Corona quarantine BG2 Options

[bulian]

Bulian's 6.4 branch update:

New items and NPC modernization - complete

• Cromwell/Cespenar dialogues,
• 9 new items, including ones for Sarevok, Minsc, Dorn, and Aerie
• Seven additional randomized items
• Sarevok is now viable as a joinable party member in TOB
• Aerie has more reasonable IA stats

Updated encounters

• Limak
• Spellhold Book
• The Four (with more relevant IA rewards, removal of unbalanced items)
• Supreme Golem in Watcher's Keep (party can now fight it and green wyrm),
• Dracolich is accessible n Ch 6/7 with significantly reduced rewards,
• Demon fight in Underdark (new Chapter 5 encounter)

Quality of life

• Early containers in Irenicus dungeon (bag of holding, ammo belt, etc.)
• Store depreciation removal - sell items for same cost regardless if the merchant has them in stock
• Stronghold quests continue in Chapter 7

All protagonists can access almost everything in the mod (less balanced)

• Remove class restrictions on forging items
• Enable Memory of the Apprenti robe to be forged 100% for all protagonists
• Enable early Ranger and Mage stronghold quests for all PCs
• Ancient Secret of Sulda will remain Vagrant only
• The Old Ones/Time Machine will remain Necromancer only
• Enable Justice Day quest for all PCs

This post has been edited by bulian: May 16 2020, 01:18 PM

[HTRT]

Hmm true...Nice find with mass invisibility. I'm probably using an old version i.e. the same version where several item restrictions didn't work well like the truth/judgement day for good aligned fighters, boots of ranger lord for rangers, hood of the honorless for (all) thieves, etc.
I believe these item restrictions have been fixed later, cause I remember reading something about that.

SPWII41 was the culprit, but apparently it is working for example in Improved Anvil-Master instead of my old version, so nevermind !

I'm reading my last notes for that archer run before I stopped and only information I didn't share about possible inconsistencies would be the following :

-A vampire called Vampire had the string Panic after Dorn's aura of despair despite (obviously) not getting actually scared.

-Flaming fists from Rasaad is dispellable but the icon doesn't wear off if dispelled, although the actual effects are dispelled. It doesn't seem to be something that should be dispelled if we compare it to other "innate-physical-fighter-type" abilities in the mod.
Mazzy's strength, invoke courage and righteous magic abilities are dispellable as well (and maybe shouldn't).

-Guardian of the ring tried remove magic on Rasaad's undispellable innate IH. It is quite likely that many IA dispellers including mages and purge magic users would likewise recognize a monk's IH and waste their efforts on that. Riskbreakers have a real innate improved haste (which is dispellable; understandably for balance purposes) and the monks have some flavour ability flurry of blows that is in terms of gameplay an improved haste. Don't know how you want to deal with that, but minimally monsters probably shouldn't recognize the monk's ability as a real IH if it's undispellable.

I don't think I will be continuing that run unfortunately. I would still like to say : Based on that incomplete archer run and countless tests/experiments in other runs, to me it certainly wouldn't seem exaggerated to go with a relatively universal fix for missile weapons in IA.

Something to take into account beforehand : missile weapons ARE usable and (quite) useful in many fights early on and mid game. Alas, many opponents are absolutely impervious to them and their usability late game is abysmal.

The idea I had would be to implement some kind of : new missile resistance = 1-((1-n)/2) where n is the slashing/piercing/crushing resistance if they are equal to each other. For example, a monster with 60 resistance to slashing, piercing and crushing would acquire a 80% missile resistance instead of 100%; monsters that are seemingly designed with weapons in mind, for example gem golems, ultra golems, would still remain immune to missile.

The reasoning behind this change would be to make some players happy and feel less obligated by IA to play a certain way and according to my experiences, taking into account the monster strengths, regeneration, sustainability, pressure to damage them quickly, impossibility to leave most fights, specific vs missile AC bonuses to many opponents, it wouldn't unbalance the game. The main idea of making most monsters totally invulnerable to missiles was to avoid cheesy uses of missiles, but with such a ruleset and the formidable challenge posed by many IA monsters, I highly doubt this kind of vulnerability would allow for drastically easy encounter solving. Remember that even with equal resistance to all types of physical damage, melee weapons will almost always do (a lot) more damage, so this difference increases further if the missile resistance is better than the 3 others.

It would not be possible to take down the rakshasha prince with enough +4 missile attacks and enough tacho and attacks per round. In a realistic scenario, you could see for example an archer reliably damaging the prince non-stop, but this amount of damage would only partially work out the regeneration of the prince, being far from enough to completely cancel it.

Anyway, just an idea !

