Delior

With respect to xp boosting, I would argue in favor of the no xp boost policy. I cannot think of anything I have found more frustrating in my runs than trying to properly balance XP progression. If playing on SCS on higher difficulties, early leveling feels painfully slow, especially when trying to fight higher-level arcane casters at low levels, which is why many who play on higher difficulties use XP exploits like rushing the basilisks. I like to role play, and so I hate using meta knowledge to use XP exploits. Later, however, if you clear everything including ToTSC content then it is quite easy to hit the level cap in chapter 6. If you add quest mods, you'll get there even faster. I've tried using the XP limiter from EET tweaks to mitigate that problem, but that only magnifies the problem of painfully slow early game leveling, and I was also surprised at how much of an impact reducing xp gains can have on a playthrough. To give just one example, on one playthrough with lots of quest mods installed (SoTSC, BST, BGQE, BG1RE, BG1NPC, etc.), I reduced XP gains for creature kills by 50%. After a full clear of all available content, I was just over 130k at the beginning of chapter 7. By contrast, in another playthrough with no quest mods and no XP reductions, I was just under the level cap at the beginning of chapter 7, and I had completely skipped Ulcaster, Firewine, the Bear River, and the Spider Grove areas. The gains (or losses) from tinkering with XP for kills accumulate over the course of a playthrough, and it ends up making a big difference overall. Given all that, I don't think David should be trying to tinker with XP rewards. It is a very difficult balancing problem to get right. BioWare's blunt and clumsy solution was the level cap, and after trying to tinker with the issue myself, I can see why they ended up with that solution. If I cannot figure out a proper solution for my own playstyle, I do not see how David is supposed to come up with a solution that works for all playstyles.

JFC . . . It's a wonder people make mods at all when people like you order them around like a customer service rep. Need I remind you that all of these mods are provided for free by volunteers! That all said, it does sound like that may be a bug with BG1UB because it is supposed to block the Kivan and Tazok component from being installed on the enhanced edition games.

I share your sentiments. I had to drop SotSC from my game partly due to the abundance of loot it adds to the game. It's unfortunate because the artwork is well done, and I can tell that Lava put a lot of time and effort into crafting all of the items. They are not simply "OP Longsword +6 with 50% stun chance" or something along those lines. If anything, my issues with the mod stemmed more from the sheer amount of changes it makes to the game. Lava has said that he prefers BG2 over BG1, which is presumably why so much of the mod ports over creatures from BG2, and as we all know BG2 (and SoD) has a lot more loot than vanilla BG1. I personally like to keep the games a bit more separate, and SoTSC is an all-or-nothing mod that changes the game a lot. I also couldn't help shake the feeling that the mod was unbalancing the game. I can see the counterargument, however, which is that even vanilla BG1EE has OP items. It's not hard for a player with meta knowledge to quickly gather up a wand of fire, exploding potions, and a necklace of missiles, and those items can trivialize quite a few fights that otherwise are fairly difficult for low-level parties.

I've also experienced this bug where the vanilla EE Kivan quest "Kivan and Tazok" does not close as it should after the bandit camp battle. Relatedly, BG1NPC gives Kivan an interjection if you choose to just travel to the bandit camp via the map to attack it rather than using the bandits in Peldvale to infiltrate the camp. The interjection has Kivan stopping for a moment to pray before you assault the camp. Unfortunately, this interjection also triggers incorrectly if you choose to infiltrate the camp via the bandits in Peldvale after the battle has concluded, at which point the interjection is nonsensical since Kivan refers to praying regarding an upcoming battle that your party just finished. Honestly, unless it messes with Kivan's other BG1NPC quests, the whole Kivan and Tazok questline should just revert to vanilla EE behavior because Beamdog did a good job with it IMO with the exception of the quest timer.

Hey @AWizardDidIt, I'll add my praise to what Sergio said and say that IMO Blackhearts is not only one of the best BG mods I've played, but one of the best mods I've played for any game. It's not perfect, but don't let your doubts cripple your ample creativity. I'd love to see you do more with it.

I wanted to revisit this topic just to note that on a separate installation of 35.10 than the one I was using when I made this post, I have not seen a single level 3 scroll drop from the RNDTRE04 group of enemies. Per Jmerry's chart above, this grouping never drops level 3 scrolls in either vanilla or SCS 35.7, but in my prior installation I had 3 such scrolls before my party even reached level 3. In my current playthrough, my party is almost level 6 and we've cleared most of the southern half of the map without any level 3 scroll drops. Based on that, my conclusion is that the component is likely working as intended, except that in my prior playthrough, the RNG gods were being a bit too generous to my party. As any longtime player of these games knows, the RNG roller is not always reliable and can get "stuck" at times, leading to odd results such as multiple instances of the same random treasure dropping, or the loot tables being overly stingy or overly generous. So, this component may be working as intended, and my OP questioning the generosity may simply have been prompted by overly generous random rolls.

Hey @DavidW, since you're looking at the scrolls component for 35.10 in response to the unhelpful complaints in another thread, I wanted to make sure you saw jmerry's last response on this thread above. The key question I have is whether you intended for level 3 scroll drops to occur at the RNDTRE04 token level. Per the chart above, that did not occur on either vanilla or in prior versions of SCS.

Install the required component to initialize the AI changes, install the improved AI component and set the difficulty to improved and, voila, you have SCS Lite.

Thanks, Jmerry. It was likely a ghoul in the map just south of Beregost that dropped the Melf's Minute Meteors scroll I mentioned earlier.

Well, I'm not sure which numbers you are looking for specifically, but here is the file from my override folder. rndtres.2da

I am seeing level 1 scroll drops as well. Some of us noted in prior versions of SCS 35 that we were not seeing many random scroll drops, and David said that his code was being "stingier" than vanilla, and so he adjusted it for the latest version. I am either getting very lucky with level 3 drops, or the code may be a tad too generous. I also had an enemy drop a Melf's Minute Meteor scroll. I didn't note who dropped that unfortunately, but my party is still all level 1 or 2 and we haven't even cleared Nashkel yet. If the component is working as intended, that's fine. It's up to David to decide how generous he wants the scroll drops to be - my only purpose in noting these drops is to ensure that the component IS working as intended.

I am playing with the wider random scrolls component from 35.10, and a level 3 scroll (Hold Undead) just dropped from an enemy in the Gnoll Fortress. Is that intended? I know it was possible to get level 3 scroll drops in vanilla BG1EE, but IIRC that only happened later in the game.

Whoops, sorry about that!

Got it. In that case, this is not a bug.

EEUITweaks is actively maintained here on G3 by Lefruet (see linked post below). The "Improved Record Screen" component is by Lefruet and mirrors what the record screen looks like in Lefruet's enhanced UI mod. I don't know why the odd entries still appear in that component while they are fixed in the enhanced UI mod. I'll go ahead and tag @lefreut as he might know why.