Bartimaeus

9 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Frankly, I think it's worth changing Ras as well... it's not like it's a difference in power, I always have a backup weapon to use when Ras disappears. It's just a matter of convenience.

Yeah, especially seeing as it's otherwise just a Long Sword +2...I guess it kinda just feels wrong to me. It's supposed to dance its way out of your hands - that's why they call it the Dancing Blade! If Ras were a quick slot item that just stayed there, it'd probably be way more enticing to use to me. Is anybody actually using Ras as a weapon? Maybe if you have three or more party members with long sword proficiencies? Hmm, I think I'll make a mini-mod for myself...

6 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

The vanilla version of Ras talks about it jumping out if your hand to attack on its own, while Spectral Brand mentions “summoning” a spectral sword to attack with you. It’s been a long time since I played with Spectral Brand in my party, but if you say Demi changed the description to be inaccurate, that is a bit weird. But, why would you change the item in a way that annoys you, rather than just changing the description??

Well, to be honest, I didn't know it worked that way in vanilla in the first place, so I'm guessing I just figured it was behaving incorrectly and I should make it consistent with Ras, particularly seeing as the description says "can attack on its own", which would definitely imply it leaves leave your hand. But if the original item worked that way, I'm gonna change it back...

12 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Spectral Brand doesn't actually do that, only Ras does. Which is the number one reason I prefer Spectral Brand to Ras 

It's removed from your inventory in IRR...but not in IR. The description in IR says "the sword can attack on its own", same as Ras, but in one case, it doesn't leave your hand and in the other it does. That's pretty weird.

18 hours ago, pochesun said:

I dunno, a person turning into werewolf naturally should tear off clothes / armor (unequip)  If i was a werewolf -  i would  

If creating a magical weapon (e.g. Flame Sword) unequipped all of your weapons, if using a figurine to summon a magical creature (e.g. Kitthix) removed the figurine from your quick slot, if using one of the mage Armor spells unequipped your armor, if transforming into something always removed all of your gear...it would make using all of those annoying for no reason. I have no desire to annoy the player in this manner, especially not when these things haven't previously worked that way. Well, I think the figurines used to, but they don't in my game, .

Though perhaps it's my own bias speaking - I find Ras and Spectral Brand to be really annoying in that their sword-summoning abilities remove themselves from your inventory, so I never use those abilities. In those particular two cases, there's not much that can be done about it since the alternatives would make no sense.

It's not something I'm super concerned about mostly because those transformations (Cloak of the Wolf, Cloak of the Sewers, Pearly White Ioun Stone) are really more intended to be for characters who are not so great at combat. Going from a fighter to werewolf is not really of much use, as your base AC, THAC0, APR, and maybe even STR/DEX/CON are likely to all be about the same or even better than what you get from the transformation - going from a mage or maybe cleric when you need some extra melee DPS or they've run out of spells to cast and you want to make them useful, that's probably the more ideal use case...a kind of cheap but much more limited Polymorph Self. There's also something to be said for the fact that I don't think there's anything that can be done about it anyways - you can unequip items via an effect, but they drop into your inventory, and that would be super obnoxious for those abilities.

6 hours ago, pochesun said:

Hello, wanted to ask about Shapeshifting ability (specificaly Cloak of the Wolf from BG1). When i shapeshift into werewolf using the Cloak extra bonuses to AC from armor and helmet still applies. Also i can quip armor and helmet when i am in werefolf form. Is it supposed to be this way? If no - can it be fixed or its somehow hardcoded?

It is supposed to work that way. But I don't think you gain "bonus" AC from the transformation - your dexterity changes, which might give you bonus AC relative to what you had before, but if you're already wearing Full Plate Mail, Werewolf's base AC of 3 shouldn't change that.

8 hours ago, TotoR said:

@Bartimaeus,

After playing a bit, I reallize that I could use items of protection with some armors without installing the component that allow it.

When I look further, it seems that some armors where not added to itemexcl.2da. those armors are:

 Leat6_, chan02b, chan03b, plat02_ and plat06_

Cheers

Aaahhh, the BG1-specific variants. Forgot about those, particularly since I always use that component. Will fix, thanks.

13 hours ago, Dan_P said:

I checked again. It doesn't work on equips for me. I tested on several different item types, including the "cdrelm" item I mentioned above.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/wbh5cc16rqxqkic/Baldur_nvZ7vov601.mp4

I can report something else strange as well: yesterday, I changed Potion of Fire Resistance's opcode 30 (fire resistance) to opcode 31 (magic damage resistance) and it didn't want to work at all. Today, I do the same thing and suddenly it worked. I don't get it.

