polytope

1 hour ago, Salk said:

I wanted to add a CheckStat for panic as trigger but I read that it only returns true for magically induced panicked state.

Actually, it will return true for morale failure (caused by a battle going badly, not by magic) but not for the Panic() which is faked like PlayDead() and which also doesn't seem to change the selection circle colour.

I think that the Panic() command is like Attack() - not AttackReevaluate() or AttackOneRound() - in that the creature won't do anything else and hence won't repeat the block, but there's no harm adding a timer or variable to be sure.

17 hours ago, Salk said:

Hello!

I was wondering which is the easiest and simplest way to make sure that a neutral creature that turns hostile is just going to run from the fight in a panicked state.

Also, I'd need to make sure that the panicked creature won't leave the area.

Thanks!

There are at least three ways of doing so, on a direct scripting level you can (after the desired trigger block), use the actions:

THEN
	RESPONSE #100
		Panic()
END

or

THEN
	RESPONSE #100
		MoraleInc(Myself,-X)
END

where X is some value greater than the creature's morale stat.

The timing for recovery of morale is glitchy and possibly fails to happen, if you need the creature to only panic for a set period of time instead use:

THEN
	RESPONSE #100
		ApplySpellRES("XXXXXX",Myself)
END

XXXXXX being a filename of a .spl which applies opcode #24, the panic state, for whatever time you want, also set global timer or variable in the action if you're not checking for STATE_PANIC in the trigger block etc to ensure the script doesn't loop.

17 hours ago, Salk said:

Also, I'd need to make sure that the panicked creature won't leave the area.

You'll need to edit the doors of the area file and apply the NPC impassable flag.

What more would you expect offhand weapons to grant? Specialist bonuses of +1/2 attack per round for ** or +1 for *****? Warrior level bonus of +1/2 at 7th level +1 at 13? Both, so that dual wielding grants the same bonuses as Improved Haste (and potentially cumulative with IH, although the engine has a hard cap of 10 attacks in a hasted round, or 5 in a normal round).

An extra attack plus the passive bonuses of an offhand magical weapon (in BG2 a smorgasbord of enhanced strength, resistances to some damage types, or immunities to many disabling or lethal effects) is already very strong compared to almost any available shield, which is the other option.

1 hour ago, boof said:

Going by Stalman, and some other clerics in the Underdark, I think a flat 6 level increase would probably be fine.

Beware of doing this for druids, they get HLAs at 15th level, but attain level 9 at only 90,000 xp, so expect to see multiple Quest Level spells thrown by those groups of enemy druids in the grove in early BG2, I think druids would need to be handled on a case by case basis by editing the stratagems->priest->override->bg1(bg2) level.2da files... adding an exception of set level for their creature file names, although someone else will probably suggest a cleaner way of doing it, just the first thing that occurred to me.

24 minutes ago, jmerry said:

How do you feel about a level 11 Mulahey?

Bassilus was about that level in earlier versions, but yeah it's too much.

30 minutes ago, jmerry said:

Or in BG2, a level 16 "Priest of Cyric" in the slaver ship?

This would be fine by me actually, that battle is still a bit lackluster and there are so few encounters where a priest rather than accompanying mages is the highest level or most threatening enemy.

On 3/9/2023 at 10:58 AM, Bubb said:

Correct. The nightmare upgrade subtracts 5 from the saving throw bytes in the .CRE, which are unsigned. The engine reads in the underflowed value as some large value, applies its [-20-20] guard to the stat, and now the creature's save stat is 20. And due to what I said above, a stat of 20 always fails.

So, to make sure I understand, a high level wizard with base saving throws (Death/Wand/Polymorph/Breath/Spell) of 8/3/5/7/4 will have 3/20/0/2/20 and automatically fails to save vs wands or spells? A high level fighter or monster like a fire giant goes from 3/5/4/4/6 to 20/0/20/20/1 thus auto failing saves vs death, polymorph and breath? No wonder some players were saying LoB becomes a lot easier in late BG2 (personally never tried it).