Another thing I wanted to talk about is I recently finished a bg1-sod-bg2-tob walkthrough. The protagonist was a necromancer and I was able to play the entire saga without any kind of inconsistency whatsoever. Sensible stuff such as being a necromancer was properly checked. I did get one inconsistency, but it isn't IA related I think : I found 2 helms of balduran in its usual container. Other than that, everything behaved flawlessly. The 500K experience on party definitly wasn't game breaking at all. It did make the early game easier, but overall the run felt quite legit and satisfying. I decided to test improved spellhold since I had that xp boost. Party was able to defeat everything theoritically doable before spellhold, including mage stronghold up to the old one battle, twisted rune, firkraag, alhoon, umar, kangaxx, slaver hq, WK3, post firkraag adventures, etc. The only exclusion was orcus. This type of run was harder and more satisfying than the usual 2 350 000 spellhold ones, imo. Jon Irenicus in harder spellhold is really hard because he summons a TON of golems and party only had 4 800 000 xp, which meant very few HLAS to get rid of the golems.

I tested two characters intensively in this run :

A berseker 9 dual class thief and Jaheira.

Berseker-9 ->thief : Use any item is currently "broken", but I think you are aware of that. Even though it is "broken" and that character can use very interesting combinations of items, I didn't feel like this character was breaking my game. As a matter of fact, he was among the weakest of my arguably powerful party. This guy was able to use the holy avenger (IA upgrade with the 5% chance to dispel) for most of the game and it was a very very nice weapon. The 5% dispel includes dispelling stuff such as hardiness and spell protections, so when it does land, for example on Rozvankee, it wreaks havoc. Interestingly enough, this holy avenger IA upgrade allows this character to backstab despite being a two handed sword. To keep the pleasure of having a thief, I refrained myself from using items that would permantently disable thief buttons, such as necro helmet, cernd's cloak, etc. Even with such restrictions, this character was a master of magic resistance and was able to reach very high amounts of physical resistance although it wasn't necessary to use that. The sunlight cursed helmet from the four helped with his low tach0 and later in the game he was able to use tenser's transformation with a noble staff. All of that seems really original and exciting, but ultimately this character proved strong, fun, but not overpowered at all, because : no warrior HLAS. Lack of warrior HLAS and low number of attacks per round (even if he could borrow jaheiras' gloves) restricted his power. MANY opponents are susceptible to backstab, you just have to test a little. Whenever an opponent was a target for backstab, this opponent got ripped apart, though once again it didn't unbalance my game and I still think he was my weakest fighter overall. Since I was going with improved spellhold I could have dualled at level 13 and make him a kensai/thief instead. I do not think the character would have been a lot more powerful. Of course, a far fetched non-legit exaggeration such as a 28 kensai->29 thief would be an atrociously powerful character.

Jaheira : Was a very powerful early game character. Her clan hunter was insanely helpful and remained pretty strong for the entire game. In mid game and certainly late game, I observed that her lack of spell casting alacrity combined with her reliance on over-preparation to become a fighting juggernaut made her a second class character, although still very strong overall. What I mean is that ultimately in the game you want somoene either ready to do great in physical combat with minimal prepration, or somoene capable of doing a lot in a little time in terms of spellcasting. There were many times where she faded away with a dispel/purge/script dispel and had trouble having great impact on the battle. Many of her critical buffs last one turn, so you don't get the juggernaut jaheira for long. I loved her usage of giant strength (rarely have anyone to cast that early on). I know that many people consider her to be very powerful and so do I, but I don't see her as a must have for a very difficult run. I feel shy to share this because people regard her as too strong, but I would have really liked to see some nice useful spells on the clan hunter who is a high level druid; the clan hunter spell selection seemed a little dull to me.

Now for the present, I made a very small private personnal private mod to include the vagrant kit in bg1, mostly following IA code. I haven't done an entire playthrough to testify properly for it, but I have made many tests and for now it seems :

1) The vagrant is totally legitimate as far as IA bg2 goes, even for stuff as sensible as the IAMVAGRANT variable, vagrant-specific items, specific quests, etc. This is great as maybe one day we could have the possibility of playing the IA party for the entire saga, see how they fared on the swoard coast before becoming strong heroes
2) The icewind dale spells from SCS in bg1 ee and sod can be exported without risk in a bg2 improved anvil game. The game will simply consider these spells do not exist as the program is missing the ressources and it will gracefully avoid their existence. They were all removed from spellbooks in a seemingly totally bugless way and the characters seem flawless.

So that's it, nice to see you guys are still working on IA ! Good luck and have a nice summer !

This post has been edited by HTRT: Jun 25 2020, 02:06 AM