Bartimaeus

Here, seems like it would be pretty easy to convert this into its own standalone thing for specifically an SRR player (less so for non-SRR players, especially seeing as the first group of spells/abilities/item resources I didn't even bother to comment names...): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/eif3zy8fh3okb77/friendly_spells_pierce.tph I guess I'll have to investigate further at some point to figure out if there any ramifications from power level 10. (e): Also, I don't think Non-Detection is supposed to be dispellable seeing as it's a spell protection, but Shield is, and I'm not sure why I included Shield in here in the first place - it's self-targeting and doesn't need it. So this might just be a matter of some minor oversights than anything systematically wrong. Although...that would still be an issue for something like Protection from Evil, I suppose, which is not self-targeting and included here.

I actually have no idea. That particular setting is optional and defaulted to off, but if you think 10 works just as well as 0, I'll set it to that instead. Don't have the capability to be testing stuff right now, though.

I think the intent of that line, although I could be wrong, was to try to understand what version of SR you are using. It doesn't really matter, though, since otyughs are about the same across both versions. I might look into what neo-otyughs' stats look like to see if perhaps it might make sense to beef them up just a little, though, at least as another stopgap since I also found them fairly weak (particularly seeing as "stopgaps" often end up being around for many years, or straight up forever...). I really, really don't like the idea of vampires for a few reasons. Vampires are not just limited sapience monsters like kobolds or xvarts, they're...I mean, they're literally demi-humans but undead, and they play a major story role in BG2, and the whole level draining business, and just... Something about even considering them for Baldur's Gate seems really wrong to me. A couple of other lesser undead/fiend summoning spells would be nice, though...especially undead, because they're usually mindless creatures and don't have the sapience issue that I'm still trying to pretend isn't weird. For me, I guess it feels like that if there's a Monster Summoning 2-8, we should have a Monster Summoning 1 and 9. As it is, I think I'm okay with gibberlings at MS1, but I will look into figuring out how I want them to turn into mutated gibberlings...the more spells that at least kind of compete with ye olde Magic Missile at level 1, the better as far as I'm concerned. P.S. If I could infinitely summon rabbits, I'm sure I'd find ways of abusing the hell out of it too...but MS1 takes up an actual spell slot, which is, uh, well, a bit of a difference, . Also, as a matter of practicality, it's honestly easier/less annoying to use one creature like a rabbit to do aggroing/kiting stuff than trying to manage 5 different gibberlings, whose creature AI also keep trying to make them attack constantly...

Why would enemy clerics ever memorize or use Negative Plane Protection when they're never attacked by vampires? Surely SCS would never have them waste a spell slot on a spell that's only ever useful to the player. How do you avoid abusing vampires outside of simply never using the spell to summon them? It's not as though you have a choice on whether they level drain, and it's not as though the AI can react to being drained like a player can - they just stand there and take it until they're dust-chunked after a handful of successful hits, and every single level drain makes them more unable to defend themselves and more likely to get drained even more. I'm generally of the opinion that you shouldn't take away cool things from the player because of the possibility of abuse, but the inevitability of abuse due to bad design is a different matter, and giving the player vampires strikes me as very bad design due to the game being unable to cope with it. Giving their level drain a saving throw is a solution of sorts, but it's a little crude. Of course, I say that knowing the Wraiths of Summon Shadows inexplicably also have a saving throw for their attack, when they also should not... Oh man, believe me, I've struggled with this particular aspect of IRR and have gone back and forth many times on it. After all these years, I've made my peace with the player simply having to make their own decision with this in-universe inexplicability, but yeah, I suppose it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have it optional. I'm currently in a period of inactive development right now anyways, so all of this is really just thoughts for the future, but...

It should be noted that SRR switches hobgoblins to MS2 (while ever so slightly weakening them so that they can better match BG1's hobgoblin stats), while the slimes are beefed up and go to MS3. SR MS3: vs. SRR MS2: SR MS2: vs. SRR MS3: Gibberlings at MS1: I don't really much love the argument that just because it's level 1, it has to be terrible. A number of level 1 spells remain pretty useful for quite some time, and gibberlings...you know, they've got so very little going for them past the first few levels because of lack of pretty much anything useful about them except for being a literal 1 or 2 round distraction that will be more or less cut down instantly by any fighter (it doesn't help that all the MS spells take a full round to cast). That can have its use, sure, but it's...not great. However, I'm thinking about the substitute of kobolds now, and it really seems like that's stepping a bit on MS2's hobgoblin archers' toes, and I'm kinda liking the idea of converting them to mutated gibberlings with increased levels instead. Something with more utility like the hobgoblins would be nice, but it is, after all, still just a level 1 spell - being just a little bit more substantial of a distraction is not a bad start, in any case.

