Forgotten Armament

[Mordekaie]

I am in the middle of mods dealing with items for my next playthrough ; and discovering most of them along with your mod.

In particular, the mod Under-Represented Items (that adds new items from IWD2)  also proposes a way to "to ensure all weapons, armor, and items are equally represented…" .

In your opinion, how do those two mods fit with each other ? Do they synergy well ?

 

al_item_pack:0;al_item_pack - Arcane Treasury mod

[morpheus562]

4 hours ago, Mordekaie said:

I am in the middle of mods dealing with items for my next playthrough ; and discovering most of them along with your mod.

In particular, the mod Under-Represented Items (that adds new items from IWD2)  also proposes a way to "to ensure all weapons, armor, and items are equally represented…" .

In your opinion, how do those two mods fit with each other ? Do they synergy well ?

 

al_item_pack:0;al_item_pack - Arcane Treasury mod

I use the base component from Under-Represented Items along with Forgotten Armament in my playthrough. My logs are located in here if you want to check out install orders: https://github.com/morpheus562/Baldurs-Gate-Install-Order-List-Repository

[Mordekaie]

Just to report an install warning :

Installing "17 - Update Existing Items in Addition to Adding New Items"  after Item Revisions (v4b10sd15, the fork from @subtledoctor) leads to the following warning about Spectral Brand+5 :

WARNING: no effects added to SW1H69.ITM

I do like the forgotten Armament version of Spectal Brand. But installing "17 - Update Existing Items in Addition to Adding New Items"  before IR is probably not a good idea as IR will probably overwrite most of the changes made by Forgotten Armament. Anyway i don't know if the two mods synergise well.

[morpheus562]

1 minute ago, Mordekaie said:

Just to report an install warning :

Installing "17 - Update Existing Items in Addition to Adding New Items"  after Item Revisions (v4b10sd15, the fork from @subtledoctor) leads to the following warning about Spectral Brand+5 :

WARNING: no effects added to SW1H69.ITM

I do like the forgotten Armament version of Spectal Brand. But installing "17 - Update Existing Items in Addition to Adding New Items"  before IR is probably not a good idea as IR will probably overwrite most of the changes made by Forgotten Armament. Anyway i don't know if the two mods synergise well.

IR completely replaces the item instead of doing the in place editing that mine does. I personally recommend either Forgotten Armament or IR, but not both.

 

[subtledoctor]

1 hour ago, Mordekaie said:

WARNING: no effects added to SW1H69.ITM

That is a good thing - the way that item is patched, it would be rather weird if the additions from this mod were added on top of IR. 

But yeah, ultimately the “Update Existing Items” component of this mod is doing the same thing that IR does: improving a bunch of weapons according to a particular vision of how they can best be improved. Whether they overwrite or patch is immaterial; in fact there would be more overt conflicts if both mods patched only. The more important point is, they both cover the same area. Like, would you use two different mods that change wizard spell tables? Of course not - you would decide which one you prefer and only install that one. Same principle applies here. 

@morpheus562 If you don’t think that component should be installed with IR (I would agree) then maybe it should have a FORBID_COMPONENT ~item_rev~ ~0~ restriction…

Edited August 3, 2022 by subtledoctor

[morpheus562]

3 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

That is a good thing - the way that item is patched, it would be rather weird if the additions from this mod were added on top of IR. 

But yeah, ultimately the “Update Existing Items” component of this mod is doing the same thing that IR does: improving a bunch of weapons according to a particular vision of how they can best be improved. Whether they overwrite or patch is immaterial; in fact there would be more overt conflicts if both mods patched only. The more important point is, they both cover the same area. Like, would you use two different mods that change wizard spell tables? Of course not - you would decide which one you prefer and only install that one. Same principle applies here. 

@morpheus562 If you don’t think that component should be installed with IR (I would agree) then maybe it should have a FORBID_COMPONENT ~item_rev~ ~0~ restriction…

Good call out, I can get that forbid component added

[J Beau]

If you are still planning on making additional changes, I have a request. Please do something with The Equalizer. For everything you have to go through to get this weapon, it ends up being pretty underwhelming. It could use a little love.

I really like what you are doing with this mod. It is going to be one of my "must haves". Thanks

[morpheus562]

2 hours ago, J Beau said:

If you are still planning on making additional changes, I have a request. Please do something with The Equalizer. For everything you have to go through to get this weapon, it ends up being pretty underwhelming. It could use a little love.

