Strange behavior from Minor Spell Turning vs Beholders

[chuft]

Hello all,

 

I just decided to install and play BG2 (including ToB) on my new PC. Been a few years. I downloaded the official ToB patch, and the latest Fixpack from here, a few days ago. No mods except the Fixpack itself.

 

Well, it wasn't long before I undertook the Unseeing Eye quest. Going up against Gauths, and then Beholders, my mage decided to try casting Minor Spell Turning for some brief protection.

 

As it turned out, it wasn't so brief. Nothing they threw at the mage affected him at all. Nor did it reflect back at the Gauths/Beholders. It would just hit me and disappear. I had to kill them with arrows/spells, and it took awhile. My mage never suffered any ill effects from the enemies.

 

Minor Spell Turning did not get used up and stayed "on" until the spell duration expired naturally.

 

I think I have seen the spell work properly in another circumstance - I cast a Dispel Magic at an enemy mage and it appeared to bounce back and affect my party instead.

 

Any idea what is up? I have searched around, including in the forums, without seeing a reference to a known bug. Posts in the Bioware forums lead me to believe that for other people (not using the Fixpack?) in the same situation, the spells gets used up normally after reflecting a spell or two back at the Gauths/Beholders.

 

Thanks for all your great work!

[chuft]

By the way I also encountered a bug with the Skinner murders quest. After having the harlot smell the three samples from the merchant, the samples disappear, but no mention of the event appears in my Journal. I can't confront the villain, the merchant has nothing more to say and the harlot asks me if I have those samples I wanted her to smell yet. There is no way to get more samples. I tried picking her pocket and she doesn't have them.

 

There was something in the journal about the circus animal tamer perhaps knowing about elephant skins, but I could find no such tamer anywhere.

 

I could not complete the quest except by attacking the villain. The guard was not overly impressed since I did not have both evidences (the elephant hide and the smell identified, I just had the elephant hide) but I got some XP out of it nonetheless.

 

On the original bug, in a battle with a Shade Lich I tried casting Magic Missile at him while he had a Spell Turning up, and it seemed to just absorb the missiles, they did not reflect.

[CamDawg]

I'll be honest--I've never used MST and my first reaction on seeing it is to breach, so I'm not terribly familiar with its workings. For the beholders, they might not be affected since their 'spells' are actually innate abilities. Since the shade lich is immune to spells of level 1-9, it might just be his inherent immunity rather than MST that was kicking in there. This may have also been another invisible change between SoA and ToB to make it absorb rather than reflect, as they did with the Cloak of Mirroring. Can someone more familiar with the spell help me out here?

 

Fixpack doesn't change anything in Rose's dialogue--do you have anything else installed that might? As for the elephant hide, you're supposed to discuss this with Aegisfield as he's the one who goes off to question the circus folks.

[Nythrun]

Were you wearing the Cloak of Mirroring, by chance? Its immunity effect takes precedence over spell bouncing and spell absorption (true also of Lich's spell level immunity).

 

The only field in a spell that matters to spell reflection is the power field - it can bounce any flavor of spell.

 

Use the [secretWord-Spellstrike] line to remove spell protections, Breach is for combat protections

 

I don't remember what I did to murdgirl.dlg locally

[chuft]

I'll be honest--I've never used MST and my first reaction on seeing it is to breach, so I'm not terribly familiar with its workings. For the beholders, they might not be affected since their 'spells' are actually innate abilities.

 

When I was searching the net for a reference to this bug, I encountered stories from people about how they used MST to kill Gauths and Beholders by reflecting their attacks back at them....

 

This may have also been another invisible change between SoA and ToB to make it absorb rather than reflect, as they did with the Cloak of Mirroring.

 

I did not realize they changed Cloak of Mirroring, I don't think I have ever played the game without ToB installed. Hmmm.

 

Fixpack doesn't change anything in Rose's dialogue--do you have anything else installed that might?

 

Nope, nothing.

 

As for the elephant hide, you're supposed to discuss this with Aegisfield as he's the one who goes off to question the circus folks.

 

Interesting. I don't recall ever getting any meaningful dialogue options from him except "I haven't found anything" even after I had the hide and Rose had smelled all the samples.

