polytope

9 hours ago, Galactygon said:

The only drawback is that the repeating opcode 272 doesn't fire during time stops

I'm pretty sure it does, it's just that associated launched projectiles aren't processed until the Time Stop effect ends.

Could use a global target type instead.

2 hours ago, boof said:

In this clip Anomen takes massive amounts of instant damage, none of it showing up in the combat log. Anyone have any clue as to what might be happening?

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1967953834  

Nyalee casts nothing at the moment damage is done. She's not attacking. Nothing is logged except the creeping doom that was casted a bit before.
The second time it happens, Anomen's health actually dips to ~10, then immediately jumps back up to ~50. What could be causing this?

I believe this is actually due to the melee attacks of the shambling mounds accompanying Nyalee.

If struck by one of those mounds and failing any of several saving throws (at +4, +2, 0) then your character's hp are set to 25% with a staggered delay.

However that will also actually increase the PCs hp if it were below that threshold. This looks like a fixpack thing @CamDawg I'm pretty sure the concept is that the target loses 25% of their hp per round (or half-round as implemented) while the shambler suffocates them, so decrement rather than set.

Should also probably add a "dying" icon to their attack, to give the player a clue that they're in trouble if hit and failing a save.

3 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

My guess would be RNG bias. I'd presume that imposing a maximum on the roll would round up values outside it to into it than to reroll the dice.

Now that I think about it, in pre-EE games rolling for a dwarf only the one in every 216 (or thereabouts, since RNG it isn't actually a fair 3d6) that has a natural 18 gets it either reduced to 17 or rerolled (however the engine does it).

So 3-18 with a subsequent -2 penalty indeed puts usual charisma score for dwarves lower than 3-17 minus 1, even though the maximum is the same the midpoint of the bell curve isn't. Since dwarves were among the best races to pick for almost any fighter class/multiclass I guess it's fine to enforce their stat penalties a bit more rigidly.

16 hours ago, jmerry said:

There is never a maximum imposed on the 3d6 roll, at least in the EE. Every entry in the "MAX_***" columns of ABRACERQ is 18. Dwarves (without any mods) have a -2 penalty in ABRACEAD, which is why they have that 16 max charisma.

Yes, that's another difference between EE and classic, it amounts to the same thing though (Cha no higher than 16, and game frozen if you try to make one a paladin).

I wasn't aware they'd changed these two files and don't see why anyone bothered to, it works out the same and is the source of the same bug in certain class/kit/race combos.

8 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

The only thing that scratches a spot in my brain is, isn’t there something with Tweaks or somewhere, that lets you create dwarven paladins - and since dwarves get -1 CHA and paladins need 18 CHA, it would crash the game? I think my mod actually changes paladins’ minimum CHA to ~16 for that reason. I think?

Dwarves by default have a max rolled CHA of 17 and a further -1 penalty (2DA files ABRACERQ and ABRACEAD respectively), which leaves them ineligible for the paladins min of 17 (if a mod allows choosing new classes for demihumans anyway).

It's an old bug for certain race/kit combos.

3 hours ago, Lurker said:

Paladins have a minimum of 17 CHA in the base game. Don't want Ajantis to crash the game.

Only matters in character creation screen when the game gets stuck in an endless loop trying to fulfill contradictory requirements of a minimum roll that's higher than the maximum allowable, when actually playing the game there are no further checks except maybe in dialogues and quite a few NPCs don't have stats that match their class.

13 hours ago, Jarno Mikkola said:

Did they also have the ammo for it ? Baecause they won't use it without the ammo...

It wouldn't matter, the bonus for attacking with a melee weapon vs unarmed aren't contingent on the target having a useful ranged weapon - although that does count - but rather on not having a melee weapon equipped.

I'm going to disagree that the problem is the plot or the railroading, it's already railroaded in the late game of BG1 and BG2 once you get to the Underdark really.

The problem is progressive late game imbalance due to a surfeit of abilities and artifact level-items, the seeming complexity offered by all the options available to high level characters is redundant because there are so few meaningful challenges at that point.

8 hours ago, CamDawg said:

Creatures with melee weapons get an additional +4 to-hit and damage when attacking a creature with a ranged weapon equipped. It's not documented anywhere AFAIK.

8 hours ago, 4udr4n said:

Wiki says:
using a ranged weapon against a melee attacker gives -8 penalty to THAC0, whereas the melee attacker gains a +4 THAC0 and damage bonus when engaging an enemy that uses a ranged weapon

Not just ranged weapons, also applies to attacking anyone "unarmed" except monks*, I think equipping anything with a melee header as a weapon (beyond the default fist attack) prevents it, this includes monster's natural weapons.

