Bartimaeus

If I'm not mistaken, Ashideena is the only better than +1 war hammer throughout BG1 and even TotSC, so I don't think it'd be entirely amiss to place Rift Hammer somewhere...either pretty close to the end on a named character, or maybe in Durlag's Tower. I've put it on the list, though I'm open to suggestions as well.

It's my responsibility to make sure that SRR is supported just as much as SR is, not anybody else's. I'll have to do some test installs with SR and SRR at some point here and see what I can do.

Latest repository/master version of SRR now has a settings.ini switch called "original_lightning_bolt" that you can set to 1 to restore the original lightning bolt animation, which also affects IRR's Wand of Lightning (if it exists).

See, I don't remember vanilla items so much I didn't even know vanilla Bala's Axe had an activated ability instead of an on-hit effect. Whoops. An activated spell-like ability that you have to cast for a damned axe sure seems kind of silly to me, but them's the breaks with vanilla item design.

Dispelling magic as an on-hit effect by way of e.g. Bala's Axe does not cast the spell "Dispel Magic", it just...dispels magic if the saving throw is failed. In other words, it's not subject to the "what level is the character who cast it and what level is the character who is affected" mechanics. Casting the Dispel Magic spell from an item (e.g. Carsomyr) or the Inquisitor's innate, on the other hand, would be. It's not clear to me whether you're playing with IR or not. If not, then I don't know for sure, as I don't remember how vanilla items handle spell-like abilities...but if you're playing with IR, I would say mostly, though with the caveat that most spell-like abilities do not scale with level and instead are set to always be cast at the same power no matter the circumstances.

If SR is, so should be SRR. But I haven't personally tested SCS's/IWDification's IWD spells with SR or SRR, so I'm kind of relying on the word of others that they apparently at least mostly work. And for that reason, I can't answer the rest of your IWD spells-related questions. Even worse (for you, that is): Item Revisions (as well as IRR, since I didn't change this) makes Wand of Lightning the no-bounce type of lightning bolt regardless of whether you have SR/R installed or not. To be honest, I think the original lightning bolt is a hilarious part of the game, so I'm kind of tempted to make an optional .ini tweak that allows it to be changed back.

No, it's not possible: those price changes are all baked into the .itm files. On a side-note, Demivrgvs balanced IR around BG2, not BG1, which has historically created a few rather unfortunate issues for BG1. You don't sell a lot of full plate mail in BG1, but you sure do in BG2, so it was no doubt the intent to make the economy a little less easy. And on a side-note to the side-note, AD&D's standard price for plate mail was 400 GP, which is actually 100 GP less than IR's 500...but its price for full plate mail is listed as a minimum of 4,000 and as much as 10,000, and IR's is only 1,000. The economy is these games is a bit crude, and the differences in the availability of magical items between BG1 and BG2 makes it even tougher to strike a good balance.

Thanks, fixed locally (will commit to the repository at some point in the near future).

In theory, yes...in practice, probably? I don't think there should be any issues with that, but I wouldn't make any guarantees. I'm fairly certain that the Druid version of the spell, for example, adds its own projectile and .bam icons and thus it isn't reliant on dvfogc.pro or the dvwi106x.bam icons being in the game...but again, no guarantees from me.

It's intended that Wand of the Heavens have both Intelligence and Wisdom requirements. Although...as I did some dumb stuff with wands a while back that I largely reverted, I am wondering why vanilla IR has a requirement of 13 Wisdom while IRR is a lower 10 Wisdom. Then again, max spellcasting level being tied to Wisdom isn't a thing unlike with mages and Intelligence (which is what wands' Intelligence requirements are determined by), so maybe it's appropriate that it's just 10 after all.

