subtledoctor

Eh, then whale on the enemy with a fighter, a ranger, and a thief. For most BG1 enemies 6 seconds of uninterrupted dogpiling = quick death. 60 seconds of stun is a totally unnecessary luxury.

Re wands: I usually tweak the Wand of MM to cast a 2-missile MM, since my mages have a 1-missile MM as an at-will cantrip... yes the thing calls the Cowled Wizards down on me... but It's *using* magic. It *should* bring the Cowled Wizards down on you. That Wand of Paralyzation is indeed super OP. I try to keep the "Stun" effect to 2-6 seconds, and use "Hold" for longer paralysis. Making either change would balance that wand. (Yes a wand that stuns for only 6 seconds would still be perfectly useful - it has a save penalty, and almost nothing resists the Stun effect, and that's 6 seconds you can either reposition a party or cast an important spell, or just whale on the enemy with GWW or something. Maybe 6-12 seconds on a failed save, 2 seconds on a *successful* save, so you're not totally wasting charges, and make it less expensive to recharge.) If it stays long-duration, I would do a 30-second Hold with a save penalty, or a 60-second Hold and get rid of the penalty.

This, I suspect. Don't use old savegames with new mod installs.

I guess what I'm saying is, why does it have to be Death Knight vs. Cacofiend? Conjurers have a huge glut at 6th and 7th levels... - air elemental, - earth elemental, - fire elemental, - invisible stalker, - wyvern, - nishruu, - djinni, - efreet, - hakeashar, - greater air elemental, - greater earth elemental, - greater fire elemental, - cacofiend ... did I miss any? Tactically speaking, what's the difference between nishruu and hakeashar? Between djinni and efreet? Between the elementals? Cacofiend is interesting and different from all the others, AND it conforms to the traditional trope of a wizard summoning a demon for dark knowledge or dark deeds. For me, it would not be the first on the chopping block. Yes there are two other fiend-summoning spells, but a nabassu is reasonably different from a glabrezu or a pit fiend - more different than a djinn from an efreet, or than a nishruu from a hakeashar, or than the elementals from each other. And the difference is even bigger when you add the excellent, excellent aTweaks PnP Fiends component. I'm finding myself having to do some weird Weidu trickery where I copy Death Knight to another spell, pull Cacofiend out of the SR backup folder and restore it, as an intermediate step before installing aTweaks. It's convenient that my mod comes in between SR and aTweaks... but it's still a PITA and I still never ever find myself summoning djinni or hakeashars.

I added the Meistersinger kit to my mod (think 'Pied Piper of Hamelin' as a bard kit) and his special innate ability is indeed to summon a swarm of bunnies.

SR goes before SCS. To stop the summoning spell switch, you could find it in the main .tpa file (search for spwi707) and comment it out. (EDIT - this was in response to geg_ma3gau, and I got super ninja'd) Demi I don't remember if Imade this clear in whatever other discussion came up about these spells... but I hate to lose one of the three fiend-summoning spells. Is there no way to keep it? Maybe collapse Djinni and Efreet into one spell? I don't even know what the difference between them is, as far as tactics, but I know there is a greater and more interesting difference between them and Cacofiend.

Just set it for 4 turns instead... Seems like the bug hits effects with a duration over 255 seconds. So just give the stones a duration of 240 seconds. No one will care, it will play fine, and you won't have to wait for Beamhaul to release the next of their once-a-year patches...

I agree Armor of Faith really has no place in a druid's spell list. At least not without a new name, and probably a new animation too. Likewise, Barkskin has no place in a Cleric's spellbook. Clerics should get AoF, druids should get Barkskin. Is Barkskin 2nd level? Maybe just add a new 1st-level variant that only works on the caster.

Well, the game was designed with a party in mind, not solo runs - think back to 1999, there were plenty of games where you could only play a solo character, a party in an RPG was actually a big deal. So I suspect the designers just didn't care about solo runs.

'fraid so. Well, I suppose exploitable, but if you have this effect in a 9th-level spell then it's only exploitable if you have two 9th-level casters. Plus, it wouldn't be totally in the player's favor because any AI mages with Ab. Imm. active would resist player Timestops as well... As for Alacrity, methinks it could stand to be rebalanced a bit. Maybe just add +2 to casting time to counteract the super-cheese. But I guess these are not things for SR.

