Just because it has a counter, doesn't mean that it's not the best of them. Being the best in comparison, doesn't make it perfect. It just makes it better than anything else.
If you pit a Sorcerer against all the other classes in a 1v1, the Sorcerer would be able to defeat them all. Mainly because of Time Stop shenanigans. While the Mage also has access to Time Stop, the Sorcerer has access to more of them, while being able to use the other 9th level spells and HLAs too.
The only counter to a max level Sorcerer is: Time Stop and kill them before they chain Time Stop. Certain ToB bosses were made immune to Time Stop because it's that powerful.
There's a reason Time Stop was removed from Icewind Dale II and Neverwinter Nights II, even though it's a Core spell. It simply is that powerful. I know, I played a Sorcerer in NwN1 where it existed.
(Anyway, let's leave class comparisons for another thread.)
Spell immunity can block time stop and if a sorceror has access to it, so does every other arcane caster to counter. Bards and thieves can use the scrolls with UAI as well. But you're right we should leave it for another thread.
I can't recall testing to see if spell immunity: alteration blocked time stop at one time but it doesn't now, I just verified for sure with charname casting SI and Imoen casting the time stop.
Really thinking about it now, doesn't make sense that spell immunity is only 5th level and so powerful.
Time Stop cannot be blocked by Spell Immunity because it's a self-centered spell. (You might be able to block it if you find a way to apply SI:Alteration to the (enemy) caster who is about to cast Time Stop.)
@argent77: Not quite. Spell Immunity only blocks spells from other characters. The caster's spells will bypass spell protections like SI. Web will bypass the caster's SI: Evocation; Spell Turning will bypass the caster's SI: Abjuration; Time Stop will bypass the caster's SI: Transmutation.
Other kinds of immunities:
MGOI and other spell level immunities work the same way. MGOI won't protect you from your own Web or prevent you from casting Mirror Image. Once I charmed Kangaxx with a Control Circlet and made him kill himself with PW: Kill.
Spells cast on self will also bypass magic resistance, though they may have changed this as part of the EE tweak of Sunfire.
Immunity to specific spells, however, will block spells cast on self. Casting Magic Missile on yourself will have no effect if you have Shield active.
Immunity to opcodes also will block spells. For instance, a Berserker/Mage cannot Imprison him or herself while enraged.
Spells cast on self also do not bypass saving throws.
I'm not sure if vanilla Spell Shield could prevent you from Breaching yourself, though, or if the Cloak of Mirroring can stop you from hitting yourself with Magic Missile.
Not quite. Spell Immunity only blocks spells from other characters. The caster's spells will bypass spell protections like SI.
You're right. There are a number of exceptions when it comes to resistances, immunities and spells to make spellcasting more convenient. Afaik, in original BG1 (non-Enhanced) your magic resistance could still block your own buffs.
if the Cloak of Mirroring can stop you from hitting yourself with Magic Missile.
Just tried that, the cloak didn't block it when I cast MM on myself so I took normal damage. The cloak did block Imoen's MM cast at charname wearing the cloak though. It didn't reflect.
IIRC when ToB was released it changed the Cloak of Mirroring from reflection to deflection. Those that were around during that time will remember it also replaced the animation with that horrible white sphere. I suppose EE must have kept it that way.
I agree with you on principle but unfortunately Skyrim is a bit light on the whole "freedom" thing. You can explore whatever you want but unless it's part of a quest (and therefore inaccessible outside of said quest thanks to changing landscape and unpickable doors) there's little point in doing so. You can tackle whatever quest you want, but you rarely have more than one way to solve them and even if you refuse the quest, the game pretends you accepted.
Exploration in Skyrim is just pointless. All locations and NPCs in this game are basically no different from each other, so it makes little sense to even try exploring it all, unless you like hoarding items. Worse still, there are obnoxious quick escape routes everywhere which coerce you not to explore further but to go find another 'reward room', which is all there usually is to be found. And as for the guy who thought that placing a bloody singing wall in every major dungeon was a good idea... boy, I was surprised you didn't inscribe them with 'The princess is in another castle'.
