IR Revised V1.3.800 (2022 January 11th)

[subtledoctor]

Does a mod have him wearing the armor? Do most giants wear actual armor? I would have thought that sort of thing was abstracted away in the .CRE file stats. 

Easy enough to stick some item on him with +10% fire res…

Edited September 21, 2023 by subtledoctor

[Nehreis]

Thanks for the great mod! I liked the new armor system, the modified item stats and the relocations.

I have two minor things to report :

- Spectral brand "dark swarm" ability didn't seem to work at all

- I *think* I never found Serpent shaft

[Bartimaeus]

20 hours ago, Nehreis said:

Thanks for the great mod! I liked the new armor system, the modified item stats and the relocations.

I have two minor things to report :

- Spectral brand "dark swarm" ability didn't seem to work at all

- I *think* I never found Serpent shaft

2. Serpent Shaft should be on Azamantes (Watcher's Keep final seal guardian) if you did not install Store Revisions. If you did install Store Revisions, it's at the drow weaponmaster store in the Underdark.

1. For some reason, all ten of the summoning effects are zeroed out. Weird. Hmm. In my opinion, this ability...uh, kind of sucks? Like, it seems as though it really sucks, but maybe I'm wrong. You get Spectral Brand in the middle of Watcher's Keep, where all enemies are going to have enchanted attacks, as they all do in ToB. Regular shadows only have 34 HP, have 15 THAC0, and 7 AC. They're going to be killed in two hits that are going to hit 95% of the time. Worse, by default, the summoning cap applies to these shadows, so...like, they prevent you from summoning anything else and all ten of them cannot be summoned at the same time anyways unless they're being immediately killed as they're being summoned every round. This just doesn't seem very useful.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Salk]

The "dark swarm" ability sounds cool enough but perhaps the quality of the summons should be reconsidered.

[polytope]

7 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

1. For some reason, all ten of the summoning effects are zeroed out. Weird. Hmm. In my opinion, this ability...uh, kind of sucks? Like, it seems as though it really sucks, but maybe I'm wrong. You get Spectral Brand in the middle of Watcher's Keep, where all enemies are going to have enchanted attacks, as they all do in ToB. Regular shadows only have 34 HP, have 15 THAC0, and 7 AC. They're going to be killed in two hits that are going to hit 95% of the time. Worse, by default, the summoning cap applies to these shadows, so...like, they prevent you from summoning anything else and all ten of them cannot be summoned at the same time anyways unless they're being immediately killed as they're being summoned every round. This just doesn't seem very useful.

There are two ways I can think of doing this if you don't want to remove the summoning cap (which needs a hack anyway on original BG2).

1. Treat the shadows as summons which aren't directly controlled by the player (EA.ids = GOODCUTOFF) like the rabbits from Limited Wish, those disregard the hardcoded summoning cap as much as enemy summons. They'd need to be scripted to attack and follow the party at a distance of course, rather than run around like the rabbits.
2. Abstract the "dark swarm" ability, say rather than 10 shadows you'd get a "single" shadow which has:

• Undispelable Mirror Image
• 10 attacks per round, or alternatively...
• Only 5 attacks per round, but an ability like Fire Shield triggered on hit (say 50% chance) to apply the effects of a shadow's touch to the nearest attacker

The second option sort of simulates 10 shadows fighting as a unit, like the Insect Plague spell, which doesn't actually summon insects treated as individual creatures in game.

[Salk]

Personally, I'd go for the first solution if the intention is to keep the Dark Swarm name.

[subtledoctor]

Don't underestimate the value of a large number of low-level summons to distract enemies.

[morpheus562]

On 9/21/2023 at 1:57 PM, subtledoctor said:

Does a mod have him wearing the armor? Do most giants wear actual armor? I would have thought that sort of thing was abstracted away in the .CRE file stats. 

Easy enough to stick some item on him with +10% fire res…

I am going about it by creating an undroppable robe armor for him with the stats of Shuruppak's Plate. This way, it won't be flagged by any mod that adds DR to plate.

Facing Yaga-Shura was definitely difficult as he had a net +25% damage immunity to physical damage due to this mod and my Skills and Abilities heavy plate armor proficiency providing that extra +10% DR. Definitely took some time to where I could hurt him.

Edited September 26, 2023 by morpheus562

[Nehreis]

1. I obviously expected the summoned shadows to not count for the summon limit. I agree with subtledoctor, it would not have been totally useless this way. I wouldn't mind for this ability to be completely removed/replaced though, since spectral brand has already a summon ability.