*(Monks of course are only relevant in IWDII and IWD:EE)

I don't think base movement rate is cleanly divisible by 5, so it's probably not a 20% increase anyway, and should maybe be converted to a flat +2 bonus*, which should work in conjunction with worn items modifying it.

*(closer to the ideal value than a +1, but more powerful)

10 hours ago, boof said:

#3 is preventable by casting relevant protections on the pair of npcs, but seems like a silly thing to have to do. Not sure if this beholder was capable to doing anything like this in the vanilla game honestly, but I was told it was an intentionally gimped variant that got replaced by the blanket changes to beholders made by SCS.

Just now, DavidW said:

I'm not convinced (3) is a bug. The beholder summoned in the Phaere/Solaufein encounter is a totally standard beholder (udbeho01) with the normal beholder script (behold01), created by block 50 of udphae01.dlg. It is perfectly capable of killing Phaere or Solaufein in the unmodded game. It's much more likely to do so in SCS, because it's much more capable, but that's what you get for installing a component that makes beholders more effective!

Yes the beholder is standard for its type, it's just that their original AI prioritizes PCs for eye-power targets, with a few references to summons and nothing about creatures outside the party & uncontrolled, so besides melee attacks it can't do much to either one of them. Now I tend to zap it with a 3x Flame Arrow sequencer before it can try to disintegrate them.

10 hours ago, boof said:

#1 and #2 are very severe, and very much out of the player's hands, particularly #1. It's one thing if your own party members get confused and attack friendlies, but to have the game end because the npcs attack each other is a bit much.

I don't know how vanilla game handled #2. Was that drow party even there, and if it had a mage capable of casting confusion spells if so.

All three of these have happened to me during no reload runs by the way. 

A confused creature will only ever attack the nearest creature, so you can tank them with your best protected party member if you want to avoid them harming each other (even in the upcoming version 35, if it's important to keep an NPC alive), I also don't think Web or Entangle were making neutral NPCs hostile in this last version (probably never came up) but if so this can be used to bind up the confused creatures to avoid them endangering each other.

I've always allowed myself reloads for obvious bugs, like allied NPCs injuring themselves and becoming hostile, as it's clearly not intended, no different to a reload from a crash to desktop imo.

That's good to know although contrary to what subtledoctor reported with repeating #326s triggering it, unless those trigger a subspell by #146. I know that #232 triggers SpellCastOnMe() also.

Just now, subtledoctor said:

Then one possible solution may be, go through the extant AoE projectiles, and make sure they all have slightly different speeds...? If that works, it might almost be within the ambit of a FixPack...

The projectiles, as I recall, are tied to the school by default so sparkly gold for enchantment, but since that's the majority of AoE save-or-else stuff plus Greater Malison (except for the Hold spells lineup, which use a smaller golden AoE) it doesn't really solve the problem.

Not to mention that it's a balance issue if some spells outrun others, an already present issue, true, with for instance Flame Arrow spells particularly speedy and Flesh to Stone quite slow, but no need to aggravate it.

13 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

Great, but here is Skull Trap doing 20d6 damage and Fireball with a worse damage type doing half the damage. Why would you use the one in your own school? Thinking about lore rather than gameplay, why would evokers have designed such an inferior spell? Demi's response was not that "Skull Trap is OP and should be nerfed." It was simply "how do we address this disparity?"

There are some obvious nerfs though, of spells which he specifically said were too powerful. Mislead, Holy Smite and Skull Trap were called out, while other spells like Larloch's Minor Drain were increased in power but without including new effects that would make the use of such spells attractive to a specialist in particular (I'm not sure if the hidden specialist-saving-throw penalty was fully understood yet when Demi withdrew from modding).

On 10/18/2023 at 1:27 AM, Luke said:

Yeah, guess you are right... My concern was about mod-added content, such as a single-target fighter kit ability, which should not probably cure such creatures... Guess such kit abilities should probably use op248/249 (see Called Shot) in order to avoid curing these creatures...

I know of one modded case where this definitely happens, but it's usually irrelevant for a regular Nishruu which can heal only equivalent to a CLW spell from each blow that probably did way more damage. It becomes a problem if CLW is improved to heal more or if the Nishruu is damage resistant.