I was going to say "in other words, the game was designed around it and mitigations were undoubtedly taken", but it turns out, the vampires you can summon in NWN do not level drain in the first place - it was included on their unarmed attack, but it's never used because they have a bastard sword in their hand and it is not possible to disarm them. Heck of a "mitigation" to just straight up not include their most iconic attack ability, I'd say, . Anyways, there's a reason the player's only avenues of level drain are extremely limited and subject to either low percentage rolls or saving throws, unlike vampires' level drain - level drain is incredibly powerful if you can use it repeatedly and cheaply, and unlike the player, enemies do not have any ability to protect themselves against it. It's difficult for me to put much work in elementals because I prefer the job atweaks' does as well, which is...not coincidentally another component of the mod I linked earlier, to unite atweaks' elementals with SRR, . I don't think I've ever played it either - mind you, I always have it installed and intend to play it, but when ToB starts is when I usually suddenly run out of any will to continue playing. Now that you mention it, it is pretty weird to have sapient (note: sapience is thought/knowledge/language, sentience is awareness/emotions/instincts...I think) creatures like kobolds...but for the time being, I'm going to ignore that because having to remove the sapient creatures like ogres and hobgoblins is too much of a jump when the selection of creatures is already very difficult, especially seeing as the ogres/hobgoblins are two of the best MS options as it is. List of monsters:

I usually use atweaks' P&P Fiends in combination with disabling SR's fiends via the settings.ini switch SRR introduced...topped off with using the "atweaks/SR fiends fusion" component from this completely inconspicuously named mod: https://github.com/BartyMae/Bart_Tweaks The same applies for atweaks' Call Woodland Beings. You know, I wouldn't really be against adding a little more flavor of undead, but one issue is that I'm not much of a creature scripter - that's usually the issue with introducing more complex summonables, I think, and is probably why many summonables in SR are essentially pretty boring fighter types. Vampires probably wouldn't ever happen because level drain is super abuseable, but I get your point regarding other types. It's actually pretty difficult to implement good summonables, and I'm already somewhat unhappy with a few currently in SRR (such as MS9's greater wolfweres...or the ridiculously sized yet fairly weak otyugh, ugh - as a general rule of thumb, you really want to avoid large-sized summonables due to the fact that they become completely unusable/annoying/terrible in many areas with too small corridors and such, which also limits the types of creatures you can use for Monster Summoning...). It is, to my knowledge, not realistic to implement variable draining unless it's a single die (e.g. IR weapons with their 1D4 Vampiric property). The reason for this is because every range of damage and healing would have to be mapped out to its own percentile range. That is to say, Vampiric Touch at, say...9D6 would have a minimum damage of 9 and a maximum damage of 50, which is 42 unique values - 42 unique values that you have to tie individually to every possible percentage of a range between 1-100%. This is undoubtedly precisely why Vampiric Touch and Larloch's Minor Drain do not use dice to determine their damage, unlike other types of damage - it's not really possible to fairly equalize something like 42 values between a 1-100% range, plus it's extremely tedious to try to implement for a single level, never mind many. I would also like 1D4 for Larloch's Minor Drain as well (representing an average increase of .5 damage per die used, or an additional 2.5 total damage at 9th level), but trying to map that to a percentage range would be difficult and awful, to say the least. It should already, although with the caveat that Banishment only applies to summoned celestials and fiends. This doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in-universe, but there's not really any other way to determine whether an outsider should be banishable in the first place (for example, if you made all fiends banishable, it would be problematic, to say the least, for areas like the Throne of Blood or the Planar Sphere abyssal plane). The difference is that demons are gated in from a different plane, while general "monsters" (i.e. aberrations) are home to the Prime Material, and generally even specifically Faerûn itself. I agree with you that a few need replacing, but I would not be in favor of replacing them with anything but monsters (it is in the name, after all). Aberrations, constructs, undead, fiends, celestials, and elementals are all quite separate classes of creatures in my brain. I'm not really sure why fiends are limited to such high level spells - I would prefer it if there was just a couple of lower and mid-level fiend spells. Trivializing a divine HLA to a simple level 9 arcane spell would...feel bad, to say the least. I haven't personally done any exact comparisons of creature strength (though I feel it certainly has to outstrip MS9 as a similarly directly controllable summon), but I would be very much against that for that reason alone: an HLA of one class shouldn't be just another spell for another. I very much like the idea of putting kobolds at MS1 instead, and allowing the spell to grow a little more. After all, who in their right mind is going to ever memorize MS1 at 9th level over a Magic Missile? The exact formula for creatures would need take some work to figure out, and the issue of Monster Summoning in general is something I'll have to consider more thoroughly at some point to see if I can figure out what exactly I want to do. I think there was an idea to do this at some point, but either nobody ever got around to them or decision-makers ultimately decided against it. The most immediate problem I can think of with doing this is that it actually causes the opposite of the typical issue with adding new arcane spells. Adding new arcane spells always causes the issue of "well, it needs a scroll, and the scroll has to be placed into at multiple locations in the game as well as stores", and that is a difficult process; condensing arcane spells like this would result in you using two scrolls for Lesser Conjure Elemental and Conjure Elemental, which leads to having 4 extra/unused scrolls between the Lesser/non-Lesser Fire/Air/Earth scrolls that are all still placed in the game. This is a bit of a major headache to clean-up, or alternatively replace with new spells. Complications abound everywhere... Thank you for all the feedback. I will have to re-visit Monster Summoning once more at some point in the future - it has always been a headache that I have not particularly wanted to deal with, unfortunately.