Idea: IMMUNITY TO TIMESTOP Is there a spell in SR that grants this? Or an item in IR? It would be nice if this was available to the player, as long as it is sufficiently rare. I could see this being a Divination effect, if you bend the definition a bit like I do and figure that the ability to glimpse the future could give some ability to manipulate and/or resist time-based spell effects. So conceivably this could be an added effect for Moment of Prescience. Alternatively, it could be resisted by phase effects: so, by Ghost Form and possibly the Boots of Phase Shifting. Altenatively, and probably most sensibly, it could be added to the effects of Absolute Immunity at 9th level, making that really the most complete defensive spell. This is based (like most of my ideas) on common tropes from fantasy writing. A powerful magic user freezes everything around him, but our hero is powerful enough to resist the effect, and now the two have a battle of wills (or, of fists) while the frozen world looks on... think of The Dark Is Rising, I forget what other sources. Anyway, just food for thought, and seems like it would be easy enough to slot in somewhere. FURTHER THOUGHT: Timestop + Improved Alacrity is pure cheese, right? Especially with the all-too popular casting-time-reducing items. But it's nonsensical; seems to me the titanic effort required to stop time would preclude an effect that basically hastes yourself. So, why not make Timestop disable (protect from) the effects of IA? Feasible? Or do SCS mages rock the TS+IA spam?

Man, Jarno is being unusually... pointed, today. Ease back, buddy. Carrying normal weapons isn't interesting or tactical; it's boring and annoying. Plus, IIRC SCS enemies will *not* switch to normal weapons. So it works out to be a *huge* advantage for the player. Which runs counter to the most basic aim of SCS. No one is talking about making the game easier. We're talking about helping the AI and making the game work better. But this is neither here nor there. Demi has said he doesn't like the way PfMW works, but changing it is beyond what SR and to do. As Ardanis said in another thread, SR has had to give up good ideas in order to stay focused on its core mission. To quote Steve Jobs, good design means saying a thousand nos for every yes. It falls to some other modder to take SCS + SR as a starting point, a foundation, and make changes that SR can't. If only there were a mod designed to be installed on top of them, to give players the choice to go that one extra step, to make more drastic changes and bend a couple rules in the pursuit of better gameplay (at least, 'better' according to one's personal preferences)... Oh wait, that's me, I'm doing that. So Demi don't sweat it, there are other mods to pick up the ideas that are too crazy for SR. Some day I'll figure out a viable solution to to PfMW problem. It might be as simple as changing the spell level. Meantime, for purposes of testing gameplay with SR, at the moment I'm much more interested in what people think make the True Seeing timer trigger more often... (EDIT - Icezera we posted at the same time. My first paragraph after the quote addresses what you're saying. Meantime I really, really didn't mean to pull this thread down this particular rabbit hole - it started out with a joke. If you want to continue discussion of PfMW it should probably be in a new thread. Lord knows there's enough potential discussion for it's own thread.)

From what I gather it's perfectly compatible. It's possible you'll want to adjust your tactics a bit... but that's what this game is all about.

^ what kreso said. PfMW cast by a mob already immune to normal weapons (which SCS *LOVES* to do... as do players after finishing SoA) is far more OP than Abs. Imm., and at a far lower spell level. I think I said multiple times that I think it's OP for 6th level in either incarnation. And I've said multiple times that I don't actually like it and would prefer to replace it with something other than weapon immunity - like Improved Stoneskin. So maybe read the thread before you start insulting people...

Well, you could turn it into full Weapon Immunity, but add a check for aVENGER's AI, and if it's present then keep vulnerability to normal weapons. Though maybe you don't like the idea of SR not being 100% consistent. In any event my main criticism is that, in either case, it should be higher level. I don't love this in concept (and I don't love things like Globe of Blades, so maybe this is just my personal bias) but I haven't tested it yet so I'll reserve judgment. I forgot that MoP takes over the Imp. Mantle slot. MoP is fantastic, don't change it. Demi, I don't know if I've ever discussed this, but imho this doesn't work very well. Repeating the TS every round lets a player go invisible and do a backstab, and certain at-will invisible enemies like SCS/aTweaks air elementals and invisible stalkers can all but ignore it, rendering it a wasted spell. I have always modded vanilla TS to work every 2-3 seconds instead of every 6... I consider it necessary, almost a bug-fix given how the spell is meant to work. Btw if True Sight only works for the caster now, doesn't that leave a gap to be filled by a high-level Div spell, to work like the old True Sight? I.e. Oracle every 6 (or 3!) seconds? Illusion Purge, or Sphere of Truth, or something. FWIW I think all of these spells should be 100% identical in effect (I mean the II part of the effect.) Anything else confuses the player. (Though, I could see taking II out of Mislead altogether, and only granting normal Invisibility... if the clone is meant to be a distraction, why would you give yourself away by attacking someone?)

