Bartimaeus

IRR V1.14a released:

1. Suryris's Blade's Staggering property was only giving a -2 penalty to casting speed...which I opted to change the description to match, since that makes more sense than -4, which is actually pretty severe.
2. ​Potion of Magic Blocking works again (thanks Luke - self-inflicted bug from the previous update).
3. A few more comprehensive and consistent protection properties (e.g. Mind Shield).

​@Jarno: I don't think that's true. I'm pretty sure you can install the Weapon Changes subcomponent (among others) without the main component.

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​@Question: No, because the strings of all the weapons would be wrong. Strings being the text of the items - most likely, they would just reference random text. The description of one weapon, if not patched via the installer, might just be a random bit of dialogue, for example. However, you can try installing just the Weapon Changes subcomponent, which is what does the 1D10 to 2D6 change, among others.

​Yeah, there aren't really a whole lot of encounters where you get blinded, so the Blind Fight property isn't the most useful. The Black Mist ability itself is actually decently powerful (especially with 3 charges at a -2 saving throw), since being blinded is a rather severe penalty, especially for the AI...but on the other hand, you get it towards the end of SoA where you have little opportunity to use it against non-SR enemies, which does suck.

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​I don't think it does work with Item Randomizer. I haven't taken a look at how Item Randomizer works, but I would imagine with iRR shifting some items around, there would likely be duplicates of a handful or two.

Ahh. There are precious few +4 items in SoA (particularly ones that don't require you to craft it), so while I understand that its special properties may be a little lacking compared to some others, it's probably for the best.

Version 1.14 has been released.

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​IRR 1.14 changelog:
1. Bolt of Lightning's lightning damage can no longer be resisted via magic resistance (thanks, Luke!).
2. Bolt of Polymorphing accidentally had a +2 save bonus instead of a -2 save penalty - oops!
3. Potion of Speed was incorrectly dispellable (also thanks, Luke!).
4. A handful of other potions (including Oil of Fiery Burning) were as well.
5. Items that provide immunity to silence no longer give the Vocalize icon, since they are not the same thing.
6. Cloak of Nature's Vengeance now fires at 25% frequency instead of (an incorrect) 15% frequency. I'm not sure if I ever noted this, either, but these types of "fire on being hit" items were fixed so that they never target other members of your party (or other friendlies - assuming you're the one wearing the item, as you'll still get targeted if enemies are wearing them) and no longer rapidfire or get stuck in a loop of constantly firing back and forth.
7. Eagle Bow no longer grants a strength bonus.
8. The Mustard Jelly form (Cloak of the Sewers) had slightly incorrect stats.
9. Summonable/shapeshiftable creatures now have their special abilities condensed into a single "Special Characteristics" field for sanity's sake.
10. For Store Revisions, The Helm of Charm Protection was moved from the Order of the Radiant Heart Store to the Adventurer's Market. There are a dearth of early game helmets, and the Helm of Charm Protection is not particularly powerful, and it feels really out of place in the OotRH store, and the Adventurer's Market literally does not have a single helmet for sale, which is...strange, to say the least. So it's there now instead.
11. Crimson Dart was only dealing an additional 1D3 fire damage instead of 1D6 (...although perhaps this makes it a bit too strong - I personally disable Watcher's Keep for SoA which prevents it being a super easy grab right at the start of the game, but that's my personal preference - I may opt to tweak the design of this particular item at some point).
12. Jerrod's Mace previously had its wisdom bonus listed as a "combat ability".
1​3. Tansheron's Bow's Phantom Arrow property is now 50% instead of 25%.
14. Ring of Kangaxx's Larloch Minor Drain no longer works on undead or golems (something I also fixed for SR!).
15. Joril's Dagger's Chaos property was all wrong - 3 rounds instead of 2, not subject to magic resistance, 25% instead of 33%.
16. Rod of Lordly Might re-design. I wanted the weapon transformations back (because that's a cool idea), but I also didn't want it to be a completely useless item like it was in vanilla BG2, so now it has a blend of abilities and transformations that you will hopefully find useful in some capacity. Properties may not be final, however - in particular, I'm still eying the mace form.
17. Somewhat of a re-organization of Store Revisions, especially in regards to scrolls and SR - same ones should be available for the most part, but hopefully they'll all now be in the correct order.
18. Added some spellstates to certain protection scrolls and potions for EE games (compatible with non-EEs, of course - a thank you to CrevsDaak for the code that can easily mass remove invalid opcodes).
19. A load of usability text fixes (many were out of order, had superfluous kit entries when the entire class was already barred to begin with, simply missing/incorrect entries, etc.). A long-time coming, although EE players won't notice any difference.
​20. Fixed Beast Masters being able to use one of Drizzt's scimitars.
21. Fixed some Shadow Veil usability problems.
22. Psion's Blade's Mindbreaking property erroneously said it had a -4 penalty instead of a -2. I went back and forth on this one, am leaving it at -2 for the time being. While not as strong as a vorpal effect (and more widely immunized against), Feeblemind is still a pretty strong effect.
23. Edwin's Amulet (both forms) receives a +3 bonus to saving throws vs. death (to make up just a little for losing one of the spell slots - while I'm not normally a "must balance everything!" kind of guy, two extra slots to every spell level is just so outrageously powerful).
24. Fixed about a dozen wands that you can find throughout mostly BG1 having an invalid number of charges (a thanks to Luke for reminding me that this was a problem).
25. The Spectral Brand summonables and the Gladiator summonable (Shakti Figurine) were slightly nerfed.
26. Everard's Morning Star receives a +50% magic damage resistance buff (was the weakest "bonus" item).
27. Scarlet Ninja-To now has the vampiric property instead of +1/2 ApR. Avoids the +ApR overlap with Kundane, but stays quite powerful.
28. Skull of Death's Gaze of Death no longer does additional damage a la Finger of Death even if the saving throw succeeds.
29. Crossbow of Affliction now has a -10 maximum hit points penalty instead of a strength penalty (a -1 penalty to strength does pretty much nothing when you instantly unequip it when switching to melee and STR does not give any bonuses for crossbows anyways).
30. The above crossbow is also a light crossbow once more (as it was in vanilla BG2). The item was a little messed up anyhow, as it lacked the +2 bonus damage for being a heavy crossbow anyways, plus it had no strength requirement, the wrong weight, was still usable by thieves (which it shouldn't have been as a heavy crossbow), and had no real price set, too.
31. Heavy Crossbow of Searing had the wrong weight.
32. When using Store Revisions, Arnolinus (dwarven Promenade blacksmith) now sells all the unenchanted helms.
33. Baldur's Gate 1 Sendai was not being patched to use Telbar's Armor (the unique BG1 Studded Leather +2) properly.

