SoD a defacto nerf to hard to reach SoA characters?
So with the increased xp will it become less desirable to take some of the hard to reach bg2 NPCs that would otherwise be decent given the scaling initial level.
To be specific, by the time you reach Mazzy, for instance, you might be well past her highest starting level due to the extra xp gained from SoD.
Thoughts? Maybe new initial files will be created to overcome this?
To be specific, by the time you reach Mazzy, for instance, you might be well past her highest starting level due to the extra xp gained from SoD.
Thoughts? Maybe new initial files will be created to overcome this?
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If you want Mazzy as a long-term party member, then the most advantageous time to recruit her is immediately, so that you can get her at level 8. That way, you can control where her level 9 proficiency point goes, and start building her proficiency in something more useful than Shortswords. If you recruit her at level 9, that proficiency point will already have been allocated to Shortswords, and if you recruit her at level 12, then that proficiency point will also have been allocated to Shortswords. Thus it'll be a really long time - you'll be in ToB - before you can get her decently competent in dual-wielding and an alternative weapon ... so basically you'll be committed to using her with Shortswords for most of the game, whether you like it or not. This considerably reduces her usefulness, compared to the present situation in which she can develop some other weapon quickly.
Mazzy is not the only example in which higher recruitment levels will lock you into proficiency allocations which you wouldn't sensibly have chosen to make.
Yes, I know you can change the default allocations with EEkeeper ... but having to cheat in future, merely in order to retain sensible choices which we currently have, is inherently bad design and (at least for me) really quite offensive.
I really hope that Beamdog will address this issue, rather than forcing players into cheating merely to play sensibly. I probably wouldn't be the only one who'd rapidly start to lose interest in the game, if playing the "official game" without cheating became a stupid thing to do.
I'm asking since I've still haven't played BG2:EE.
I'll be honest, that sounds like the biggest non-issue I've ever heard. Short swords are perfectly good weapons, and she starts with grandmastery in short bows regardless.
However, at the moment she can also be built into an excellent front-row melee tank in a Good party, and that's how I usually employ her. Although Shortswords could be used as primary weapon for a front-row tank, they're not generally among the top choices, and therefore losing the chance to build her with our own choice of weapon proficiencies would significantly diminish the attractiveness of using her in that role. Instead of being a welcome and versatile recruit for many parties, she'd instead be rarely the best person for the job.
That's a significant nerf for those amongst us who enjoy employing her in a front-row role, not a non-issue. (Of course, Evil players wouldn't usually want Mazzy anyway, and so might not care, but that'd be pretty darn inconsiderate to the rest of us.)
Furthermore, it's not just Mazzy who suffers from poor proficiency choices when recruited at higher levels. Similar issues apply to others, e.g. Valygar. That's true, but it's not the point. Of course we could cheat in all sorts of ways, but it shouldn't be necessary to start cheating in order to retain the flavour and usefulness of existing characters. IF Beamdog incorporates that Tweak Pack component into the official game, then fine, that solves my issue nicely and I'd support it ... in fact, I recently suggested doing something like that in another thread.
Admittedly, I haven't recruited Mazzy in years, but according to Sorcerer's Palace she starts with a pip in short swords by default. So, either way, you're stuck with short swords for a while. Although, "stuck" seems disingenuous given she starts with her own custom +2 short sword that protects her from stun effects and hits enemies with Slow. Give her the Shield of Harmony from Trademeet, full plate, and a +1 ring and she's got one of the best possible ACs in the game in addition to laughing at mind flayers trying to mind blast her and debuffing their AC with an on-hit Slow. What's to complain about, the d6 damage die? As opposed to what, a slightly better d8?
Again, the NPCs not being 100% min-maxed optimal sounds like a non-issue.
If the answer is to use some third party tool to hack the data files of the original game, that is an admission that the game is broken - unless those tools are bundled as part of the game itself. Don't get me wrong, it is very nice that those tools are available for folks that want to use them, but they should not become a /necessary/ part of the game experience.
That said, is a little flexibility in BG2 something I am prepared to trade for an extra 25 hours of game time, set at the "sweet spot" levels where the game tends to be most fun? That sound like a worthwhile trade still, especially as I suspect completionist runs will exceed the quoted 25 hours.
More to the point, it is common to pick up these characters today well below 12th level - how would I know the /intended/ progression unless I took extra effort to play a game specifically picking them up at the highest level possible (experimentally determined by waiting till end of Chapter 6 to recruit most folks) in order to set up the metagaming knowledge to inform my future plays? That is not how I interpret the intended play style of an exploratory RPG.
In Mazzy's particular case, if I'm intending to build her for front-line melee work (as I usually do), then one of the first things I'll typically be RP-saying to her is "Mazzy, we'll be facing a lot of enemies who are more vulnerable to blunt weapons, so you'd better start practicing with this hammer". Another thing I'd soon be RP-saying to her is "Mazzy, you'll be a more effective warrior if you get the hang of dual-wielding your weapons, so you'd better start practicing now because it takes a lot of training to be any good at dual-wielding". Her Shortsword proficiency is good for an off-hand weapon, but I'll be putting her next several proficiency points into dual-wielding and a more versatile main-hand weapon, which she needs more urgently than more Shortsword proficiency.
Her development along these lines is delayed for six whole levels if her level 9 and level 12 proficiencies have been already been pre-allocated to Shortswords by the time you recruit her, and six levels of delay is a serious handicap - she won't mature as an effective dual-wielder with a good blunt proficiency until we're into ToB, instead of being ready to fight that way in the second half of SoA. That's a game-changing nerf to her potential, which is often likely to affect decisions about whether to include her at all.
Is that a nerf?
Even if we charge straight for Mazzy, and even if she were standing outside Irenicus's dungeon instead of on the far side of the map, our new starting level will not only cause us to miss the chance to allocate her level 9 point in every case, but in some cases quite likely (and even more seriously) her level 12 point as well. So that quite substantially nerfs our options for how to build her.
As I've also pointed out earlier, Mazzy is only one example, we're also going to have this problem with some other characters too, whenever the default allocation of proficiencies in the higher-level .cre files is anything other than what we'd have chosen if we had the chance (e.g. Valygar). For some characters that's a more serious problem than others, but certainly for warrior types the choice of proficiencies makes a real difference to how we can (or can't) use those characters.
Can Beamdog do something like adjusting the higher-level .cre files, so that the NPC has the same experience as now but hasn't yet been levelled-up beyond the base-level .cre, so that we can immediately level them (and assign any additional proficiencies appropriately) at the point of recruitment? That'd be exactly the same procedure as we already have when recruiting NPCs through the Fate Spirit in ToB, and it'd solve the problem neatly. (I know I could do this for myself with EEkeeper, but I reckon some such solution ought to be available for everyone as part of the official game.)
If my level 12-15 party had an option to pick up Mazzy (or various others) at level 8, then that would entirely solve the problem I'm addressing, and I'd be perfectly happy to help her along by micro-management until she got to higher levels. However, that isn't an option - if my party is level 12-15, then Mazzy will be recruited as a level 12 character whether I like it or not, with her level 9 and level 12 proficiencies already allocated in places which (usually) aren't what I'd have chosen if I'd had the chance to collect her sooner. Currently I can collect her sooner, so it's my choice in each run whether or not to do so, but now that we'll be starting the game at a higher level, I'll lose that choice, unless some adjustment is made to address this problem.
The choice we're in danger of losing is every bit as much a role-playing choice as a power-gaming choice!
Honestly I always hated how BGII broke the weapon proficiencies down so specifically. BGI's original system was more fun since it meant I could use a lot more of the items I come across.