Otherwise the Nishruu script could be rewritten to check if LastAttacker() is a mage or other arcane caster to deny the heal-on-hit thing, alternately, the CLW spell could be patched to not heal more than once per round if target race = MIST or something like that, I think not all mod added Nishruu are definitely mists, but all should use the mist creature animation. I'm not sure it's worth fixing...

On 10/17/2023 at 10:16 PM, subtledoctor said:

Eh, to the extent the bug incentivizes making more creative and diverse sequencers, I don’t mind it. 

Only if the spells inside actually require different types of saving throws, i.e. Web and Stinking Cloud in a Minor Sequencer. Comboing spells with the same projectile-speed and save type (like Emotion and Chaos) still only results in one saving throw rolled (most of the time, it's a bit random). If you successfully saved vs Chaos at -4 then the save was also made against Emotion etc.

Note that Slow is faster than most "sparkly" AoE magic, so if put in a sequencer with others will be saved against first and separately.

7 hours ago, InKal said:

what the fakkk are ye doing? Haste and improved haste is totally fine and much needed in heavily tacticaly challenging installs. don't try to fuck them up. nobody will download this crap anyway so it is just a wasted effort.

Yes, but long ago Demivrgvs decided Haste needed a nerf to be at the same power level as other 3rd level spells in SR. I don't actually agree because in spite of the power of Haste it's not a game-breaker in the same way that unmodded game Mislead, Project Image and Improved Alacrity are. And you can probably only use it once (and not more than twice) before your party ends up badly fatigued.

Still Haste has to be changed from what it was in SR (i.e. not really haste), as that causes bugs with AI being unable to detect it. The original bug of it doubling poison/disease/regeneration rate is usually trivial, the only way it can matter is with the 7th level spell Regeneration or the Shapechange option for greater wolfwere.

7 hours ago, InKal said:

better fix pathfinding instead. 

Needs a programmer to fix that one. It seems to be pretty ironed into EE.

17 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

2) The Haste spell and its ilk will use op16 “weak haste” to double framerate and provide either +0 or +0.5 extra APR. And apply the STATE_HASTED state. On top of that, it will also grant a separate +0.5 APR bonus via op1. This way casting Haste on someone with Boots of Speed still gives them an APR bonus. Probably keep it AoE for the sake of negating Slow, maybe drop the duration to 5 or 10 rounds.

Might as well revert both the spell and the boots to vanilla behavior at that point (i.e. spell grants opcode #16 type 0, boots opcode #16 type 2), at least that's inherently unstackable. Isn't it kind of odd for Haste to be less useful if you're wearing the boots?

On 10/11/2023 at 4:20 AM, subtledoctor said:

If anyone is interested in playing around with this, I have coded it up in my Spell Tweaks mod. Should work on mod-added spells (it looks for offensive spells procedurally)… but I have not tested it extensively.  

I'm interested what happens if MR-by-level-penetrating spells are cached in a Sequencer or Trigger, my recollection is that so long as the projectiles have the same speed (or no projectile) these can end up resolving simultaneously, so that the 2nd spell might penetrate MR at twice the value it should & the 3rd spell three times.

Do you think it's worthwhile to add a zero duration #101 vs #166 at the end of the feature block? It will require some time in testing to even see if this bug can be triggered as is though, it's a bit inconsistent but it certainly happens with saving throws.

On 10/14/2023 at 12:40 AM, Axatax said:

If you side with the vampires, you fight Aran Lindvail and SCS doesn't give any love to this scenario.  This should be considered as a major boss fight.

12 hours ago, DavidW said:

This looks good - but won't make it to v35, it's closed to new content now.

Rogue Rebalancing should still be compatible with SCS and improves Aran among others in this questline, but I'm unsure where EE-maintained versions can be dowloaded from anymore.

It should also be mentioned that by default you get substantially less xp from the quest line of siding with Bodhi to get to Spellhold, so I'm not sure if it needs to be equally hard, on the basis that it's also less rewarding.

Interesting, you use unseen creatures & scripts to keep track of weapon type and number of proficiencies? I considered something like that but was worried it would be too cluttered with slowdowns.

About the styles:

Quote

[Two-Handed Weapon Style]
1 Slot: +1/2 attack per round.
2 Slots: +1 attack per round.
Strength modifier to your melee damage is increased by 50%.

Without mods it's 2 proficiency slots (specialization) to get an extra 1 attack per 2 rounds , or 5 (grand mastery) for a whole extra APR, but only with a specific weapon, whereas this modification applies to all weapons of the two handed type. The +50% melee damage from strength will also be greater or equal the +5 damage bonus you'd normally get from weapon grandmastery once the character's strength is 22 or higher.