Godhood just isn't very interesting to me, and I honestly just don't much care for it as the 'end' of the Bhaalspawn Saga. Well, maybe it could be interesting, but to me, stories should be driven by characters, and SoA's Irenicus and Bodhi are great characters, I love both of them and the game is fundamentally more about them rather than CHARNAME and I am perfectly fine with that (heck, I find it pretty difficult not to cheer for them over Ellesime and all those cruddy elves!), while with ToB...what seemed to be the most interesting character of the whole lot, Gromnir, is done pretty dirty in terms of his relations to the player, not to mention he's killed off quickly. Though not as quickly as...uh, you know, Illasera the Quick - it never occurred to me that that silly moniker was probably a joke by BioWare relating to her immediately showing up and getting killed by the player until just now. Anyways, point is, ToB has always failed to make a convincing case in terms of its story and characters for me, so it's hard to much care about it, especially as the game starts to unravel mechanically as you get such a ridiculous glut of spells and powers that open up way too many broken tactics. I have thus traditionally considered the fight against Irenicus to be the end of the game, with Watcher's Keep as an optional "let's go kill Demogorgon" final challenge. I always think I'm going to really actually go through ToB leading up to Irenicus, but then I axe him and get into the elf grove and pretty much immediately lose all inertia. I don't really know what, if anything, I'd want to 'save' from ToB and put into SoA...there's probably something, but I'm hard-pressed to immediately name what.

See here: I initially designed it without actively considering the projectile/saving issue, in order to make it so that characters would be more or less instantly affected once they walk in range of the aura. Which it is good for, but...the saving issue is a more of an issue than that was. Yes, it's way less of an issue because it casts every six seconds instead of every one second. But that's how it already was before I went and had my big, bright idea of re-designing it to be every second, so...just reverting it back to every six seconds would solve that issue anyways.

One...actually, I'm going to go straight to two here, then circle back to one, so two, that condition doesn't exist in pre-EE games. Generally speaking, if there's something that's really helpful or interesting that comes from the EEs, it's worth considering, but in this particular case where it's just a couple of swords and aura effects, I don't particularly want the implementation to vary between games. Okay, now back to one...does this actually prevent the saving issue? I'm kind of surprised, since if this works as you're describing, I would think this would cause the spell and projectile to rapid fire all the time, which is what I would've thought is the thing causing the save hold up. I guess I'll try it out and see. Well...it allows you to skip the 272 opcode, but otherwise it's really no different. It doesn't rapid fire like I thought it would, it just casts it once per round with no ability to define whether you want it to be quicker or slower (which is the opposite of what I ideally wanted, as I wanted it to fire at least every second), and the same "cannot save" issue does apply, because it is as I thought, an issue with the projectile currently in the air. That's easy to figure out by testing with two characters: have the second character stand some feet away from the character wielding the weapon, wait for the "Resist Fear" icon to pop-up on the character who's wielding its portrait but before it pops up on the other character's, pause and try to save, and it will not let you because the invisible projectile is still flying through the air to the second character, and that prevents saving.

Oh lord, I really should've thought of that when designing that aura effect. O.K., yeah, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same issue applied to BG1's The Whistling Sword. Basically, the normal approach is that those auras only apply every 6 seconds, which means that if another party member/summonable walks into range of the aura, there may be a whole 5 seconds where they aren't affected...so I went and made it so that it cast every second so that the effect applies pretty close to immediate of being within range of the aura. With a spell being cast every six seconds, there's a likelihood you run into being unable to save once in a while...but a quick press again should solve the issue, so no big deal. At every one second, that changes from a possible mild annoyance to a pretty major one. Thanks for reporting, I'll have to do some testing to see if speeding up the projectile used by these helps at all (IIRC, the game cannot be saved if there are any projectiles currently flying through the air, even invisible projectiles) or if I really do need to completely revert it back to every six seconds. Forgot about this: this should be fixed in the latest repository version of SRR (and has been for nearly a month now)...unless you install the alternative Celestial appearance component, in which case it most likely breaks again. I don't think there's anything I can do about that, as the summonable limit is apparently tied to celestials using their normal appearances.

