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aVENGER_(RR)

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Posts posted by aVENGER_(RR)

  1. Unlike an elemental, an aerial servant cannot be commanded to fight for the caster.

     

    That's how it works in 2E AD&D, unless you're a Strifeleader of Cyric in which case the Aerial Servant can fight for the caster.

     

    Bioware's developers probably wanted to make the spell more appealing, so they made the Aerial Servant fight for any priest. It would have been of little use in BG2 otherwise.

  2. Summon Shambling Mound

    I'll make it summon a couple of 11-12HD shamblers (a la IWD/PnP), instead of the current 16HD greater version.

     

    Just a small heads up, aTweaks' Shambling Mounds will also use 11 HD and thereby match their PnP counterparts more closely than the shamblers provided by RR currently do.

     

    For consistency, aTweaks will also detect and adjust Shambling Mounds from other mods (including RR).

  3. Btw, what you did with Drown and Drowing Kiss is what should be done to Mind Flayer's INT drain ability too. They should be able to use that ability only on helpless targets (e.g. stunned by Mind Blast). Good work as usual. :)

     

    Agreed, and I'm sure that Wisp will take that into account when he gets to PnP Mind Flayers.

     

    I personally find Bioware's "brain drain on-hit" implementation extremely silly.

  4. On a side note, judging by the readme I'd say aVENGER made water elementals use Drown, and he made just made it a save or die spell.

     

    True, but with some restrictions.

     

    Water Elementals can only use Drown on helpless (held or sleeping) targets and it doesn't work on creatures that do not breathe (undead, constructs, elementals...) nor on large/incorporeal creatures. Note that this is handled via the Water Elemental AI script and not within the spell itself.

  5.  

    Why do you think using blindness opcode is is better?

     

    Blindness sets STATE_BLIND which is used as a script check in my AI. Reducing the visual range does not.

     

    Would my suggested FoC break your AI?

     

    It depends on how much your lower the visual range. Reducing it by half probably wouldn't be that much of a problem, but going any lower than that without setting STATE_BLIND would almost certainly cause issues.

  6. I'm not sure I like dryads without neither Entangle nor Sleep (or something in general), they would just stand there and cast tons of Charm Person spells. Mmm...

     

    aTweaks' Dryads also have Speak With Plants (a.k.a. "Unentangle"), Wild Empathy and Dimension Door.

     

    On a side note: why the hell no one told me aVENGER already implemented Fog Cloud? I'm still here wondering if reduced LoS is a pain to handle for the AI...

     

    Not for aTweaks/RR AI. The only requirement is that reduced visual range is caused by the blindness opcode and therefore sets STATE_BLIND. Also, it should be noted that all effects caused by cloud spells have a base duration of 6 seconds and get re-applied every round but only if the victim actually remains within the cloud.

  7. Concept wise, the idea is that good aligned priests and paladins would not harm non-evil creatures, while evil priests, being evil, actually enjoy hurting neutrals too.

     

    If you do this, you might also want to make those spells party-friendly.

     

    Otherwise you'll get enemy priests harming their own neutral aligned summons (i.e. animals and elementals) with Unholy Blight while the party could accidentally kill neutral aligned commoners with Holy Smite during battles that take place in the city.

  8. Why would anyone want to place undroppable item in the head slot, if not to even the odds against party, not because there is a mysterious reason that particular creature must be immune? And if we remove the immunity from party, then there is no more need for opponents to cheat to remain on par with PCs.

     

    That is all well and good, but it's still out of scope for Item Revisions. If you want to do this, make a separate mod/component named "Remove spurious Critical Hit immunity from opponents" or something and then hand-pick the target creatures. Most of them probably fall under Bioware's "Boss Immunity" stuff but there are also some creatures that should legitimately be immune to criticals. In aTweaks, we deliberately grant this immunity to elementals, slimes and mists and I'm sure that you don't want to intentionally break that.

     

     

    Consider it a failed attempt to disguise as a certain someone from our scene :)

     

    Admittedly, I haven't been to BWL much since the Iron Curtain went up, so I may have lost my appreciation for the finer aspects of modding debates. :)

     

    *insert snarky comment about IR breaking "dependencies" or some such*

  9. I'm my view, removing critical immunity from items that are not available to the player is far beyond the scope of an Item Revisions mod. Again, I'd urge you to reconsider.

    Personally, I see no problem here as long as it's planned as an optional component. :)

     

    The problem is that making such a change in the manner which Ardanis proposed can break other people's work.

     

    To clarify, I have no problem with Item Revisions removing critical hit immunity from Ioun Stones, helmets, hoods and similar headgear which is available to the party. My issue is with removing critical hit immunity from undroppable items which were deliberately placed on creatures to grant them this trait.

  10. I indeed have initially thought to leave unmovable items untouched, but I am no longer sure. I beileve bosses were given illegal crit immunity only to even the odds, because party is immune already. By illegal I mean things exactly like Bodhi, because nothing indicates she is actually wearing anything in her head slot and vampires are not generally immune.

     

    I'm my view, removing critical immunity from items that are not available to the player is far beyond the scope of an Item Revisions mod. Again, I'd urge you to reconsider.

     

    What's more, since you and Wisp has shamelessly stolen our Creature Revisions idea without asking any permission prior to (not that I complain - less work for us :D ), perhaps you can implement PnP crit immunities for all other creatures? I'm sure I saw spectral undead to die from critical hits in vanilla game.

