Chant spell bugged.

Durenas

A bit of background: I'm no stranger to BG2 modding. I've used Fixpack, Tweakpack, Unfinished Business, Widescreen mod. I installed all of these recently intending to do a playthrough of BG2 with my cleric/mage. While going through Irenicus' dungeon I noticed something disturbing. Chant was not granting attack bonus nor damage bonus. So I did more investigating.

Using Fixpack version 10, the files relevant to Chant were added to the override folder that modified it. After trying with and without those files, I determined that the fixpack provides a partial fix to Chant, in that it gives the saving throw bonus, but didn't appear to affect attack bonus or damage.

I should be more clear. I was looking at the character statistics screen.

So the next thing to do was to do some baseline comparisons of how the spell actually functions in combat. I went and started hitting a memphit with a basic weapon I have proficiency with, a warhammer. I found that I had +0 bonus to my thac0 without chant, and a +1 bonus to my thac0 with it up. So it does appear to be working.

TLDR: Why doesn't chant show the +1 to attack and +1 to damage in the character record?

TJ_Hooker

I agree that your THAC0 should change. But I thought the character records in BG2 only showed damage bonuses from strength and proficiency (or maybe just weapon style proficiency)? So in that case the damage bonus not showing up wouldn't be inconsistent.

Durenas

The bless spell adjusts your thaco on your character sheet. As to the damage, I agree, BG2 doesn't have very good consolidated damage calculations like in BG:EE.

CamDawg

Chant works in a slightly different way than people realize--the chant effect does add the +1 to hit, but for damage it simply raises the minimum. A weapon that does 1-6 damage normally will do 2-6 damage under chant. As for the inverse, I'm not sure if the negative effect changes 1-6 damage to 0-6 or 1-5.

Durenas

Shouldn't it also raise the maximum? Just for consistency's sake?