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bg1 feedback


kreso

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I've just finished Durlag's tower, and heading to Cloakwood mines. I tought to post some feedback/toughts/questions here.

The party I played consisted of 3 paladins (Cav, UH, Inq) thif/mage multi, sorcerer and Lathander priest.

I'll post info and toughts about specific encounters in order I fought them.

First relatively improved battle was a random meeting with some Ogre Berserkers. I can't recall if they used their rage in SCS21. Now they do, and it's a huge pain to handle - melee combat vs them is very difficult if at all possible, damage done exceeds 20HP per hit.

Which brings me to another point - Blindness spell. This is arguably the single best spell in BG1. It's the "ultimate" save or die for low-level spells, and I was indeed surprised by just how many creatures are vulnerable to it (Battle Horrors, even some boss-type dwarves in Durlag's tower - Fear, Pride etc.)

This spell could (should?) go through a revision, at least the duration should be much shorter (something like tweak to GR, Insect Plague and the like) - it's that effective and AI has no response to it in BG1.

Greywolf - has this been changed? I don't recall him dual-wielding.

Bassilus - here I have a slight issue. I finished this without reloading, but he used a 6th level Physical Mirror spell. I tought his level was around 9 or 10. Slightly too much too soon in BG1 I think. Iirc, in SCS21 he used only up to 5th level spells afaik, and was still dangerous.

Droth, the Ogre-mage - he failed a save vs Hold Person. I tought Ogres can't be held by this spell. Seems this one can.

Ankhegs are vulnerable to Sleep. Shouldn't this be changed? They're worth almost 1k each and fall to a level 1 AoE spell. Blindness is at least single-target.

Nimbul - he's a bard, right? He casts 2 level 4 spells. Is such such high level intended (11th, perhaps I'm wrong) for him?

Bandit camp - for some reason, I found this quite easier than before. Some of the enemies there didn't "activate" immediately, and their mage had a bad pre-buff (only Mirror Images I think).

Wolf of Ulcaster - what happened to this encounter? I loved such hand-made gems of SCS :( . It's gone I guess.

Icharyd - same as above. I pulled out my pre-electricity gear, only to find out that the battle from v21 is gone. Any chance for bringing back these encounters? I kind of hoped that SCS24 would introduce more of these types of encounters. I think people love them.

Ghost in Durlag's tower - ......PFMW+Contingency. I somehow don't like PFMW in BG1. May be just me. It makes him kind of a "poor man's lich". The only reason I managed to kill him without reloading is that I disrupted his Cloudkill casting.

Pride, Avarice etc. - Pride is extremely difficult to handle. He ignores summons if he sees any party member in his melee range, and hits for over 25 damage - he kills in 3 hits (I play on Core). He constantly uses some clerical spell (Holy Power or something) as if he had unlimited use of it. The only way I could kill him was to Blind him, and then use magic missiles and scorcher from Wand of Fire - this still took ages, since he constantly runs. This guy is imo harder than Sarevok. I don't recall him being that difficult to manage in v21. The others aren't a pushover by themselves, but Pride's power is immense.

Off to visit Cloakwood Mines.

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Pride has just finished my no-reload run. He's indeed like Sarevok. 27 damage per hit, 4 APR, rarely misses. (And he's wearing a axe despite being fighter/cleric).

Out of curiosity, I made several attempts to kill him and succeced on the 4th one, with full prebuff, losing 2 party members.

That be version 18.

 

Another one I can recall is Borda, who's mage 9/thief 9 and has 100% magic resistance on the top of it. He ended my another no-reload cleric/thief run.

 

And Shandalar is just plain cheater with his 100% resistance to about anything.

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Daveorn casts Flesh to Stone. :( Baaad. Also seems to have 3 or more Sunfires. Took 4 reloads before I nailed him. In addition, and quite unbelievable, he had a ToB-like Superior Healing potion, which I looted :D from his dead body.

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Thanks - very helpful.

First relatively improved battle was a random meeting with some Ogre Berserkers. I can't recall if they used their rage in SCS21. Now they do, and it's a huge pain to handle - melee combat vs them is very difficult if at all possible, damage done exceeds 20HP per hit.

