spanyam

The way ankheg behavior/AI works, once you get 2 apr, it's very easy. When they first show up, they pop up at range. If you have auto-pause on enemy sight and attack right away, you will get both attacks off before they even try their ranged attack. As soon as you fire the second arrow, walk out of sight (just a few steps is enough, as the next round will begin soon). They will dive underground without attacking and again pop up at range. Repeat till ankheg dies. This works even inside the cave. After I got to level 4, most ankhegs would die in 3 rounds (exactly 6 hits). In case you linger too long and the ankheg decides to come up to your feet, wait for it to pop up at your feet (and time the rounds correctly). As soon as it pops up, fire an arrow and walk out of melee range. The oddity here is that once an ankheg "decides" to melee, it will almost never fire ranged attacks at you. As soon as you go out of melee range, it again dives underground. Repeat this until the ankheg dies. By level 3, with 19 dex and early THAC0 bonuses, you will almost never miss against an ankheg. That's an easy 20 to 25 thousand xp depending on how often you return to the map at night (to reset the spawns). I can also think of a good many BG2 fights that cram you into tiny spaces. If we can make up some excuse to give the archer a spell / ability that shoves an enemy away, would that help balance the positional issues you mentioned? Being a ranger, even an ankle snare type ability would be fitting. The other approach could be to make the archer's glass-cannon-ness even greater, allowing it to be the undisputed champion of bows at high levels (meaning there is no way a fighter should be able to match up with a bow). Increased critical hit rate, adding alternate damage types, bleeding side effects, etc. are all options to consider, IMO.

Also, I wanted to echo that Archers are outlandishly powerful in early BG1, but I'm not quite sure how one would mitigate that. A lone elven archer with a longbow (quickly upgraded to a composite) and regular old arrows can juggernaut through the entire first four chapters of the game without breaking a sweat. You can solo the entire Ankheg map (especially at night when they come out) and cave starting from level 3, and you'll easily end up close to 6 by the time your joyride is over. At level 5 (just a couple of thousand xp away from level 6) with nothing but a composite bow, the archer attacks twice per round with an astonishing 7 THAC0, and I've barely just made it past Nashkel. I haven't even picked up Long bow of marksmanship or any useful bracers/gauntlets. Perhaps things will balance out towards mid to late game, as other classes start to shine. But going by Kreso's feedback from earlier, it would be good to give some boost to the later levels, while balancing out the early ones.

There are very few who can, since two magic missile castings will kill you, and Horror is very hard to resist at level 1. Namely, clerics (Command), mages with familiar, stalkers/thieves apart swash, berserker. Others have to rely on luck I'm afraid. Fwiw, the best deal for level 1 character is rush to Beregost, speak to Marl for 900 exp, give the book to mage for 300, help that evil bardess kill the actors (300 exp + 3 defense potions), kill spiders in house with ranged weapons (lure them out), kill ogres south of Beregost with range weapons and give letter to the chick. That should give you level 2 at least. Now go to FAI, if you're a monk use stealth and return spider, boots and wine to guy at top floor. That should give you level 3, usually enough to kill Tarnesh solo. Or pick up Viconia to tank his magic. Good to know. Will try that next time I play an iniyially squishy melee character.

Makes sense I do see your point there. It's overall still a nice class to use at lower levels in a normal party scenario.

Yes I have the latest beta.

Called shot is showing up as Deathless Frenzy for Archers. This is with latest SR beta, KR b20, and latest IR beta. Weidu.log at the bottom. Weidu.log:

I summoned Sendai and tried to Banish her Aerial servant, which saved vs spell and remained in place. Are Aerial servants not banishable or is the "does not allow a save" aspect not working?