Then there is this poor khajiit who forgot to put a jar on someone's head before thieving.
Exploration in Skyrim is just pointless. All locations and NPCs in this game are basically no different from each other, so it makes little sense to even try exploring it all, unless you like hoarding items. Worse still, there are obnoxious quick escape routes everywhere which coerce you not to explore further but to go find another 'reward room', which is all there usually is to be found. And as for the guy who thought that placing a bloody singing wall in every major dungeon was a good idea... boy, I was surprised you didn't inscribe them with 'The princess is in another castle'.
I think my brother only plays that game without items just to keep things interesting, so yeah.
New Vegas is probably still the ''king'' for me among those games.
I haven't even completed skyrim..There's a been a number of times I've installed it..Played a few hours, then gotten disillusioned and just dropped the entire play-through.
The dialogue of the guards you meet all over the game world is so bad it's good, hence why that arrow in the knee meme started in the first place.
Are you thinking of IWD2? That has racial subclasses for character creation, including drow. But AFAIK the BG series never had an option of race selection past human/elf/half-elf/half-orc/gnome/halfing/dwarf
New Vegas is probably still the ''king'' for me among those games.
I haven't even completed skyrim..There's a been a number of times I've installed it..Played a few hours, then gotten disillusioned and just dropped the entire play-through.
The dialogue of the guards you meet all over the game world is so bad it's good, hence why that arrow in the knee meme started in the first place.
mods they are you best friend! You'd probably love the requiem mod, it basically delevels al of skyerim back to a classic rpg, abilities and all. Changes a ton of shit and put an overbearing amount of enemies in dungeons while upping the ai.
Are you thinking of IWD2? That has racial subclasses for character creation, including drow. But AFAIK the BG series never had an option of race selection past human/elf/half-elf/half-orc/gnome/halfing/dwarf
In the original release of BG there was a "subrace"" field on the character sheet, so you could call yourself any race you wanted. It had no effect on gameplay.
I think it's the same exact thing, if not worse with Oblivion. So I cannot understand why people like that lazy piece of buggy mess.
Everything is leveled. Everything. If you're level 1, you can still go and defeat the Champion of the Arena, because he levels with you.
You can also go and find the "best" weapons in the game, given by the Daedric Princes' quests. Those are leveled too. Which means, that this "super weapon" gets quickly outclassed as you level up. So if you actually want the best version, you need to go and grind your skill to level up, so you can get the last leveled version.
Same with the enemies. You can go and fight the various story "bosses" at any level you like. Then at level 40 for example, you start seeing level 40 bandits with daedric armor and level 40 mudcrabs.
Bandits... in daedric armor.
What's the point of any weapon or armor if it's outclassed by everything else, by simply leveling or crafting your own overpowered equipment? Daedric Cuirass simply became a gold mine for me after a point. If I needed gold, I simply went to a random dungeon at higher levels, I grinded bandits that all had daedric equipment and I took it, then I left and sold it. Repeat until you're rich.
Wow, such amazing exploration with leveled loot, enemies and equipment in dungeons that all look the same. Either caves, or mines or ancient ruins that have the same enemies and slightly different layout.
Bethesda simply took the lazy path and made everything slightly varied and leveled. While removing all the options from Morrowind that made it fun, such as teleportation and flying. I would assume for the sake of balance.
Congratulations Bethesda, you made Oblivion so balanced, that everything feels generic, lazy and boring. Nevermind the huge buttons that were optimized for consoles as well as the handholding, or ugly character creator or boring quests with one of the few exceptions being the Dark Brotherhood questline and a couple of others.
Gameplay-wise, Oblivion can be infinitely richer than Skyrim and there is one reason for this: modding freedom. Skyrim's core gameplay mechanics are, in principle, no different from that of a poor console FPS and, what is worse, everything is so hardcoded that very little can be fixed with mods.
In Skyrim, Bethesda strives to create a cinematic experience. And that feels like a radio broadcast company chairman leading their board in the lines of 'Duuude, we should totally print the radio waves in a book and then throw them at people'.