ETA: In my tests setting THAC0 to -1 via opcode 54 (not coded directly into the creature's file) gave me a similar wraparound to 20 problem, incrementing by opcode 54 is ofc safe.

22 hours ago, jmerry said:

Actually, I'm on the side of the auto-fail value probably being intentional. For one example, consider trolls. If you shoot a fire arrow at a downed troll, you expect it to die, right? The arrow auto-hits because the downed troll is helpless. Then the fire is a save or none effect, with no modifier. Helpless creatures are allowed to make saves normally. Now (looking at the old implementation), a typical downed troll CRE (example: TROLIC02) has 1/N HP, 100% resistance to all damage types except fire and acid, and base saves of 20. Without the auto-fail, the troll would succeed on its save if it rolled a natural 20, surviving the arrow 5% of the time. With the auto-fail, the troll is guaranteed to die on that execution shot.

I too think it was intended, iirc besides downed trolls only zero level civilians and kobolds have base saves of 20 in any category, that being Breath Weapon, which would rarely be relevant in game, and all tables for player character classes start below 20 in each category.

I can confirm it was this way on the old engine too, noticed some years ago that any creature with a save vs spells of 20 is auto-killed by Chromatic Orbs from a 12th level caster, although the +6 bonus should grant a 35% chance of survival.

I will say that while spellcasters may not need HLAs, warrior types do because otherwise the player has a boring advancement in the later stages (saving throws stop improving at lvl 17, THAC0 at 21), so just 3hp/level and one new proficiency every third level. Thieves need something too (just not Time Traps).

The expanded spell progression table beyond level 20 from the Complete Wizard's Handbook might be enough for mages (class level vertical axis, spell level horizontal, if it wasn't obvious).

	1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9

21      5   5   5   5   5   4   4   4   2
22      5   5   5   5   5   5   4   4   3
23      5   5   5   5   5   5   5   5   3
24      5   5   5   5   5   5   5   5   4
25      5   5   5   5   5   5   5   5   5
26      6   6   6   6   5   5   5   5   5
27      6   6   6   6   6   6   6   5   5
28      6   6   6   6   6   6   6   6   6
29      7   7   7   7   6   6   6   6   6
30      7   7   7   7   7   7   7   6   6
31      8   8   8   8   7   7   7   6   6
32      8   8   8   8   7   7   7   7   7

It still has the problem of enemy mages falling behind in firepower, and being scripted to use HLAs anyway, although those could be retconned (from the modder's perspective largely just reskinned but tweaked a bit too) as the results of Wish spells. There's also the issue of how to expand the tables appropriately for sorcerers and bards (there is a table for bards in the High Level campaigns book, but that also includes a different table for high level wizards, further confusing things), lastly, priests already have a glut of high level spells, so giving them more is redundant, then again Quest level spells for arch priests are canonical in AD&D, and druids are supposed to have their own particular abilities upon becoming a Grand Druid, then a Hierophant.

@Endarire I didn't yet tag you in this thread, that was jmerry, even though their avatar is a polytope. But yes, there is no advantage to hosting this mod on GitHub, that would be for complex mods like SCS where the version tree is important to find the last stable/compatible release, not for an overwrite of a single 2DA file. Besides, pointlessly inflating the number of BG2 related GitHub repositories makes it harder for searchers to find relevant ones.

3 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Planetars become a lot more reasonable when you take their ridiculous vorpal swords away. In my last game I modded them to be "noble genies" by simply 1) changing their animation from celestials to djinni/efreeti, and 2) replacing their swords with a sword that does electric/fire damage (respectively). And for whatever reason, my mod loadout was suppressing their regeneration (as it was suppressed by design IMHO). These very small changes made them a lot squishier against big bads like dragons and liches.

The vorpal weapon isn't the real problem. Unmodded, their regeneration rate, fast casting heals and weapon immunities together make them simply unbeatable by a large fraction of the creatures encountered, it's likely to take more than one round for even a very powerful boss type to take one down upon which the wizard can just summon another (unless you've got the SCS component to make celestial summons once per day innates, which is an improvement although making wizard HLAs into innates is generally overpowering as it means the player no longer has to decide between 9th level spells and HLAs).