I have very limited experience with using the IWD spell stuff, but my recollection is that it's supposed to be installed after SR/R in order to prevent unnecessary duplicate spells and wasted slots. The way the SR installer is written, I don't think it'll care if an IWD spell that it wants to add already exists and so it'll make a second version, whereas with IWDification/SCS IWD's spells, if it detects a spell that it wants to add already exists, it should skip said spell. I'm not sure what's best with regards to determining the order of the affected mods.

Only obvious thing I can see is that flails can be animations FL, F0, F1, or F3. Beyond that, it's just testing across different game types with and without the main component installed to make sure that nothing funky happens (as IR's subcomponents, such as Weapon Changes, are largely supposed to be agnostic with regards to whether the main component is installed - i.e. they should still ideally work even if the main component hasn't done its complete .itm overwrite, which...at times can be troublesome when you're trying to get compatibility between all different game types). Realistically, it'd probably be difficult to identify any potential problems short of someone making a real install and playing while specifically keeping an eye out for anything weird.

If you take a gander at item_rev\lib\identify_item.tpa, you'll see that its approach varies on a 'by need' basis. Some items are identified by item type, some by proficiency, some by both, and some by a combination of item type, proficiency, animation, and even strength requirement due to particularly tricky to identify item types (and the more elaborate it is, the more likely something will slip through the cracks, especially once you start throwing in mod-added content). It seems to be specifically designed around vanilla oBG2 and issues may indeed arise if another mod goes and makes changes to the ecosystem. Take, for example, your problematic morning star: in oBG2, morning stars and flails use the same proficiency and animation, and IR's Weapon Changes wishes to globally change all morning stars (including any added by other mods!) to the mace proficiency. Luckily, item type identifies the difference between morning star (0x16) and flail (0x17), so it just uses that...but if your mod or someone else's changed that, then how might you identify which is which? Different but similarly reliable methods would have to be determined that work across both oBG2 and the EEs (and hopefully the majority of mod-added content) if you want to go changing the item type identification process.

It's safe to say that documentation is always outdated, . If you ain't looking through the arcane/divine .tra files (which is what will actually appear in your game when you install the mod), then you're looking in the wrong place. Honestly, speaking at least for myself here, if a maintainer barely has time to fix outstanding bugs, they are certainly not going to have time to consistently keep on top of all the different layers of documentation. (e): Also, technically, the last few versions of SR on github are "release candidates", so maybe they shouldn't even be documented until they're final. Thing is, the latest official versions of SR have been betas or release candidates since forever at this point, so how compelling of an argument that actually is in practice...I'm not sure. I think the most important consideration is what version people are actually playing with, which...I assume is b18 and not any of the b19 releases, because the official G3 download link still goes to b18.

https://github.com/Gibberlings3/SpellRevisions/blob/master/spell_rev/languages/english/arcane.tra: "When this spell is cast, an opaque globe of shimmering, multicolored light temporarily surrounds the caster. This magical mantle confers complete invulnerability to all weapons of +3 or less enchantment." Specific commit. Looks like grodrigues just yoinked SRR's description and maybe made a couple of edits (that or I've made edits to Prismatic Mantle's description since then), which is fine.

My big thing with mod content (be it NPCs/characters, locations, items, spells, combat encounters, et al.) is that it should feel like it seamlessly belongs to the game world it is being inserted into. Unfortunately, it is understandably very difficult for most modders to write, make art, design characters, create/balance new items and abilities, voice act, and so on, in a style and with enough attention to detail to really make it feel like high level mimicry...and that's when modders even attempt to do so in the first place, as I feel many do not and instead just want to go off and do their own thing with no heed for whether what they make will cohesively fit into the already existing game world or not. That's their right, but it's not for me. Whenever I've tried the EEs, I feel like a significant percent of the new content added by Beamdog fails my standards for "does this actually make sense and fit in?". The new party members are, of course, the most extreme instances of that, but even more minor stuff like a lot of the items Beamdog designed and even where they put them, too many of their boneheaded decisions* make me grind my teeth when I come across them. Anyways, I don't suggest anyone ever tries to make anything to suit my tastes, as it would almost certainly be a fool's errand. *Mind you, BioWare had a number of pretty boneheaded decisions themselves...