My point being, it looks like a better idea for characters in the early game to spend slots on this style than in actually specializing with specific weapons.

Quote

[Two-Weapon Style]
-1/2 attack per round, unless 5 proficiency points are put into Two-Weapon Style (See the component 'More proficiency points can be spent to all Weapon Styles').
0 Slot: -2 to melee damage.
1 Slot: -2 to melee damage while +1 bonus to melee AC.
2 Slots: -1 to melee damage while +2 bonus to melee AC.
3 Slots: +2 bonus to melee AC.

[Sword and Shield Style]
With a shield that blocks the enemy's view, you can make a sudden strike with +2 bonus to attack rolls per round.
1 Slot: +1 bonus to melee AC, one additional shield bash on nearest enemy per round besides normal attacks, which can break down your enemy's defense (-2 penalty to AC) for a while and knock him back. The enemy can make a save vs. breath with a +4 bonus to avoid the shield bash (-1 save penalty for every 5 levels of the attacker).
2 Slots: +2 bonus to melee AC, one additional shield bash on nearest enemy per round besides normal attacks, which casues stunning damage of 1D4 + strength modifier and an extra stunning check.  The enemy can make a save vs. breath with a +4 bonus to avoid being stunned (-1 save penalty for every 5 levels of the attacker), but he'll still suffer a defense break and being knocked back.
A hasted character can cast sudden strike and shield bash twice in one round.

These look good actually, but maybe reserve the shield bashing thing for 2 proficiency slots and its improvement to 3 (if you're going to expand allowable proficiency point spending). A +1 to AC vs melee weapons and a +2 bonus to the first attack in a round is already pretty good for 1 proficiency spent, especially at low levels when you have few attacks per round and it's more notable to boost even one.

13 minutes ago, DavidW said:

My current tweak is to block only physical damage.

That sounds like a good option which still leaves the spell useful for AI priests survivability, but without enabling the player to trick a high level mage/lich into wasting their wiltings, DB etc.

The 7th level version may not need a nerf, since it's the highest possible spell level for priests being "exchanged" in that instance.

1 hour ago, Christian said:

My experience is that stacking all the Bless/Chant spells and then Emotion Hope leads to absolutely insane ST bonuses. So it is not a single spell in my opinion but how they play together.

I don't regard negative saves from dispellable buffs as such a big problem per se, as there exist other fairly low level spells which give blanket immunity to certain save-or-else attacks, Resist Fear, Death Ward, Free Action etc. and it was possible even in mid-game without mods (starting with a dwarf, gnome or halfling). Mages shouldn't blithely cast at such a buffed character/should try to debuff them. Negative saves from equipped things (multiple protection items, a non SCS tweak) is honestly worse.

That said, the stackability of some of those buffs has its own problem. With Emotion Hope & Emotion Courage your characters are already at +3 to hit, +5 to damage for 1 game hour. Add in two short-duration spells, Recitation & Righteous Wrath of the Faithful (same alignment) and you're up to +7 to hit, +9 to damage, an extra attack per round which by default does stack with (Improved) Haste, contrary to the description... oh, and best of all +8 hp haha. Little reason to be a single classed warrior with that loadout available as AoE magic that doesn't have drawbacks in contrast to, say, Champion's Strength or even Aid, even without matching alignment for the more potent version of RWoTF I think I'd much rather memorize it of vanilla CS. It gives the advantage to a party of dual classed fighter->casters, or even thief->mages/clerics.

1 hour ago, Christian said:

Divine Protection I didn´t find to be out of line but I didn´t abuse it for elemental protection in a pinch but rather as a shorter PFMW. After all priests have plenty of elemental protection at their hands with IWD spells now and they now have even ways to protect against dispelling. So I never had any use for the elemental resistance of the divine spells. To be honest, with SCS and Ascension installed and all the saving throw bonuses from the additional spells I find it very hard to get killed by spells once you get past maybe 2.5 mill XP. From then on physical damage is the main threat. Making those spells have a cast time of 7 with a duration of 3 rounds or some such would all but eliminate them from gameplay. There is no chance to cast them uninterrupted at that stage in the game.

I concede it would be a little harder to get it off in the thick of combat, but then again, it's a 5th level spell not a HLA, priests can have pretty good AC and missile protection (buffs or otherwise) and a ward from single target offensive spells at least.

If it's truly needed to keep the short casting time then perhaps it should only grant +50% resistance to all damage, still more useful to the player than the AI though, and encourages stacking with other things like Hardiness, this spoils some of the uniqueness of these two spells though.