After playing through for a while, using two different approaches, here's what I found. I only played through part of BG1 to see if Monks work well in the early stages of the game (as we all know they do work well in late game). First go: Played "normally" with a rather full party. Optimized stats at creation to 18/18/16/18/10/7. Here I found the Monk to be quite usable at early levels, especially with a starting AC of 3. Stunning Fist is especially useful in early stages of the game when single enemies are more prevalent. After about 20 hours of play, I found that so long as the Monk didn't attract too much aggro, he was quite effective at dispatching enemies (48% kill rate in a party of 6). I felt that he rolled an unusually high number of crits, but maybe that's just luck. The 1d8 boost at level 3 is also very welcome. I didn't find a lot of use for Ki Step at this stage, but Stunning Fist and Ki Dodge proved handy in a pinch. A little bland on the "fun" department, since he doesn't have very many toys to play with at these early stages. But at least it would be less bland than someone like a fighter. All in all, if you are optimizing stats and playing with a party, the monk is very usable at early levels. Second go: Tried a "role play" solo attempt, where I was Butch, the unfortunate "every day regular guy" who went to bed one night in Los Angeles and woke up the next in a strange body in a strange land called Faerun. He doesn't trust anyone and prefers to work alone, only talking to others to gain information on how to get back to his comfortable apartment. Unfortunately for Butch, he only had 14 dex (since I did a "roll 10 times and take the best without altering anything" run), which meant his AC was at an abominable 7! Poor Butch could not engage a single thing other than a Gibberling in melee. The only way he got by is Kiting bears and wolves and a train of 10 other critters using a lowly sling. He couldn't even enter the inn in FAI because Tarnesh was absolutely impossible to face at level 1. He tried skipping the inn and wandering around to the neighboring areas in search of XP and answers. But with his inability to do anything other than chuck pebbles (or risk instant depletion of his paltry 9 hp), he quickly gave up his quest and decided to accept his fate as a farmhand specializing in collecting manure. So basically, solo monk in BG1 without stat optimization is BAD, almost unplayably bad. I can't even imagine walking that poor sucker through the traps in the lower Nashkel mines.

Simply wonderful work, Demi. I look forward to testing it out. Especially the Improved Mantle change looks drastic and interesting!

Great, Demi! Will you be PMing us once it is up?

This seems like a great solution. I don't yet understand the technical side of pulling it off, but if this works as you said, it would achieve exactly the effect that we want. One small thing: if APR is 0, wouldn't a charmed opponent still *try* to attack by just walking up to you and standing there looking silly? If we wish to halt movement as well (to mimic what happens to charmed party members), can we additionally set movement speed to zero?

Rigid thinking?Yup. As a 3rd level divine. It worked for a whole round, though. Oh which spell? I'm not able to find any 3rd level priest spell that causes confusion in SR 3.1 readme, "new divine spells for v4", or in "planned changes for v4". Is this a PnP spell? Nvm, the spell's name IS rigid thinking! >.> I thought we were talking about how the original developers were rigid in their thinking.

Maybe replace charm with a single target confusion (without -3 save penalty, unlike the 4th level spell) and replace dire charm with single target stun (lowering the duration of course)?

That's a pity Is there any way we can mimic the "purple circle" effect when two party members go beyond control and start fighting each other? That way you can make charmed characters ignore your party and go after someone else. Also, wouldn't adding a berserk opcode to Dire Charm make the spell less useful than a regular charm (in which you can full control a charmed character)?

Looks like the original PnP versions (2.5e) of both Charm and Dire Charm do not confer any form of control of the charmed person. They simply see you as an ally and act on their own convictions (though it does seem that you can strongly suggest some actions to the charmed person, and they will do it if they are convinced that it is useful). "Controlling" the opponent seems to be more of a feature of "domination" type spells then "charm" type. As it stands, charm and domination seem to have more or less the same effect.

