GordonHalfman

Oei_badler: Yeah. Rangers no longer share health with their animal companions.

Glad to help!

I noticed a slightly obscure bug with the knockdown skill where it can become disabled. You need to time the knockdown such that the targeted creature dies mid animation, before it connects. I think it also needs to be the last creature in the encounter so the combat state ends, not 100% on that though. After doing this the knockdown skill is grayed out and shows the text "Already activated". This persists through subsequent encounters, and also saving and reloading. It does seem to be re-enabled by returning to town though. Here's a video to show the effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ6MSlaY6Zo

Immunities in BG2 weren't perfect, but I don't find them particularly problematic either. They suffer from a general lack of opportunity cost, being cheap to cast and often having long duration with no downside. Partly this is a symptom of high level D&D, low level spells just become too plentiful after a while. But I think the expression "hard counters" lacks nuance, it could refer to different things. Like: A) X is completely necessary to counter Y B) X is completely sufficient to counter Y C) X is completely sufficient to counter Y, but has some interesting downside or wrinkle that requires more subtle use I think A is a problem, B is fine and C is better. In general in Bg2 I don't think A actually occurs. Also I feel like a point that is sometimes missed in the debate about "rock paper scissors" is that immunities are less about requiring some kind of tactical genius to counter and more about just giving encounters a different look. The game has great variety in encounter design partly because of the number of different monsters but also the number of different circumstances. Like golems for example, they have 100% magic resistance. So the usual stuff your mage does won't work. Does that mean he's useless? No, there's a half dozen things he can do but it's not the same stuff as every other encounter. Or say you have a surprise group of vampires running at you when you're not prepared. Maybe you have to break out a wand of summoning that you haven't used for ages just to get a quick wall of fodder between you and them. But the summons don't last long so you use a few potions as well to try and take them down quickly. But then you end up having to tank the last remaining vamp with a mirror image and just survive the encounter with a level 1 wizard. And then as you run back to the inn you get jumped by some thieves and your wizard has to use an invis potion because he has 6 hp. And that's cool. And then next time you fight vampires you're prepared and it's much easier. And that's ok as well. Rpg's don't have to be designed with the philosophy that every encounter has to be some hand crafted thing designed to give an optimal experience that tests the players tactical muscles but not too much while also listening sympathetically to the player's ideas concerns and expectations. After playing Bg2 almost any modern Rpg just feels extremely one note by comparison largely for this reason.

Word of advice: Cut it out with worrying about timed quests. 80% of the time it doesn't matter, and the other 20% gives you absurd time allowance. Your "too much content" problem would disappear if you relax and accept them as they come, doing at any time what quest you feel like it, leaving the others for when the mood strikes you Yeah this, there's like one quest in the underdark much later that has a time limit that might potentially matter, the companion quests give you ages and will warn you before they leave anyway.

Regarding spell memorization, almost any temple sells potions of genius and potions of mind focusing, these stack and can get your INT up to 24 which gives you 100% chance to learn a spell. I always save up my scrolls and learn them all at once this way. Kind of cheesy I suppose, but whatever it's a rubbish mechanic.

Mage Thief can be sort of fun, since you can mem a bunch of invisibility spells and use them to repeatedly go for backstabs in the fight, and early game you can get the arbane sword and cast webs everywhere like a fighter mage would. Unfortunately your THACO will be lousy though unless you use Tensers which is a level 6 spell. Although you can use items and priest buffs to help as well. Fighter-Thief is probably the best thief class, they can dual weild and get 2 attacks per round. Multi-class in general is good at the start of SoA but starts to fall off a bit because of the way the leveling curve works. (It's a long time between levels in the second half of the game.) If you like thieves and bards you can consider the rogue rebalancing mod: http://avenger981.github.io/doc/readme_rr.html It has some cool stuff, designed to make single class rogues more viable. Crucially it adds dual wielding, which is straight up better in this game unfortunately. I also liked the spell revisions and item revisions mods over at gibberlings3. These are more for experienced players just to give the game a different look.

I don't really get it, you complain about Beholder's being an example of "hard counters" when you were able to brute force your way through the fight just fine. Then you complain about fighting vamps without negative plane protection when apparently you got through that fight just fine as well and could solve the level drain issue with one trip to a temple. Vampire encounters can also be avoided by not going out at night. Then you complain about not having a Paladin specific solution to the Maevar quest, a quest that starts with you joining a criminal organisation to investigate one of their members for treachery and ends with with you murdering him for his "crimes." It is actually possible to ignore Edwin's quests and just kill him with a backstab or something and take the key to Maevar's strongbox to complete the quest line that way. I don't think you can pickpocket it though, which is unfortunate. But regardless there's no way to square the entire quest line with a lawful good alignment, even if you just assume everyone at Maevar's guild is evil enough to deserve death getting paid to kill them is a pretty... pragmatic interpretation of a paladin's code. Anyway you're basically describing a bunch of stuff about the game that makes it so awesome. A excellently rendered fantasy city, tons of little encounters, lots of weird and wonderful monsters to learn about, lots of companion quests and interaction, some morally dubious **** for you too etc.