 

By the way, I just noticed that my Quest Log still has an entry in it about a damaged golem in the next room, told to me by a trapped knight. I have long since solved the Planar Sphere quest (the end of Valygar's family quest is in the Done section) and am in the middle of the Mage Stronghold apprentice quest.

[chuft]

Were you wearing the Cloak of Mirroring, by chance?

 

No, this was very early in the adventure.

 

The thing is, MST did not just absorb the Gauth and Beholder attacks; it did not get used up either regardless of absorbing a huge number of attacks.

 

Use the [secretWord-Spellstrike] line to remove spell protections, Breach is for combat protections

 

I think I was trying to remove a Protection from Magic Weapons or something. In any case my point was it didn't bounce back and hit me.

 

Thanks.

 

Incidentally I did not receive an e-mail notification of the replies here even though I have that setting on ("You are currently receiving email notification of replies ").

[chuft]

Just had another interesting experience. My cleric walked into a room full of archers, equipped with the Reflection Shield +1, and started casting a long spell. The archers fired and some of them hit her. She did not take any damage, nor did they. The spell was not interrupted.

[BigRob]

Incidentally I did not receive an e-mail notification of the replies here even though I have that setting on ("You are currently receiving email notification of replies ").

 

Check your spam folder (if you have one), I find a lot of automated messages from this and other forums get classed as spam if you don't put the address on a safe list.

[Nythrun]

I've done a quick double check, and can't replicate any of this behavior with or without Fixpack.

 

Two more irritating questions:

 

English language version?

 

Baldurdash?

[chuft]

I've done a quick double check, and can't replicate any of this behavior with or without Fixpack.

 

Two more irritating questions:

 

English language version?

 

Baldurdash?

 

Interesting.

 

Not sure I understand your first question. I live in the U.S. and I bought SoA and ToB in a retail store here a few years ago. I installed them a few weeks ago on a new computer I recently built, downloaded the latest ToB patch from Bioware and installed it, and then downloaded and installed the latest FixPack from here. Nothing else.

 

By the way I had an encounter with an enemy mage who had some kind of Spell Turning spell up and it did reflect back my Magic Missiles. This is the first time I have clearly seen a reflection effect working as advertised.

 

I experience a fair number of crashes too, sometimes one every two hours of play or so. One time I tried to Quick Save and it said "Save attempt failed" or something. My previous Quick Save was erased and the only two Saved Games I had were the Auto Save and one named save I had done manually. Windows XP Pro is my OS.

[Nythrun]

That honestly sounds more like an install problem than anything due to mods (or repairable by mods)

[Guest Guest]

That honestly sounds more like an install problem than anything due to mods (or repairable by mods)

 

Hey, I just got a topic notification via e-mail! First time.

 

Install problems are easy to fix, just reinstall. I am still in the (endless) Chapter 2 - when do you guys usually move on to Chapter 3? It seems there is endless, though not required, stuff to do in Chapter 2. It's hard to just put it all aside and move on - feel like I should do all the quests I can (i.e. those related to people in my party, and related to my class, and the general ones).

 

I did notice that I was having a lot of crashes when Keldorn was in the party and my reputation was low. I never once heard him complain, but I suffered a lot of crashes at times (non-combat, non-inventory) when he could have complained. I began to suspect that the crashes were somehow caused by him attempting to complain. I jettisoned him from the party and the crashing stopped, until recently when my rep got to 15 (and I noticed a lack of complaining by Viconia) and I started crashing again, although this time it seemed to happen at or near times when I going into or out of inventory.

 

Anyway it is easy enough to re-install, the only question is whether to try to save my saved game, or whether that is corrupted somehow too.

[chuft]

That honestly sounds more like an install problem than anything due to mods (or repairable by mods)

 

Well I just uninstalled the whole thing (keeping my saved games elsewhere), reinstalled, repatched, reinstalled the FixPack, memorized some Minor Spell Turnings and went down into the Cult of the Eyeless area and slept until some Gauths appeared.

 

Minor Spell Turning now works! It reflected back attacks and got used up!

 

Thanks!