Strange: opcode 31 with type 0 seems to work perfectly fine for items you equip (using any kind of timing mode, be it 0, 1, 2, or 9), but nothing seems to apply when you do it through a .spl (and possibly an .itm's extended effects?).

2 hours ago, pochesun said:

@Bartimaeus I wanted to ask you about Rogue Rebalancing component that adds equipment for bards and thieves. i was going to try it (4-5 pieces of equipment look pretty cool and have fun design), but not sure how it works with IRR (is it stable enough etc?). Also i have no idea if IRR (or IR) borrowed some ideas from RR before and already implemented those. And if there are duplicates among euipment does the order of installation RR then IRR holds? What are your thoughts about it?

Also, always wanted to ask but always forget  Is ToBex already implemented in EE version of the game or they are incompatibale, or some elements of ToBex implemented in EE? Does IRR or SRR install any elements of ToBex?

1. I have never looked at RR's items, so as far as I know, no concepts/designs are lifted from it for IRR (and I would say probably not IR either). ...This is not entirely true, as I did once install those components probably around a decade ago, saw that it added IWD-like items, and immediately yoinked it out of my install. If I were to ever add it back, it would be only after I significantly re-designed all of it...and nobody wants me to do that, me least of all, . I'm of the mind to leave everyone else's content alone at this point outside of truly tiny tweaks that I could put in their own mini-component (i.e. nothing in the scope of IRR/SRR). General install order would be...IIRC, RR's item additions/modifications change a few vanilla items, so it depends on whether you want IR's or RR's changes to be the final word - if the former, you install IR's base component after RR; if the latter, you install RR's item-changing components after IR's base component (but before its secondary components). I have no comment on how well they fit in beyond what I already said and it not being for me, as I think I am probably the harshest judge around regarding this sort of thing.

2. If you're on the EEs, you need not worry about ToBEx or anything it did - the vast majority (but not quite all!) of what ToBEx does was implemented for the EEs, and the few things that weren't you can't change with or without ToBEx anyways, so there's nothing that you can do about it AFAIK.

4 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

ToBExAL/Improved GUI backported the right-click-on-innates-to-view-their-description feature to classic.

Yeah, I have heard about this, but to my knowledge, Summon Ghast and a number of abilities like it just...never had a description in the first place. So the question is, should they be written or should they just be zeroed out? If you start to add a few, it feels like you might have to add them all...

1 hour ago, pochesun said:

I am not sure if it pertains to SR, anyway, Tiax got a description of Barskin spell insted of Summon Ghast description ability.

I don't think Summon Ghast ever had a player-facing description to begin with (or maybe the EEs added one?). I generally try to zero out descriptions when they're never intended to be seen, so let me know if you see any others like it that you think could be relevant to SR/R.

On 1/5/2023 at 10:16 AM, Lord_Tansheron said:

That might have been it, honestly. Oops. I did try on some regular enemies too, but in hindsight I think those might actually be stun immune so that was a screwup on my part. I tested again with the Umber Hulks you mentioned, and it does seem to be working against them.

Apologies for wasting your time! Seems I just jumped the gun and underestimated how many things are stun immune.

Derp moment on my part!

No problem, totally understandable. Indeed, it would've been the very first thing I mentioned if I had actually remembered before doing all that troubleshooting, but it's as obvious to you as it is to me - which is to say not at all, . I only "remembered" because on my second test with your weidu.log, instead of the umber hulks, I smashed Jan and it suddenly stopped working...until I remembered, oh wait, it's an AoE effect that only targets enemies...hey, wait a second...

7 hours ago, Lord_Tansheron said:

It's entirely possible something got screwed up otherwise.

Here's the item file, and also the mod log. All freshly installed with the most current versions I could find, several days ago.

HAMM09.ITM 954 B · 0 downloads WeiDU.log 12.42 kB · 2 downloads

I can't see anything wrong with it. Just to make sure, you are testing it on a hostile creature, right? These kinds of AoE effects generally only work on hostiles. Since your weidu.log is pretty short, I tested the same install you have short of the SCS components, and spawning some umber hulks and using Crom Faeyr on them still worked.

1 hour ago, Lord_Tansheron said:

Fresh install using the most recent version, it seems that neither Celestial Fury nor Crom Faeyr are properly stunning targets. Possibly a problem with the DVTHCLAP.SPL resource that they're both using? There's not even a saving throw message in the log (should be save vs. breath). The visual effect happens just fine, as does the extra electricity damage. Just no stun. Checked the resource myself and it LOOKS fine, can't really explain why it isn't stunning anyone. Tested on various targets of course, including summons, enemies, party members etc.

