Bartimaeus

Should look like this, right? (There are weird delays and fraudulent "spell ineffective" messages for the sectype removals, but it does seem to work.) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/emxj527wuablqjz/tHq0SmCvl6.mp4

I think you meant to put this in the SRR thread, not your Spell Shield thread, but my answer is the same regardless: it's probably somethin' inexplicable and/or stupid, just like it always is when something in these games isn't working like it seems like it obviously should.

Hey, the lady's clearly unwell and being possessed and needs help, sometimes you have to be firm about these sorts of things! ...Sure, she dies in the process, but nobody knew that was going to happen! Maybe from now on, I'll just wait until Sarevok is dead before I move on to the real final boss...

Wouldn't be too difficult to change the behavior of Haste/Slow to simply counter via subspells and immunities, but I'm not a hundred percent convinced it's a good idea. I suppose the problem for you is how strong of a swing it is? Actually, I've wanted to branch out Emotion: Despair into a more generalized Emotion spell with multiple choices for a while, but with no icons (and I am not an artist that can create them), it's kind of a no-go. An anti-despair (hope?) that applies to friendlies would be neat, a more powerful Horror (fear, terror?) would make sense as well...and then maybe "Love" as a low effectiveness (0 or +2 saving throw) mass charm? Lots of things you could do with that, but no icons means no spells, . Oh well! I feel like Confusion makes sense where it is, given Horror 2 levels below with a similar effect (albeit it with no saving throw penalty and a little more difficult to manage). Hmm.

Gosh dangit, I forgot about the new(ish) SCS innate difficulty dial, I could've toned just down the AI/precasting for just that fight. My party is ~level 6-7ish, and that was just too insane. ...I ended up effectively cheating by kiting, since his AI is weird in that he glues to the main character (or at least to mine - most enemies will disengage my main character who's a swashbuckler in favor of squishier targets like mages, but he would walk right past mine unless my main character went completely out of sight or near so). Feels bad.

I *think* Slow already works that way - Haste doesn't grant immunity to Slow, Slow dispels Haste by sectype and then applies itself afterwards. The exact reverse happens with Haste, too - sectype dispel of Slow, then apply the Haste effects. I really don't like Waves of Fatigue, and I'm borderline in favor of restoring the original Chaos (even though it's super lame, seeing as it's basically Confusion+ - I'd rather enemy spellcasters be casting that than Waves of Fatigue).

Okay, so uh...what's the deal with Kahrk? Dude's insane. Has like 4 APR with his proficiencies, hits virtually every time even against a character with -6 AC (and he hits like a tank even with his unenchanted long sword - presumably because of the 19 STR and the proficiencies), seemed to be totally immune to first level spells (no magic missiles to wear down his Mirror Image for me!), just keeps casting Minor Globe over and over (and had a Spell Deflection in his pre-casting), and I can only hit him with crits (literally - I checked). Hardest freaking fight in the game given its location, .

It has a strong damage bonus, but I thought it was more in the realm of a simple +6, not +12 or +30 or 2D6 + 12. It sounds like something has gone wrong there.

"Surges of negative energy render all hostile living creatures in the spell's area fatigued, as if they haven't rested for a day. While fatigued, they suffer a -2 penalty to luck, movement rate, casting speed, and speed factor. Multiple castings of this spell are not cumulative." Also a spell I don't like and never did like. Maybe you're on to something with gating some of the worse effects - like ApR and the casting speed penalties - to a saving throw while making others non-resistable, effectively making it into a "Greater Slow"...

At the very least, it does work this way on a ToBEx game: level 1 character that casts carrier spell Larloch's Minor Drain with only one extended header that simply casts Magic Missiles with instant timing at 0th level will only create one missile; level up the character, and suddenly it's five missiles. Don't know about BG/2EE, I suppose - I *hope* it works that way. (e): Although now in your latest post you're mentioning the fact that wrong class types can sometimes interfere, which is I believe true - a non-arcane user casting a mage spell at 0th level would cast it at 1st level, I think.

I can't really think of a good solution for Physical Mirror. I made it last longer in order to make up for the loss of power, but I still wasn't ever particularly happy with it.

Given that I've done the reverse countless times, I don't see why it wouldn't be fine this way instead.