More or less the same explanation I gave about IRR, except about spells instead of items. Most of those errors are once again "no changes made" effectively, which doesn't really concern me - it just means the spells in question were not modified. What exact practical effect that might have on your game remains to be seen, but usually it doesn't mean anything critical like causing game-crashes or missing resources or anything of that nature - it just might mean a spell wasn't updated to quite how the mod wanted it to be. IWD Divine Spell Pack is letting you know that it did not install IWD spells that already existed in the game - namely, cleric Cause Disease, cleric Circle of Bones, cleric Mass Cause Light Wounds, and cleric Cause Serious Wounds. I don't think any of those particular errors have anything to do with SR/R, because the first three aren't SR/R spells to begin with, while the last one, Cause Serious Wounds already existed in the base BG2 game. So I can't say for sure what's up with that.

It is (to my knowledge) fully EET compatible. Changes are a little difficult to summarize, but basically, it's a combination of graphical fixes for EE games, handling of some additional items that weren't touched by the original mod, and a number of small-ish tweaks to items here and there. Also, a number of debatable bug and text fixes. That's the gist of it - feedback welcome if you play with it. MISC75.itm is Dagger of Venom and MISC2P is Greagan's Harp, and both of these are already modified by IRR. The exact warning there is simply that Rogue Rebalancing attempted to make changes to these items, but did not do so - either because the items were already changed in the manner it expected, or because it found the items in an unexpected state and decided not changing them was the wiser course, depending on the exact conditions of what the mod was trying to do. I would personally not worry about it, but the exact result may be that IRR's versions of these items were preferred over RR's. I usually install RR before IR, so I don't think I've ever seen this before.

Ergh, duh - it's almost certainly Soul Trap, aka SPIN788. I always forget about Soul Trap...but I thought SPIN788 was only used by Kangaxx?

@subtledoctor Yeah, one has to track does what actual spell resource is being used by enemy spellcasters to figure out what's going on here. I have not experienced this exact problem before, not exactly sure where to look. There are only two abilities/spells called "Maze" in my game, and neither of them are the problem. Are you certain that it is indeed a spell called "Maze" being cast - i.e. does it the combat log actually say the spellcaster cast Maze?