Attached it here for reference.

DVTHCLAP.SPL 346 B · 0 downloads

I was about to be the big mad again, because I swear I've fixed Thunderclap at least a couple of times over the years, but after installing IRR on a fresh copy of BG2EE and spawning a bunch of umber hulks and throwing Crom Faeyr at them, it does work correctly. Phew. So the question is more why doesn't it work in your game - can I also get a copy of HAMM09.itm from your override? Everything with your spell seems to match mine besides the projectile being one number different (but that's normal, since the projectile number will depend on when the projectile is added in your mod install).

I installed the exact versions of the same mods that affected your BAZEYE01.CRE.

Quote

~SPELL_REV/SETUP-SPELL_REV.TP2~ #0 #0 // Spell Revisions: v4 Beta 18 (Revised v1.3.900)
~EET_TWEAKS/EET_TWEAKS.TP2~ #0 #2052 // XP for killing creatures -> Decrease to 50%: 1.12
~STRATAGEMS/SETUP-STRATAGEMS.TP2~ #0 #5900 // Initialise AI components (required for all tactical and AI components): 34.3
~STRATAGEMS/SETUP-STRATAGEMS.TP2~ #0 #6000 // Smarter general AI: 34.3
~STRATAGEMS/SETUP-STRATAGEMS.TP2~ #0 #6030 // Smarter Mages: 34.3
~STRATAGEMS/SETUP-STRATAGEMS.TP2~ #0 #6100 // Potions for NPCs: 34.3

The only errors/warnings during I received during SCS's installation (see debug file here) was one about the Stone to Flesh scroll not existing (which is correct, Stone to Flesh does not exist in SR, as it's replaced by Break Enchantment) and about a number of creatures unexpectedly using ranged weapons instead of melee weapons (presumably not a big issue, and also probably nothing to do with SR/R). Your specific error is "not_found", which...sounds like the file is unexpectedly missing (as opposed to corrupt or something else), but at least some of the files you listed as being affected are present in vanilla BG2EE and so it should it be impossible for SCS to not be able to find some version of them, so I don't know how that would be.

13 hours ago, Notso said:

Just thought I'd post this here: for macOS users, do not use Finder to merge the folders. MacOS' "merge" feature (which can be accessed by holding Option when the dialogue box asking if you want to replace the folder in the destination with the new folder) does not merge subfolders. Instead, we have to use the following command in terminal (press Cmd+Space, then search for "Terminal"):

cp -R /path/to/item_revisions_revised/item_rev/* /path/to/item_revisions/item_rev

This should, as far as I can tell, merge the folders in the same way File Explorer does in Windows (overwriting items in the destination folder with incoming files if they share a name). If, like me, you find typing out entire paths to directories tedious, drag IRR's item_rev folder into the terminal window once you've typed "cp -R", remember to add "/*" and a space to the end of the path, then drag IR's item_rev folder into the terminal window.

Yeah, I give a warning in the second line of the original post: "If you are on a non-Windows OS, make sure that the two folders are combined: if the "change-log.txt" file still exists in "(game directory)\spell_rev\", then you should be good - if it doesn't, post in the thread for help." In the past, when someone's had an issue, I just manually combine the archives for them in a temporary link.

2 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

Noone told you to keep the IWDEE compatibility in your softforks either, which you just acknowledged you don't care about, why don't you cut that out then? Beamdog put it in, because it's cheaper to maintain one shared engine branch between the BGs and IWDEE and sure, they could've kept the option within baldur.lua only, but a Hidden Gameplay Options mod would've still exposed it.

Yeah, so I don't believe I ever said I didn't care about IWDEE compatibility, . What a weird, mouth-stuffing conclusion to immediately make, particularly given my history of introducing optional settings that I don't use for other people (and having literally offered to make a mini-mod for Lord_Tansheron having the issue with Un/Holy Word!).

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

All that post suggested to me is that LoB is stupid and people shouldn't play the game that way. I mean, if you are purposefully throwing out all sense of balance among the various game mechanics, then yeah get ready for some game mechanics to be totally unbalanced. Don't think a mod needs to adapt to that...

