First, I mean Second, try at a big(ish) EET install

[subtledoctor]

1 hour ago, Endarire said:

What's the recommended fix for Transitions + EndlessBG1?

I’ve already specified what players should do, here as well as here (that second one describes it over two posts).

[Endarire]

Thanks for the explanation again and your patience, doc.

[jastey]

@Endarire To be aware that Transitions inserts own versions of: Fenster, the Dukes, the Imoen&Jannath interaction, the Flaming Fist healers after the Sarevok fight, and Korlasz' Dungeon in BG1 in its main component - replacing EndlessBG1's content, thus not install the according components from EndlessBG1 if you plan on adding Transitions.

[subtledoctor]

Some small bugs and oddities in early SoD - I'll try with some pics!

1. This was in the undercity on the way to the final battle against Sarevok.   I gave it a wide berth.

 

2. Perhaps related to the Eltan dialogue difficulties, perhaps not, for some reason he didn't have a foot circle? Weird.

 

3. In early SoD, before leaving the city, there are two Belts in the Ducal Palace. Doesn't seem to cause any problems though.

 

4. Moving from the Coast Way Crossing to the Troll Claw Forest in early SoD, it seems like it lets me travel back to BG1 areas. Some are greyed out (Upper Chionthar, BG City) but some seem to allow travel (Wyrm's Crossing, Bandit Camp).

Finally, something weird is going on with Sirene. She has some resistances I guess as a tiefling, and she gets some DR from her kit as a paladin of Ilmater, but they seem to be compounding over time. Maybe some of the spells lack trailing op206 effects, so they are cumulative when she joins the party? This is her at level 10, with NO armor on:

Add some plate mail with YARAS installed and she gets 98% piercing resistance, and ~70% slashing/crushing resistance. That's a bit ridiculous. It's supposed to be 30% from her kit, so these should read 30%. Maybe a bit more for fire and piercing from being a tiefling (?) but not 30% more! Gonna have to edit this down.

I also did some more save editing, which I haven't mentioned. I was playing Charname as a fighter->cleric with your basic plate mail, long sword + shield setup. He would just walk in, tank with great AC, shield bash, swing the best melee weapons around. Switch to hammer against slashing-resistant enemies. It was...fine. Super powerful. But soooo boring. So I'm toying with changing it up a bit, editing the save to make a retroactive change to be a ranger->cleric. Dual-wielding instead of shield bashing, for a bit more balance of offense and defense. Short swords instead of long swords, since there seem to be a fair amount of short swords I haven't been using. And quarterstaff for blunt attacks since there are always great staffs around for clerics to use.

Alternatively, stick with long swords and go single-weapon style? This gives an offensive bonus which will make up for my reduced thac0 advancement as a cleric in the late-game. But would leave me fairly vulnerable to melee attacks with no shield or off-hand main-gauche to defend. I get to pick a new spell sphere at 10th level, which is soon; if I choose the sphere of Protection that gets me ProEvil, Armor of Faith, Shield, and Shield of Lathander. Add some defensive items (greater ring of protection + displacement cloak, and gargoyle boots for stoneskin) and maybe I don't need a shield?

[jmerry]

Beholder in the Undercity: pre-placed or spawn point? The skeletons there are certainly a spawn point; there are a lot of spawn points generating skeletons and zombies and occasional ghasts down there.

Sirene's resistances: As far as I can tell, the game casts the AP_ spells in the CLAB when a character joins the party, and removes them (321) when leaving the party. Resistance spells should be cast with the right timing mode (9, not 1) so they leave removable effects, but that's about all you have to worry about.

As for tiefling resistances ... Haer'Dalis has 15% physical resists, 25% fire and electric, and 50% cold. Looks like Sirene copies that exactly, and then the kit resists apply on top of that. Most of those are just 30% more than the assumed base tiefling level. The exceptions here are piercing and missile damage; I suspect that the bonus that should have been there for missile damage resistance was mistakenly turned into piercing damage resistance.