Yeah, BG1 kits are new in SCS v22. I can't tell if you think it's a problem or not.

Which brings me to another point - Blindness spell. This is arguably the single best spell in BG1. It's the "ultimate" save or die for low-level spells, and I was indeed surprised by just how many creatures are vulnerable to it (Battle Horrors, even some boss-type dwarves in Durlag's tower - Fear, Pride etc.)

This spell could (should?) go through a revision, at least the duration should be much shorter (something like tweak to GR, Insect Plague and the like) - it's that effective and AI has no response to it in BG1.

You might be right - I try to mess with spells as little as I can manage but in this case I see your point.

Greywolf - has this been changed? I don't recall him dual-wielding.

Yes - as of v22 I designate a few BG1 creatures to dual-wield so that you see some dual-wielding in the game. The full list is Gardush, Molkar, Haseo, Gretek, and Greywolf.

Bassilus - here I have a slight issue. I finished this without reloading, but he used a 6th level Physical Mirror spell. I tought his level was around 9 or 10. Slightly too much too soon in BG1 I think. Iirc, in SCS21 he used only up to 5th level spells afaik, and was still dangerous.

Unchanged since version 21 (since version 7, in fact, I think!)

 

Droth, the Ogre-mage - he failed a save vs Hold Person. I tought Ogres can't be held by this spell. Seems this one can.

Droth is HUMANOID for some reason, not GIANTHUMANOID, so Hold affects him. That's a bug in vanilla BG1 that's been copied over to the Enhanced Edition. I'll flag it on the EE buglist.

 

Ankhegs are vulnerable to Sleep. Shouldn't this be changed? They're worth almost 1k each and fall to a level 1 AoE spell. Blindness is at least single-target.

Vanilla bug again - their level is too low.

 

Nimbul - he's a bard, right? He casts 2 level 4 spells. Is such such high level intended (11th, perhaps I'm wrong) for him?

He's a 7th level mage/thief. At that level he should be using 1 4th level spell (plus his precast stoneskin, which is long enough duration to cast the previous day). Which spells did he use?

Bandit camp - for some reason, I found this quite easier than before. Some of the enemies there didn't "activate" immediately, and their mage had a bad pre-buff (only Mirror Images I think).

That's the downside of randomly generated mage spells - sometimes you get a weak hand.

Wolf of Ulcaster - what happened to this encounter? I loved such hand-made gems of SCS :( . It's gone I guess.

Icharyd - same as above. I pulled out my pre-electricity gear, only to find out that the battle from v21 is gone. Any chance for bringing back these encounters? I kind of hoped that SCS24 would introduce more of these types of encounters. I think people love them.

Bug. They're supposed to be unchanged from v21. It's too late at night (in the UK) for me to try to debug it now; I'll upload a fixed version tomorrow.

Ghost in Durlag's tower - ......PFMW+Contingency. I somehow don't like PFMW in BG1. May be just me. It makes him kind of a "poor man's lich". The only reason I managed to kill him without reloading is that I disrupted his Cloudkill casting.

Ultimately, BGT and BG:EE use the BG2 spell system, so that's the resource set I work with. (On tutu, you can choose the BG1 or BG2 spell system.)

You can buy a scroll of Breach somewhere, but in general playing for time is usually the best way for lowish level parties to handle PFMW. It only shows up about twice.

Pride, Avarice etc. - Pride is extremely difficult to handle. He ignores summons if he sees any party member in his melee range,

Most intelligent SCS enemies do that.

and hits for over 25 damage - he kills in 3 hits (I play on Core). He constantly uses some clerical spell (Holy Power or something) as if he had unlimited use of it. The only way I could kill him was to Blind him, and then use magic missiles and scorcher from Wand of Fire - this still took ages, since he constantly runs. This guy is imo harder than Sarevok. I don't recall him being that difficult to manage in v21. The others aren't a pushover by themselves, but Pride's power is immense.

He's unchanged from v21, actually. (iirc he was always the strongest of the four.)

