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SR Revised V1.3.900 (2022 August 8th)


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Does someone knows if IR(R) moves the Short Sword of Backstabbing in BG2? According to the wiki it says "The Shadow's Blade" is rewarded by providing evidence and killing Mae'var. I did a long time ago and I didn't get it. The only mods that I could think of that could affect this items are "Rogues Rebalanced" "SCS" and "IRR".

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50 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

has a range of 30 in vanilla, and SR (not SRR) sets it to 20. That seems a little silly to me given it's an AoE spell that can damage the party - I will be increasing its range back up to 30.

Demi was trying to differentiate it from Fireball (or, more to the point, Delayed Blast Fireball).  The vanilla version is just a better Fireball - better damage type, more damage, and if you aim wrong it will wait for enemies to come inside its blast radius.  It's sort of insane how OP it is for a 3rd-level spells.  With a reduced range, you have to use it like a (...wait for it...) trap, by placing it somewhere and then moving away from the blast radius.  Since it is supposed to be, you know, a trap.

Having it fail to cast when the AI tries to use it between range 21 and 30 is a bad side-effect.  (Which occurs because the AI is using the spell as a dumb "better Fireball" instead of as a trap.  But whatever.)  Increasing the range back to 30 cures that but goes right back to the drawing board: what, then, should be done about the spell?

My idea: make Shield block Skull Trap, just as it blocks Magic Missile.  After all it is a directional blast of the same kind of magic-energy damage type that magic missiles do.  This creates a nice tactical choice between Skull Trap and Fireball: Skull Trap is the better spell overall, but it is less effective against your squishiest party member, the mage who is most likely to perish from a direct-damage AoE attack. 

EDIT - cripes, if SCS puts three Vitriolic Spheres into a Spell Sequencer, I'm might hang up my hat and go play Super Mario Brothers.

Edited by subtledoctor
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I don't mind it being 20, but if it breaks it for the AI, that is a much worse scenario than it having an additional 10. Shield idea: I feel like that's too exploitable. Helps enemy mages against Skull Trap, but also means you can fire them at yourself at will as well, and I feel like that's more of an additional positive for the player than it is for the AI. Now I wouldn't exploit it like that personally, but clearly making it an obvious and usable option means other people will: "Shield" at 1st level is much cheaper than "Protection from Fire" at 4th.

Edited by Bartimaeus
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1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

@DavidW, any insight into what SCS enemies tend to put in sequencers/chain contingencies?

Look in stratagems/caster_shared/triggers. All the SCS contingencies/triggers/etc are listed there, in a fairly human-readable format. I probably don't pay enough attention to range. 

24 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

Which occurs because the AI is using the spell as a dumb "better Fireball" instead of as a trap.  But whatever.

If you think it is viable for Infinity Engine AI to use Skull Trap as a trap rather than as a fireball, I would really, really like to see your code. (I'm serious - I'm always happy to learn, and lots has improved in scripting since EE came along. But in general it is really difficult for enemy scripting to show any signs of spatial awareness.)

24 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

if SCS puts three Vitriolic Spheres into a Spell Sequencer

Guilty as charged. Hey, it's a legal choice!

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

I am not too concerned about the summonables since they're usually summoned at self by the AI anyways (...I think?)

If you're thinking of SCS, then mostly not, actually (I'm not sure about vanilla). Summons are mostly offensive weapons, it makes sense to summon them near squishy enemies.

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1 minute ago, DavidW said:

Look in stratagems/caster_shared/triggers. All the SCS contingencies/triggers/etc are listed there, in a fairly human-readable format. I probably don't pay enough attention to range. 

If you think it is viable for Infinity Engine AI to use Skull Trap as a trap rather than as a fireball, I would really, really like to see your code. (I'm serious - I'm always happy to learn, and lots has improved in scripting since EE came along. But in general it is really difficult for enemy scripting to show any signs of spatial awareness.)

Guilty as charged. Hey, it's a legal choice!

If you're thinking of SCS, then mostly not, actually (I'm not sure about vanilla). Summons are mostly offensive weapons, it makes sense to summon them near squishy enemies.

I think his comment about Skull Trap is more to do with the player than the AI - that the AI uses it the same way the player was, simply as a "dumb" fireball.