3 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Honestly I didn't use many HLAs at all - I set my HLAs to be available at level 20 regardless or multiclassing, and my XP table doesn't get you to level 20 until close to 4 million XP. I think I reached the end battle with my single-class characters at level 24 (4 HLAs each) and multiclass characters at about level 18/18 (no HLAs at all). It was kind of fun to dip my toes into the HLA waters, but I could pretty easily have done without them.

Solo, or in a duo, trio or even quartet it would be more obvious even with the crucial level requirement (except for multiclasses, but that simply disadvantages the player who chooses multi!) and the XP table revision, bear in mind that most players have the original game default of neither. 3M xp earned unlocks HLAs for them.

On 2/28/2023 at 8:31 PM, subtledoctor said:

Anything beside the current Highlander rip-off that doesn’t even abide by its own Highlander rules and instead has a non-Bhaalspawn step in and steal the finale.

On consideration, one of the things which has always annoyed me was having to fight all the Bhaalspawn again almost immediately after defeating them the first time if you play with Ascension (and without Ascension is still much too easy on repeat plays even with SCS), along with Irenicus twice, or thrice if you're good aligned and meet him in the pocket plane. Oh and possibly Sarevok too, for the third or fourth time. It felt like one of those old arcade games which do that to you and was out of line with the rest of the saga.

I would like to see a mod to somehow fill in the time between the encounters with the main antagonists, who keep coming back.

I agree with most of Ballad's comment on the old thread (except that UAI is arguably one of the more imbalancing):

Quote

Sure, there are some neat, well thought out HLA's, such as the extra spell slots, Alchemy, Scribe Scrolls and even Use Any Item. These abilities have a lot of utilitarian value and are powerful in their own right, but not game breakingly so. But then there is stuff like Greater Whirlwind, Critical Strike, Assassination and Time and Spike Trap. And let's not even get started on the level 10 wizard spells - ESPECIALLY "Summon Planetar/Dark Planetar."

Or actually, scratch that and let me rant some about Planetars. These creatures are obscenely, gamebreakingly overpowered. I'm running SCS and I'm not sure if that makes them even cheesier, but whenever either party in a fight summons one, the fight is basically over for the other side. A lot of times, the Planetar is actually more powerful than the wizard summoning it. When confronting the Twisted Rune in Chapter 6, I managed to take out Shangalar and co quite easily but still lost the fight due to the Fallen Planetar the old bag of bones summoned before snuffing it. Globe of Blades, PfMW, Improved Haste, [just a note that planetars have permanent haste rather than the *improved* version and the equivalent of permanent mantle rather than PfMW - Ed] instacast Heals and godlike combat abilities all in one summoning spell? Whoever came up with that and thought it fit well with the rest of the game? Honestly, when I discovered it is also immune to death spell contrary to being a summoned creature, I wasn't even that surprised anymore.

Overall, the worst part about Planetars and other HLA's is that they make most other spells and abilities seem second rate in comparison. Why bother casting improved Haste when you can just slam Greater Whirlwind all day long? Why bother using a spellcasting strategy other than Time Stop -> Improved Alacrity when it's all you need to win 9 fights out of 10? And, why, oh why would I bother summoning any other creature again once I have access to Planetars? It is almost as if some Bioware developer looked at the wonderfully complex, intricately balanced system of spells and abilities that was SoA and thought, that's too many spells, let's have like, 9.

It looks like Beamdog took his advice and nerfed planetars by giving them 48 hp/round regeneration on top of all their other perks.

Unfortunately mods that touch the HLA system (like Refinements) generally add new HLAs of comparable power (or attempt to, most Refinement HLAs are weak in practice, but on the upside they did nerf UAI to use of scrolls only), treating the vanilla game as a benchmark. Rogue Rebalancing does replace the outrageous Time Traps with Acid Traps, but adds some other very strong HLAs especially for bards.