I'm not a fan of it, but I wouldn't go that far: people should play their game however they want, and if LoB makes it more interesting/enjoyable to them, that's all well and good. I can kind of see the appeal: if you've played the game a hundred times and you want to be forced to consider different approaches and strategies you might not otherwise have to, to go to a power-gaming extreme you've never had to go to before, that can certainly shake the experience up. But it's not the main way of playing these games, and both IR/SR were designed with...actually, solely oBG2 in mind (even if there were later BG1/BGT/IWD/EE compatibility additions eventually added), so it's a little much to go expecting everything to always work in perfect harmony when you're talking about something as wacky and extreme as what Legacy of Bhaal does. But the beauty of modding is that you can personally fix these kinds of issues, or ask someone to help you out if it's a small enough thing like stripping a couple of spells of their death effect.

6 minutes ago, Graion Dilach said:

FTFY. Beamdog has nothing to do with the design of how that works, they just reimplemented it accurately from oIWD.

Didn't see anybody holding a gun to Beamdog's head to make them implement it in the BG games, or implement it in the same exact way. Haven't really ever played IWD1 (by far my least favorite of all the IE games, I've probably only ever gotten through maybe 1/4th of it), so I can't really comment on how well it works (or doesn't) for that game - only for the BG games, where Beamdog is wholly responsible for its inclusion and implementation. Either way, too difficult to re-design certain spells around.

5 hours ago, Lord_Tansheron said:

A lot of the spells using hit-dice based mechanics are really unbalanced in Legacy of Bhaal mode - but one of them in particular is just absurd.

UnHoly Word will kill enemies 10+ hit-dice below the caster. As hit dice are effectively = level for enemies, any time an enemy casts UnHoly Word, the LoB level increase means they're virtually guaranteed to kill you. Without save. ON THE ENTIRE PARTY. I'm pretty sure that a party-wide no-save instant kill is not exactly desired behavior, especially since a common enemy (Planetars summoned by enemy mages) does this routinely.

At the same time, of course, the hit-dice scaling means that when those spells are cast by the PLAYER, they do almost nothing.

I'm not sure what the best way to fix these would be, as even if they scaled simply with caster level, they'd still get unduly buffed by LoB. Perhaps just removing the kill component, replacing it with something more manageable; at least that way it wouldn't just wipe you instantly without a saving throw.

No offense to Beamdog, but I think it would be folly to try to balance for an extreme and unbalanced difficulty mode whose questionable design will be inherently subject to issues like this. It's true that instant party death is not intended, but the vast majority of mods (SR/R and IR/R included) are not even slightly intended to played with LoB either. Get your Skull of Death, Periapt of Life Protection, and Hindo's Doom out and memorize a few Death Wards, I guess. I could also just write you a mini-mod that strips Un/Holy Word of their death effects if you like: I imagine those spells have zero use for you the player anyway sdue to everything always being too high level.

1 hour ago, Chitown Willie said:

Bartimaeus,

Just checking on best practices - Are the following "base" mods now recommended for the Revised mods?

• Item Revisions 4b10sd16
• Spell Revisions 4.19rc1

Thanks!

Yes to SR, no to IR. I would not really expect it to have any issue, but I have not checked. Regardless, in both cases, they'd be superfluous (i.e. whatever changes they'd make compared to the previous/base versions should be included or overwritten by IRR/SRR anyways). As the official version of IR is what IRR is intended for, I would recommend that instead, whereas I have tested with the newest official (release candidate) version of SR.

17 hours ago, valky said:

I really need to look up on that further; it was often the decision of our mighty DM *bows down*

It seems in 5E, "silver" weapons were more like "silvered" weapons, meaning that such weapons aren't usually typically made completely out of silver, but just have a silver coating. Which...does make sense, considering silver would be an atrocious weapon material. However, who knows for Gith silver swords...

33 minutes ago, valky said:

You did some excellent work in making boring weapons useful.

Not me, Demi and Mike, the creators of Item Revisions, I just run this "Revisions Revised" off-branch. Unless you're actually talking about specifically my changes, in which case, O.K., fair enough, but you'd have to have played non-Revised IR and know it very well to know which is which, so when in doubt, just give credit to them.

33 minutes ago, valky said:

The Silver Sword thingie is a good point, though. I might be mistaken, but a Paladin could further imbue his power into a silver-weapon and made it holy and further increase the effect of keen. But I think, there is no real restriction, to why thy should or shall not wield such a weapon. Silver is literally the element of anti-evil and despite being a weapon, that *whirrs and aims to kill* while being unsheathed, I see no issue to some restriction for a Paladin.

It's rather the 2nd effect, that makes it a true paladin-weapon (silver weapons get double the benefit of keen for a Paladin, but that is a mix of house-rules and 3.5 + 5e stuff and some very old 2e reading). No Complain about being 'vorpal' - 'vorpal' is just what it is....