2. Oh ok the Ust Natha store. It's somehow vicious as a location, since the item gains a lot in perceived value when you get Ravager and talk to Cespenar.

[Bartimaeus]

I think I would like to upgrade these shadows to wraiths (43 HP and 4 AC instead of 34 and 7 respectively) just for a little more staying power...and exempt them from the summoning limit, which just means changing their gender from 0x6 (summoned) to 0x20 (no limit summoned). Though having them be autonomous might not be the worst idea either...but they need to have a script to follow the wielder around, and having them crowd the wielder with no ability to override their movement could get awfully annoying.

1 hour ago, morpheus562 said:

I am going about it by creating an undroppable robe armor for him with the stats of Shuruppak's Plate. This way, it won't be flagged by any mod that adds DR to plate.

That seems like as good an idea as any. Yoink!

1 hour ago, Nehreis said:

2. Oh ok the Ust Natha store. It's somehow vicious as a location, since the item gains a lot in perceived value when you get Ravager and talk to Cespenar.

I'm not...super high on it myself, but I would guess the rationale was that Serpent Shaft should ideally have some kind of theoretical utility to the player in of itself rather than its use being totally tied to the Ravager, so it needed to be placed in SoA and that's where it happened to end up. It's actually kind of bad design in the sense that if one were playing just ToB, it would lock you out of ever having the chance to upgrade the Ravager.

[Salk]

59 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

think I would like to upgrade these shadows to wraiths (43 HP and 4 AC instead of 34 and 7 respectively) just for a little more staying power...and exempt them from the summoning limit, which just means changing their gender from 0x6 (summoned) to 0x20 (no limit summoned)

Sounds like a good idea to me.

[polytope]

9 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I think I would like to upgrade these shadows to wraiths (43 HP and 4 AC instead of 34 and 7 respectively) just for a little more staying power...and exempt them from the summoning limit, which just means changing their gender from 0x6 (summoned) to 0x20 (no limit summoned). Though having them be autonomous might not be the worst idea either...but they need to have a script to follow the wielder around, and having them crowd the wielder with no ability to override their movement could get awfully annoying.

Unless the most recent version of EE changes this, having 5 "summoned" allies (or whatever value is in summlimt.2da) already in an area prevents any more allied creatures being summoned, regardless of what's in the creature's gender field.

One way around this; when you want summon-disrespecting spells or effects, have them set a global variable. The background script needs to be appended so that whenever the variable is of a non-zero value an unseen "spy" creature is spawned next to whoever cast/used the ability (detectable stat on the caster), which proceeds to spawn secondary allied creatures by script, the type & number dependent on what value the variable was initially set to, before returning the variable to zero and despawning.

Or it may be fixed globally soon anyway.

[Bartimaeus]

37 minutes ago, polytope said:

Unless the most recent version of EE changes this, having 5 "summoned" allies (or whatever value is in summlimt.2da) already in an area prevents any more allied creatures being summoned, regardless of what's in the creature's gender field.

Well, I'll leave it for you to determine whether or not it's a change in the latest version of the EEs (I do not believe it is, because as far as I ever remember, this has always worked...though with the caveat that I only test EE stuff when I'm changing something specifically for it or in situations like right now), but in a vanilla BG2EE game, I just changed Spider Spawn's SPIDSWSU.cre's gender from 0x6 to 0x20 and was able to summon six of them just fine...then I tried to summon six skeleton warriors (whom I did not modify), but was only able to get five before the summoning limit kicked in.

Edited September 27, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[polytope]

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Spider Spawn's SPIDSWSU.cre's gender from 0x6 to 0x20 and was able to summon six of them just fine...then I tried to summon six skeleton warriors (whom I did not modify), but was only able to get five before the summoning limit kicked in

In my games at least if you do it the other way around it chokes, if you have 5 controlled creatures with gender = SUMMONED then you can't summon anything else no matter what the allegiance or gender field. On the other hand you can have arbitrarily many friendly but uncontrolled monsters with gender = SUMMONED, or controlled monsters with 0x20, but only if they're summoned first.

[subtledoctor]

Sounds like a good argument to simply remove the summoning limit. Or maybe implement in a different way?

What about celestials? What if you 1) changed all celestials to gender SUMMONED, changed summons to gender CELESTIAL, set the “celestial” summoning limit to 5, and used a different method to restrain celestials. (The limit is one, so have every such spell kill any on the battlefield before summoning the new one.)

Not really something SR/IR can do, just spitballing.