I really like what you are doing with this mod. It is going to be one of my "must haves". Thanks

Thank you!

I am playing around with some ideas for improving this weapon. First, I want to bring it up to +4 enchantment so it will automatically deal 1d8+4 damage with a +4 thac0 bonus. Additionally, I want to do bonus magic damage the further away from True Neutral the enemy gets (i.e. +2, +4, and +6 bonus magic damage). I then want to provide benefits to the user depending on their alignment (i.e. True Neutral gains the most benefits while Lawful Good/Chaotic Evil gain the least benefits). I could do something as simple as bonus to all saving throws to increasing character hp or have scaling regeneration based on alignment.

Edited August 4, 2022 by morpheus562

[Endarire]

What about making it +5 to be comparable to Carsomyr & Staff of the Magi, +5 early game BGII weapons?

[morpheus562]

1 hour ago, Endarire said:

What about making it +5 to be comparable to Carsomyr & Staff of the Magi, +5 early game BGII weapons?

Neither of those weapons are even comparable to The Equalizer as they are straight drops from difficult encounters instead of collected over time and forged by Cromwell. For examples, I would look toward the Silver Sword +3, Gesen +4, Wave +4, and Crom +5. The Silver Sword, Gesen, and Wave require non-functional pieces to complete the weapon, similar to The Equalizer, while Crom uses functional items (i.e. str belt and hammer) to complete. Because you lose a str belt, I can see the justification to make Crom a +5 weapon. So now the debate becomes, should The Equalizer be a +3 or +4 weapon? I personally steer toward +4 due to all the effort to collect the pieces and forge it as well as general lack of +4 weapons that are available within the game.

Edited August 4, 2022 by morpheus562

[Endarire]

I agree the + on Equalizer should be at least +4 because it requires effort and missable content.

Note that LG (and to some extend LN) can get its +5 Carsomyr.  Ir'revrykal is usable by Evil Paladins, primarily LE.  Mages get a Staff of the Magi.  Neutrality gets... what in the base game?  To my understanding, The Equalizer is the intended Blade of Neutrality that requires adventuring through to chapter 6 in BG2EE to get, whereas these other artifact quality weapons are available soon after entering Athkatla.

When I played through BG2EE many years ago, we had Keldorn in our party who switched from Carsomyr to Crom Faeyr once we had Crom since continual 25 STR and a super fast weapon (speed factor 1) that did electrical and crushing damage meant that it was the offensive weapon for anyone who focused on wielding it!  Carsomyr was still useful as a backup defensive weapon on occasion.  The Equalizer is available about the same time as Crom but is so much better (and Crom is 1 handed!) that there's little point in it.

What say you?

Edited August 4, 2022 by Endarire

[mickabouille]

On 8/4/2022 at 6:14 PM, morpheus562 said:

I am playing around with some ideas for improving this weapon. First, I want to bring it up to +4 enchantment so it will automatically deal 1d8+4 damage with a +4 thac0 bonus. Additionally, I want to do bonus magic damage the further away from True Neutral the enemy gets (i.e. +2, +4, and +6 bonus magic damage). I then want to provide benefits to the user depending on their alignment (i.e. True Neutral gains the most benefits while Lawful Good/Chaotic Evil gain the least benefits). I could do something as simple as bonus to all saving throws to increasing character hp or have scaling regeneration based on alignment.

Looks good.

Looking at the actual change, I was wondering, you seem to make a difference between law-chaos and good-evil axis, eg. CN opponents receive less damage than NG. What is the rationale?

[morpheus562]

5 hours ago, mickabouille said:

Looks good.

Looking at the actual change, I was wondering, you seem to make a difference between law-chaos and good-evil axis, eg. CN opponents receive less damage than NG. What is the rationale?

That's how the game does it with the base damage. Lawful/chaotic neutral are closer to true neutral then neutral good/evil.

[mickabouille]

Ah true, hadn't noticed. I rarely used the equalizer, always found it underwhelming.

Edited August 13, 2022 by mickabouille

[morpheus562]

Just now, mickabouille said:

Ah true, hadn't noticed. I rarely used the equalizer, always found it underwhelming.

Same. Hopefully now it gets more use.