I honestly don't remember the history of the Gith silver swords: are they actually made out of silver, or do they just...look like glowing silver? I'm reading the Forgotten Realms wiki page on them right now, and it's really not clear to me. Willed into existence...from maybe a piece of a portal to the Far Realm? Maybe it's just assumed they're actually made out of silver, I don't know...

2 hours ago, valky said:

A few Ioun stones should be available earlier anyway, by the time you get most of them, they add little to no effect (0.02$)

There are a few different items throughout BG2 that are kind of head-scratchers with where they're placed, as there's just not much realistic possibility you don't have something undeniably better by that point. Depending on your party composition and what quests you've done by that point, their current location doesn't guarantee that they're useless...but in some cases, it can be pretty bad.

2 hours ago, valky said:

It's also good to see, that Carsomyr ain't the OP weapon it once was or at least with SCS - get's replaced by the new & cool Silver Sword very soon. The save or die or rather decapitation effect on a few weapons is really awesome.

A couple of points here:

Carsomyr: IR changed it from +5 to +4 until you enhance it in ToB, and also chopped down its 50% MR to 20% (25% enhanced). IRR changes it from 20% to 10% (20% enhanced) but gave it additional Dispel Magic charges (its original 3 instead of just 1). I'm still not certain how I feel about this, I'm sure it's made someone somewhere kind of mad that the SoA version has so little MR in comparison to vanilla's insanity.

Silver Sword: In normal IR, the Silver Sword is actually not usable by Paladins, which...I kind of get, but I also kind of don't. IR introduced a number of "paladins can't use such an evil artifact!" item restrictions, but unlike something such as The Ravager, the Silver Sword is not an inherently evil artifact as far as I'm aware (decapitation is kind of grisly to be sure, but the other vorpal weapons aren't disallowed to paladins and I'm not certain that paladins would actually have a problem with such). Two-handed weapons are paladins' bread and butter, so it feels like an unnecessary form of pigeon-holing to force them into Carsomyr, especially with how relatively easily accessible Carsomyr is. The "if the death effect fails, then it at least deals some extra damage" was my own invention for making the vorpal effects less "it either works or it doesn't"-y, which also makes it easier to not worry about the saving throw penalty (or lack thereof) being too weak as much.

2 hours ago, valky said:

edit: noticed you didn't add the 'sword of the flame' (sw1h53.itm) - scimitars are still scarce, even if you get the whack-a-mole thingie in Cloakwood (Rashad's Talon) it would be nice to see it added to some vendor. Ulgoth's or Sorcerer's are probably fine - by that time, you already swim in quite a few +1/2 weapons anyway.

At this time, IR doesn't make any kind of large changes to how items are allocated in BG1. It would be nice to fix up BG1 stores, but it's also an incredibly daunting task with how many there are and how many are completely useless. The changes IR makes to BG2 stores with its Store Revisions must have taken positively ages to work through.

2 hours ago, valky said:

Ioun stones should probably be renamed in some cases, as a lot of their effects including vanilla doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I think these really just take off after vanilla in intended design for the most part (even if the exact effects have been revised, who they're made for and their general effect has stayed mostly the same). Not sure why BioWare made the color choices they did.

Thanks for the feedback!

You can see mention/investigation of the issue from last year here:

I thought Angel did end up fixing this, but perhaps it didn't quite work as intended.

1 hour ago, Nathan82 said:

@Bartimaeus hello, how or what would i need to edit to change how many charges wands get? I've had a look through various files and in NI but can't work it out. Hopefulyl i've got the right mod. Thanks

It's unfortunately not so simple. Even if you increase the number of charges on the .itm files themselves, when an item exists in an area or on a creature, the charges are individually set in each instance as well irrespective of what the .itm file says. If the .itm file says 50, but the .cre on which the wand is dropped from says 10, it's gonna be 10. However, if you just want to kill IR's nerf of wands (i.e. set them back to the number of charges they had in vanilla), you'd really have to do two things:

1. Go into each wands' .itm and set the maximum charges back to their original values (50? IDK what they are in vanilla).
2. Disable the "// Wands" sections of item_rev\components\main\fixes\item_charges.tpa.
3. Optionally: if you have Store Revisions installed, change the number of charges for sold wands from 10 to whatever you want them to be.

It may be easier to just do only step #2 (which is what actually sets the charges of each wand found in-game) while then selling and re-buying whatever wand you want to re-charge when you need to.