This is a very good idea, btw. Voting with both hands for it. Mantle (6) - immune to weapons, self, 4 rounds Protection From Weapons (7) - single target, X rounds, perhaps longer casting time (iirc SCS only uses it to prebuff, so it won't notice the casting time change) Improved Mantle (8) - immune to weapons and +Y save bonus, self, 4 rounds AI (9) - immune to weapons/debuffs/elements (no direct spell immunity though, let Spell Deflection still play a role), party, 4 rounds I also agree about fireshield/acid sheath. But I still think total weapon immunity for 4 rounds is too powerful for a level 6 spell. Maybe level 7... in fact you could turn PfMW (which SCS uses situationally) into a 7th-level spell, and turn Mantle (which you say SCS uses for pre-buffing) into a 6th-level Ironskin/Improved Stoneskin. Then make Mantle at 8th level (weapon immunity + whatever) and Abs. Imm. at 9th level. And I actually really like the idea of Abs. Imm. covering a group, it would finally give the spell an advantage over Timestop.

Probably because you have that SCS component. kreso is describing how SR works if you don't use that SCS component. In that case you would change around the order of the steps in your plan, to (I think) [3], [1], [4]. I've already expressed my opinions on PfMW and I don't want to thread-jack here, so I'll spoiler my response:

EDIT - ninja' by kreso, you can ignore the Wall Of Text below. And that implementation of Non-Detection sounds great, I can't wait to play with it. ...

Wait - how do you remove the dispelling screen if the guy's invisible? I hope this isn't an instance where the AI can become invulnerable. The game's only fun when you can use problem-solving abilities to overcome stuff. (That's why stupid PFMW needs to be torn from SCS' clenched hands and murdered and thrown out with the trash... ahem - I greyed out there, what happened?) (Man, I really need to get all this stuff installed and do some testing. If my Elven Archer's Faerie Fire arrows can bypass all that and turn the wizard visible... that would be pretty boss.)

Well that is more accurate... but then again I said it in 6 words and you used 60. Maybe we should return this discussion to the IR beta... I've got it installed in IWDee but I only just made it to Kuldahar since I spent most of the day doing emergency surgery on my mod. As I progress in my game I'll report anything that seems worth mentioning.

After all other items-related mods.

Ha ha, my mod does that too. (The APR change, not the d4 damage, but that's fairly easy.) I'll update the above mini-mod to have both changes later today when I have some time. UPDATE: okay try downloading it again, now it should change both quarterstaff and darts https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86011511/StaffAC.zip

This code is already in my mod - here, I can extract this bit pretty easily and make it a tiny little extra mod. (It won't be reflected in staff descriptions though, that's a bit more involved.) Install this after IR and anything else that changes quarterstaves: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86011511/StaffAC.zip

Do you want to mention which mod it was, in case someone with a similar problem finds this thread? Incidentally, a similar thing happened with my mod: I had a CLAB reference to a file that hadn't been COPIED over. Ordinarily this is no big deal: the spell effect wouldn't happen, but you can still play the game. With SCS however, it choked and refused to install. Now, this was actually helpful for me, since it called my attention to the bug. But for the player it's very frustrating - they are unable to install a mod that they see dozens of other people installing, and they don't know why. The retort is, of course, "it's a bug in the other mod, not SCS, so it's not SCS's problem." And point taken. But I'm curious, what exactly is SCS doing that causes it to choke so hard on a simple missing CLAB .spl reference? What, exactly, is the function that the other mod's bug is causing to be interrupted?

Damn... I just did a new IWDee install and I couldn't figure out how to fix that error (I was seeing something to do with ".../item_rev_inlined/main_bracers_of_speed.tpa" and I couldn't find any such folder.) I also noticed that the main component, unlike most others, does not have the little commented-out "/* || ENGINE_IS ~iwdee~ */" line, so I just assumed the main comp is not for IWDee. I just rolled a party and made my level-1 save. With that fix, can I install the main component on IWDee? Is it worth reinstalling all my mods for that? Not the end of the world, probably 30 minutes' work, but I'd avoid it if you tell me the main comp is incompatible even with this fix...