Yes...and potentially no. In spell_rev\components, there is a file called main_component.tpa. Open it with a plaintext editor (e.g. Notepad), and search for the name of the spell you want to disable. Perhaps I want the original version of Haste - I would search for Haste, and put the start comment symbol "/*" at the beginning and the end comment symbol "*/" at the end of its block - see here: This prevents Haste from being overwritten with SR's version of the spell. However, there are some spells where this may cause issues either in-game or cause the installation to error out. Off the top of my head, Spell Immunity is one that people sometimes wish to restore for its cheesiness, but trying to restore Spell Immunity in this fashion would not really work in-game, because the spell is hidden from the spell selection screen via the hidespl mechanism and the spell scroll file is used by a different spell, Dispelling Screen. You could remove Spell Immunity from hidespl and also prevent Dispelling Screen from being installed so as to effectively restore it, but this could very well cause install errors as the mod assumes that Dispelling Screen is installed and may error out because of it not being installed. In other words, it depends on what spells in particular you're trying to restore. Some spells can be disabled without issue.

Yeah, the 177s in the subspell is redundant - harmless if they match the 177s in the base spell, but redundant and confounding if you're adding more in the base spell. In my case, I think they're an artifact of SRR's Banishment killing "gated" creatures upon a failed saving throw, which I originally handled with the same subspell and thus I needed separate 177s with different saving throw checks...but as you can see, there are now two separate sub-spells, one for summoned creatures and one for gated creatures, so now it's unnecessary.

Thanks, fixed - yes, it should be RING39D.

Am I crazy, or doesn't Imprisonment use a different graphic from Maze? I thought it used the Pocket Plane ability graphic. Let's see here... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/tlzh9dfesfawxw4/bgmain_UIgG7wZ4EO.mp4 Well, it does in SRR, anyways. Also, it sure looks like a -6 saving throw may not be enough of a malus for my optional "Imprisonment allows a saving throw" tweak. In regards to the issue of the Harpers, I think you could interpret it a little differently - Imprisonment takes a full round to cast, and the game assumes you have party members, in particular Jaheira, to back you up. Indeed, the point of discussion seems to be whatshisface trying to convince Jaheira to support him. To start casting it at the protagonist, and certainly to finish casting it, without explanation or provocation would surely invite an all-out response from the rest of your party...so your party needs to be defeated and the protagonist subdued for the spell to be cast without fear of it being interrupted. That, or they just planned on killing you altogether instead once it became clear you wouldn't acquiesce. SRR makes it so the vanilla implementation (i.e. the actual imprisonment effect) applies to non-party characters, but the "revised" implementation (aka still broken maze effect) applies to player characters. As with Prismatic Mantle, I don't really love any solution I've ever heard or seen for resolving this, unfortunately, including my own.

Does any of this surprise anyone? I mean, really, literally anyone?

Very against Cone of Cold as well - I also despise cone spells (particularly non-party-friendly ones), as cone projectiles are tricky and...unreliable, to say the least. Confusion as an alternative seems fine to me...and I'd say it's almost certainly a better value at 5th level compared to Waves of Fatigue at 5th level - hell, it'd honestly probably make sense to switch them in the mage spellbook. That might be my dislike of Waves of Fatigue talking, though... Wouldn't mind Greater Malison either, but I do find a certain appeal in returning to Avenger what is essentially the vanilla spell in the first place.

I think vs. wand makes a vague sort of game rule-set sense...but I've never been able to really come up with anything that makes it make sense in any kind of real or in-universe sense. A Wand of Fire...casts Fireball. What's different about this Fireball from a mage casting it normally that makes it not require a breath save but instead a vs. wand save? What the hell does saving vs. wand/rod supposed to even mean? Vs. breath is "you were quick enough", vs. spell is "you were able to resist magic", and vs. death is a "you were able to stave off the worst of its effects". Vs. petrification/polymorph and vs. wand/rod are the odd ones out, but I can at least sort of see a sense for the former as a kind of "you maintained your normal shape/form" (though I'm not really sure what that actually fundamentally means...and I think it could really just be rolled into vs. death as being close enough), but what the hell is vs. wand/rod supposed to be? A fireball is a fireball, dog - you have to get the hell outta the way. Practically though, these are games coming from a P&P rule-set that was presumably trying to do some sort of balance thing, it's fine/whatever to me.