​34. Honestly, probably a couple of things that I have forgotten about.

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​Hopefully nothing is horribly broken.

You can just read the arcane.tra and divine.tra files in the language folder to get the best idea for the majority of the spells (although there are a few spells simply not accurately described, IIRC, like Feeblemind).

Uh, wait, what? What item does the demon give you? Can't say that I recall him giving you anything.

For as many times as I've played BG, I've never actually tried something like a party of all mages. I should try that to see how powerful mages actually are in BG...

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​On a side-note, am I crazy for thinking that in vanilla ToB, you can only have one celestial at a time? Why/how has SR changed that?

...Yes, it seems you're right. IR will only install the tweak if the item under the header "ERINNES_SLING" is installed, but there is no item with any such header - there is only "ERINNE_SLING_3" and "ERINNE_SLING_4", so yes, it would appear to be a bug. I did not even realize I fixed this problem.

Yeah.

(e): Also, I just remembered: I *did* add a .mrk file a while back - item_revisions_mc.mrk (MC stands for main component, installed when...yep, you guessed it). BUT...if you're doing something that should apply to both IR and IRR (e.g. this Ring of Energy compatibility fix), IR does not have this mark file, so stick with the approach above.

I'm going to not trust anymore anything by Demiurgus given the premises, it's been 12 years and we still don't have a definitive version.

Hey, that's how the creative process works. Sometimes you get new ideas that replace old ideas - or after a certain amount of playtesting, you realize that your new ideas maybe weren't quite as good as the old ideas to begin with, and there was a reason things were that way before. And sometimes you get bored with how something works and want to change it up just for the sake of doing something new. And other times...you majorly change the design of something, but then forgot to update its description - or vice versa. These things happen.

Sorry, I've been away. The incompatibility regarding the Ring of Energy is a result of IR, not IRR - so by adding a fix for IR, it should be doing the same for IRR. Although I've been sorely tempted to decrease the price of Ankheg Armor due to the fact that it's a total rip-off for a Plate Mail +1 with 50% AR, I have not made any changes to any recipes via IRR - so unless I've gone bananas, I don't think your statement of "there are no conflicts between IR and these components" should be true...right? If not, sure, I can introduce a unique marker file...but actually, since I didn't make that change, if for some reason the latest version of IR doesn't do that, I would actually prefer to just revert it as well. But I'm pretty sure it does.

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​Also, in other news, a new version with some fixes and a couple of item changes (most notably the Rod of Lordly Might, which will be getting another major re-design...hopefully, if I can make it work - trying to make it a little closer to its multi-formed P&P counterpart) will be out in a few days.

Thanks for the code, CrevsDaak - useful for quickly un-EE-izing your install.

 

Oh, it seems the latest version(s) of Weidu is busted or something - on version 24500 on a clean non-EE install, I have BG2 Fixpack failing to install with the same sort of "illegal 2-byte read" error. Downgrading weidu seemed to have fixed it.

 

(e): If you install SR first, and you use the Big World Fixpack's fixes, seems like everything installs fine and the spells in question are okay (although no doubt missing whatever latest changes the EEs have made). But installing SCS first corrupts those spells, and it's difficult to decipher why. So...if you use both mods, just install SR first (like you're supposed to anyways).

Oh wow, Wisp should be informed of this...

 

If that's RE: weidu, I actually went to the weidu website and learned that 24600 is the latest version, and that seems to work fine (whereas 24500 consistently made BG2 Fixpack fail), so that problem seems to have already been solved.

