Made another biggish BG2 install

[Thacobell]

What if spell and  attack protections had similar durations?

[subtledoctor]

As things stand now, depending on your modlist, some spell protections last 1 round per level, some last 20 rounds, and some last 50 rounds. While, with SR/SCS, I'm seeing that PfMW, Moment of Prescience, and Absolute Immunity all last 4 rounds. Stoneskin and my variant "Iron Skin" last as long as the skins stop hits, which depending on the number of attackers and their APR, could be as little as a few seconds. Protection from Missiles lasts quite a long time, which is good.

I'm also trying to figure out how to rebalance my Magic Battles Revised to make it easier to tear down spell protections.

[DavidW]

1 hour ago, Thacobell said:

What if spell and  attack protections had similar durations?

If you shortened spell durations to 4ish rounds, it would be difficult for wizards to have much time to do anything other than keep their defenses up, even when not under magical attack. If you lengthened attack protection durations, I think it would be overpowered.

[subtledoctor]

I think limiting spell defenses to 10 rounds, and stretching physical defenses to ~6 rounds, would not be crazy. But the more I think about it, the more I think that the big answer is to enable mages to bring down spell defenses faster. Right now there is a bias toward the defense - layered spell defenses are stronger than spell attacks of equivalent level. Exhibit: Spellstrike can bring down Spell Trap, but is stymied by Spell Trap + Spell Shield. Maybe reduce the power of Spell Shield, say spell attacks with "pierce" in the name can pierce it. (See how that works?) So:

• Secret Word removes Spell Shield or two deflection/GOI layers
• Pierce Magic removes Spell Shield and two layers
• Ruby Ray removes Spell Shield or Spell Trap or three layers
• Warding Whip removes Spell Shield or two layers, then Spell Shield or two layers, then Spell Shield or two layers
• Pierce Shield removes Spell Shield and either Spell Trap or three layers
• Spellstrike removes all spell defenses utterly

I'm still not sure that's good enough... in the middle of the game enemies will have 3-4 layers of GOI/Deflection plus Spell Trap plus invisibility, and then will renew if if you strip them. I just fought Kayardi and Necre and this is precisely what happened. Even with this weakened Spell Shield, they would each need ~3 castings of Pierce Magic, or ~5 Secret Words, or ~8 Spell Thrusts. That basically completely exhausts my 4th- to 6th-level spell slots... with Lavok and Tolgerias still ahead of me!

Also need to increase the duration of Detect Invisible. Right now it needlessly burns through my 2nd-level slots just to keep targeting the enemy.

[DavidW]

I'm not sure I understand the 'bias towards the defense'. The average attack spell brings down more than one defense, so in a contest between someone who's trying to lower defenses and someone who's trying to raise them, the person trying to raise them is going to get outraced.

I suspect the changes your describing will make fighting mages significantly easier for mixed parties, especially at high level. Spellstrike + Breach + melee pile-on will bring down even high-level mages in a few seconds. (At a technical level, though, I think SCS's AI will handle that change fine.)

I also suspect your NWN 'spell turning affects AoE' is shifting the balance a lot here. Without it, mid-level and high-level AoE spells become effective against mages. (They have counters, but they're not the same as the counters for single-target spells.)

[subtledoctor]

It’s like I said: if I’m about to face down Tolgerias or Lavok, people want it to be possible with Minsc + Mazzy + Valygar. Which is fine. I myself was on record at one point advocating to reduce the duration of PfMW. 

But if I’m going to face Tolgerias in chapter 2/3 and I have a choice of being backed up by Minsc + Mazzy + Valygar, or Edwin +Jan + Aerie... right now the former seems like a better choice. And that seems wrong to me. 

I’m okay if Spellstrike demolishes spell defenses because I don’t get access to Spellstrike until the end of the game. At 9th level it’s basically god magic. While I’m casting Spellstrike the enemy can cast Time Stop, which means for their spell defenses, mission accomplished.

If anything mages need more protection specifically against Breach. Dispelling Screen does that, so (note to self) if Spellstrike leaves Dispelling Screen intact then that would be another speed bump to make mage duels more mage-y and less smash-y. 

Or, if we want to consider more radical ideas, we could shift Spell Shield from being in front of spell defenses to being behind spell defenses but n front of Breach. That could work in the context of my Magic Battles Revised mod... but given Dispelling Screen is already in that position, maybe it would be redundant. 

If not, here’s another pretty radical possibility: on the assumption that SCS likes to cast Spell Shield more often than Dispelling Screen, maybe switch those spells. That would lead to mages putting more emphasis on protecting their combat protections than on their spell defenses. Because even with no spell defenses up, mages might still be able to weather offensive magic, via specific protections and some combat protections. (E.g. ProEnergy, and Pro Missiles actually blocks a large number of spells.) But once their combat protections are gone, nothing can protect them from an axe to the head...