Sorry, forgot to respond: no, it is no longer necessary. Thanks for your help!

So too would SR's celestial appearance component... Definitely good to know, definitely weird and annoying.

Well, I have to confess, I was a little stupefied by you saying that SR's Icelance is pure cold damage, as I had zero recollection of ever splitting the damage into cold/piercing purely on my own initiative. It's not the worst decision, if one looks at an Icelance as being more literal a la what SR does with Acid Arrow and Flame Arrow (acid/fire damage...AND missile damage, because they're arrows!), but still seems a bit odd to me with the vast majority of other elemental spells being...well, pure elemental damage. And with that in mind, I didn't even think to check the EE .tphs...because yep, it's right there. Good call: now commented out for both arcane and divine Icelance. Yay for finally tracking that down! What's even more curious to me is that I already tested it out on a BG2EE game, as explicitly mentioned at the end of this post. I don't know what I did or saw wrong that it failed to crop up in that test. This is why I should always take videos of any tests I do... It wouldn't help, of course, but at least I could go watch my video and be like "look, we can literally see that Icelance did piercing damage to my 100% cold resistance character, right there!". Thanks. Has SCS historically had normal mages (i.e. those who don't already have protection from normal weapons) use Mantle instead of PfMW even when SR is installed? Mantle for the longest time in official SR didn't give any direct protection against attacks, but that was somewhat recently changed.

Yep, that is true, and I did not know that. I would expect the same limitation applies to oBG2. But...I think it's of pretty limited risk: Dark Swarm would not work if you already have 5 normal summonables active...but 4 or less, and all of the shadows/wraiths will come in just fine, and they won't affect the normal summoning limit once they're in. I think it's acceptable, even if less than ideal. And a player that uses either Anthology Tweaks (EE-only) or d0tweaks' (oBG2) no summoning limit has nothing to worry about in the first place. I think (but am not positive) that the celestial summoning cap is actually hardcoded to work on the basis of opcode 67s (Creature Summoning) using one of the 4 default celestial .cre files (DEVAGOOD, DEVAEVIL, PLANGOOD, PLANEVIL). Simply renaming one of the .cre files to something else and having the HLA summon that instead will bypass the celestial summoning limit. Let me test this to make sure before I make a fool of myself...I was pretty sure that it worked that way, but it sounds really dumb, so it's better to just make certain. Okay, yep: renamed "DEVAGOOD.cre" to "DEVAGOOF.cre", changed SPDEVA.eff to call DEVAGOOF, and was able to summon two of them. However, I did find out that there's some additional mechanic that is similar to the Dark Swarm issue with the summoning cap and the order of how you summon: if you've already summoned a creature with the "Both" gender (0x5, which is what the celestials use) and then try to summon one of the four aforementioned celestial .cre files, it will run afoul of the summon cap as well. So I had a DEVAGOOF already summoned and then tried to summon a PLANGOOD as well, and it was a no-go...but I summoned a PLANGOOD first and then a DEVAGOOF, and that did work. Weird stuff.

It does, but as the Fighter starts with THAC0 20 at level 1, level 20 would only be 19 levels later and thus decrement THAC0 to only 1 and not zero. Fighters reach THAC0 zero at level 21, and the spell specifically mentions that it stops scaling at level 20. Your Icelance has EE-specific 324 opcodes set to type 99, which provides complete immunity to the spell in the event of 100% or more cold resistance. This is not something that either SR or SRR adds to Icelance. Someone else who is more familiar with the EE modding scene might be able to discern which mod you have installed that would do that, but as I do not play on the EEs, I would be wholly unfamiliar with a mod that adds these 324s. You could try doing a changelog on SPWI323, which would likely identify the culprit.