Summonables: Dang it. Well...I'll have to look into your file and see what spells are used for triggers/contingencies and make some calls, I guess.

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Incidentally (apologies for double posting) as regards Skull Trap vs. Fireball for enemy AI, I don't use Skull Trap except for necromancers. Purely mechanically, invokers and conjurers ought to be using it instead of Fireball, but they don't. At least as of v32, I try quite hard to be a bit thematic as regards who uses which spells, even at some cost in tactical efficacy.

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1 minute ago, DavidW said:

Incidentally (apologies for double posting) as regards Skull Trap vs. Fireball for enemy AI, I don't use Skull Trap except for necromancers. Purely mechanically, invokers and conjurers ought to be using it instead of Fireball, but they don't. At least as of v32, I try quite hard to be a bit thematic as regards who uses which spells, even at some cost in tactical efficacy.

Something of an in-universe explanation could be that Fireball is bound to be a much more commonly found spell in the Forgotten Realms setting than Skull Trap probably is, so it makes sense that only Necromancers would be focused on finding it (given their additional bonuses in casting it).

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@subtledoctor Install order: I tagged you earlier to show you what I did, but as the resources of IR and IRR are quite different at this point, I don't know how much of it is directly applicable/translatable to the base mods. As mentioned before, there is also the issue of inconsistent spell-like abilities between IR and SR. One decision I made very early on is that I wanted IR and SR resources to be consistent (e.g. I want IR's Prismatic Explosion to have the same effects as SR's Prismatic Spray except for the unique projectile/graphic), which is simply not something IR does for the most part - many effects are instead based off of vanilla spells. I don't know why that's the case, and I wasn't prepared to have a discussion on the subject as I *was* going to have SR spell-like abilities one way or another, so I simply updated all of IR spell-like ability resources to match SR/R's, something that obviously cannot simply be copied and pasted over to non-Revised IR. However, you may certainly use the macros I included and repurposed with a little of Mike's direction for updating item descriptions. I have not yet completed the tooltip macro updates, but I'll get around to it, most likely after I sort out these range issues. Note that not everything will necessarily apply as-is to non-Revised IR/SR.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/3ykwxbvqxejnq6e/item_revisions.tph

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/c5z95pnxqgb6nzd/macros.tph

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/hxf23a6btstqenw/item_revisions.tra

...Side note: what is the intended difference of a "tph" vs. a "tpa"?

Edited by Bartimaeus
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9 minutes ago, DavidW said:

If you think it is viable for Infinity Engine AI to use Skull Trap as a trap rather than as a fireball, I would really, really like to see your code.

I don't expect that the AI (any AI) should use the spell as a trap.  I think the way the spell was designed, by Bioware and/or the original 2E authors, is kind of stupid.  Your AI uses it exactly as it should use it given the vanilla form of the spell: as a better Fireball.  I'm only intimating that I think it's a shame the designers couldn't have come up with a more interesting concept and/or execution.

If reducing the range and making it more like a trap than a grenade messes up SCS, than I 100% agree with Bartimaeus that is an unacceptable side-effect of the SR change.  And I'm pretty confident Demi would agree as well.
 

11 minutes ago, DavidW said:

I don't use Skull Trap except for necromancers. Purely mechanically, invokers and conjurers ought to be using it instead of Fireball, but they don't. At least as of v32, I try quite hard to be a bit thematic as regards who uses which spells, even at some cost in tactical efficacy.

See, now this I love. 

In fact that gives me clarity about how to modify the spell.  Why fight so hard against the tide?  Best to just make the spell what it really is, as far as how the AI and most players use it: a necromantic version of Fireball.  So, equalize them.  Give Skull Trap the exact same characteristics as Fireball - including 10d6 damage cap and explosion radius - except of course don't use fire damage.  And make it explode instantly, and not be a trap at all.  If the spells are commonly used in identical fashions and the question is how to balance them, then let them be identical.  As SCS already does, let the difference be thematic rather than functional.

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Alternatively, other traps (such as Glyph of Warding, Fire Trap, Symbols) are 20' - you could just as easily set it to that instead. Personally, I don't really like the "trap" mechanic because of how easily abusable it is with metaknowledge, so I try to never use it. A bit of a shame.