After playing for a bit, I find that the Level 1 Charm Person (arcane) spell is a bit too good, making certain fights against single opponents trivial. I know it comes with a +2 bonus to saving throw, but I find that there aren't very many enemies with good saving throws at the lower levels. I have SCS installed. For example, Bassilus (who is supposed to be strong at level 12) seems to fail his saving throw against charm very easily, allowing me to pretty much control him with Edwin the entire fight. Seriously, he failed it like 7 out of 8 times. I can charm him right off the bat to interrupt his first spell and waste some of his useful spells while I have him under my control (which also wastes his blade barrier). I can also use him to buff my own party if I want. I have a full 5 rounds to do all this, that too for a level 1 spell you find quite early. I also won the tough Lamalha fight by charming Zeela right away and having her effectively occupy Lamalha the whole time. The spell also seems to work unfairly in the player's favor in a couple of ways: Firstly, if an enemy charms one of your party members, they just stand around doing nothing. You on the other hand have full control over them. Secondly, any creatures summoned by the charmed person continue to remain friendly to you even after the charm wears off, which seems strange to me. From what I have read of PnP and forgotten realms lore, summoned creatures should listen exclusively to their summoner. It would make more sense if summoned creatures maintained allegiance to their summoner no matter what. I feel that if the above issues can be taken care of, the spell will be much less of an "I win" against early opponents.

Oh I see. Regarding PW:Kill, does it use the remaining HP or the max HP in its calculation?

Yup, it's right.

One small issue I notice. If someone has a "Regenerate ___ wounds" spell cast on them and they travel before the spell has run its course, the spell effect is lost without having healed the person. It would make sense that whether a character is standing around or traveling, the regenerate should continue to work. If the character rests instead while regenerating, the healing is fully applied.

Ahh okay. Well, didn't do that But i did replace the finabaz.bcs with the fixed content after SCS. Will it be okay, still?

Well, considering I have a full party, I actually need 24000xp to get her to the same level, since she gets 1/6 of the total xp =/ Thanks, I'll just install the component now.

I would suggest doing two distinct installs. If you're itching to play, simply starting with SR, IR, KR, and a few basic tweaks/fixes makes for a really fun playthrough. This lets you experience the game with only the flavors from the Revisions mods, letting you feel the changes then and there. This helps you with beta testing as well. Then once the officials are out, you can do a larger megamod install with your other favorite components. Read this post if you want a good install order for a beta test install: http://forums.gibberlings3.net/index.php?showtopic=26482&p=226926 You need to install Shield Bash after SCS, by the way. So here's what I did. Right after SCS, apply the fixes given here: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/29107/ascension-five-death-script-glitch-spoilers/p1. Scroll down the page till you find a post by darkly180 with a zip file attachment that contains the fixes you need. There is one more bug related to "more consistent breach" component of SCS, but you don't need to install that component with the latest SR v4 beta, I believe (I skipped it). I know Kreso said that Abazigal fix goes before SCS, but I noticed that before SCS, he had his death script just fine. It only disappeared after SCS, and the "finabaz.bcs" script went from some 50kb to 1.6mb in size thanks to SCS. The post-SCS script was missing the death script. The zip file by darkly contains the fixed finabaz.bcs. Just make sure to back up any files that you are replacing. After doing the SCS fixes, install shield bash, then widescreen, and finally gen-biff if you want. One final tip + question from me to the others here: In my install, I skipped LVL 1 NPCs component "NPCs more closely match player experience", and I sort of wish I didn't. I find myself wasting valuable time/exp on characters that I don't plan to keep around too long. Right now, I picked up Viconia, an NPC I plan to keep, and she's almost 4000xp behind my main . I'm wondering if it is okay to install just that component of Lvl 1 NPCs now after the playthrough has already started and pick up Viconia freshly. If not, I suppose I can live with it.

Oh I see. Thanks, didn't realize that.

Small suggestion: Update this description to say "starting at level 3." Since all chars start at level 1, I assumed that the monk won't be getting the apr bonus till level 1+3 = 4, whereas it actually happens at level 3. This just makes the description clearer to newbies.

Go play, I'd say, since it probably took fairly long to install. Use BW when you install a lot of mods, 10 isn't really much. Okay thanks, I'll keep that in mind. Well, if you want to use the mod betas, then yeah, but if you want to actually play a large install without beta mods, then no, the choice is really up to you. I do have the betas installed actually, just not the latest of the latest SR.