 

 

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Daveorn casts Flesh to Stone. :( Baaad. Also seems to have 3 or more Sunfires. Took 4 reloads before I nailed him. In addition, and quite unbelievable, he had a ToB-like Superior Healing potion, which I looted :D from his dead body.

 

He's 11th level (in the vanilla game, and in SCS), and so shouldn't get Flesh to Stone (and doesn't have it on my install). And unless something is seriously wrong, only wizards of level 22+ should get Superior Healing potions in SCS. Any chance you're using some other mod that might have increased his level?

 

 

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Ogre Berserkers- I'm fine with kitted oponnents, quite so..however, these amost never travel alone, and there's very few disables against them prior to Slow . I guess Web, Grease, Entangle and Blindness cover it, and I only had Blindness. So I had to run until their Rage wore off. They kill a 2nd-level fighter in a single blow.

Wolf of Ulcaster -great.

Ghost+PFMW - fine I guess. Met a few others using PFMW, it's managable. The big difference is that this particular creature is immune to normal weapons, others using it are not.

As for Daveorn - I installed Aurora's shoes "Shorten cutscenes", that's the only mod which could have messed with him since it seems to install "fix area/creature references" regardless if I want it or not...I have no other suspicious mods currently installed.

Alas, he might have been casting Chromatic Orb, but he managed to kill my protagonist (great saves paladin) and I doubt he'd be so lucky 2 times in a row - unfortunately the delay between casting and seeing game over animation is too fast to read what happened, in addition both times he used it at almost melee-range so I couldn't see the animation either. That still wouldn't explain the big healing potion which is seen in Watcher's Keep at earliest.

Will unistall Aurora and see if anything changes.

His Battle Horrors seem to behave differently than v21, they no longer follow him around, but actually fight. This is good.

Anyways, I finished BG1 part, off to BG2.

Some more toughts:

Iron Throne battle was exellent, a really nice surprise and I loved it . My fav.

One more encounter seems quite a bit easier - Prat and his Air Elemental. This battle was quite hard in v21, but now Air Elemental seems gone.

Aec-Laetec - this I'm not sure how is even doable without running and attacking with ranged weapons in conjuction with invisibility (I had aTweaks Demons, so this may not be for SCS alone) - however, even those chanters which he can posses seem to have huge HP pools and are quite long-lasting. Fighter-thieves (Cult asassins or something) are very deadly and I had more than 10 reloads total for my last visit in that forsaken village. It's not that I don't like the challenge, but it seems that aTweaks and SCS together make for some very hard encounters (level drain isn't fun in BG1). This was the hardest battle by far, followed by Daveorn.

Sarevok is unchanged I guess. I haven't played without Item Revisons for a long time and was surprised by how easy this battle can be with only a couple of Arrows of Dispelling, and I had no reloads. He does seem to ignore summons, however. It would make for a more interesting finale if he was unkillable until all of skeletons were slain as well. :)

 

Edit: Slythe the Asassin had a droppable Cloak of Non-Detection. I'm fairly certain he didn't have one in v21, and don't know if this is intended.

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As for Daveorn - I installed Aurora's shoes "Shorten cutscenes", that's the only mod which could have messed with him since it seems to install "fix area/creature references" regardless if I want it or not...I have no other suspicious mods currently installed.

Do you know how to do a weidu --change-log command?

(If you open a command line window at your game directory and type "stratagems/weidu --change-log davaeo.cre" then it will tell you which mods have messed with him.)

Alas, he might have been casting Chromatic Orb,.

Yes, probably.

That still wouldn't explain the big healing potion which is seen in Watcher's Keep at earliest.

Will unistall Aurora and see if anything changes.

No, if that's SCS then it's a bug. Looking at the code it's difficult to see how it could have happened (and it's not there on my install) but you never know.

 

Iron Throne battle was exellent, a really nice surprise and I loved it . My fav.

Cool. It's not really changed from v21, but there have been various scripting tweaks so maybe something gels there now.

One more encounter seems quite a bit easier - Prat and his Air Elemental. This battle was quite hard in v21, but now Air Elemental seems gone.

This component has tended to be quite buggy and to get mixed reviews, so for v22 I cut it out pending my getting time to work out something else better.