HLAs are used not only in SCS but by some vanilla enemies and especially Ascension enemies, so we can't easily imagine the late game completely without, instead modders generally try to increase the power of enemies encountered at high level to match, the trouble here is that a solo character will unlock HLAs very early in the saga, around when a party of 6 would be about 10th level (dependent ofc on how much of the xp you gained was quest xp, many quests give raw xp as for slaying monsters/learning spells/solving locks and traps though).

19 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Well, from the point of view of encounter design, if any sensible illithid facing spellcasting adventurers would naturally use Energy Control… and if that ability is completely undispellable by any tool available to the adventurers… then not much difference in just applying the benefits directly to the creature.

Psionics underwent several revision in 2nd edition, but strictly BtB Energy Containment - not Energy Control, I misnamed it - is not a durational power which the psionicist pays PSPs round by round to maintain, like the less comprehensive Inertial Barrier, it's something you need to activate in the same round you want it (locking out the use of other psionic powers that round), prep time of zero though, not even one, so can be used instantly if the psionic character or creature lost initiative or perhaps even if they were surprised.

That's putting aside the successful power check needed to activate it, I think most players agreed that the system of power checks in the original Complete Psionics Handbook was bad, and use one of the alternatives if they want psionics.

Mind flayers could certainly activate Energy Containment - to be on the safe side - in rounds when they couldn't find anything vulnerable to their other mental attacks (Blast, Domination etc.) or any unprotected low hp target to nail with Detonate or Ballistic Attack.

It's a good idea to add more content to Throne of Bhaal, the endgame feels kinda rushed and you have little opportunity to actually use the late game items you acquire from defeating the two enclaves.

I have little experience in area design, the only thing I can contribute to this topic is that you can make a reused area look quite different simply by editing the lightmap (AR____LM.bmp) to give new hues and adding some static animations, the tiles themselves are a pain to edit and put back together.

3 hours ago, boof said:

Wow I had no idea they used to be immune to all elements in the base game. Now I feel dirty about my standard tactic of fighting mindflayers under a firestorm shower. Immunity to elements with 90% magic resistance may have been overboard, but just stripping all elemental resistance to 0 is as well.

Not all of them were, vampiric mindflayers and ulitharids were always vulnerable to elemental damage, but regular mindflayers were immune. It makes little sense since ulitharids are supposed to be the more powerful, and the vampiric ones at least should have had a regular vampire's 50% resistance to cold and electricity.

There are btb some psionic powers (Energy Control, Inertial Barrier - only the 2nd was implemented, but still unused) that a mindflayer could use to make themselves temporarily resistant to elemental damage, which seems better than just coding it into their creature files, because there's nothing about these psychic squidy critters that suggests they're supposed to be inherently immune to such damage types, they're flesh and blood, not constructs or something like that.

15 hours ago, jmerry said:

The playthrough I was referring to happened back in 2.5, so now fireshield/fireshield loops. What was happening:

- My front line includes two high-level druids in fire elemental form with AoFD active. They're immune to fire and poison, but not disease.

- Demogorgon hits them, inflicting a disease effect that deals poison damage every second.

- The poison damage is reduced to zero, but every time it ticks triggers retaliation from AoFD as long as we're in melee range.

It's still an undesirable bug that the damage tick from poison, bleeding or disease activates a Fireshield, since that's obviously not how it should work.

I'd think it should be retaliation per attack, so, while a high level fighter using Whirlwind would damage themself more quickly swinging at a fireshield I don't see the logic in taking a worse scorching from a fireshield if they used a poisoned weapon...

5 hours ago, jmerry said:

Balors are about the only ones that get their fire immunity back. Definitely intentional in most cases, and it feels intentional for Demogorgon too. Recall that scripting for AoFD; balors get a custom fire shield that doesn't affect their resistances, but Demogorgon gets the actual priest spell with its "set to 90" effect.