I don't think that was actually Kangaax but one of the liches guarding his remains. Anyway good read, I wish I could play this game for the first time again.

I wonder if they made a single armour rating or class value whether both DR and Res (or whatever they want to call it) could have a fixed relationship with it? i.e DR = AC and Res(%) = 2*AC or something like that. I can't remember what the typical values were before. Doesn't feel like it should be an issue either way.

In 3e you had evasion to consider but in AD&D most spells were save for half, with some exceptions. Basically equivalent to a graze except when you consider DT grazes will be less than half damage in general, and then you have misses and crits on top of that.

Oh so it was. Derp. Plz delete.

-Left click on a corpse or other temporary loot container on the ground to open the loot UI -In the loot UI take some action that will close it and also destroy the container such as clicking Take All -Ensure when doing this that as you close the UI the cursor is positioned over the soon to be deleted container on the ground -Observe the loot cursor (the armoured hand thing) is now persistent and has replaced the normal move cursor.

I think if you click on door that you have the key for it should just prompt the party leader or closest character to open it. Instead it prompts the one with the highest mechanics skill to do so as if the door needed to be picked. This is slightly annoying when your rogue is in the back and can't path his way to the door!

-Open the loot UI for a body or container. -Pick up each item individually using click and hold the LMB to drag and drop -As you pick up the last item in this way, observe the loot UI closes and you see the floating item icon still. When you "drop" the item the icon disappears and the last item is still in the container. EDIT: when looting a body it seems the item sometimes be destroyed doing this. One time when looting some coins in this way the coin icon got stuck to my cursor.

I've noticed a bug where after reloading my party can no longer move. I'm not sure about the conditions only that it seems to happen after multiple reloads in the same session. Quitting out of the program and reloading always fixes it. The move target reticule thing displays when you click but you don't go anywhere although you can still cast spells. If you use the RMB the formation rotate cursor becomes stuck and doesn't go away. Shown in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_r1p2dNjIo&feature=youtu.be I've attached also the output log. output_log_cant_click.zip

Just had a look, seems to work! I shouldn't be so surprised. Actually quite easy to test since you can see the duration on the buff tooltip. Seems like it's the total duration that is buffed, not just the linger time specfically, so you can get 100% uptime on alternating chants with 16 resolve I think.

Cool, thanks!

Yeah if you don't mind, could be interesting to know. I suppose it doesn't make that much difference, if it buffed the "linger" duration then you'd have slightly less down time when alternating chants but not a whole lot.

The level 1 nuke seems completely daft. Not much reason to do anything other than spam it off cd. The phantom summon thing was pretty good as well. Pace of the combat doesn't seem to favour them right now, since you don't get to use many invocations. Must be a difficult class to balance. They could use some UI improvements. In particular the tooltip for the chants could show some icons for the phrases. Also it would be nice to see the AoE of chants somehow. Are phrases supposed to benefit from Int and Resolve bonuses does anyone know?

I agree that CON is pretty crap. The BB priest now starts with an amulet that gives +20 Endurance, which didn't strike me as being a particularly overpowered item, but it's equivalent to at least 10 points of CON for most characters? I also think it would be nice if they integrated more incidental bonuses into the stat system. Like the range bonus you get from Perception, this is obviously not the selling point of the stat but I think logically appropriate incidental perks like that make the stat system more satisfying. It stands out as an oddity since most stats don't have this. It could have done with other things by removing some talents and integrating their bonuses into the stat system, like Graceful Retreat, Fast Runner, Interrupting Blows and Armoured Grace. I'm not too likely to take these talents over stuff that effects combat capabilities more directly, but they could make sense as extra bonuses in a stat system. For example they could have done something like: Dex - +3% action speed, 0.15 MS, +1.5 Deflection against disengagement Con - +2% Endurance, + 2 Flat Endurance, -5% recovery penalty from armour (multiplicative) Per - +1% critical range, +1.5% interrupt, +0.3m range Numbers can be tweaked but the idea being that maxing out Dex is roughly equivalent to the bonuses you get from fast runner and graceful retreat combined.

The level 1 Priest spell halt applies a stuck effect of the same duration (12.5 seconds for the BB priest) regardless of whether the effect is a graze, hit or a crit.

If you cast the Wizard spell Bulwark Against the Elements and look at the character sheet you notice only the Burn DR is listed as applying, the other types are listed as suppressed. This appears to be true even if you have no other DR active. You notice a similar thing from the Druid spell Wood Skin, where again only the first DR type is active and the others are suppressed.

In the fight against the mercenaries in the Dryford crossing I noticed something odd, the npc Elfya cast a Ghost Blades spell where the cone originated from his target instead of from his feet. You can see the Ghost Blades particles here: