Bartimaeus

as someone who listens to a lot of audiobooks, I have to tell you an AI impression of David Warner is legitimately better to listen to than the majority of actual real human readers for audiobooks, and this may prove incredible if the right companies can license the right voices it's not nearly a perfect impression by any means, but it's still better

Assuming you're using SRR (you are posting in the SRR thread!), it should. Taken straight from the arcane.tra file where descriptions are pulled from during installation: "When this spell is cast, the wizard and all of their gear become insubstantial. As an incorpreal creature, the caster moves silently and cannot be heard or backstabbed, and is vulnerable only to magical attacks of +1 enchantment or better (or by creatures otherwise able to affect those vulnerable only to magical weapons). Non-damaging spell effects affect the caster normally unless they require corporeal targets to function (e.g. Polymorph Other, Flesh to Stone, Disintegrate, and Implosion) or create a corporeal effect that incorporeal creatures would normally be unaffected by (e.g. Entangle, Grease, and Web). While in wraith form, the caster also has a base AC of 4 and is immune to the effects of disease and poison, but is unable to cast spells. Any melee attack made while in wraith form is considered a melee touch attack (+4 bonus to THAC0), while projectiles become corporeal as soon as they are fired. The transformation lasts for the duration of the spell or until successfully dispelled, but cannot be used in conjunction with other shapeshifting spells such as Polymorph Self and Shapechange. Multiple castings of this spell and Ghostform are not cumulative." A number of spells use similar verbiage, e.g. Phantom Blade: "Strength modifiers do not apply to THAC0 or damage, and attacks with the shadow blade are considered to be melee touch attacks (+4 bonus to THAC0)". If it does not mention it, some other mod has overwritten Wraithform's description. Spell Deflection: Do keep in mind that you can run Minor, normal, and Greater Spell Deflection all at the same time - a Secret Word will only take down one of them. Can't run multiple instances of the same one, though. I just did a fresh install of SRR on a copy of BG2EE. Not sure what's happened in your game that strings have seemingly gotten overwritten. That's pretty funny. Probably won't make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things for the poor beholders against that silly shield, but...

I don't know the official reasoning for it on the part of Demigrvs, but I have a few theories: 1. There's no way to have the "Spell Deflection Blocks AoE Spells" component work with it, I think, leaving the AI with a major gap in their defenses if they choose to memorize this instead of Spell Deflection. 2. The AI doesn't typically have all the tools that the player does: if the AI doesn't have an antimagic spell that can dispel it, its only options are to either avoid the affected character (if it has other targets available!) or to continue to cast magic at them and possibly get themselves blown up. Neither of these are great options. 3. AI will presumably choose to blow themselves up if you aren't using SCS AI. 4. It can cause dumb stuff like instantly exhausting the Spell Turning if two casters both have it running. A number of spells give that "melee touch attack" +4 THAC0 bonus, and I have to be honest, I'm not really sure what the rationale behind it is exactly, but it's a convenient excuse for making summoned weapons and miscellaneous spells like Wraithform a little more powerful. On a side-note, I actually didn't know the invisibility state gave a +4 THAC0 bonus. That should really be noted in the description of at least second level Invisibility, where it would seem to be the most relevant. I thought it used the icon of Spell Immunity but actually said "Dispelling Screen".

Unholy Word: From deafness to silence? But...it's Unholy Word! The entire idea is that it's something you hear, . I can see where you're coming from though, the design of this spell is a bit...difficult to balance. Arcane spellcasters shouldn't be quite as affected from it if you have the 'Spell Deflection blocks AoE spells' component installed, though - sure, you can hit them with it once when their spell protections are down, but assuming you're using SCS, you can't just Holy Word right at the beginning of a fight and make a big group of mages all useless. I never really thought about the fact that a mage can vocalize through silence but not deafness. Spellstrike: You know, I couldn't ever really put it into words, but I never really liked the idea of Spellstrike giving spell failure, and I think you just made me realize what it is: there's no counter for it. It doesn't matter how powerful of a spellcaster you are, how high your magic resistance is, or what protections you have running*, a spellcaster is just...straight up disabled with no counter by Spellstrike, and you have to just sit there and take it, and if you're a player that can feasibly cast multiple of them in a row, an enemy spellcaster just has...no recourse whatsoever. That's not really very cool. *Okay, technically, I think Spell Shield will absorb a Spellstrike, but Spell Shield is so easily done away with via a Secret Word that it's barely worth mentioning. I'd actually be more in favor of making Spellstrike kill Spell Shield and the other spell protections as its "unique" factor rather than doing the silly spell failure thing...buuut I'm not sure how SCS AI feels about that. Dispelling Screen: Don't think this one will change, think it would make it way too unattractive. Maybe a simpler tweak would be to reduce its AoE down to 10' radius (size of a Skull Trap) from 15' (Fireball), making it a bit more difficult to effectively use in an already raging battle.

The changelog tool can be found here: https://github.com/InfinityMods/WeiDU-FileChangelog I think so, part of a cleanup of weird/inexplicable duplicates I did at some point. But...sometimes, I feel like I should probably revert ones like this, where it's obviously never intended that you kill Lothander in the first place, where a normal player would never find the duplicate anyways - removing Boots of Speed from him is really just putting a damper on the fun of the more exploity players who just want their cheese.

That SCS doesn't have special behavior specifically for SR installs to account for Dispel Magic being changed to only affect enemies, contrary to the vanilla behavior. It probably doesn't help that that change only happened within the past few years.

To my knowledge, SCS AI doesn't like to cast a ton of spells where there's a high probability of friendly fire, and it would be pretty egregious for it to consider Dispel Magic: if the caster's Dispel Magic hit themselves, it'd be a 50% chance of dispelling all of their own buffs. Unlike mages, priests don't even usually have multiple castings of most buffs, as many of them are supposed to be longer duration AoE single cast spells (plus they don't get Mirror Image or Stoneskin, where there's obviously going to be a good use case for having multiple memorizations). Dispel Magic's initial projectile follows the target until it hits IIRC, so the player could easily abuse the hell out of that with Dispel Magic. Oh, a priest is attempting to dispel my fighter? I'll have them bum-rush the priest before it hits so that it dispels them too!

It's less "blocked from their books", more "never memorized". They don't have/use anything for dispelling, it's left for mages to do with Remove Magic.

My understanding is that SR only allows the player to use SPWI326.spl (Dispel Magic) but the AI continues to use SPWI302 (Remove Magic). I don't know if it currently works this way in the latest version of SR, but Dispel Magic is supposed to target both enemies and friendlies while Remove Magic only targets enemies; the AI (and SCS) are not so foolish as to try to cast Dispel Magic and possibly dispel its own buffs, which is also why SCS doesn't let divine casters cast Dispel Magic (and if the message log says SCS is having its mages cast Dispel Magic, it's actually Remove Magic). SRR has both Dispel Magic and Remove Magic enabled for the player, but changes Remove Magic's projectile size from a 15' radius (same size as a Fireball) to a 10' radius (Skull Trap) while leaving Dispel Magic at the larger 15' size. This makes SCS' spam of Remove Magic slightly less insane while also reducing its potential power for the player as well, obviously...and giving some kind of benefit to using Dispel Magic instead, though I imagine most people still prefer Remove Magic because of its ease of use.

If trying to fit that special SRR Remove Magic into normal SR, I think the best way to approach it would be to replace both SPWI302.spl and SPWI326.spl in spell_rev\spwi3## folder with your spwi302.save.spl before installing SR. It still wouldn't update the description, but it would result in both the player and AI having access to and using that Remove Magic. It wouldn't change how the divine or Inquisitor Dispel Magic work though, but SCS AI doesn't use those.

The issue with SCS is basically... A. SCS will often duplicate spell resources as they currently exist to other names/resources. B. SCS will then use the duplicate spells for special uses. C. Any updates to those spells after SCS has been installed will not be effective - you would've had to make those changes before SCS was installed so that the changes could be applied to the duplicated resources. Honestly, between SCS and both Dispel Magic/Remove Magic existing in SRR but not SR, putting those .spls in your override is kind of just a bad idea in general.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/93jimnb7nqmnm0b/spwi302.save.spl https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/7zu2a2wgkf4b222/spwi326.save.spl Remove the ".save" from both filenames and place it in your override and both Dispel Magic and Remove Magic will work that way instead. The descriptions of those spells will be busted, but the spells should work. Maybe make a backup of spwi302.spl and spwi326.spl first. (e): I don't know that this will work if you currently use SCS though, because SCS does a lot of spell duplication for use with its AI. So I definitely do not make any guarantees of this working here.

That's fine, just that...one person disagreeing with everyone else is probably a lot closer to consensus than you seemed to imply in your initial reply.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I actually believe you are the only one that maintained that particular position. Even subtledoctor said that Assassination should be corrected given that there is absolutely no mechanical basis of any kind for it to be considered a combat protection, unlike the others - even though he still agreed with you that those others should be changed as well. Let's not cut off our noses, shall we?

It's an optional tweak in settings.ini. Here's what the SRR readme says: alternative_dispel_magic (default 0) When set to 1, Dispel Magic (arcane, divine, Inquisitor's, and Yeslick's) no longer uses the caster level vs. target level mechanics as per vanilla, but instead a simple saving throw that scales with level (-1 for every 5 levels of the caster, up to a maximum of -4 at 20th level). When set to 0, the vanilla dispelling mechanics are used. When set to 2, Dispel Magic becomes a sort of lesser Breach AoE effect - one combat and one specific protection are removed from each creature, growing to two of each at 10th level, then three of each at 15th level. alternative_remove_magic (default 0) Identical to the component above, but instead applies to the Remove Magic.

I was really thinking more when you run into venerated and ancient vampires, the few Bodhi fights (especially if you install the improved Bodhi from SCS...), and maybe a couple of others. No saving throw level draining in those more difficult encounters are...well, certainly quite difficult without any Negative Plane Protection, and I'd say those fights are very likely to last longer than 5 rounds. I have memories of running into those super vampires in Firkraag's lair at like level 9 or 10 and having a very bad time. The more random vampire encounters with generic vampires are obviously not nearly so big a deal. I'm all for making changes to how both level draining and petrification work, but...it's not something you can assume that other players will want/use, so you kind of have to make do with what you assume the majority of players will have installed.

Man, I had no memory of NPP being only 5 rounds in vanilla. But...it's kind of the same old Protection from Petrification problem, really: without its protection, the relevant encounters become unmanageably difficult; with its protection, those encounters get a bit trivialized. Make the protection too short and...what, the player fills up their entire 4th level spellbooks with only Negative Plane Protection when they have a difficult series of vampire encounters? Or worse, they just rest in between every battle so they have their spell slots again? Ugh. Level draining and petrification as currently designed in the official games are two really annoying mechanics that don't leave a lot of operating room to avert besides these stupid "I win" spells. Probably a good idea to use subtledoctor's "level draining has a saving throw" component.

Are the spells you've pointed to with the 2DA named? I changed the Spell Immunity 2DA in both oBG2 and BG2EE to point to SPWI101, and in both games, it showed the Grease spellbook icon and displayed "Grease" when I hovered my mouse over the option - no other modifications necessary.

@NdranC My own bias speaking here, I personally don't really love the majority of stationary spells (e.g. Cloudkill) compared to instant effect spells, so for me, it's really a no brainer to use Spell Deflection Blocks AoE Spells. Might as well give those stationary spells that unique advantage to make them more attractive options for myself - certainly can't hurt them. Dispel Magic: Well, you can make it so Globes of Invulnerability completely protect against it via the dispel_globes option, you can make Spell Protections protect against them as if they were any other hostile spell via the spell_protections option, and there are also the two alternative Dispel Magic options via the alternative_dispel/remove_magic options. For myself, I leave dispel_globes at 1 (globes can't be dispelled but don't protect against dispelling either), spell_protections at 0 (dispels go through spell protections), but change alternative_remove_magic to 1 (scaling saving throw Remove Magic). I feel like that gives the optimal amount of power to Remove Magic as used by SCS while making it a bit less insane - there's no blanket immunity to it, but even if a lich casts it at you, a -4 saving throw is by no means insurmountable for the player. Combined with a Dispelling Screen, and some of your characters might be able to make it through even a 3x Remove Magic sequencer. Plus, it makes it so that the player can also use it against higher level enemies and have it succeed some percentage of the time, as opposed to typically no percentage of the time as it generally is with the ridiculous level/percentage-based system. What a cloddy idea that whole thing was.

Is this BG1EE or BG2EE? (e): Don't think it matters, IRR doesn't touch the Gold Digger's icon as far as I can tell. Does doing a file search for "isw2h22.bam" in your entire game directory turn up any results? Interesting thing about BG2EE is that icons are always auto-sized and auto-aligned purely based on the dimensions of the image, which...can be helpful but also an issue. In the original games, icons were never auto-sized and always had to be manually aligned using offsets, but BG2EE ignores these values. A number of EE icons are mis-sized or misaligned because of this feature with Beamdog never noticing or bothering to fix the issue. Look at all them baby icons! ...But I don't know the issue with Gold Digger here, I installed IRR on BG2EE just to make sure and it seems fine.

I probably didn't speak clearly enough: what I meant is that I didn't want the text of those item/spell descriptions to reflect those bonuses, not that I didn't want those bonuses to actually be applied. You know, a hobgoblin might have 16 base HP, which is what the spell description says, but if their constitution happens to give them a bonus to that base HP, it doesn't get listed in the spell description...but it could still apply. Mind you, I didn't love this approach either, because certain bonuses can become...difficult to estimate (your example of a pit fiend having 24 strength is a good one: the player might not remember offhandedly that 24 strength gives a whopping +12 damage and +6 THAC0 with the standard strength bonus table) but I figured it would be better to let players who have played this game for 20 years to be able to roughly estimate rather than force my own calculations that won't be right across different most game and mod installs. Yeah, I don't really know what to do with the fiend summoning stuff. I personally go with atweaks' fiends instead and then just use a mini-mod I made to SRR-ize the spell descriptions, but...I don't know, I feel like fiend summoning spells are really better left for the AI to abuse rather than the player, so I tend to avoid them. SR creatures being wildly different from actual creatures of the same type is something that really bothers me - I don't mind if they're a little different/better, but sometimes the disparity is just so great. That was actually the motivation for me switching MS2 and MS3 from vanilla SR (and upgrading baby wyverns to normal and greater wyverns, and otyughs to neo-otyughs, and...), because the way those slimes and hobgoblins had their stats setup made zero sense to me. I'll probably never be able to get that quite how I would ideally want it though, because I know that if I go too far in changing certain summonables to be more like their actual game incarnations, it just makes those spells unattractive or downright unusable, and I don't want to do that, that's even worse. But I've tried to make sensible adjustments where I could.

Kind of: vanilla IR/SR came up with a format, but I found it to be...messy, so I changed it. For example, the otyugh... IR: Otyugh (7 Hit Dice): STR 14, DEX 10, CON 13, INT 5, WIS 12, CHA 5; AL Neutral HP 70, AC 3, THAC0 10, Saving Throws 10/12/12/14/12 3 Attacks Per Round, 1d6+3 Piercing or Crushing Damage (Bite & Tentacles +3) Combat Abilities: Disease: creatures struck moves at half speed and suffer 1 point of damage per round for 1 turn Special Qualities: Immune to disease effects Slashing, Crushing, & Piercing Resistance 5%; Missile Resistance 100% IRR: Otyugh (7 HD): ST14, DE10, CO13, IN5, WI12, CH5 HP 76, AC 3, THAC0 10, APR 3 1D8 Piercing/Crushing (Bite & Tentacles +3) Saving Throws 9/11/10/10/12, AL TN SR 5%, CR 5%, PR 5%, MR 100% FR 0%, CR 0%, ER 0%, AR 0% Special Characteristics: Protected Against: Disease Diseasing: target suffers 1 damage per round and slowness for 1 turn (save vs. poison at -2 neg.) Mostly, I was annoyed with inconsistent line breaks as a result of lines getting too long. And anyways, I needed to go over all the creature statistics to make sure they were 'accurate' while also re-calculating certain stats anyways (primarily to ensure that only the base values of HP, AC, THAC0, and damage were being used, not any attempt at combining HP+CON or AC+DEX or THAC0/damage+STR/proficiency, mostly because that can get pretty crazy quickly while also opening up the possibility of being very inaccurate depending on which game and with what mods a player is using). Item descriptions for mod-added content, especially pre-EE mod-added content like RR where there wasn't really any agreed upon format/style between games and modders, is a bit of a disaster. I had thought about trying to provide direct support for re-descripting the items of a few "important" mainstay mods like RR, but it ended up being a can of worms that I decided not to commit to due to how much of a pain it is.

Yeah, so basically, the component takes a list of wands that it knows of (both vanilla and mod-added), changes them to be usable by thieves, tries to strip the usability text mentioning not being usable by thieves (not applicable to the EEs since usability text is generated on the fly, so no issue there), then also tries to add the intelligence requirement text. If the intelligence requirement text already exists, it's not supposed to add duplicate text obviously, but the formatting is different between oBG2 games and EE games, so it would appear to not be catching it correctly in the case of the latter. Will look into it, thanks.

Are you using the "Thieves Can Use Wands" component, by chance?

@subtledoctor Thanks, I didn't even consider the issue of the specific version of SCS. Kind of forgot that it's only been within the past few versions that that change happened. I wonder if it's the case that @WanderingScholar was insistent upon mixing these versions together, whether it might be a good idea to simply disable all spell.ids-related changes in spell_rev\components\main_component.tpa for more optimal results.