yakattack

Yep. You should be able to change those options with the "Fine Tune Difficulty" button in gameplay options. Or the difficulty slider will affect it more broadly. It's nice because you can change a lot more things post-install.

Yeah I agree 3E stats are a superior design, although the craziness of 2E stats does have some appeal to me . If IR(R) is designed with those kind of stats in mind then the existing items make more sense. As for EE content, I totally agree with you. I'm thinking of switching to non-EE myself. The only item that jumps out at me is the Big-Fisted Belt which is very powerful with +3 strength.

Well to be fair you can't get 25 on three characters unless you use barbarians and custom characters. However that's not an uncommon way to play. Restricting ourselves to one barbarian and custom characters you can do: half orc (PC) barbarian 19+4(rage)+2(duhm) = 25 half orc berserker 19+3(gloves)+3(belt) = 25 human lathander->fighter 18+2(duhm)+2(other gloves)+1(tome) = 23 This is a very powergamey setup, but it's also within the rules of how most people play BGEE

Not sure if you have much interest in changing BG1 around, but I've been playing it recently with IR and I have a few thoughts... At the moment IR increases the player's power in BG1 quite a lot. The main thing is the +strength items, of which there are three if you include the belt from Rasaad's quest (I would personally prefer that any EENPC items be relatively weak so I can happily remove them). You can get two characters to near-max strength, plus many items like varscona are straight-up buffed compared to vanilla. In fact, two of the strongest weapon classes (longswords and scimitars) receive considerable buffs, while many "bad" types like axes, flails, katanas, and halberds, remain bad. Missile weapons are a little bit nerfed, but you forget about that pretty quickly when you have a 25-strength level 5 fighter dual wielding varscona and the new and improved vampire's revenge. With so much strength available, dual-wielding is supreme. Generally I am not a fan of the conversion of strength-setting items to +strength items, even in BG2. It favours powergaming or custom parties, since if you have good stats already it makes you even better, and the items can often be combined to reach 25 strength on multiple characters, which is mostly impossible in vanilla. In vanilla these items are a great way to improve suboptimal bioware NPCs, while powergaming is somewhat limited since they can't be stacked.

With the weapon proficiency overhaul, is it correct that warriors no longer get APR at 7 and 13? Could be a good thing to add to the readme if so.

That sounds great, thank you!

Maybe this has been brought up somewhere before, but would you consider moving the Robe of Acid Resistance off Gorion? It totally messes up his look, and it gives the player 750g off the bat.

It appears to me that the APR bonus for single-handed is activated by a script (presumably due to technical limitations). You won't see it immediately in the inventory screen when a weapon is equipped. But if you unpause for half a second and then go back to the character/inventory screen, it should show up.

I'm a bit confused about specialist mages and spontaneous casting. Testing with some basic characters, they're able to convert spells to specialist spells of the same level, but the readme says they should convert to spells of one level lower. On the other hand, the in-game description doesn't mention the one level lower part. Level 1 spells can't be converted at all, which is consistent with the readme. This is on BGEE 2.5 with just SR and TnB installed.

They do a bit of other stuff. When working correctly they will attack between spells (potentially with MMM which can be significant), and move around a bit. Not sure how they decide where to move, but it can make them harder to target. Being immobile can also make them ineffective if they're on the opposite side of the fight to the party. Even more so if the player indulges in a little kiting.

BG2, Morrowind and Dota 2 are perhaps my three favourite games But I don't think it's the best comparison. Dota 2 is a competitive and addictive multiplayer game with huge prize money. It's to be expected that it will have more mainstream staying power than Morrowind or IE games. Despite that I think games like Morrowind and BG2 are doing fine. The modding scenes are alive, and at least in BG2's case there are modern clones popping up all the time, although none have really done it for me so far. I believe some of them even have some decent mods. Dota 2 also has a decent "modding" scene with custom maps, although Valve could do more to encourage it.

I seem to have found an incompatibility between "Improved NPC customisation and management" and a couple of components of Tweaks Anthology: the XP cap remover and "APR on spec". When installing these three together, warriors don't get their bonus APR at levels 7 and 13. This is on BG2EE 2.5, using the newest SCS and Tweaks from github. I'm running linux with BG on a case-folded partition, however everything else works fine in a big modded install. I can reproduce the problem with the following minimal install: // Log of Currently Installed WeiDU Mods // The top of the file is the 'oldest' mod // ~TP2_File~ #language_number #component_number // [Subcomponent Name -> ] Component Name [ : Version] ~CDTWEAKS/SETUP-CDTWEAKS.TP2~ #0 #2090 // Change Experience Point Cap -> Remove Experience Cap: v9 ~CDTWEAKS/SETUP-CDTWEAKS.TP2~ #0 #2440 // Everyone Gets Bonus APR from Specialization: v9 ~STRATAGEMS/SETUP-STRATAGEMS.TP2~ #0 #4100 // Improved NPC customisation and management: 33.7 I test it by loading in Abdel to the start of ToB - with these components installed he has only 1 base APR, but if I remove any of the three it's the correct 2 APR. I also tested with a ranger, and leveling a character "naturally" from level 1 by granting XP. They also didn't receive the APR. I have also applied (and un-applied) the fix to standard_mage.ssl described earlier in the thread, and it doesn't have any effect on the issue.