusions to actually make them dispel it.

[minutus]

The magical fire/cold stuff is going in, along with some other stuff. It would have been in already, except here I deferred the decision to another time and that time never came (or it is now, take your pick).

 

Nice, much appreciated! It's not "never" if you're fixing it now. Besides, it's never too late to iron these kind of oddities out. Not that it changes much for those who already know the actual behavior, but it can definitely make the game play a lot smoother for new players.

 

Would it be feasible to cut/hide the "magic cold / magic fire" resistances from the character sheet? My reasoning would be that there's no way devs would purpousely put absolutely fluff stats there to confuse the player, especially since the character sheet is the place I've learned to go to get at least mostly accurate data on what effects characters have on them. It also clutters a list that can already get very long. I suggest to do this only if it's clear that those stats are not used for anything in the game, as it seems so. Hiding might be better than cutting them, as maybe there's some mods that utilize them somehow (though if those dmg types cause crashes, then I don't see how). It might be hardcoded / too much trouble though, but maybe worth a look?

 

In the case of Blindness there's also Glitterdust, which claims to add blindness effects (AC & Thac0 penalties of 4) and additionally penalty of 4 to all Saves. I wonder what the actual effect there is.

[minutus]

Few more oddities:

 

- Protection from Normal Missiles (Arcane) doesn't seem to do anything. I only noticed this while testing the enchantment level of arrows, but it doesn't block even regular arrows, darts or bullets. In fact I didn't find anything it would block. As a sidenote, I found it fairly odd that pretty much all projectiles except the +x ones have an enchantment level of 0 (or 1 which also counts as nonmagical in SCS (depends) I suppose). At least it makes arrows of dispelling lot less overpowering against bosses. I'm curious, are they really nonmagical or actually +1 in terms of what they can hit? I mean biting/wounding/piercing/elemental/dispelling/poisoned/asp's and the various stunning bolts.

 

Edit: Found a way to test it. Dispelling arrows are actually magical, but probably +1 enchantment level? Funnily Arcane Protection from Normal Weapons doesn't block them in SCS (while PfMW does), but the bhaalspawn immunity to normal weapons does. That has nothing to do with Fixpack of course.

 

Edit 2: Arrows of dispelling disregard SI:Abju. That is very odd, hmm.

 

- Cleric/Druid HLA: "Elemental Summoning" is bugged and it almost feels like the odds in it are flipped around. It's supposed to have a 10% chance to summon a Prince but instead it feels more like 90%. Also, it often summons both a Prince and 1-2 elementals. I wouldn't consider this a description error as the current behavior makes this spell stronger than the supposedly upgraded "Greater Elemental Summoning" version.

 

- Divine HLA summon Deva (non fallen one) is unable to use her Chaos spell. Other spells seem to work, and Fallen Deva is able to use Chaos just fine. Not sure if Deva would use it via AI scripts, but if you order her manually to use it it won't fire.