Mods can change everything. I was talking about the vanilla game when I first played it, almost when it came out so many years ago.
The more I played it, the more I hated it and grew tired of it. It simply felt so pointless, boring and non-challenging.
Sure, Temple of Elemental Evil with the Circle of Eight fan-patch is amazing a decade after. But that doesn't change the fact that the vanilla version without the fan-patch is an unplayable buggy mess with game-breaking bugs.
Still, Oblivion needs a TON of mods to make it decent. Something for the UI, something for the leveled nonsense, something for the ugly faces and hair, something for the bugs, something this something or that.
If the base game needs so many mods to make it good, it's an awful game with a great modding capability but still an awful game. At least Temple of Elemental Evil has the honor of being the most accurate DnD (3.5E) game ever made.
Any "freedom" Oblivion supposedly gives you has been done better by Morrowind, if not Daggerfall. About the modding, Morrowind was quite moddable in every important area, but I am not an expert on these differences.
@God except the fact that mods like requiem DOES INFACT change the core, and play of the game.
@Archaos If you chase after all the best weapons and all the best items without planning when or where you're going to go after them, that is more a personal problem. Believe it or not, but some people actually liked the fact that the world is leveled.
I can't really get into the Elder Scrolls series. I feel like having the world leveled, with how leveling is handled is the biggest issue of the series.Without metagaming, you have what 4-5 individual skills leveled up, while the encounters get a flat boost across the whole board. It makes leveling feel useless to me, and it always made me feel weaker when I should be getting stronger.
Taking the discussion here in a different direction.
- Minsc is the most overrated, overblown character I have ever had the displeasure of playing as in a video game and I once save-scummed to briefly include Quayle in my party in the first Baldur's Gate. His Berserk ability has the potential for friendly fire, his constant yelling about "buttkicking for goodness" is obnoxious in the extreme and his talking to and about his hamster grated my nerves like a freaking cheese grater. The worst part is that the second game basically forces you to bring him along during the prologue and acts like the two of you are great friends and partners in fighting evil. Newsflash, BioWare: I DON'T LIKE HIM!
- The uneven priorities given to the various romances is unforgivable. Jaheira got an entire questline of her own tied intimately to the romance, while Aerie's was reduced to you telling her to quit her whining and Viconia's... the quality of hers is debatable. Meanwhile only Anomen's romance remained for the ladies, and Haer'Dalis' and Valygar's romances were straight-up left out of the game. My God, who was responsible for that?!
- Throne of Bhaal should have had more story. The most interesting and in-depth part of it is hanging out with Sarevok and possibly turning him into a good guy. A few souped-up boss battles are all well and good, but I personally would have appreciated getting to know Charname's siblings a bit more. It might make me care more about fighting them. Hell, even learning something more about Amelyssan would have been nice. And don't even get me started on some of the epilogue slides...
Comments
Just because it has a counter, doesn't mean that it's not the best of them.
Being the best in comparison, doesn't make it perfect. It just makes it better than anything else.
If you pit a Sorcerer against all the other classes in a 1v1, the Sorcerer would be able to defeat them all.
Mainly because of Time Stop shenanigans.
While the Mage also has access to Time Stop, the Sorcerer has access to more of them, while being able to use the other 9th level spells and HLAs too.
The only counter to a max level Sorcerer is: Time Stop and kill them before they chain Time Stop.
Certain ToB bosses were made immune to Time Stop because it's that powerful.
There's a reason Time Stop was removed from Icewind Dale II and Neverwinter Nights II, even though it's a Core spell.
It simply is that powerful.
I know, I played a Sorcerer in NwN1 where it existed.
(Anyway, let's leave class comparisons for another thread.)
*EDIT* But doesn't timestop belong to a school like any other spell? Shouldn't Immunity (Insert school here) provide pretection from it?
Really thinking about it now, doesn't make sense that spell immunity is only 5th level and so powerful.
