Implosion and Bigby's Hand spells should not affect certain very large creatures

[DavidW]

(I'm assuming a general framework for thinking about opcodes 109, 175 and 185 which I laid out here.)

This one is a stretch. I'll put it out there, but if it's too much for a fixpack, fair enough.

Certain attack spells - specifically Implosion and the Bigby's Hand spells - physically confine the target in a damaging region and play an animation to show that. But if the creature is really huge - dragons are the obvious example - this looks stupid, because the animation is far too small to cover them. This is something the BG2 designers are often quite alive to - dragons don't use Globe of Invulnerability, for instance, and they have their own bespoke versions of Spell Turning and Stoneskin precisely because the animations for those spells are too small for dragons. But they didn't get caught in this case (these are all ToB additions, and probably got less playtesting). In addition, the immobilizing effect doesn't work on dragons, as they're immune to the relevant opcode (changing to 185, as I've suggested elsewhere, for these spells doesn't work, as they're immune to 185 too) so that they can just wander out of the animation, which looks even sillier.

Left to myself, I would grant really large creatures straight immunity to these effects, via a 318 conditioned on their circle size. (I advocated something similar here for Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, but that's just cosmetic. This obviously does have an in-game effect.)

[DavidW]

On reflection, a more lightweight option would be to put a movement rate=0 clone of the 185 on these effects. It won't do anything for creatures affected by 185, and it will freeze the 185-immune creatures in place, which is about the best we can do to simulate the effect of the spell given that bosses need immunity to 185 to avoid scripting problems. Most boss protections don't give immunity to movement speed changes.

It still leaves the animation silly, but I'm sympathetic to the view that that's too much for a fixpack. I'll do it myself in SCS or something.

[subtledoctor]

I don’t love the idea of immunity, only because those are high-level spells and therefore the kinds of spells one should be using against big bosses. I just fought Abazigal and while I knew I couldn’t immobilize him, it was a handy way to tag him with some damage. 

 

[DavidW]

I think this is correct, on reflection. The aesthetics isn't a sufficient argument, at least in a fixpack.

[CamDawg]

Yeah, I'm a wary of outright immunity here. The problem as described is aesthetics, we have precedence for dragons using custom knockoffs for seemingly aesthetic reasons, so to me that says we could look at alternate aesthetics (or suppression) for creatures of a certain size.

Aesthetics.

[Sam.]

7 hours ago, CamDawg said:

we could look at alternate aesthetics

With basically no BAM frame size limit in the EEs, you could just scale the existing animations larger for the biggest creatures, if you wanted to go that route.

[Graion Dilach]

It is really hard to upscale animations while ensuring the end result still looking good though. The playerbase is already picky with zoom afterall.

[DavidW]

I've had a more careful look at this, and it's better than I had thought (the EE implementation differs significantly from the oBG2 implementation).

Here's how Crushing Hand works (Clenched Fist is similar).

• If you *make* your saving throw, you're hit by a 1-round, no-save Sleep (39) effect.
• if you *fail* your saving throw, a secondary spell hits you with a 2-round no-save sleep effect *that bypasses Sleep immunity* (via opcode 337) and inflicts various bits of secondary damage.
• After one round you're hit with another secondary spell which, if you make a saving throw, removes the effects of the first secondary spell.

Observations:

(1) that is a seriously messy way to implement the spell.
(2) Still, there is a fairly clear (Beamdog) developer intent. If you save immediately, you can bypass the no-save Hold effect if you're sleep-immune. If you fail the save, the hold locks you in place even if you're sleep-immune, which nicely addresses my aesthetic concerns.
(3) It is *slightly* dangerous to bypass immunity to an incapacitating power. If you use Bigby on, say, Abazigal, you'll freeze him in place for up to 18 seconds, during all of which he might be indestructible at 1 hit point. Still, it's probably not unacceptably dangerous, because it has a fixed duration (and there is something cool about finishing the battle with Abazigal by crushing him into a pulp and finally releasing him to gasp out his death speech.
(4) Having tested it, the hand icon is not unacceptably unaesthetic on dragons. It's not terrific, but it's okay.

So 'm now inclined to say that the Hand spells are fine, except (as noted elsewhere) we should move the opcode from 32 to 185.

Implosion dumps instant damage on the target and then plays the chasm animation over them; dragons indeed walk out of the animation, and that does indeed look a bit silly (though, to be fair, not as silly as I thought it might). I am inclined to pursue a purely cosmetic solution here: give 185-immune creatures immunity to the Implosion animations. Then the spell will just shake the screen and dump some fiery/crushing damage on the creature, source unspecified - leaves the balance unchanged but sorts out the aesthetics.