Aec-Laetec - this I'm not sure how is even doable without running and attacking with ranged weapons in conjuction with invisibility (I had aTweaks Demons, so this may not be for SCS alone) - however, even those chanters which he can posses seem to have huge HP pools and are quite long-lasting. Fighter-thieves (Cult asassins or something) are very deadly and I had more than 10 reloads total for my last visit in that forsaken village. It's not that I don't like the challenge, but it seems that aTweaks and SCS together make for some very hard encounters (level drain isn't fun in BG1). This was the hardest battle by far, followed by Daveorn.

I've never tried with aTweaks. SCS doesn't modify Aec'letec at all (he's scary enough already!) I agree that the SCS changes to the assassins are fairly nasty - this component is probably at the upper end of my difficulty tolerance.

Sarevok is unchanged I guess. I haven't played without Item Revisons for a long time and was surprised by how easy this battle can be with only a couple of Arrows of Dispelling, and I had no reloads. He does seem to ignore summons, however. It would make for a more interesting finale if he was unkillable until all of skeletons were slain as well. :)

I'm reluctant to make this fight any harder. There is an "arms race" in tactical modding, where players with lots of experience of a mod gradually find the battles easier and so the mod author is tempted to make them harder to compensate. But then the fight can get unmanageably difficult for new players.

 

Edit: Slythe the Asassin had a droppable Cloak of Non-Detection. I'm fairly certain he didn't have one in v21, and don't know if this is intended.

Intentional.

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Do you know how to do a weidu --change-log command?

Yes. Mods affecting davaeo.cre - BGT

BG2Tweaks Exotic items pack (adds an ioun stone)

and SCS -Smarter general AI, Smarter Mages - Instant prebuff, Potions for NPCs - half are dropped.

Aurora is innocent it seems. This was the only such potion found in the game, I have not seen any oponnent using or droping another.

I reinstalled and will see later today if I can reproduce it.

 

Aec'letec

I've never tried with aTweaks. SCS doesn't modify Aec'letec at all (he's scary enough already!) I agree that the SCS changes to the assassins are fairly nasty - this component is probably at the upper end of my difficulty tolerance.

It's not Aec'letec who's the main problem here. He's scary and all (and uses Remove magic), but that cursed mage in there is awful. She might as well have a sign on her forehead "Hit me with an Arrow of Dispelling or you'll die". The fact that you can't kill the demon until acolytes are dead (and this takes a relatively long time) doesn't help either.

However, it's completely optional. If I played a no-reload I wouldn't even go there. One more big factor in the difficulty is that you're attacked as soon as you enter the village and cannot pre-buff for the first part of battle. Mages had Stoneskin so they won't get backstabbed but those Asassins hit even -7 AC with very little trouble. It's managebale, but the first 2 rounds or so are very decisive. I might have made it quite more difficult with full prebuff for mages. This way, they get a free round to disable half of my party and I needed to Stoneskin asap, loosing precious time.

Note, I'm also very avoidant of using Invisibility so I make my own life harder.

 

Sarevok

I'm reluctant to make this fight any harder. There is an "arms race" in tactical modding, where players with lots of experience of a mod gradually find the battles easier and so the mod author is tempted to make them harder to compensate. But then the fight can get unmanageably difficult for new players.

Agree. It's not like he's a walkover anyway. What makes it easier is that you need not to save potions and other resources anymore - I fight this at the very end. It's imo significantly harder than v21, since he seems to completely ignore summons and goes straight to chopping.

I also played very aggresively, killing Semaj and Angelo very fast so they don't use their offensive spells (this worked out perfectly).

 

EDIT:

I can't reproduce Davaeorn bug on a full-clean Ascension-Fixpack-BGT-SCS24 install.

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@kreso

You can enter Ulgoth's Beard with stoneskins, you just have to make a stop at the Zombie farm. At least in my install there's only a travel time of 8 hours from the farm to the Beard.

 

10th

Tnx, didn't know that. I'm however, a hard-core roleplayer so I "pretend" I don't know about the ambush there. Then again, why would a mage travel without stoneskins in place anyway....? Think for the next playthrough I'll pre-cast skins. :)

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