[Edit - corrected fire/cold res for H'D]

Edited January 11, 2023 by jmerry

[subtledoctor]

31 minutes ago, jmerry said:

As for tiefling resistances ... Haer'Dalis has 15% physical resists, 25% cold and electric, and 50% fire. Looks like Sirene copies that exactly, and then the kit resists apply on top of that

Ah. Well. That is, charitably, ridiculous. The 2E tiefling is supposed to have:

• +1 INT/CHA
• -1 STR/WIS
• 50% cold resistance
• +2 to saves for fire, electricity, poison

I glanced at a 3E source, and admittedly mixing the munchkiny 3E into 2E was all the rage when Bioware was making BG2. But even there in the 3E Monster Manual, it says "resist cold/electricity/fire 5." I don't really know what "resist cold 5" means... can we assume it means 5%? Or is it supposed to be 5 out of d20, i.e. 25%? That tracks with some of HD's stats, but TBH it doesn't sound like a correct interpretation. And neither source says anything about physical DR. I think that stuff was just added for H'D like Coran's illegal DEX/longbow proficiency, or Edwin's bonus spells, or Faldorn's dread wolf. Sirene should not be getting that stuff as a tielfing; getting bonus DR is the whole point of her kit.

I'm going to give her... say, 50% cold resistance, and 10% fire/electric/poison resistance.

Oh, except wait, I can't open this save file in NI. Dammit!

EDIT - okay I opened it in a different version of NI, which does not have all the mods installed. And I got some clarity: the kit apparently applied piercing resistance twice and did not apply missile resistance. So small bug there. And yeah she had inherent 15% plus the kit's 30%, which equals 45% base DR before armor (and 75% for piercing by mistake. So, I'll remove her inherent 15% DR and fix the piercing/missile mix-up, and she should be at 30% physical DR, 40% fire/elec resistance, and 80% cold resistance. That seems eminently reasonable. (Hopefully editing and saving the .GAM file from a version of NI without mods installed will not erase a bunch of mod content.)

Edited January 11, 2023 by subtledoctor

[Lava]

It's not a bug, I added that beholder for all those that feel they want to do one last challenge before they finish the BGEE portion of the game.

It's so not on the main path, so it's optional and I... really damn hope someone spit their pepsi on the screen or something! Those that don't want to go through that file may just go straight to the battle with Sarevok and never face that floating fella.

[subtledoctor]

10 minutes ago, Lava said:

It's so not on the main path, so it's optional and I... really damn hope someone spit their pepsi on the screen or something!

I almost did! Very surprising to see that in BG1. A beholder actually wouldn't be too big an issue for this party - as I said earlier, a modded end-game BG1 party is a lot better-equipped than a chapter 2 BG2 party, and I already fought the beholder at the end of the Black Pits, with a drow sorcerer on its side! Buff saves, send summons to soak up errant eye blasts, focus fire, it goes down pretty quick. But, I didn't feel like expending any resources before the Sarevok fight, so I snuck by this fellow.

[mickabouille]

37 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

"resist cold/electricity/fire 5." I don't really know what "resist cold 5" means...

I think that means "subtract 5 from damage"

[jastey]

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

In early SoD, before leaving the city, there are two Belts in the Ducal Palace. Doesn't seem to cause any problems though.

Sarevok's doppelgangers are still active, as it seems!!1

[subtledoctor]

14 minutes ago, jastey said:

Sarevok's doppelgangers are still active, as it seems!!1

Ah, beat me to the doppelganger joke!

[jmerry]

Following up on tiefling resistances in the BG series, I ran a search on unmodified BG2EE. Aside from Haer'Dalis, here are the tieflings:

- Aawill, bounty hunter in the planar prison. No resists.

- Raelis Shai, quest giver. No resists.

- Generic tiefling party in Watcher's Keep: 50% cold and electric resistance, 25% fire resistance, magic resistance 20% for fighter and thief/40% for mage.

- Aesgareth's followers: 50% cold resistance, 25% fire and electric resistance, magic resistance 0% for fighter and thief/25% for cleric and mage.

(I disregard the Rilmani as false positives and Elgiad as a clone that isn't used anyway.)

Haer'Dalis is the only tiefling that gets physical resistance. His elemental resists (50% cold, 25% fire and lightning) are pretty standard, but the physical resistance is unique to him.

[Chitown Willie]

On 7/14/2022 at 3:42 PM, subtledoctor said:

A quick test, and it seems like I've fixed Sleep. I'll update SR soon.