My preference would be to revert DP/GDP to original casting time and also allow touch range casting on an ally, plus it really needs to be detectable for the AI (my earlier comment on boosting resistances rather than blocking the damage opcode should incidentally accomplish this, but I know it's not the spell's original concept).

6 hours ago, DavidW said:

For reference, which are the ones you think are overpowered, and does that include with SCS's tweaks?

Divine Protection (formerly Shield of Lathander), specifically with the reduced casting time, making it instant with the amulet of power.

In terms of the comprehensive protection it provides on the fly, the closest equivalent would be a mage firing off a Spell Trigger of Protection from Magic Weapons, Protection from Magic Energy and Protection from Fire; true, all those last longer (if not dispelled) but the mage could still be killed with:

• Normal weapons
• Triple Chain Lightning Triggers, or triple Lightning Bolt sequencers
• Cone of Cold
• Acid Storm

...and of course the mage needs to be 16th level, and could do this once per rest period, clerics get DP at level 9 and have a lot of 5th level slots by mid game. Even a potion of magic shielding (another "panic button" type defense that can be used very swiftly) only grants +50% damage resistance from magical/elemental sources, no protection from physical attacks, and is rare, expensive and consumable.

I think there was a good reason why it was originally so slow to cast.

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Spider Spawn's SPIDSWSU.cre's gender from 0x6 to 0x20 and was able to summon six of them just fine...then I tried to summon six skeleton warriors (whom I did not modify), but was only able to get five before the summoning limit kicked in

In my games at least if you do it the other way around it chokes, if you have 5 controlled creatures with gender = SUMMONED then you can't summon anything else no matter what the allegiance or gender field. On the other hand you can have arbitrarily many friendly but uncontrolled monsters with gender = SUMMONED, or controlled monsters with 0x20, but only if they're summoned first.

9 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I think I would like to upgrade these shadows to wraiths (43 HP and 4 AC instead of 34 and 7 respectively) just for a little more staying power...and exempt them from the summoning limit, which just means changing their gender from 0x6 (summoned) to 0x20 (no limit summoned). Though having them be autonomous might not be the worst idea either...but they need to have a script to follow the wielder around, and having them crowd the wielder with no ability to override their movement could get awfully annoying.

Unless the most recent version of EE changes this, having 5 "summoned" allies (or whatever value is in summlimt.2da) already in an area prevents any more allied creatures being summoned, regardless of what's in the creature's gender field.

One way around this; when you want summon-disrespecting spells or effects, have them set a global variable. The background script needs to be appended so that whenever the variable is of a non-zero value an unseen "spy" creature is spawned next to whoever cast/used the ability (detectable stat on the caster), which proceeds to spawn secondary allied creatures by script, the type & number dependent on what value the variable was initially set to, before returning the variable to zero and despawning.

Or it may be fixed globally soon anyway.

7 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

1. For some reason, all ten of the summoning effects are zeroed out. Weird. Hmm. In my opinion, this ability...uh, kind of sucks? Like, it seems as though it really sucks, but maybe I'm wrong. You get Spectral Brand in the middle of Watcher's Keep, where all enemies are going to have enchanted attacks, as they all do in ToB. Regular shadows only have 34 HP, have 15 THAC0, and 7 AC. They're going to be killed in two hits that are going to hit 95% of the time. Worse, by default, the summoning cap applies to these shadows, so...like, they prevent you from summoning anything else and all ten of them cannot be summoned at the same time anyways unless they're being immediately killed as they're being summoned every round. This just doesn't seem very useful.

There are two ways I can think of doing this if you don't want to remove the summoning cap (which needs a hack anyway on original BG2).

1. Treat the shadows as summons which aren't directly controlled by the player (EA.ids = GOODCUTOFF) like the rabbits from Limited Wish, those disregard the hardcoded summoning cap as much as enemy summons. They'd need to be scripted to attack and follow the party at a distance of course, rather than run around like the rabbits.
2. Abstract the "dark swarm" ability, say rather than 10 shadows you'd get a "single" shadow which has:

• Undispelable Mirror Image
• 10 attacks per round, or alternatively...
• Only 5 attacks per round, but an ability like Fire Shield triggered on hit (say 50% chance) to apply the effects of a shadow's touch to the nearest attacker

The second option sort of simulates 10 shadows fighting as a unit, like the Insect Plague spell, which doesn't actually summon insects treated as individual creatures in game.