The Burning Earth - which creatures for each bonus?

[polytope]

This is not my best thread, for some reason I tested with the unmodded OBG flame tongue (which uses multiple #179s as an equipping effect) rather than the unmodded EE flame tongue (which ofc moves the damage to #177s in the feature block).

Since #178 is like luck and a few other opcodes it's bonuses won't correspond to extra damage in the weapon's feature block, unless applied (and subsequently excluded by #324) in the exact same order.

The first #178 on equipping (and top #177 in the melee feature block) should probably be the bonus versus undead, so that it would be fully +4 versus undead that were also classed as "cold using" if there are any.

Or just revert the damage bonuses to #179 and reorder from greatest to least, so there won't be a problem with ceil rounding of small but separate damage increments when striking something that has physical resistance.

[CamDawg]

15 hours ago, polytope said:

Or just revert the damage bonuses to #179 and reorder from greatest to least, so there won't be a problem with ceil rounding of small but separate damage increments when striking something that has physical resistance.

The move from op179 to on-hit 177s was to prevent one weapon's damage bonuses from applying to the other weapon in a dual-wield situation. There was no solution for the 178s.

I'm not saying we shouldn't explore this avenue, just that we need to balance any proposed solution using 179s against this (admittedly small) regression.

[polytope]

3 hours ago, CamDawg said:

The move from op179 to on-hit 177s was to prevent one weapon's damage bonuses from applying to the other weapon in a dual-wield situation. There was no solution for the 178s.

I'm not saying we shouldn't explore this avenue, just that we need to balance any proposed solution using 179s against this (admittedly small) regression.

Well, considering flame tongue is slashing, the separate 3 points of damage in the feature block creates a genuine ceil rounding issue IMO, because it's an odd number and undead are so often slashing resistant, most notably demiliches but all skeletons and mummies too. Damage rounding is always less accurate when the damage is split into multiple increments which is probably why EE changed the "save for half" mechanic.

Daystar, in contrast was obviously and intentionally coded to work that way from the start, but it's always obviously meant to be a higher tier weapon.

[jmerry]

I did a scan through the game files to detect which creature types are ever referenced by something. Posted here: https://www.gibberlings3.net/forums/topic/36985-list-meaningful-creature-types/

 

 

And based on that ... actually, there's some identifier cleanup that should happen regardless of the Burning Earth.

First, BG2's water elementals (ohbewwei, ohbwat01, elwatg01, elemhydr) should all gain the class ELEMENTAL_WATER in place of their current NO_CLASS. I can understand the pre-EE excuse of not having that class in the IDS, but that just doesn't apply anymore.

Second, Cryonax shouldn't be of class ELEMENTAL_EARTH. The ring of earth control shouldn't be able to charm them. The obvious fix here is to introduce a new class ELEMENTAL_ICE for them.

And once ELEMENTAL_ICE is in play, we might as well use it for a few other things. Salamanders have always had ELEMENTAL_ classes; this was all _FIRE in the past, and 2.6 split the ice/frost salamanders over to _WATER. Moving that to _ICE makes sense to me. And of course, the Burning Earth should target ELEMENTAL_ICE for the "cold-using creatures" filter.