Beholders don't anti magic ray me when I have Spell Shield

[potatoteers]

My impression on Beholder is that it will strip you butt naked with anti-magic ray no matter what, then petrify you, lastly blast you into millions of stone pieces. Yet on my recent playthrough(Hardcore difficulty), they seemed to be dazzled by me shining Spell Shield, not be able to do anything about it. They still stole my shining shield and cape though and zapped my ass with lightning, but they just couldn't take down the Spell Shield, which was hilarious.

I have to ask: did I broken the Beholder AI with my mod installation? This is not an intended feature right?

[DavidW]

No, but Spell Shield has often caused problems for beholders. I'll look into it (won't make it into the next release, though, because that's imminent).

[potatoteers]

Okay, one more thing I want to mention is that, even the dead magic room in Watcher's Keep will not take down Spell Shield. The room strips everything except Spell Shield.

P.S. David you are still updating the SCS? Are you mad? Kudos.

[DavidW]

I have maintained SCS for 15 years, through intercontinental moves and two children; it's fairly unlikely I'll stop now, though I've taken 2-year-plus breaks before and probably will again!

[jmerry]

On 9/16/2021 at 6:25 PM, potatoteers said:

Okay, one more thing I want to mention is that, even the dead magic room in Watcher's Keep will not take down Spell Shield. The room strips everything except Spell Shield.

Dead magic areas dispel everything. However, spell defenses such as Spell Deflection, Spell Turning, and Spell Shield are not dispellable. So they remain.

 

On the Antimagic Ray/Spell Shield interaction, I'm currently building a tweak mod addressing that among other things.

Currently, in both the vanilla game and SCS, Antimagic Ray is an abjuration spell with the MAGICATTACK secondary type that hits as level zero. The secondary type lets it go through abjuration immunity but makes it subject to the deflection effect of Spell Shield. And since it hits as level zero, it uses up none of Spell Shield's one level of deflection and the shield remains. In effect, Spell Shield grants immunity to antimagic rays for its full duration.

I offer two options in my mod.

- Antimagic rays ignore Spell Shield. I remove the school and secondary type for this one; antimagic rays just go through all spell defenses this way.

- Spell Shield blocks one antimagic ray. I set the power to 10 for this one while leaving the types in place. Spell Shield (and nothing else) will still block a ray, but will be used up in the process.

[potatoteers]

On 11/27/2021 at 11:36 AM, jmerry said:

Spell Shield blocks one antimagic ray. I set the power to 10 for this one while leaving the types in place. Spell Shield (and nothing else) will still block a ray, but will be used up in the process.

Sounds good and what I originally thought should happen.

To be honest, I just hope Antimagic ray is truly a cone of ray in front of the beholder so you can avoid it by flank the beholder, or position yourself through Haste. Every time I want to pick up BG2 again, the idea of fighting beholders just scares the shit out of me.

[boof]

I've seen a guy on youtube play with an older version of bg2 and scs where spell shield would block one anti-magic ray, and then be dispelled. Seems like that's how it should work.

As it is right now, it absorbs infinite amounts of anti-magic rays. You can cast immunities to all that the beholders can do, abjuration immunity and spell shield and there's nothing they can do, other than chomp.

Edited January 13, 2022 by boof

[subtledoctor]

On 11/26/2021 at 10:36 PM, jmerry said:

I offer two options in my mod.

- Antimagic rays ignore Spell Shield. I remove the school and secondary type for this one; antimagic rays just go through all spell defenses this way.

- Spell Shield blocks one antimagic ray. I set the power to 10 for this one while leaving the types in place. Spell Shield (and nothing else) will still block a ray, but will be used up in the process.

I think you could also just add a dummy effect as the very first effect in the Anti-Magic Ray spells, like "AC bonus of +0 for 0 seconds", with a power level of 1, and that should trigger the Spell Shield to dissipate.

I think.

[jmerry]

It should work. No problem with other deflection effects being eaten into as well, since they don't touch anything with the Spell Attack type. No problem with spell level immunities like a minor globe, since the deflection effect takes priority (I've broken liches' Spell Shields with Spell Thrust before). But I don't know how a spell with mixed levels interacts with protections, and I'm not about to test it when I already have working code for this component. It's entirely possible that the game would take one effect being eaten by a minor globe as a reason to kill the whole spell, and I don't want to create a new immunity button with this.

I'm not the first to use a "level 10" effect like this; SCS does it with the component that lets Spellstrike break Protection from Magic.

Now, I just have to get back to working on my mod so I can finish and release it.

[subtledoctor]

7 hours ago, jmerry said:

No problem with spell level immunities like a minor globe, since the deflection effect takes priority

Even better:

• spell shield only considers the power level of the spell's first effect, so this would properly interact with the spell shield
• deflections also only consider the power level of the spell's first effect, but they cannot block the MAGICATTACK sectype so this would get through
• GOI (opcode 102) considers each spell effect separately, so the first throwaway effect would be blocked but the rest of the effects (power=0) would get through

Not saying you need to change anything, just throwing out information and more possible solutions, since I have been doing a lot of testing lately of how these effects interact. (In my own mods I use the old SR dual-subspell version of Spell Shield interactions, for added flexibility; but I actually use the spell shield effect for, of all things, Haste and Slow interactions.)

Also for anyone focused purely on beholders, I just checks and this problem should NOT happen if you have Spell Revisions installed - it incorporates beholder anti-magic rays into the dual-subspell Spell Shield system so that it works as expected in this context. My own Magic Battles Revised mod will also fix this as of the next update, probably later today. (In fact, with both my mod and SR, I'm playing around with the idea of allowing both Spell Shield and Dispelling Screen to each block one instance of Anti-Magic Ray, giving you potentially 2+ rounds of protection.

Edited January 13, 2022 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

Neither here nor there, but I've never really understood this implementation of Anti-Magic Ray. Looking at my current install, it strips you of protections and dispels everything... and applies casting failure for 30 seconds?  So the beholder can zap you with magic effects while you cannot cast spells back? I thought the classic beholders' central eye ray behavior was, they could not affect you while you cannot use magic. And, when you can be affected by the beholder's magic, you can once again use your own. (See, e.g., the sequence of OOTS strips here and here and here.)

[jmerry]

By "this", of course, you mean the standard BG2 implementation. The SCS beholder component changes the rays to grant full magic immunity as well as dispelling and blocking spellcasting, but also reduces the duration. And tweaks the AI so that enemies won't use the ray on fighter-types unless they have certain buffs deemed worth removing.

Well, your fix for the antimagic ray/spell shield will definitely be released first. I'm still working on adding bits to my mod before initial release. Completely unrelated to this one, of course.

[Jarinex]

Sorry to bring necro an old thread, but since I noticed Davis was looking at some old bugs, I wondered if this behavior ever got looked at.

 

You mentioned you looked at it, but it wouldn’t make it into the next update. Currently using jmerrys mod to allow for one spell shield to protect for now, but thought I’d ask.

[DavidW]

There will be a fix in v35.

[jmerry]

Good. That way, I won't have to worry about install order issues; right now, the SCS beholder component actually nullifies my tweak if the former is installed after the latter. (SCS adds effects to the beginning of the antimagic ray, with defined power level of zero. Spell Shield is only used up if the first effect in the spell it just countered has positive power level.)