Edited October 13, 2021 by subtledoctor

[Endarire]

@subtledoctor
May we split this discussion caster/non-caster handling into another thread outside how it directly relates to your install and playthrough?

My opinion:  Casters have variety, but require more setup (spells and foreknowledge) to work properly.  Non-casters have the simplicity of clicking the thing until it dies as a more viable option.  (I didn't realize how fast I could win BG until I played a throwing axe Kensai and could just keep going!)  The classes aren't balanced 1:1, but they have different sorts of spotlight time.

Edited October 13, 2021 by Endarire

[subtledoctor]

Oops, just spotted a somewhat nasty mod interaction: with @polytope's Revised Dispel Magic installed, a Remove Magic spell can remove my spell protections, even though they are set to be undispellable. If you use SR and/or SCS and especially with my "Magic Battles Revised" tweaks, you probably care about the 'mage duel' system and this is a pretty undesirable result.

I looked at the files and it seems to be because polytope's mod applies a subspell which, instead of using opcode 58, uses eight instances of opcode 220 to remove all spell effect of each individual school. It would be way better to use opcode 58 here. I note that I installed the "Dispel Magic Only Dispels Up To Level 6" option, without really investigating how it works.  Opcode 58 could not achieve that. But instead of opcode 220, I would use opcode 221 to remove spells by sectype, targeting the 'Combat Protections,' 'Specific Protections,' and 'Illusionary Protections' sectypes. That would still allow stopping at a maximum spell level, but would leave stuff like Spell Protections alone.

For now, if the spell battle system is at all important to you, I would steer clear of that mod.

If you have the PolyDisp mod installed and want to tweak it, look for A^DISPE2.spl. Change the eight instances of op220 to either one instance of op58, or to three instances of op221, as described above.

Edited October 14, 2021 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

Aaand, here we go:the gods-forsaken ranger stronghold quest. I know I’m not really a ranger, and it is mod-enabled, but does it have to be quite this buggy?? Once again, I go to Imnesvale, and there is nothing for me to do. Mazzy’s cousin stops by and tells us we must go to Trademeet; If I go to Trademeet and return to Imnesvale (16 hours), the ranger quest is failed. If I ignore Mazzy and go to the Temple Ruins and back (8 hours round trip) the ranger quest is failed. If I just go to sleep for 8 hours right in front of Nelleck… nothing happens, there is nothing to be done.

Is there a solution to this goddam quest somewhere? Does anyone know if this is a bug in BG2EE v2.or a bug in Tweaks Anthology? Last time I encountered this it was with the old Tweaks component; this time it is with the new component by DavidW… I hoped it would work better but it’s got the exact same bug. I’m ready to just CLUA myself the damn Moon Dog, but is it so much to hope the game would work correctly??

Is there a solution to this somewhere that I’m not aware of - some variable I can set?

[DavidW]

32 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

Last time I encountered this it was with the old Tweaks component; this time it is with the new component by DavidW…

I don't think either do anything except enable the quest.

[subtledoctor]

Yeah that makes sense. 

I ended up moving forward. I wish I could tell people how... I kept reloading a save at D’Arnise Keep, trying different combinations of traveling to Imnesvale, talking to Nelleck, sleeping, traveling out of Imnesvale, talking to Danno, etc. Several times the quest just failed with no warning; once Delon showed up but gave me the wrong dialogue (and then the quest failed) and then finally Delon showed up and gave me the right dialogue, which then allowed Nelleck and the minister to give me the quest. (This is specifically the ogron invasion/Atta rescue quest.)

Looks like this is an EE bug. I found evidence of it being brought to Beamdog’s attention as far back as seven years ago, which is not a great sign. Looks like some devs and even some players blamed it on user error and “missing” the message from Delon, but my experiments with timing show that timing has nothing to do with it. Really disappointing that Beamdog can’t be bothered to get a handle on this. 

Edited July 8, 2022 by subtledoctor

[Thacobell]

The way I get through it, is I camp out in front of the mayor's cabin, save the game, and rest. I do this right after getting the stronghold. I go and talk to the mayor, if there's no mission, I rest again. Talk again and repeat until I either get the quest or get notification that the quest failed. If it failed, I start using ctrl-t and checking in every in-game hour. Whether Delon ever actually shows up or not to give the message seems entirely random. I do it this way, because I've had Delon reach me in the temple ruins, go immiediately to the Umar Hills, and have the mayor tell me I took too long.

Alternatively, you can set the right variable with the console. As far as I can tell, this only happens with the first ranger quest. I've never had any issues past the start.

[subtledoctor]

Interesting. I have consistently had trouble with the second quest - the ogron "invasion" - not the first. Whatsername the forest spirit has always successfully found me to tell me about Lord Igen ripping up trees.

