Thoughts for future versions

[polytope]

Improved Haste

Changing improved haste to an AoE (like regular haste) with duration of 5 rounds.

This would make the spell even more overpowered than it already is. While 5 rounds duration might seem little, if a single IH affects multiple warriors the end result is that you get out of it even more damage within less time!

 

I disagree: By 17th level (i.e. under SoA cap) a sorcerer wearing ring of wizardry for instance has no less than seven 6th level slots. That's enough to cast Improved Haste on all party fighters (if you have three like most people) and leave four for defenses like globe, ProMW, protection from magic energy... ample really. IH lasts for two turns at 17th level so you can have all your fighters improved hasted for the duration of a major battle without the mage needing to spend a round in combat to refresh it.

 

In contrast, 5 rounds of IH is short enough to actually wear off in combat - after all the 5 round duration of NPP is a source of frustration for many players even vs vanilla game vampires, which aren't particularly hard to kill. I just finished underdark; house Jae'llat and the group of slime priests (and particularly their summons) definitely took more than a turn. Dragons with increased staying power take a turn or so iirc. Even for a quick battle (5 rounds or less) a short duration IH would tie up the party's mage or sorc for the first round and forbid another offensive action.

 

I repeat myself here, but barring a MAJOR rewrite of the prebuff and general wizard scripts I can't see a single target Improved Haste being useful at all to enemy fighters. Currently some mages like ambushing bandits and Yuan Ti for instance use haste in their prebuffs or sequencers precisely because it's an AoE that can be self targeted without fuss.

 

Cloudkill

Cloudkill - even if you don't abuse it by exploiting line-of-sight cheese against the AI - is too powerful for interrupting enemy mages and can only be defended against by SI:Evocation (...which no-one uses).

SR's Neutralize Poison protects from damage animation, and I think ToBex allows characters with 100% poison damage resistance to avoid being interrupted too

 

Yeah, I use ToBEx "No Spell Interruption on Zero Damage" tweak, but only a monk can have poison damage resistance, there's simply no wizard spell that grants it.

 

Unrelated, I remember (from my first playthrough, way back...) that vanilla game Qilue - the priestess who the giant fish wants dead - would teleport about her home. SCS removes this behaviour from her, it's currently easy to quickly mob Qilue and avoid fighting some of her mage servants in the next room (who are quite high level). It would definitely be more of a challenge if you allowed her to teleport there.