@Luke: I see. SR reverts that change, since it hasn't been updated to take advantage of it, so that's why SCS suddenly works again. I checked all of the listed spells and items (for BG2) after installing, and none of them seem to be corrupted when installing SR first and then SCS second...but of course, the spell-state doesn't dispel itself when the spell deflection is exhausted, either.

Oh, it seems the latest version(s) of Weidu is busted or something - on version 24500 on a clean non-EE install, I have BG2 Fixpack failing to install with the same sort of "illegal 2-byte read" error. Downgrading weidu seemed to have fixed it.

(e): If you install SR first, and you use the Big World Fixpack's fixes, seems like everything installs fine and the spells in question are okay (although no doubt missing whatever latest changes the EEs have made). But installing SCS first corrupts those spells, and it's difficult to decipher why. So...if you use both mods, just install SR first (like you're supposed to anyways).

I can't seem to reproduce this issue as of a clean BG2:EE 2.5.16.6 install.

Arrows of Fire are not simply "flaming arrows" (i.e. arrows that are on fire), though: they're magically enchanted, and in IR, they're rather strong. It's very unbalancing for the player to get easy huge stacks of them early in BG1, which is why the developers made arowkc undroppable. As for your examples of Black Talon Elites and Sirens, Black Talon Elites are a bit stronger than kobold commandos, only spawn with 6 Ice Arrows to begin with, and they're shot first so you'll probably only get 4-5 of them per enemy even if you kill them pretty quickly. Sirines, meanwhile, are a rarer (and way more difficult) creature that *still* don't drop as many enchanted arrows as kobolds do in vanilla IR even assuming they never got to shoot even one off...which is not particularly likely to happen, unlike kobolds where a Sleep spell lets you slaughter them for most of their enchanted arrows with relative impunity.

As for Hobgoblins...they're a similar case to the kobolds. They have a giant stack of Arrows of Biting, but they're undroppable - you could make them droppable, as IR does for the kobold Arrows of Fire, but on such relatively weak creatures (that also respawn), it just means the player will have nearly infinite powerful arrows. If you really wanted to get rid of unfair monster advantages like that, the preferred fix would probably be simply to change the arrows to the real versions, but reduce the amount the monster has (i.e. give those hobgoblins and kobolds only stacks of 5 or 6 like the Black Talons).

I think I already made them identical, but I made them undroppable in IRR as per vanilla (whereas IR makes them droppable). I've said it a few times before, but some types of kobolds are supposed to have a stack of fire arrows they can fire at the player (arowkc), but the player isn't supposed to get these literal hundreds of enchanted fire arrows in BG1 for basically free by killing them before the kobolds can fire them, which is what happens in normal IR and made me realize that something had gone terribly wrong (that, and having two different types of fire arrows that appear to be the same but can't be stacked is silly and annoying, too). Instead, those kobolds simply drop two normal (i.e. droppable) fire arrows (arow08) for the player, same as vanilla. If people really, really wanted them to be droppable, I'd probably create a settings.ini option to patch all creatures' arowkc.itms into arow08.itms to prevent the stacking issue, but I don't think it's really necessary, since you're really not supposed to get that many enchanted arrows so easily.

I may have forgotten to properly create an arowkc.itm with the changed properties, though, now that I think of it. I'll take a look later.

(e): No, seems I didn't forget - they're as they should be, undroppable but otherwise normal Arrows of Fire.

Breach specifically says it "[the spell] breaches and dispels all of the specific and combat protections on the target". It is not simply "dispel", but also "breach" - as in, to make a hole or opening. Why would magic *not* be able to remove something nonmagical? All sorts of magical energies interact with nonmagical energies and physical matter all the time - Breach will break the protections it's designed to break regardless of whether they're magical or not.

Yes, in that case, you're using just regular IR.

Is that with IRR or regular IR? I provided 1 second immunity for "fire shield"-like effects to prevent it from (hopefully) rapid-firing in IRR, but maybe it's not working properly...or you're just using regular IR.

What are their default stack sizes in the EEs (and is it the same for both games)? Should be easy to fix via patching for just the EEs (and I'll leave it up to Anthology Tweaks for non-EE games). Are there any other EE-only problems like that you can think of?

Also, I agree that they're pretty horrible, but removing them from appearing in the game outright is probably best left for another mod. If people had suggestions for better placements and/or properties, I'm all ears - I don't play on the EEs, so I can only provide very limited input.

Thanks for the feedback, both of you. Hmm @ Hobgoblins - not sure if that's my fault or not, I'll have to look closer. Thanks!

It was moved from the Copper Cornet store to the Bridge abandoned house fight (the random group of clerics that immediately attack you upon entering).

Well, I usually wait until I have at least a few things to fix or add to make a new patch. Right now, I have just the bug fix from April (...and I've been thinking about making a new icon for Dagger of the Star). Eventually, I'll add the BG2:EE items, but I have not started them yet...and considering how badly designed the majority of the new EE items are, I'm not in a terrible rush to start.