Passive Warrior HLAs

[Thor Thunderfist]

I am excited to be dipping my toes into the G3 waters by finally releasing my first mod.

You can find the full repo here and download the latest release here.

I am very interested in feedback on this.  I have not really tested it, so some abilities may be glaringly under-/over-powered.  Notably, Hardiness and Resist Magic I considered scaling at 10% per increment (still capping at 50%).  Also of note: this does not impact AI usage of HLAs; warrior enemies still use the original, unchanged HLAs.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Passive Warrior HLAs

The warrior's role in AD&D combat was much more passive than it is in modern RPGs.  For the most part, you would choose a target and attack; unique abilities were left to the spellcasters.

The High Level Abilities (HLAs) introduced by Throne of Bhaal add complexity and micromanagement antithetical to the role of warriors, characters who have remained relatively passive participants in combat for the majority of 2 games.

This mod aims to reduce this added complexity by reworking the majority of activated warrior HLAs into passive bonuses.

Whirlwind Attack
Provides a permanent +1 attack per round.

Greater Whirlwind Attack
Provides an additional permanent +1 attack per round.

Requires: Whirlwind Attack

Deathblow
Critical Hits automatically slay enemies level 12 or below.

Greater Deathblow
Critical Hits have a 5% chance of automatically slaying any foe.

Requires: Deathblow

Hardiness
Permanently increases all Physical Resistances by 5%.

May be taken up to 10 times in total.

Resist Magic
Permanently increases Magic Resistance by 5%.

May be taken up to 10 times in total.

Power Attack
Permanently increases all attack damage +5.

Critical Strike
Increases Critical Range by 1 (if you would crit on 20, now crit on 19-20). Also eliminates possibility of Critical Misses on attack rolls of 1.

Requires: Power Attack

Smite
Critical Hits stun foes for 1 round.

Requires: Power Attack, Critical Strike

War Cry
For 1 round per 2 levels of the warrior, all allies in a 15-ft. radius gain increased movement speed and +2 bonuses to hit rolls, damage rolls, and AC.

NB: Obviously this is not a passive bonus. This is intended to be used alongside other pre-buffs so the warrior does not have to worry about activating it in the midst of battle.

[jastey]

Congratulations on the release! And welcome to G3.

[TotalMilk90]

I like it a lot and think it’s a great idea. I always get more enjoyment out of passive skill upgrading vs getting new abilities. I think it adds a better sense of level progression.

Any plans to do other classes too?

[subtledoctor]

I don’t like the idea of stacking multiple MR feats. I’d set it at 10% or 15% and only allow it to be chosen once. 

[DavidW]

Congratulations on the release!

At a purely technical level, your regexp pass through the HLA 2das

COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP ~LU....2DA~ override

will miss files like LUFI10.2da, which might exist if there are a lot of mod-added kits present. (It is matching LU, followed by four arbitrary characters, followed by '2da' - the last character will be a dot, so there have to be exactly 3 other characters.) A safer regexp would be

COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP ~LU.*\.2DA~ override
	PATCH_MATCH "%SOURCE_RES%" WITH
	LUABBR LUNUMAB BEGIN
	// do nothing, these aren't proper LUxxxx files
	END
	DEFAULT
		... your code
	END

(The really elegant thing would be to parse luabbr.2da for the actual list of lua files, but that's probably overkill.)

[Thor Thunderfist]

4 hours ago, jastey said:

Congratulations on the release! And welcome to G3.

Thank you!

 

32 minutes ago, TotalMilk90 said:

I like it a lot and think it’s a great idea. I always get more enjoyment out of passive skill upgrading vs getting new abilities. I think it adds a better sense of level progression.

Any plans to do other classes too?

I started digging into the Thief HLAs.  As I was attempting to rebalance the traps, I hit a stumbling block (it's difficult/impossible to remove innate abilities 1 "charge" at a time) and haven't gotten back to it for a little while.

 

31 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

I don’t like the idea of stacking multiple MR feats. I’d set it at 10% or 15% and only allow it to be chosen once. 

By the time Warriors are picking up HLAs, spellcasters are summoning planetars, stopping time, and breaking the game wide open.  I think Warriors get the short end of the stick for endgame power and don't feel bad giving them a significant bump to try and match.

 

14 minutes ago, DavidW said:

Congratulations on the release!

...

Thanks for the feedback!  I started working on a LUABBR parser before just settling for the quick and dumb approach.  I may get back around to properly doing that, but for now I can update the regex per your recommendation.

[subtledoctor]

23 minutes ago, Thor Thunderfist said:

By the time Warriors are picking up HLAs, spellcasters are summoning planetars, stopping time, and breaking the game wide open.  I think Warriors get the short end of the stick for endgame power and don't feel bad giving them a significant bump to try and match.

It just seems like this will not be used on its own, but with some notorious items for permanent 100% MR cheese. 

23 minutes ago, Thor Thunderfist said:

it's difficult/impossible to remove innate abilities 1 "charge" at a time

I made a function to basically do this - with a pool of innate abilities, not just one, but it works perfectly will with just one. You can feel free to use that function, implementing it is fairly simple.

 

[Thor Thunderfist]

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

It just seems like this will not be used on its own, but with some notorious items for permanent 100% MR cheese. 

I am sure it will be used for cheese.  I don't have an interest in trying to balance my tiny corner of a system so decidedly imbalanced in the first place.  Mages can become godlike without much effort, I think warriors deserve to have some power fantasy fun of their own.  I revel in the chaos of AD&D.

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

I made a function to basically do this - with a pool of innate abilities, not just one, but it works perfectly will with just one. You can feel free to use that function, implementing it is fairly simple.