For what it's worth this is one of SCS's nods to PnP-ization/ Demons (not devils) should take half damage from magical fire, none from electricity. Devils are fireproof and lightning vulnerable. Both take half damage from cold. Exceptions are Balors and Succubi who are supposed to be completely immune to fire. Mind flayers are also stripped by SCS of their elemental resistance, which they shouldn't have had.

As for the wiki entry, it's inaccurate, but what's new? Wiki also states monsters without proficiency in their weapon take a penalty to their attack and damage rolls (in game, only attack rolls, and only if they have a character class, there never was a damage penalty at all).

However, with SCS, Succubi are now fire vulnerable, which is contrary to both the vanilla game and AD&D rules, as for the "fireshield feedback" exploit with Aura of Flaming Death, obviously in need of a fix, but it's not really an SCS problem, present in vanilla.

6 hours ago, feedwony said:

hello. should this be installed before or after SCS?

For now you may want to install it before SCS simply because SCS (current version!) clones remove magic to SPIN138 called INNATE_FIEND_DISPEL_MAGIC, the version used by fiends. If you installed polydisp after current SCS, then fiends (but not other spellcasters) would use remove magic with vanilla behaviour.

Then again, SCS is slow to install and polydisp is very fast, so ideally polydisp would come after SCS, I'll fix the fiend loophole in the next version.

On the other hand, if you installed aTweaks fiends instead of SCS, polydisp should be installed after that, I accounted for aTweaks' fiend version of RM, but was unaware SCS did the same.

Also, if you want to play with the Spell Revisions mod, definitely install polydisp after SR.

6 hours ago, feedwony said:

 especially together with "Reduce power of Inquisitors' Dispel Magic" SCS component?

This mod revises the inquisitor kit's dispel magic to operate at 4 levels above their actual level, so don't install the SCS nerf together with it (as seen on the first page although I've misquoted the probabilities, I'll fix that).

6 hours ago, feedwony said:

does it work on BG1EE? and if not, will the dispel magic discrepancy be noticeable between BG1 and 2?

For now it doesn't work on BG1 unless you're using Baldur's Gate Trilogy, because it searches for a filename present only in ToB, I did this to prevent it being installed on original BG1 (where it wouldn't work) or original BG2 without the ToB modifications to the game engine. Future versions should include BG1EE compatibility.

I honestly wouldn't memorize Dispel or Remove Magic in BG1, you have too few lvl 3 slots to make it worth taking a chance on, and you don't encounter enemies with Protection From  X Weapon type spells even with SCS. I'll be honest that I haven't played Siege of Dragonspear and am unsure of the importance of dispelling there. The exception is for the Inquisitor I guess who gets it for free whereas other paladins at these levels can't cast any spell... I really don't think BG2 kits are properly balanced for BG1 even after all these years, but that's another story.

On 2/22/2023 at 2:23 PM, Bartimaeus said:

Basilisks getting stuck in a "I'm going to petrify you even though you're already petrified" loop is pretty undesirable. I'd probably have to ask for help on how best to implement something like that though, as scripting states aren't something I'm very knowledgeable about.

If you want to revise basilisks with a permanent hold type effect then just tack on an opcode 100 against RACE = BASILISK (102) with the same saving throw, that way the basilisk will simply ignore anyone who it has faux-petrified, just need to ensure that it's removed by Break Enchantment (opcode 321 on EEs, needs a sectype on original engine), and that anything that would prevent the hold effect also prevents all effects of the basilisk's gaze attack (easiest if externalized as a .spl).

I'm not sure if it's worth the effort just for consistency between an arcane spell and a monster's special attack though, why must petrification from a basilisk be identical to a wizard's Flesh to Stone spell?

6 hours ago, cdx said:

Turns out Time Stop causes the crash. It worked when I charmed Sion and cast Summon Dark Planetar but when I tried to cast Time Stop I got the assertion fail. Same thing happens if I try to cast Time Stop with the main character. The spell doesn't start to cast, as soon as I click on the spell icon in the spell menu the game crashes.

Time Stop actually does summon an invisible creature to act as a timer (on original BG2 SCS with ToBEx, haven't checked the EE version) but only if cast successfully. If the crash occurs the instant casting is attempted the problem is something completely different.

Can you extract SPWI909.spl from your installation's override folder and PM it to me? I'll see if I can figure out what's happening when I have time later today.

9 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

15 points above the minimum is still a lot better, for rogues who aren’t big bruisers by nature. 

It would be reasonable to give all daggers a passive +1 backstab bonus, up to x6 (x8 for assasins). 

I also increase dagger damage to 1d5, since honestly a max-damage hit from an 18-inch long dagger should be very close to a max damage hit from a 24-in long short sword. 

Put those together and now the max backstab damage is 24 higher than the minimum, adding some drama. Limit big weapons like longswords to a x4 multiplier, and you are helping daggers shine.

1) Not really what I was referring to, even though rogues actually can do more damage per hit than anyone except a kensai (and even per round, with Mislead spell or assassination), a narrow window for damage due to the small die removes the suspense from backstabbing and wondering whether your thief will roll high enough.

2) I can understand the rationale behind penalizing the backstab multiplier for large weapons even though it's bad for some kits like the stalker because of the interaction with dual wielding, but granting daggers an actual bonus to backstab multiplier is even worse. Why should daggers in both hands inflict a better backstab on the first hit than a dagger with one hand free? It makes no sense at all, whereas with dual wielding longswords you could at least imagine it makes the character more awkward and genuinely more unlikely to pull of a successful backstab.

3) A d5 isn't a platonic solid... okay neither is a d10, but that's at least symmetrical. I don't like the idea of dice that aren't used in the real world.

This particular one hasn't happened to me but it looks like you're running the original engine with ToBEx? And EET Tweaks? I don't think the current version of SCS is stable with ToBEx on non-EE games and really isn't being actively supported and updated, and I've no idea whether any EET Tweak components which were mostly designed for a different engine work alongside it.

Can you check Sion's script? Does his initial Chain Contingency contain a summoning spell? Certain animations are borked and reliably cause a crash to desktop.

For many, many years since before SCSII and SCS were merged into a single mod, enemy mages have been Dimension Door-ing after the party when you get out of LoS, iirc, in the early versions they didn't need to actually have Dimension Door memorized, only to be above a certain level, with the more recent Stratagems spell memorization is a bit more strongly enforced, so fewer AI spellcasters might actually have a DD and if you're new to the mod you're less likely to see it.

4 hours ago, boof said:

It stacks with both hardiness (if used before transforming) and AoF in my game.
Even if it didn't, with the tokens it gives you instant access to 50% phys res at any time, for as long as you want, for an investment of 1 HLA, as the token is permanent.
If it required multiple HLA points for every time you want to switch back to elemental form, I might agree that that would be balanced. But that's only assuming it didn't stack with hardiness and AoF, which it does.

Turns out this works, I remember previously testing with an item that increases (while equipped) resistances by +50% and a durational spell or potion that sets to 50%, with the result being that resistances are stuck at 50%... but if it's done the other way around, with an equipable item setting and a timed duration spell or other such effect incrementing (which Hardiness and AoF do) then you end up with all the cumulative resistances. Effect order application is strange like that.

Obviously this needs to be addressed, in Enhanced Edition it's easy enough for the Shapeshift tokens to remove (in the instant of equipage) all effects specified by a .spl resource (like Hardiness), on vanilla engine you'd need to remove all 1st level combat protections (Hardiness and Armor of Faith both count), that's actually mostly fine because druids can't cast Shield or whatever except from the amulet.

Another problem is the that the tokens are usable by characters who shouldn't be able to use them, like ranger-clerics, F/M/Cs and monks in enhanced edition.

4 minutes ago, jmerry said:

The draconic "Lower Fire Resistance" spell (which, by the way, is already used in the base game) allows a save to avoid its effects. Your party member made the save (vs spell, at -3).

Seems intentional (because so few spells require a save at exactly -3, rather than -2, -4 or whatever).