At any rate, I managed to get through the verkakte quest (and what an astoundingly disappointing "invasion"), and then played Trademeet. The last time I played half of SoA, It was as a stylized fighter/druid, with an FnP kit focusing on radiant magic. It wasn't too hard for Charname to beat Faldorn. This time I am a fighter/abjurer. Which means I can't fight her myself. And I booted Jaheira some time back. Which means the fate of the grove is down to... Cernd. Uh-oh.  On the bright side, when Cernd joined the party I clicked the ability from my psionics mod and... he's a wild talent! Cool!  And lucky, because this turned out to be instrumental in getting through the quest, on which more in a second.

I played through the grove map, everything went fairly well. There are three set-piece group fights against spellcasters, which means I have to use up a lot of spells. This is one of those quests where I force myself to play the whole thing through without resting. But that's okay, because unlike most quests, in this one five of my guys get to take a breather when I reach the end boss. So I conserved Cernd's spells and used everyone else's more than I normally would. I specifically declined to talk to Guildmistress Busya or the genies this time, because I didn't want to tackle the Ihtafeer fight. I wanted to play it straight: meet Ihtafeer in his disguised form, walk away, and then come back later. Unfortunately, I forgot once again that Ihtafeer will automatically go hostile if you have the Flail of Ages when you enter the room. Why? Who knows. Some interaction that was cut from the original game. But the result was, I walked into that fight completely unprepared. I popped some quick summons (Kitthix, an earth elemental from the Ring of Earth Control, Shadow Monsters which has a quick casting time) and then just... tried to survive. Charname and Fade spent round 1 getting up spell deflections while the rest of the party summoned meat shields and tried to occupy the rakshasas. Then Charname and Fade one-by-one methodically took down the enemies' deflections, and then Breached them. Whereupon the rakshasas raised new deflections and new Stoneskin/PfMW. I ran out of Breach spells and while I have since modded Remove Magic into a kind of mini-Breach, it was not prepared for this fight. Luckily I had many castings of Gust of Wind (SR for Zone of Sweet Air) so I could disperse their increasingly nasty cloud spells. It took some time but eventually I prevailed! I say again: this game is the most satisfying when don't do stuff like pre-buffing.

A mod note: with Item Revisions installed, one of the druids in this are drops Belm, a scimitar with a constant +1/2 bonus to APR. Then from the rakshasa (or the genies, I forget), you get Rashad's Talon, which has the "Cleave" ability, a 20% chance of +1 APR, once, after a successful hit. This is stupid. Rashad's Talon's occasional APR boost is completely overshadowed by Belm's constant APR boost, but you get them both in the same quest and Rashad's Talon is presented as the end-of-quest reward. Either that Cleave ability should be replaced with something more inventive, or the two scimitars should be put in very different places in the game.

Anyhoo, then I trooped over to Faldorn, and Cernd challenged her, and... Cernd got curb-stomped. I tried again, and again he lost the fight very quickly. And again. Et cetera. I reloaded from outside the cave, and rested to get everyone's spells back. Now I pre-buffed a lot - hit Cernd with Emotion: Hope, Pro Evil, Bless, Improved Invisbility, and Stoneskin (from the Ring of Earth Control). Then tried again... and lost again. As I said: uh-oh.

Turns out, Cernd sucks. Admittedly, this is due to a confluence of factors: 1) in his native Shapeshifter kit, the FnP sphere system removes a lot of useful spells from him, including stuff like Barkskin and Iron Skin. 2) Unlike most FnP druids, the shapeshifting for this vanilla kit is not instantaneous - it happens slowly and prevents him from casting spells for 6 seconds. 3) I could not change him to a different kit as I wanted (he really shines as a Northern Druid) because of a bug in the interaction between FnP and NPC_EE. 4) Faldorn is supported by SCS scripts and she gets pre-buffed as well, and can shapeshift instantaneously and make physical attacks in between casting, and some of her spellcasting actually seemed to be uninterruptible. (Some, but not all. It's weird, especially since I turned off concentration checks so everyone should always be interruptible.)

So yeah: uh-oh. I started to worry that I would not actually be able to beat this encounter.  But finally, I tried a different load-out of spells, and also remember that Cernd is a wild talent! The 2% chance of having a psionic power would have been way more fun on another character who spent more of the game in my party. But Cernd makign that roll ended up being critical because on the next try I led with his 'Solar Flash' psionic power, and successfully interrupted Faldorn's greater earth elemental summoning, and blinded her for a round. And because psionics doesn't quite operate on the "1 spell per round" principle, I could cast my next spell before she did: Insect Plague, which itself interrupted her next spell and then made her panic. I summoned some bombardier beetles to get in her face, and then kep blasting her with save-or-suck spells: Doom, Icelance, Hold Person, Sunscorch, Command, Icelance again, etc. She was never fully paralyzed - her saving throws must be crazy - but I did enough damage and interrupted enough of her spellcasting and summoning that Cernd, at long last, prevailed. *Whew!*

[subtledoctor]

Then I returned to Athkatla with this party:

• Isra (paladin)
• Yeslick (F/C)
• Charname (F->M)
• Fade (M/T bard)
• Nephele (C)
• Evandra (M)

I had been carrying a gem around that I had obtained for Raelis Shai. I returned it to her and watched her whole retinue be abducted by extraplanar bounty hunters. I buffed up for another tough series of encounters, and followed.