Thanks, that's a really intense function.  I have achieved some level of WeiDU fluency at this point, but it may take some time to wrap my head around it to be sure it's useful to me.

[subtledoctor]

1 hour ago, Thor Thunderfist said:

I am sure it will be used for cheese.  I don't have an interest in trying to balance my tiny corner of a system so decidedly imbalanced in the first place

1 hour ago, Thor Thunderfist said:

Thanks, that's a really intense function.

Yes, it is quite complex, it went through at least five iterations to get to this point. But the upshot is the complexity should be behind the scenes, you just need to feed it 1) a list of innate abilities, 2) a spell table with only one level of spells, to define how many uses the player gets per day at each character level, and 3) which stat you want to use (this is fairly arbitrary, you can use the 2nd byte of the bastard sword stat, so you would tell it 89<<8) and voila, you get something like monks’ “ki pool,” a group of innates with a shared pool of points to govern uses per day.

If you become interested in using it, I can help you set it up. In my 2nd link it only takes up 35 lines of my Samurai kit’s weidu code.

Edited September 22, 2023 by subtledoctor

[polytope]

I like the concept compared to original HLAs, and it means e.g. high level archers, kensai or berserker/barbarians are no longer choosing to use a HLA or kit ability in any given round, but I have some suggestions.

13 hours ago, Thor Thunderfist said:

Whirlwind Attack

Provides a permanent +1 attack per round.

Greater Whirlwind Attack
Provides an additional permanent +1 attack per round.

Requires: Whirlwind Attack

This basically removes any incentive for dual wielders over 2-handed weapon users or even single weapon/sword and shield style, since each will be at 5 apr, and dual wielding has a penalty for offhand attack rolls. Less so for a paladin/ranger/barb or anyone else restricted to specialization but they'd still be at 9/2. I'd like it if GW gave attacks a chance per hit to spread (like Chain Lightning) additional damage to nearby foes.

13 hours ago, Thor Thunderfist said:

Power Attack

Permanently increases all attack damage +5.

+5 damage as a permanent passive bonus is a lot for a single ability chosen once, equivalent to 15 levels of kensai or 20 of swashbuckler, even +2 would be pretty good.

Deathblow, Critical Strike, Smite these look fine, as does War Cry but iirc single or two handed weapon styles actually double the chance so instead you'd be critting on 17-20 after taking it once (as per my earlier comment about +2 passive attacks per round making two weapon fighting redundant).

7 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

It just seems like this will not be used on its own, but with some notorious items for permanent 100% MR cheese.

100% MR is not such a big deal, it's achievable in the vanilla game, mages can lower your resistance, some spells outright bypass it Imprisonment, Dragon's Breath etc. as do actual breath weapons.

I'd be more concerned about having 50% undispellable permanent physical resistance really.

[Connelly]

The idea is great, but from what little I understand, the mod is basically providing its own HLA spell files, then changing the tables so the game look for those instead of the vanilla spells, instead of changing those from the start. I'd assume one would have then to install this mod after any that also changes the HLA tables, very late even? Because they would at best ignore the new IDs if they want to make changes to the spells, and at worst revert the tables to using the vanilla HLAs.

[Thor Thunderfist]

Unfortunately, there isn't really any other way to accomplish this for 2 big reasons at least.

1. The HLA tables would always have to be modified to grant the HLAs as passive abilities rather than activated, daily special abilities.  Just changing the original HLA spells wouldn't be enough.
2. The original HLA spells are used by various creatures in the game.  Changing them to have different permanent effects would negatively impact those encounters.  I've considered going through and adjusting all those cases to use the new passives, but it's a complicated bit of heavy lifting I haven't felt is necessary yet.

So, yes, this mod probably needs to be included rather late in an install order.  I'm happy to be shown another way, of course.

[TwiceTested]

I like this a lot!  I always thought it was silly that you turn a fighter into a one-fight-per-day creature like the wizard once you get hardiness.  Also, by the time you got 5 levels of hardiness, you have all-day levels of resistance cheeze anyway, so it might as well be passive so you don't forget about them.

+5 damage is really strong, but since you can only take it once, I'm all down for it!

Whirlwind issues listed by Polytope are legit.  Whirlwind was one warrior ability I never minded having a activation for.  Oh, what about making it an ability that you can only use once per turn?  Then you can just keep the Whirlwind is -4 to hit, and GWW changes that to normal to-hit levels.

Greater Deathblow seems too strong.  5% chance to kill Irenicus is VERY funny, but seems too much.  Maybe 5% chance to deal an extra 50 physical damage and 50 magic damage? The magic damage is there in case the guy you hit has stoneskin up.  Or, make the attack hit as tho no protections are in place?  5% chance to ignore absolute mantle?  Heck yeah!  Makes me think the Hulk saying "Puny Mage" after slapping them around the battlefield!

Smite should have a save to negate.  Stun is basically death, and if you crit on 25% of your attacks, and deathblow on 5%, laws or probability just means you're gonna wreck it! Maybe the stun can have a penalty equal to your strength damage bonus?

[jmerry]

1 hour ago, TwiceTested said:

Greater Deathblow seems too strong.  5% chance to kill Irenicus is VERY funny, but seems too much.

Irenicus (in Hell), along with many other quest bosses that have something to say before they die, is immune to instant death effects. The only way to beat characters like that is to bring them down to low HP so their scripts kick in and finish them. So, ironically, this form of Greater Deathblow would be absolutely useless against foes like that.

[Thacobell]

I always forget my fighters' HLAs. So this is perfect for me.