Demogorgon vs Pit Fiend

OlvynChuru

If you summon any kind of fiend and have it fight Demogorgon, he says something like, "No, you will not use my own kind against me!" and then he dominates the fiend. It feels really weird when you summon a pit fiend and he says that. Demogorgon is a demon, while a pit fiend is a devil. I'd expect Demogorgon to promptly obliterate that baatezu with extreme prejudice, but apparently he considers a baatezu to be his own kind. Is there a reason for this? The ironic thing was that even in Watcher's Keep there was a level filled with demons and devils that clearly didn't consider each other to be kin.

sarevok57

is demogorgon still a pushover? i remember the last time i fought him all i had to do was haste protection from evil, and i killed him in 2 rounds ( didnt use any traps or summons) back in the olden days, i had the original tougher demogorgon patch and he was actually challenging, it kind of makes me wonder why they amped up the difficulty of the other demons but left demogorgon as the easy breezy one

OlvynChuru

Yeah, I think he was pretty easy. In some ways he was easier than the group of six from the previous floor (I think you know what I'm talking about). On my first time playing he was a real pain though, since I didn't know what I was doing.

sarevok57

yeah i know the group of six, those guys i actually had to do some battle prep for, they really need to give demogorgon his original tougher mod thingy, you can beat the game without killing him, so if people cant do it, well better luck next time tell they learn how, plus it makes it soooo much better killing him when he is actually hard, because all you need to do now is haste everyone in your team and have all your melee'ers whirlwind him, and wooosh, dead in 2 rounds without a fuss

elminster

The most likely reason for this is that mechanically there is no such thing as a devil in the game, only demons. Therefore the pit fiend mechanically is considered of the "demonic" race and has a class of "tanari". The particular part of the script for Demogorgon that handles this looks like it activates when it sees these two characteristics.

OlvynChuru

@elminster‌

Yes, I see the technical reason for it, but it just feels weird. I feel like they should have made some sort of exception for pit fiends, but whatever. What's done is done.

Tresset

Hmm... I looked at Demogorgon's script once before and IIRC it didn't make him take over pit fiends. I will have another look and maybe see about reporting it as a bug if this is an issue.

Edit: Nope, elminster is right. There is no Baatezu classification in the game. To fix this they would have to add one and they may not want to do that...

shawne

@Tresset: Dorn's Abyssal Blade still distinguishes between damage to demons and damage to devils, though...

elminster

shawne said:

@Tresset: Dorn's Abyssal Blade still distinguishes between damage to demons and damage to devils, though...

From the looks of things it does extra damage to "demonic" and/or possibly to the "Imp" class depending on the version of the sword. The +5 vs devil, +5 vs demon sword (ohdsw2hd.itm) you get for instance really just uses one EFF file for this against "demonic" race creatures.

argent77

Tresset said:

Edit: Nope, elminster is right. There is no Baatezu classification in the game. To fix this they would have to add one and they may not want to do that...

I think it is possible to distinguish between devils and demons by taking their alignment into account. Demons are always chaotic evil while devils are lawful evil.

As @elminster‌ already mentioned, Dorn's blade against devils actually targets only imps. It also works on Cornugons and maybe some other devils because they are flagged as imps internally. Pit fiends are flagged as tanarri however, so the sword's special power doesn't affect them.

Mathsorcerer

Edit class.ids and add another entry for "baatezu" or "devil"; they would both still retain the racial id entry of "demonic" which could be edited to be "lower_planar" to avoid confusion. I just did this and it seems to work just fine but I would have to go through and edit all baatezu creature files to reflect their new class id of "devil", which is entry 211.

A modicum of work involved, to be certain, but the hypothesis is sound and it should work in practice. hrm...this would also necessitate editing some effect files. Oh, well...a little more work but it wouldn't take all that long to complete.