Edited by Bartimaeus
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33 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

I wanted IR and SR resources to be consistent (e.g. I want IR's Prismatic Explosion to have the same effects as SR's Prismatic Spray except for the unique projectile/graphic), which is simply not something IR does for the most part - many effects are instead based off of vanilla spells.

I agree.  The most obvious solution is something like, in SR, copy the appropriate spell to overwrite the subspell cast by the IR item (and change the type to innate).  What gives me pause are

  1. I'm just not familiar enough with IR items to have a list in my mind of just which items need this treatment; and
  2. Resulting item description changes.  Yeah, super annoying.  I'll take a look at those macros.

I'm sitting here with a copy of SR4b18 and IR4b10sd13, but it occurs to me that maybe this should not be done in IR/SR themselves.  Maybe the design intent of IR is in fact to use vanilla-style effects, instead of SR-style effects?  That seems crazy to me, and unlikely.  But, it seems presumptuous to make changes to the mods themselves without some kind of confirmation.  Maybe I should implement this sort of thing in a different mod... hmm...

  EDIT -

33 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Side note: what is the intended difference of a "tph" vs. a "tpa"?

Nothing, as far as I know.  I think it's  totally arbitrary - you can use .tpx, .tpr, heck I'm pretty sure you can put a bunch of code in "macros.txt" and INCLUDE it, and it will work just as well as .tpa or .tph.  In several mods I have Weidu code in a file with an .ini extension, and it runs just fine when INCLUDEd.

Edited by subtledoctor
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7 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Alternatively, other traps (such as Glyph of Warding, Fire Trap, Symbols) are 20' - you could just as easily set it to that instead. Personally, I don't really like the "trap" mechanic because of how easily abusable it is with metaknowledge, so I try to never use it. A bit of a shame.

Fire Trap & Glyph of Warding are party friendly!  No need for a trap effects there, I just blast away in the middle of a scrum. 

OTOH Symbols (and Delayed Blast Fireball) are high-level magic, so I can justify giving them a unique tactical application.

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33 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

I'm sitting here with a copy of SR4b18 and IR4b10sd13, but it occurs to me that maybe this should not be done in IR/SR themselves.  Maybe the design intent of IR is in fact to use vanilla-style effects, instead of SR-style effects?  That seems crazy to me, and unlikely.  But, it seems presumptuous to make changes to the mods themselves without some kind of confirmation.  Maybe I should implement this sort of thing in a different mod... hmm...

  EDIT -

Nothing, as far as I know.  I think it's  totally arbitrary - you can use .tpx, .tpr, heck I'm pretty sure you can put a bunch of code in "macros.txt" and INCLUDE it, and it will work just as well as .tpa or .tph.  In several mods I have Weidu code in a file with an .ini extension, and it runs just fine when INCLUDEd.

There are merits to a democratic, discussion-based approach on these sorts of things...but it's also a hell of a lot more convenient when you can play the role of mod author and be dictatorial on the things you feel strongly instead. There are, of course, many things I don't feel as strongly about and look for feedback from others on...but this wasn't one of them.

Yeah, I didn't think there was any technical difference, just wanted to know the intended difference is, since you can find .tpas and .tphs in the same mods sometimes, but I could never figure out the difference.

I forgot about the party friendliness aspect of those two. On the other hand, their damage is 33% lower as well...on the other hand, they're divine spells. I think an argument could be made, but really, I don't feel that strongly about it. In some circumstances, I feel like the 20' trap aspect of Skull Trap is actually less convenient rather than Fireball's immediate explosion, but you're probably right in that it's more of a net gain than loss most of the time. Most of the time.

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1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

...Side note: what is the intended difference of a "tph" vs. a "tpa"?

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

Nothing, as far as I know.  I think it's  totally arbitrary - you can use .tpx, .tpr, heck I'm pretty sure you can put a bunch of code in "macros.txt" and INCLUDE it, and it will work just as well as .tpa or .tph.  In several mods I have Weidu code in a file with an .ini extension, and it runs just fine when INCLUDEd.

There is no practical difference.

There seemed to perhaps be a convention to use the .tpa extension when the file contains actions and the .tpp extension when the file contains patches.  That way, you'd know whether to use INCLUDE or PATCH_INCLUDE for the file.  But I'm not sure how the .tph extension fits in.

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