v35 comments / questions (report a bug in a new topic, not here)

[Zorutar]

Deleted.

Edited March 5 by Zorutar

[DavidW]

Please don’t use this thread for bug reports.

[Guest imbadatthisgameok]

Hello,

I'm playing on Tactical. Tolgerias in the Planar Sphere has 131 hp as opposed to his usual 96. In fact his hit points seem unaffected by any fiddling with the sliders. The only mod affecting his CRE file is SCS. Is this WAI? Am I to assume that this sort of HP bloat also affects other mages?

BR

[DavidW]

On 3/29/2024 at 1:12 PM, Guest imbadatthisgameok said:

Hello,

I'm playing on Tactical. Tolgerias in the Planar Sphere has 131 hp as opposed to his usual 96. In fact his hit points seem unaffected by any fiddling with the sliders. The only mod affecting his CRE file is SCS. Is this WAI? Am I to assume that this sort of HP bloat also affects other mages?

BR

It's a bug: a library that stopped being loaded as of v35. Fixed locally, will be in 35.11; and yes, it will affect all spellcasters, sorry about that.

[barzolff]

hi, the new spell tweaks broke Foebane's balance. The laroch's minor drain effect applied hits for 5D4 according to the new spell tweaks. Damage output is almost doubled

[Anterwaare]

Wasn't someone reporting that Larloch gets an additional +1d4 damage which isnt listed, by mistake? Because from my experience, the avg damage is too high to be 5d4, it lines up with 6d4. And yeah, i think it made Foebane a bit too good.

[jmerry]

So Foebane +5 casts LMD, straight up. Actually the secondary spell of the innate version of LMD, but that mostly amounts to the same thing (except for the "don't hit certain enemies" filter, which is a bug in the base game to be addressed by the EE Fixpack).

Looking at the spell tweaks ... LMD is tweaked to be dependent on caster level, scaling from 1d4 at level 1 to 5d4 at level 10+. And this is applied to both the innate version (most often seen as a Bhaalspawn ability) and the mage version. Sensible, so far. But now we put it as an on-hit ability of a sword, delivered several times per round... yeah, that's trouble for anything that stacks with itself, like damage.

It seems that the cleanest thing to do here would be to tweak Foebane to always cast the spell at level 1. Which is doable in the EE, by setting parameter 2 of the op146 effect to 2 instead of its current 1. But not in non-EE games; for them, nerfing the sword would require creating a new non-scaling version of LMD.

[CrevsDaak]

I think creating a new spell for the sword to use (by copying the old LMD it was using prior to it being modified) is the most sensible thing to do, since if other mods decide to modify LMD they would also be editing the sword's spell (though it's going to be a bit late by the time SCS is installed to prevent that). Also doesn't require any engine specific code and works if Foebane has been changed to apply LMD in some other way (you just alter all the effects to change only the resource name to the new copy of the spell).

[polytope]

1 hour ago, CrevsDaak said:

I think creating a new spell for the sword to use (by copying the old LMD it was using prior to it being modified) is the most sensible thing to do, since if other mods decide to modify LMD they would also be editing the sword's spell (though it's going to be a bit late by the time SCS is installed to prevent that).

Worth mentioning that in un-modded BG2 (not EE) Foebane inflicts a flat +4 magic damage, +4 hp bonus to the wielder, no shell spells involved. And it was already the best sword in the game (better than Blackrazor in most cases).

The problem is that rather than giving the sword its ability from the original source books (I forget which supplement, but it's meant to be 1d8 hp drained) the devs "standardized" the on-hit effect as a copy of Larloch's Minor Drain except for it being cloned into the weapon's feature block, rather than cast on hit (probably because of the bug with variable dice values in opcode 18).

There isn't really a need to do things differently here from the BG2 Sword of Chaos, or Adjatha, I think more problems have been introduced than fixed.

P.S. sorry for the "bug report" derailment DavidW, it's up in the air whether this is more of a bug or more of an issue with design decisions.

[jmerry]

It should be noted that the EE description for the sword includes the line "Each successful hit casts Larloch's Minor Drain on the target (no save)". What does non-EE BG2+ToB say there?

And the EE version of the spell uses opcode 12, just with flags to make the damage grant equal temporary HP to the wielder (which was bugged before patch 2.6, but now works fully as intended). I suppose that with an opcode 12/18 combination, there wasn't any way to couple variable damage and variable healing so they were always equal?

[DavidW]

The ToB text is the same. But none of it says anything about caster level, so I think deeming it to be cast at level 1 and applying a level 1 (bespoke copy) version of LMD would be fine.

[CrevsDaak]

16 hours ago, polytope said:

Worth mentioning that in un-modded BG2 (not EE) Foebane inflicts a flat +4 magic damage, +4 hp bonus to the wielder, no shell spells involved. And it was already the best sword in the game (better than Blackrazor in most cases).

Hmm, I assumed it used spin104a as well but it appears that that's a BG2Fixpack change, what changes is that SCS patches spin104.spl instead on BG2 for it's spell tweaks so it isn't even bugged—it does in fact deal 4 flat damage and heal/give extra HP for the same static amount.

[DavidW]

Fixed locally, will be in SCS v35.11 and ToF beta 9.

[Guest stillbadatgameok]

On 4/1/2024 at 6:56 PM, DavidW said:

It's a bug: a library that stopped being loaded as of v35. Fixed locally, will be in 35.11; and yes, it will affect all spellcasters, sorry about that.

Hmm, ok. I thought was weird because Lavok next door had normal HP, but I think some incarnations of Irenicus also had significantly higher amounts. I take it that the intent is to make it adjustable on the fly by the sliders, or an optional component at install time? I'm not really interested in inflated stats or HP (that's more Larian's style) -- just sensible use of level-appropriate resources for mages. 

BR

[DavidW]

No, it’s a pure bug. Hit points aren’t meant to be adjustable except in special cases. SCS makes sure NPCs have at least 75% of their max hit points; the algorithm calculating them is broken.