If you could limit the hard-coded thieves' "Detect Illusions" ability... how would you?

[Caedwyr]

Also, non true class thieves are pretty skillpoint starved and they'll have to pick and choose which skills are going to be raised to high enough levels to be useful, especially if you have something like epic thieving installed which expands the range for which points provide meaningful benefits.

In the past, the advantage of Detect Illusions was that it bypassed the Non-detection, greater invis/mislead/spell immunity combo that made it impossible to target a mage with all the buffs active, especially for older tactical mods which would just forcecast a new set of buffs every time you brought them down.  Most of the stuff I've seen so far in more modernized mods don't have quite the layered defenses that made Detect Illusions so critical on higher difficulties.  Then again, I haven't gotten to the higher levels of SCS fights so maybe Detect Illusions will regain its killer app status.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Well, in my opinion, the illusionary defenses are a part of the mages critical defense layers... but it's not the only layer, and as such if for say blur and mirror images could be ... say if they were casted at higher level ... could be undispellable by the thieves skill, while the invisibility effects SHOULD be dispelled by it. They could give better defence values etc also. But nothing that could not be countered.

[subtledoctor]

44 minutes ago, DavidW said:

Is it actually that unreasonable?

It's the idea that a rogue can, by just being alert, surpass the most powerful divination spell in the game.  It's kind of like how I feel about mages summoning planetars - tactically speaking, it is fine I guess, even if like most of what Bioware did in BG2 it's a bit on the munchkiny side.  But whether balanced or not, it's just silly in concept.  Or not even silly, but misplaced.  It could be reasonable as the 2E version of a Spot check - let it reveal invisible things.  If it operated by secondary type it could be that.  But the way it plays in the game, it feels more like an HLA than a skill.  And like I say, it could work well to actually make it an HLA: give thieves the Inquisitor True Sight ability as an HLA.  The other version of high-level abilities, in the Dark Sun sourcebooks, had 21st+ level thieves dabbling in illusion and divination magic, IIRC.  So there is some basis for that.

But I'm not modding thieves; I'm modding invisibility.  How invisibility interacts with the thief skill was going to be something I added as an afterthought.  Now that I realize it uses primary types, I'm no longer really interested in it.  OTOH,

44 minutes ago, DavidW said:

opcode 276 modifies Detect Illusion. If you want things like SI:Abjuration or Nondetection to interact with thief DI, you could probably do it aura-style

That is an excellent idea.  The component already modifies Nondetection, it would be a cinch to add something like this.

Edited August 5, 2020 by subtledoctor

[lefreut]

8 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Maybe... maybe not.  I'm  not sure if the current value is exposed to the UI when you're in the level-up screen.  @Bubb or @lefreut might know.  It's certainly outside my wheelhouse though.

You can disable the '+' button once a skill hit a certain value. The only thing is to properly detect which one is the skill you want to limit.