Looks like Sleep is still broken in the official release (not Beta):

~SPELL_REV/SETUP-SPELL_REV.TP2~ #0 #0 // Spell Revisions: v4.19

SD,

Was it a simple fix? I'd like to patch an existing game.

Thanks.

[subtledoctor]

Almost done with SoD. I'm not enjoying it quite as much this time. It's still a bunch of great set-piece battles/situations, but the pacing is weird. Especially at the end -

LITE SPOILERS!

- when you are in the big defensive battle, it's just several sequential party-v-party fights and in-between you can talk to the priest and basically say "let's pretend I rested!" and you get your spells back. It's quite weird in a BG game, it's really obvious it was made by the same people who made the Black Pits. I went through the whole thing without resting, which is fine, it should really be the default way it works. But then you get the opposite problem at the end - I was completely resource-depleted, and then told to run over to a different battlefield to start the much bigger encounter that gives the whole game its name... but I'm not supposed to rest before initiating it? I for sure rested, but we were literally the last six living souls in this tent-city ghost-town, it was extremely awkward and felt wrong.

And then, after going through that big last encounter, which is super fun, you get to Bence Duncan and he's like "hey dude you got here just in time, the big finale is right here in the next room, we're about to bust down the door and do it. You ready? If you're not ready then go ahead and get ready, and tell me when you're ready. We're going in like two minutes, but if you need to get ready, then get ready." Like, it's clear you're supposed to rest, because you really want to be well-rested, where you're going! But in the story it's not a time or place where it makes sense to sleep for eight hours! This is where they should have let you talk to the priest and be like "can we just pretend I got a good night's sleep?"

Like, even coming back from the underground river, the dialogue suggests you are not supposed to waste any time before meeting the peeps. So, theoretically, if I were to play it organically, it would be (BIGGER, CLEARER SPOILERS):

Spoiler

• Underground river/Kanaglym
• Dragonspear warrens/basement
• several sequential defensive Camp fights
• the giant Siege battle
• all of Avernus including the BBEG

...without resting. That's like six maps of content, 8+ party-v-party fights and at least two boss fights, without resting. Or rest 1 to 2 times, and make it fun, but extremely awkward. I rested twice in that time. You could probably get away with resting once - it's a good time to use All The Wands - but definitely at least once.

Oh well, BG1 for sure has its own pacing problems, as I've discussed in this thread, and Lord knows BG2 is even worse. Maybe Beamdog just felt it was in the grand BG tradition to write in a huge tension between the intended pace of the narrative and the intended pace of gameplay progression...

Not much to report as far as specifics... I installed a mod that lets you use the Spectacles of Spectacle nine times, to see all the content... and then I only used them four times.   Also the item that lets you summon a stone golem summons a golem with a blue circle, and enemies just ignore it. In fact the Dancing Lights spell is the same way, it's supposed to create some one-hit distractions but they are blue-circle so enemies just ignore them.

My game is paused right before the confrontation with the BBEG, I'm going to fix the stone golem thing before heading in. Then on to the end-game, and then on to BG2!

I'm a level 10 cleric, with about 350K XP. Right on track. I've been very happy with the pace of progression in this run.

  

On 1/13/2023 at 1:38 PM, Chitown Willie said:

Looks like Sleep is still broken in the official release (not Beta):

~SPELL_REV/SETUP-SPELL_REV.TP2~ #0 #0 // Spell Revisions: v4.19

Was it a simple fix? I'd like to patch an existing game.

Looks like my fix was either not incorporated into 4b19, or not implemented correctly. And surprisingly, I never made a hotfix for it. It shouldn't be too hard to make a hotfix mod for this, if you can wait a day or so. With the fix, SR Sleep is a wonderful spell, Imoen has been using it to great effect all through SoD. (MnG Bards are variants of the Enchanter kit so they impose save penalties on enchantment spells.)

Edited January 17, 2023 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

On 1/13/2023 at 1:38 PM, Chitown Willie said:

Looks like Sleep is still broken in the official release (not Beta):

~SPELL_REV/SETUP-SPELL_REV.TP2~ #0 #0 // Spell Revisions: v4.19

SD,

Was it a simple fix? I'd like to patch an existing game.

Try this.

EDIT - that fix is EE 2.0+ only, it will crash a pre-EE game without a secondary fix. 

Edited January 18, 2023 by subtledoctor