Hmm.. @Troodon80 Let me see if I understand you correctly,
To me it's fine if it's once a round. Yes like you say at low levels if you have one or two attacks and you hit once a round it makes sense to me for that to be sneak, the extra damage won't be THAT significant as well because sneaks will be lower and due to thieves natural low number of attacks and THACO. So to me the low end is balanced.
At later levels if you somehow manage to have 10 attacks a round or whatever then only the first landed of each round should be a sneak and to me the high end is balanced as well.
Is that what you have then right?
@FinneousPJ I suggest opening a bug report if you'd like this to be changed in a patch. I would think that especially if the game behavior is inconsistent with the description that this is something that would be fixed. Or if IWDEE behavior is different than original Icewind Dale implementation then again that might be a reason to bug fix this. I don't recall how the behavior worked in vanilla IWD, mostly I liked it in Neverwinter Nights.
Anyone who played NWN2 knew damn well one of the silliest strategies was controlling Neeshka and running around all enemies and stabbing them in the back while the party kept aggro and keep on doing this until everything died. It's the same damn reason they decided to make late-game enemies immune to crits (and thus sneaking attacks), which effectively crippled rogues and killed the desire to play a pure rogue or backstab build in the campaign without multi-classing.
Actually, to address this issue, that's how Rogues work in PnP. They are an all or nothing class. Either they do stupid amount of damage through sneak attacks and dual-wielding or nothing.
But that's where Use Magic Device comes in. Throwing summons, spells on enemies or buffs on yourself through items like wands. In the case of the OC and Neeshka, all it takes is enchanting a couple weapons with Holy, something else and Disruption, then have the casters use Greater Magic Weapons on them to turn them into +5 weapons. Hell, use the Druidess as well to cast Flame Weapon on both of them for an additional 1d8 fire damage.
Suddenly, a Rogue with two +5 2d6 (holy), 1d6 fire/acid or chaos bane (2d6), 1d8 (Flame Weapon) and Disruption short swords with 6 attacks per round is pretty good and maybe one-shotting undead.
Or staying at range and shooting magic arrows at them.
In Mask of the Betrayer you get Epic Precision which makes Rogues relevant again and quite powerful.
EDIT: My bad, undead bane weapons don't exist in the OC. But holy, disruption, axiomatic and elemental ones do.
An official patch? I'm only QA, so I cannot say one way or the other. :-)
However, this is not a bug—if you want to see something changed from how it was designed, create a topic under the Feature Requests section.
As for that file on the previous page—for Android and Mac users, it should be a similar process of copying and pasting to either the portraits or override folder (portraits or override in the user data directory, not the game package). For iPad, I'm not sure it would work (though I think you can still add custom portraits, so I see no reason why it wouldn't work). @Pibaro would probably be the one to know.
@Troodon80@FinneousPJ In your iPad you can put any modding file in the character folder (under library) and it should work unless it needs the dialog.tlk to be edited. You just need to try and see.
@Troodon80, thank you for taking your time to make and post that file to change how the sneak attack works. I don't actually have a dog in this race, as I'm fine with the original vanilla version of sneak attack.
But, I wasn't seeing where anyone was saying "thank you", so, thank you. And a very happy new year to you!
The thing is, if IWD had decient AI, someone who was sneek attacked would reposition themselves to try and make sure the rogue didn't get another chance to sneek attack, so it should be much harder to land a second one. The IWD AI isn't up to that, which is why the "one per target" rule exists.
Comments
To me it's fine if it's once a round. Yes like you say at low levels if you have one or two attacks and you hit once a round it makes sense to me for that to be sneak, the extra damage won't be THAT significant as well because sneaks will be lower and due to thieves natural low number of attacks and THACO. So to me the low end is balanced.
At later levels if you somehow manage to have 10 attacks a round or whatever then only the first landed of each round should be a sneak and to me the high end is balanced as well.
Is that what you have then right?
@FinneousPJ I suggest opening a bug report if you'd like this to be changed in a patch. I would think that especially if the game behavior is inconsistent with the description that this is something that would be fixed. Or if IWDEE behavior is different than original Icewind Dale implementation then again that might be a reason to bug fix this. I don't recall how the behavior worked in vanilla IWD, mostly I liked it in Neverwinter Nights.
Either they do stupid amount of damage through sneak attacks and dual-wielding or nothing.
But that's where Use Magic Device comes in. Throwing summons, spells on enemies or buffs on yourself through items like wands.
In the case of the OC and Neeshka, all it takes is enchanting a couple weapons with Holy, something else and Disruption, then have the casters use Greater Magic Weapons on them to turn them into +5 weapons.
Hell, use the Druidess as well to cast Flame Weapon on both of them for an additional 1d8 fire damage.
Suddenly, a Rogue with two +5 2d6 (holy), 1d6 fire/acid or chaos bane (2d6), 1d8 (Flame Weapon) and Disruption short swords with 6 attacks per round is pretty good and maybe one-shotting undead.
Or staying at range and shooting magic arrows at them.
In Mask of the Betrayer you get Epic Precision which makes Rogues relevant again and quite powerful.
EDIT: My bad, undead bane weapons don't exist in the OC. But holy, disruption, axiomatic and elemental ones do.
An official patch? I'm only QA, so I cannot say one way or the other. :-)
However, this is not a bug—if you want to see something changed from how it was designed, create a topic under the Feature Requests section.
As for that file on the previous page—for Android and Mac users, it should be a similar process of copying and pasting to either the portraits or override folder (portraits or override in the user data directory, not the game package). For iPad, I'm not sure it would work (though I think you can still add custom portraits, so I see no reason why it wouldn't work). @Pibaro would probably be the one to know.
But, I wasn't seeing where anyone was saying "thank you", so, thank you. And a very happy new year to you!
[edit]
At least we didn't hardcode it