RestInPeace

Actually I'm not deciding it myself, I'm following PnP, and I was even quite "forgiving" for player's sake because else I should have removed from druids quite a lot more spells (e.g. Doom, Bless, Cloak of Fear, etc.), and clerics should have the incredibly more restrictive sphere system used by Divine Remix. Only Morninglords of Lathander should be able to cast from the sun sphere, and druids were never able to cast the Cause Wound serie of spells. What's CS by the way? P.S Cleric should be able to handle undead monsters with their innate ability to Turn Undead (if not, what's there for?), and already have a bunch of anti-undead spells. Actually it's not a matter of divine spells being counterparts of arcane ones (not to mention gate is another arcane spell thus I don't see much difference in that regard), it's that, as you noticed, summoned demons are extremely powerful, and letting a L14 priest summon a 24HD Pit Fiend would be outstandingly OP. In theory I could restore Gate, but it would still summon weaker creatures than its 9th lvl counterpart for obvious reasons. I even though about making it more like PnP, using good aligned creatures too for non-evil characters (e.g. Devas), but that's another story. Last but not least, I really don't think priests should be better summoners than mages (the latters even have a specialized kit, the Conjurer), there's absolutely no reason behind it. I'm sympathetic to this, but I don't think it will happen, sorry. Heavily modified or replaced spells When it comes to compatibility I assure you there's no such issue, but I partially agree with you. Anyway this is something I very rarely do, when it happens it's for good reasons*, and I never do it without asking player's opinion. I consider SR a community mod almost as much as a mod of mine, thus I try to discuss everything with players (which also makes much harder/slower to mod trust me), and what you see generally is the end result of long debates. Both NB and Symbol changes were heavily discussed back then, especially the former. If your wishes meet the ones of the majority of the community then it's quite probable I'll please them. Long story short, I always encourage feedback (even negative one) and feel free to open discussions on those things (like this post) but remember I can't please EVERYONE, I think it's obvious such task is almost impossible. *Vanilla's NB was almost broken because the AI cannot cope with blindness as players, whereas Symbol of Fear was kinda weak as a 7th lvl spell considering a 1st lvl spell can both cure and protect the entire party from it (in fact it's a 6th lvl spell in PnP - as a side note I may restore it as such). I agree, in fact this won't happen in V4, and Mages will probably get both Animate Dead and Summon Shadow. Summoned Creatures We recently discussed this a little and within V4 quite a few summoned creatures will be slightly weaker (e.g. less hit points), but most of them are very fine in terms of concept, abilities and qualities. I know, and I agree, though SR almost gives for granted that SCS will be installed with it. What I said above (about nerfing some summons) is particularly true for demons and celestials but don't expect them to become extremely weaker than they are now Summoned creatures granting XP Well, time permitting I could make it so that only AI summoned creatures grant XP, removing possible exploits. I'll take it into account when I start to seriously work on V4. Summoning Cap SR doesn't remove such cap, though many players asked for it, and I may be favourable to add it as a separate component. Do summoned demons ever had a cap? I'm not sure. Anyway, SCS removes their "summoned demon" flag, thus any eventual cap, and it's not SR's "fault" if you end up fighting tons of them. Various I'm sympathetic, but I'm not sure this will happen. Vanilla's items are very "outdated" in this regard, and don't use actual spells but custom effects. I could spend a lot of time to explain you what this means, but let's just say that I would have to seriously alter the itm files to make them work as they should, and that I'm not sure doing it within SR is a good thing (even if it can be done via patching code the end result would be a heavily modified item). That being said, how many times SR spells are so much different than vanilla's ones? Not to mention you can consider spells cast from items as custom spells rather than perfect copies of the original ones, which is even more true in vanilla because it's exactly what they are and how they work. Except a few "must have" re allocations (e.g. SCS ones are mandatory for compatibility reasons) such component will surely be separate from the main one, though, as with many other IR components, I'll always give for granted they are installed for various reasons. Alterations in the spell system is what concerns me most as I doubt the AI can use their new spell book efficiently. Maybe SCS can deal with that but what will happen if SCS is not installed? I have two copies of BG installed, one with SCS and one without. The summoning cap - I had no other spell tweaks installed. No summon cap removal or celestial cap removal. I found this not long after I had started a new BG2 game when I used Monster Summoning I in the starting dungeon. I was able to have more than 5 hobgoblins under control. Then I tested with those celestial summoning spells and found that celestial creatures was no longer limited to 1.

Bah! If there's so many things you can't tolerate in the mod, why bother and install/play it? The fact is that I installed and played, I had a reason. I love most part of the mod and I don't think things that I don't agree with are "many".

Right to the point: 1. Please don't decide for players what spells should be clerics' and what should be druids'. I was really upset when I found in the middle/later part of the game that my cleric could not cast Sunray and Jaheira could not use CS+Harm. Moreover, I don't think Level 7 divine spells should be some counterparts of Arcane ones of the same level, so why no Gate for a cleric. I always think priests should be better at summoning creatures than wizards. You can make a separate component, such as "heavily modified priest spell book". 2. Please don't make radical changes to spells. Nature's Beauty, Symbol Fear, etc. You can make overpowered spells less powerful (saving throw, duration, etc), weak ones more useful, but please don't change those spells to totally different ones. Both for game play consistency and compatibility. No animate dead for wizards? It's odd that a necromancer cannot raise skeletons. 3. Some summoned creatures are a bit overpowered compared with those "natural" ones in the game or with those should-be-powerful-but-weak creatures. For example, if one don't have SCS installed then SR's demons are much more powerful than those in the game. Demons: a. vanilla - weak b. atweak - slightly more powerful and useful c. scs - extremely powerful, overpowered if you don't have other creature enhancing components installed I think you can use atweak's pnp demons by default (and tweak other summoned creature a bit accordingly). So we can use atweak's pnp fiends with SR if we don't want those overpowered ones from scs. If we want a more challenging game then we can just install SCS as SR's demons will be overwritten by SCS. 4. Please give players xp for killing hostile creatures (unhappy demons and those summoned by enemies). This is reasonable. It is strange that you get no xp after doing quite some work. Some one may think this will be exploitable (killing demons for xp), but whether to exploit it or not depends on the player. I don't think this is what modders should consider. We can get infinite xp on the walls of Saradush if we like that. 5. Summoning cap has been removed. I like this idea but can we restrict the number of demonic/celestial creatures to 1? When my low level charname was surrounded by 8 SCS enhanced glabrezus and 2 mordy swords summoned by a nameless lich, I felt hopeless. Another problem is that skeletons are not affected. You cannot summon more creatures if you already have 5 skeletons, but you can summon up to five skeletons no matter how many other creatures are already there in the field. p.s. Please make SR version of spells cast by items for people who don't want IR. And for IR, please make item re-allocation a separate component.