This was a bit wacky. The initial fight is always hard, and the tendency of SCS yuan-ti mages to summon efreet makes it worse. Then, while I was managing things and starting to take the upper hand, a few thralls from the north and the east somehow heard the commotion and ran over, prolonging things substantially. Something about this version of SCS Better Calls for Help? I don't know, but it made a tough fight tougher. After pausing to heal, I ventured east the handle the gaggle of thralls over there along with several umber hulks and a big wyvern. This was another tough fight. Then I looked for the Master of Thralls... but he was nowhere to be found? I saw some messages about him tripping a trap and being Slowed... very weird.  I tip-toed toward the northwest corner of the area, with Fade invisible and protected from divinations. The Master of Thralls was not there, but the Warden apparently has the innate ability to see invisible creatures (opcode 193), and several thrall spellcasters cast True Sight and Detect Invisible. Fade ran, and the Warden + thralls + umber hulks chased her and started the fight before I was ready!

I usually like the way this plays out, where you can free the thralls and they turn on the Warden, and sure they all die but you get to join the battle while he is distracted. Not so this time, I had to take on all of them together. It was, again, very tough. I summoned some stuff to occupy the enemy in the corridor, then Charname and Evandra focused on taking down the Warden's protections while Fade, Yeslick, and Nephele startsed raining down every AoE disabler they could: Curse, Entangle, Web, Slow, Confusion, Emotion: Despair, etc.

I have switched the spells for Spell Shield and Dispelling Screen, so that any time SCS scripts call for a caster to have Spell Shield up, they instead apply Dispelling Screen to their whole group. The idea is to make it slightly easier to take down their spell protections, but slightly harder to Breach their combat and specific protections. So far, I am tentatively enjoying this. It made the end of this fight pretty satisfactory: the Warden died not because he was made vulnerable and then overrun by summons or fighters, but because his spell protections were momentarily stripped and Charname managed to land a Discorporate* spell for 104 damage. Bang!

* (What used to be "Disintegrate," merely renamed because BG2 removes all role-playing possibilities from the spell and only allows it to be cast on living(-ish) things.)

I had been having some talks with Fade about freeing herself from her service to the Shadow Thieves, so she took this opportunity to hop a lift from Raelis Shae and roam the planes, while Haer'Dalis decided to adventure with me.  Rationale: Fade is a mage/thief with the 'Jinxer' kit, while HD is a mage/thief with the Blade kit. She gets a few cool spells (Curse, Doom, Malison, Break Enchantment), while he gets an extra proficiency point. But other wise they are fairly identical: dual-wielding daggers and short swords, with high DEX and good AC and access to, eventually, 7th-level arcane spells. I had stopped going down the romance path with Fade a while back, and unfortunately, she basically stopped talking at all. There doesn't seem to be a "friendship track" or whatever, and there have been no interactions with other party members. I want to get away from the vanilla NPCs (just look at that party list above), but Fade seems to have become a cardboard cut-out, while Haer'Dalis, whatever else you can say about him, at least has lots of personality regardless whether you are sleeping with him. So I think this is the right move, and in keeping with Fade's character according to the conversations we've had so far.

If that's not the right move, somebody let me know. HD has banters, but no more quests; maybe Fade still has more content to see? Can it be seen if you are not in a romance with her?

And now a bug is starting to annoy me enough to do something about it: something has screwed up Spell Sequencers, they aren't checking for known spells as they should. This also affects the wizard robes from the SoD-to-SoA mod that I bought for about 18,000 gold. So no more playing until I figure this out and can use sequencers.

EDIT -

I seem to have fixed sequencers. Yay! that was quicker than I thoguht it would be. Looks like the next mod to come along and run Kjeron's Sequencer Menu utility is... maybe overwriting the file?  That's odd, it shouldn't do that.  Need to double-check what's going on here...

EDIT 2 -

For some reason the robe still doesn't work. Can’t figure out why. You can cast spwi710 from an innate ability just fine, but it’s not working from an item! Boo. The sequencer spells actually work a lot better when activated by an item, instead of by a spell. 

Edited October 19, 2021 by subtledoctor

[Guest Morgoth]

You know, I thought the playthrough was mostly you testing how your compilations worked, but the fact that you write your own impressions and feelings and how it is going is making it pretty enjoyable.