My response over there duplicated here: Some comments: Core v2 component: Cool, seems like you've added virtually all of my fixes and changes from my 1pp_fixes, with the exceptions of Roranach's Horn, Short Bow +3, and Mithral Field Plate. That's like...17/20, I can live with that. Projectiles: Fixed the bolt06 and bolt09 bugs, IR compatibility for throwing axes and dagger, plus an attempt at fixing SR's & IR's Protection from Missiles/Physical Mirror stuff (the last one will prove problematic for me, but I can fix it after the fact). There's no patching of SR's dvenbolt, dvenarow, or dvenbull - they're all duplicates of the +3 projectiles. Spell Tweaks: Looks like you got everything, although with a radical rewrite of how I did it. Probably for the best. Core v4 component: Optional Sleeper conversion, you left Deflection Shield as a tower shield because I suppose it is as well in BG2EE, left HELM13 as its unspiked appearance and left HELM15 as its unhorned appearance (presumably validating EE changes)...all understandable. No support for IR's variants of throwing axes/daggers in this one - may want to add that, especially since you already did in the projectiles component. Also, IR hammer variants compatibility as well. You are still letting 1pp patch dagg21 and dagg22 (Dagger of the Stars) for the Shadow Thief icon that you have disabled it from installing - the colors will be wrong as a result. Borok's Fist/Runehammer: BG2EE is really weird about this, it has HAMM03, HAMM05, HAMM10, and HAMM11 all set to that green-looking hammer icon (though HAMM03 is using the original variant instead of the rest where the contrast was just jacked up to make it look different). What are they doing? Still not an ideal situation here even with the switch (there are other icons that can be used to prevent these duplicates!), but I suppose it makes sense if you're just trying to validate according to the EEs. xbow15/16 (Firetooth +4/+5) should get location wpink set (IMO, with gradient 19), otherwise it would appear the Firetooths are shooting blue bolts on the character paperdoll, which seems like a clear oversight. No support for BGT's bgmisc89 (Edwin's Amulet). I think Rashad's Talon and Belm have opposite colorizations, if I'm recalling correctly. Seems like you got most of my other fixes besides a few other minor and highly debatable things. Cool - thanks for the big rewrite! A couple of suggestions: Additional linebreaks in between options in the config.ini. It's confusing to read the description and then try to figure out whether the option was above or below the description, especially when some of the settings have very similar names - just put an additional empty linebreak in between each option. Set gem lore to disabled by default. Placed into an automated install, mass amounts of gems needing to be identified is virtually guaranteed to annoy most people that get stuck with it not realizing it was the default setting (and it wasn't the default in the original installer, not even if you selected the "let the installer auto-configure everything" option). /end duplicate He integrated most of my fixes from when I sent them to him months ago. There are some things that are oddly missing that I pointed out above, and some other things not so oddly missing that I might just roll into IRR and SRR (including a large quantity of color fixes). I am unsure how I am going to handle that, though. If I made it so that all of 1pp (except for the avatar switching script) was supposed to be installed before IRR and SRR and then both just patch themselves to be correct upon detecting an EE or 1pp installation, would that be an issue for you? I know you like your BG1-style shields, but I don't remember the exact details of when or how you install them or whether that'd mess with anything.

Flavor text, don't pay it any mind. However, this is a good opportunity to fix its aura-like effect in the same way I fixed Shield of Falling Stars...

It was crazy powerful, especially since Luck apparently affected how much it worked. But I didn't revert it for a reason, after all - just slightly increased its duration. To be honest, I've thought about increasing it more, since a base 5 rounds makes it pretty difficult to use, since it's too short to ever even think about pre-casting and 50% is not that reliable...but it hasn't really been on my mind. As it is, it's okay to absorb a few hits for early levels of fighter-mages, I guess. Side-note: I'm pretty sure Kreso made the same exact change to Physical Mirror as he did to Reflect Image, so it's a moot point.

Thanks!

It seems unlikely everyone would agree on something (seeing as it's insanely subjective), may make sense to present multiple options. ...Although I say that as someone that prefers the "THAC0: +x bonus" format the best, with "Attack: +x bonus" the second best, which wasn't even an option discussed by anyone else. Also, if you really want to waste time, code up something that scans items and spells for dice rolls to change to either lowercase or uppercase (i.e. 1D8 vs 1d8), since people are particular about that too.

Boy, I sure didn't think when I picked this comic up back in like 2005 that it'd still be meaningfully continuing 15 years later.

As a test, I once summoned probably like 40 hobgoblin archers and had them fight against spellcasting-triggered SCS Cowled Wizards, and the Hobgoblin Archers pretty easily won. Overwhelming numbers can sometimes be just that: overwhelming.

Since you're interested, I noted some additional details: when traveling via the map from area to area, you are considered to be in both areas (the one you're traveling from as well as the one you're traveling to) at the same time for the purposes of the purge. If there's only an hour left before a purge for an area, and you decide to travel to it but it takes 24 hours to travel to, the purge does not go through, as it is frozen while you're traveling to it. Similarly, if you travel from an area and that takes 24 hours, the original area you were in will still be at the 24 hours left mark when you arrive in the new area, so you can actually travel back and forth freely between two areas as much as you like with no fear of the items being lost, even if the travel time between them is 24+ hours.

I moved Blackrazor up to +4 by popular request, but I certainly don't restore the insanity of the original four level drains. Similarly, Blackmist gets a small buff in the form of a "Weakening" ability that deceases THAC0 and damage upon every hit and the Blackmist ability has a harsher saving throw. Never had a strong feel for Human Flesh, so I left it alone (though I personally would prefer it to have stayed at +5, especially given that its saving throws bonus was nerfed and all other dragon armors are +5, including the Shadow Dragonhide which you can get quite early and has +3 AC over Human Flesh currently). Item moves? Miscellaneous, or the big overpowered ones that people usually take issue with (which can be disabled in the settings.ini)? There are a number of miscellaneous item moves/additions, but nothing as big as Robe of Larloch and such.

You forgot the audible lip smack! @ptifab @subtledoctorConfirmed scroll issue, Necromancy, Illusion, and Evocation scrolls are being set to the wrong kit usabilities by subtledoctor's school-setting function. Though ptifab reported that it should be 0x2e instead of 0x2f, I think what it actually is is the two bit writes are swapped. 0x2f should get the 00, 0x2d should get the value. So, for example, on line 526: WRITE_BYTE 0x2d ("0x00") //blocked: WRITE_BYTE 0x2f ("0x04") //blocked: illusionists ...just swap the 0x2d and 0x2f.

The EE style seems to use the capitalized version as well - does that mean you manually correct all of the other BG2EE items, too?

Top IR style, bottom EE style.

I hear you, but unfortunately, I just...straight up don't like the EE text style more than the IR text style. If I were to actually switch to the EEs, I would be converting the remaining BG2EE items to the IR style, not everything the other way around. Which I planned on doing anyways, but I saw the ridiculous amount of random BG2EE items they added, and I kind of lost motivation to do so after I finished BG1EE, .