A. Feeblemindedness was what I implemented in SRR. B. I don't feel super strongly about this, but I don't think CC should block berserk because berserk is (or at least can be) a self-imposed mental state. It'd be like saying CC should block you from feeling sad about your dog dying or something - doesn't make a lot of sense to me for a spell whose intent is to block external magical/supernatural mental commands. I would instead opt for simply blocking external sources of berserk...but now that I think about it, what sources are there besides the Berserking Sword/Kiel's Morning Star* and Sphere of Chaos, the latter of which is having it removed? Are there any popular mod-added sources that make use of it as an attack? Given that it's never affected enemies in the non-EE games, I would guess there aren't too many, but I'm sure somebody has used it somewhere. *Funnily, I would really not be too against having Chaotic Commands protect you from the Berserking Sword and Kiel's Morning Star, because I feel as though that qualifies as an external magical command. However, I don't think that's possible without blocking berserk wholesale, so...eh. Though also, I would perhaps argue that as powerful cursed artifacts, such magic could be argued to overrule simple duration-limited spells anyways. As I said though, not something I feel super strongly about. C. Petrification would be better than what I did, which was confusion. Confusion is just a worse stun, after all, and more stuff is immune to it - petrification is much more interesting and a very different kind of effect with different utility, plus I think you can make a pretty good argument for keeping the "vs. wand" saving throw with petrification. It's not as though the "vs. wand" saving throw made strict sense for either feeblemindedness or confusion either, after all.

I'm always disappointed by dragons...but I've banged the drums on that too many times now, I think. I do use all of SCS's "improved [x]" stuff, and I always set dragons to the absolute maximum and they're still just not that much of an issue. There's also not really any situation with any of them where you could be conceivably "surprised" by their sudden appearance - the two reds, maybe, but they're ironically both gracious enough to let you walk away without issue...so there's not really any reason you shouldn't be prepared for them. If my level 10/11 party had to take on Firkraag without having pre-buffed or prepared a couple Lower Resistances, then yeah, we'd have a pretty major issue...but that's not really the case, because there's not really even a justifiable in-universe reason you would do that, unless you were like...playing a chaotic stupid party that just tried to butcher everything immediately without ever preparing - not exactly the kind of party that would last through an entire game to get to Firkraag in the first place, though...not unless you like reloading a million times.

Yeah, I think Armor of Missile Attraction is correct, but looks like Blade of Roses isn't. I'm actually not sure what happens if you only have the "friendly only" flag set but not the enemies one - perhaps it still affects enemies? Anyways, thanks, fixed.

I don't know what it looks like in Near Infinity, but in DLTCEP, you must use both the "only enemies" and "only friendlies" flags for it to affect only friendlies - setting both flags is necessary even though it wouldn't seem to make sense at first glance. If you want it to affect only enemies, you only set the "only enemies" flag; if you want it to affect everyone, you set neither. Thanks, fixed - looks like a matter of an incorrect name (SHIELD_OF_THE_LOST -> SHIELD_OF_THE_LOST_2) preventing it from being installed. It should be safe to simply copy them over.

Thanks, will fix.

IMO, dragons are pretty underwhelming in general, even if you try avoiding some of the cheesier strategies like constantly summoning. The simple reality is that a dragon is only one creature, and it's difficult for one creature, no matter how powerful, to really match the action output of 5 or more pre-buffed characters unless it is truly insanely strong...especially if they're not spellcasters with a wide array of tools at their disposal. Well, dragons are technically spellcasters, but they have a very limited spellbook that seems to be defensively oriented just to buy themselves time in between attacking and firebreathing. As it is, I don't think it's really that particularly difficult to kill any of the dragons in even SoA the moment you come across them if you sufficiently prepare. I find something like the Haer'Dalis planar prison fight many times more challenging than Firkraag.

I think the Cause Wound spells have had questionable damage efficiency since pretty much forever (particularly since you also have to make a successful attack with them, which can sometimes be more of an issue than you might expect - missing it in the first couple of attacks you try to make is super annoying!)...which has always made me wonder they're ever worth any spell slots. Relative to SRR's enhanced Poison and the ever reliable Holy Smite/Unholy Blight, I believe I should be pleased and think it's a good thing if someone likes using the Cause Wound spells. To be honest, I've always wished that Vampiric Touch was a second level spell and not a third - at third, it's competing with too many other spells that are much greater pressing needs (even in the same school, you already have Skull Trap!), and with the maximum HP bonus, it's difficult to balance just right, so I guess I hear you on that one. Thank you for the feedback.