     

    While, I'm sure you're joking, I wasn't even aware that there is a Creature Revisions mod nor that we needed anyone's permission to reference PnP source material.

  11. As a general rule we planned to not remove the "immunity" from all head slot items flagged as "not droppable" or "not removable". It should work, shouldn't it? :)

     

    In theory, yes, but remember that it is possible to flag items as undroppable in the CRE file as well, so your approach is not 100% error proof.

     

    If you are already doing mass patching, a better way would be to have a list of designated items which need to be changed instead of automatically modifying every single helmet-slot item in the game.

  12. Revised Critical Strike: this component will remove "immunity to critical hits" feature from all head slot items

     

    I hope you mean all head slot items available to the player and not every single helmet-type item in the game.

     

    There are many instances where a helmet-type item is deliberately used to make a creature immune to critical hits, both in the ummodded game and in certain mods. For example, vanilla Bodhi has HELMNOAN.ITM in her helmet slot which makes her immune to criticals, while aTweaks' elementals use RR#ETRAI.ITM in for similar reasons.

  13. Dismiss Summoned Creature

    This feature could be useful, especially if we decide to not remove the summonnig cap, but it's not a big deal imo for 90% of summons (they last so little anyway), and it would serve no purpose if we instead decide to remove the cap. Anyway, I do follow your works aVENGER (you do great things), and thanks for the suggestion!

     

    It's also useful in cases when a large summon (i.e. an Earth Elemental) gets stuck behind a doorway or when you want to replace one summon with a different one without waiting for the duration to expire. Removing the cap would probably make it largely redundant though.

     

    Leaving aside that I consider Cyric encounter slightly over the top, with hugely too much loot

     

    While it's true that the CoC party carries much more magical gear than regular opponents, I think the readme makes it pretty clear that this is intended as they are supposed to be a high level group of adventurers, similar to the player's own party. And, as we all know, the player's party is always fully decked out in magical bling from head to toe. ;)

     

    Unless you have not make it work as it should (that's possible judging by player's report) that thing grants +3 to all saves (that alone would probably make it the most powerful head slot item in the game imo)

     

    Eh? The luck opcode doesn't provide a bonus to saving throws on its own, and I don't add this manually.

     

    +15% to all skills

     

    Again, luck doesn't provide a bonus to thieving skills on its own.

     

    I generally consider your items almost the only ones on par with IR's ones in terms of concept and balance, but this one is simply insane imo.

     

    Thanks, for the vote of confidence. :) In this particular case though, I disagree with you. Venduris' sword, cloak and Luckstone are meant to be at artifact-level. For that tier, I don't think they are so different from Carsomyr or the Staff of the Magi. Also, you get Venduris' Luckstone very late in Chapter 6 which isn't necessarily the case with the aforementioned two. However, I should probably update the description to make it clearer as to what bonuses the item actually provides.

  14. If you like it, feel free to borrow aTweaks' approach for allowing the player to dismiss summoned creatures. The technical details can be found here.
    Believe it if you will, but I had almost the same in mind :D

     

    I believe you. :)

     

    Dismissing summons has been a standard feature in NWN/NWN2 since waaay back, and I'm actually a bit surprised that it wasn't modded into BG2 much earlier. In ToEE, you could even dismiss some area-effect spells like Web and Entangle, but I'm not sure how well that would translate into BG2.

  15. Damn, we checked only vanilla and SCS AI...I hate you! :D May I ask why you're using such a terrible spell? Is it a must have?

     

    I thought it was pretty good for disabling low-level spellcasters. As you may know, some of RR's Shadow Thieves carry level 1-2 spell scrolls and Deafness seemed like a nice fit.

    Another thing to note, if you want any of SR's new spells to be used by SCS/RR/aTweaks' AI, the chances for that are much better if you make them party friendly. :)

     

    Btw, which name are we going to use?

     

    Since RR already adds Sound Burst as a bard HLA, Sonic Blast sounds better to me. :D

  16. Actually, misc75 has the (correct) small sword proficiency in BG1, as do all daggers and short swords. So the bug is only for Tutu - you may want to report it in the Tutu forum.

     

    This is fixed by Rogue Rebalancing for BG2 and will be addressed for Tutu as well as of RR v3.9.

     

    BTW, the original description of the Dagger of Venom doesn't mention that the poison damage can be avoided by a successful save vs. death. That too is fixed by RR but you might still want to include it into the fixpack's GTU.

  17. The previous versions of the RR overwrote the black-market thief's (located in the thieves guild entrance hall) dialogue file.

     

    IIRC this was mostly fixed in v3.5. Essentially, the problem arose when I was coding v3.11 (back in 2003.) and at that time I had no idea how to make an existing dialogue pause the game so I simply recompiled it with a 0 value after BEGIN. ;) As of v3.5 I use COPY_EXISTING ~BMTHIEF.DLG~ followed by WRITE_LONG 0x30 0 to achieve the same effect and afterwards I simply append the rest of my dialogue.

     

    However, v3.5 still has a tiny bit of leftover code from the earlier versions which REPLACEs a small part of the BMTHIEF dialogue (state 0 to be precise). No worries though, that code will no longer be present in v3.6 since I now prefer to use less destructive WeiDU commands like ADD_STATE_TRIGGER and ADD_TRANS_ACTION in all of my .D files. ;)

     

    Update:

     

    The incompatibility issue has been completely resolved in RR v3.6.

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