Perhaps it should be -25% if your party members makes their save, -50% if they fail?

A small d4 die for damage removes some of the suspense from a backstab*, regardless of allowing a x5 multiplier, because the maximum damage is at most 15 points above the minimum (and specialization/magic/kit bonuses would usually provide most of this damage anyway).

If something needs to be done to improve daggers globally, then a good candidate would be an enhanced critical hit effect if wielded by warriors or rogues (i.e. not by single class druids or mages).

*Although of course maximum damage can be guaranteed if you're a kensai->thief using kai or cleric/thief under Righteous Magic.

15 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

Eh, that just incentivizes the Stalker to dual-wield weapons more appropriate for backstabbing. When a kit is supposed to hew to a theme, and the game mechanics push it toward that theme,

The only recruitable stalker NPC is a katana specialist...

Also, it depends on what you think are appropriate weapons. The vanilla game list is fine except for staves, which should really not be weapons for single class thieves, even spears would make more sense (I believe Safana in original BG1 had a mysterious spear proficiency? So long since I've played that version...). Then it became worse when the Staff of Striking and particularly the Staff of the Ram were introduced, which made clubs totally redundant to thieves.

Light single handed blades (not battle axes or bastard swords) and light blunt weapons (clubs) are thematically appropriate for thieves, the reason daggers are a wasted proficiency (except for poisoned throwing daggers, and Fire Tooth if you're playing EE) is that the circumstances in which daggers would be useful just don't occur in game:

• Disarmed of your main weapon (even if you drop weapons due to a special attack you can move and pick them up).
• Trapped with a net and need to cut your way free (doesn't happen)
• Enveloped/constricted/swallowed whole by the monsters that can do that (which aren't encountered, or for which this attack form wasn't implemented)

Forcing players to backstab with daggers (which have low damage ceilings) doesn't improve the situation much I'm afraid, as it is daggers are a ranged weapon only in BG2, which is also silly, but there you go.

4 hours ago, StummvonBordwehr said:

Okay. Could a lower backstab multiplier be implemented? Like:

- regular multiplier for daggers, clubs and  short swords,

- multiplier -1 for regular thieves weapons besides the above,

- multiplier -2 for all else.

Item Revisions (in a previous version, I haven't checked lately) did this but there's a problem when dual wielding. Longswords in both hands (for instance) means a -2 penalty to backstab multiplier, kind of ruins the stalker kit which is clearly supposed to be both a backstabber and also a two-weapon fighter (like other rangers).

On 2/15/2023 at 1:47 AM, Userunfriendly said:

So in your tests. Only 5 of the bunnies transformed into skeletons?  That does make sense. Still worthwhile, if your Kensai/mage or fighter mage is using a strength belt, and the belt of Constitution. And Cat's Grace...

Actually the caster will get +1 str, dex and con for each creature killed by Soul Eater (so up to +20 if you can somehow get all rabbits in the AoE, no need for other stat enhancing equipment), it's just that the subsequent animation of all but 5 skeletons fails because they're controlled summons and the game won't let you have any more (In Enhanced Edition you'd need to edit SUMMLIMT.2da, in original BG2 - which doesn't support conversion of either Soul Eater or Seven Eyes - I believe it's hardcoded).

17 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

And once there are 20 bunnies on the field... well, it would make perfect sense to change them into 20 3HD skeletons.

Can't do that without modding away the summoning cap, the engine is quite strict here (in my tests) and you're stuck with 5 skeletons (instead of five potentially better summons). Actually dangerous encounters that are worth using 7th level spells for tend to feature enemies that can one shot either a 3HD skellie or a bunny rabbit (maybe not if they're using slashing/piercing weapons, which skeletons resist), but even so, unless they have AoE damage they will need to expend at least one attack (and some time moving) on each rabbit, which is what made the Limited Wish for a rabbit horde useful, tactically you can think of it as either a double strength Stoneskin cumulative with regular skins or a Maze spell that still allows attacks on the confused bunny-hunting monster.