Other kinds of immunities:
MGOI and other spell level immunities work the same way. MGOI won't protect you from your own Web or prevent you from casting Mirror Image. Once I charmed Kangaxx with a Control Circlet and made him kill himself with PW: Kill.
Spells cast on self will also bypass magic resistance, though they may have changed this as part of the EE tweak of Sunfire.
Immunity to specific spells, however, will block spells cast on self. Casting Magic Missile on yourself will have no effect if you have Shield active.
Immunity to opcodes also will block spells. For instance, a Berserker/Mage cannot Imprison him or herself while enraged.
Spells cast on self also do not bypass saving throws.
I'm not sure if vanilla Spell Shield could prevent you from Breaching yourself, though, or if the Cloak of Mirroring can stop you from hitting yourself with Magic Missile.
Then there is this poor khajiit who forgot to put a jar on someone's head before thieving.
I haven't even completed skyrim..There's a been a number of times I've installed it..Played a few hours, then gotten disillusioned and just dropped the entire play-through.
The dialogue of the guards you meet all over the game world is so bad it's good, hence why that arrow in the knee meme started in the first place.
I think it's the same exact thing, if not worse with Oblivion.
So I cannot understand why people like that lazy piece of buggy mess.
Everything is leveled. Everything.
If you're level 1, you can still go and defeat the Champion of the Arena, because he levels with you.
You can also go and find the "best" weapons in the game, given by the Daedric Princes' quests.
Those are leveled too. Which means, that this "super weapon" gets quickly outclassed as you level up.
So if you actually want the best version, you need to go and grind your skill to level up, so you can get the last leveled version.
Same with the enemies. You can go and fight the various story "bosses" at any level you like.
Then at level 40 for example, you start seeing level 40 bandits with daedric armor and level 40 mudcrabs.
Bandits... in daedric armor.
What's the point of any weapon or armor if it's outclassed by everything else, by simply leveling or crafting your own overpowered equipment?
Daedric Cuirass simply became a gold mine for me after a point.
If I needed gold, I simply went to a random dungeon at higher levels, I grinded bandits that all had daedric equipment and I took it, then I left and sold it.
Repeat until you're rich.
Wow, such amazing exploration with leveled loot, enemies and equipment in dungeons that all look the same.
Either caves, or mines or ancient ruins that have the same enemies and slightly different layout.
Bethesda simply took the lazy path and made everything slightly varied and leveled.
While removing all the options from Morrowind that made it fun, such as teleportation and flying.
I would assume for the sake of balance.
Congratulations Bethesda, you made Oblivion so balanced, that everything feels generic, lazy and boring.
Nevermind the huge buttons that were optimized for consoles as well as the handholding, or ugly character creator or boring quests with one of the few exceptions being the Dark Brotherhood questline and a couple of others.
In Skyrim, Bethesda strives to create a cinematic experience. And that feels like a radio broadcast company chairman leading their board in the lines of 'Duuude, we should totally print the radio waves in a book and then throw them at people'.
Mods can change everything. I was talking about the vanilla game when I first played it, almost when it came out so many years ago.
The more I played it, the more I hated it and grew tired of it. It simply felt so pointless, boring and non-challenging.
Sure, Temple of Elemental Evil with the Circle of Eight fan-patch is amazing a decade after.
But that doesn't change the fact that the vanilla version without the fan-patch is an unplayable buggy mess with game-breaking bugs.
Still, Oblivion needs a TON of mods to make it decent.
Something for the UI, something for the leveled nonsense, something for the ugly faces and hair, something for the bugs, something this something or that.
If the base game needs so many mods to make it good, it's an awful game with a great modding capability but still an awful game.
At least Temple of Elemental Evil has the honor of being the most accurate DnD (3.5E) game ever made.
Any "freedom" Oblivion supposedly gives you has been done better by Morrowind, if not Daggerfall.
About the modding, Morrowind was quite moddable in every important area, but I am not an expert on these differences.
except the fact that mods like requiem DOES INFACT change the core, and play of the game.
@Archaos
If you chase after all the best weapons and all the best items without planning when or where you're going to go after them, that is more a personal problem. Believe it or not, but some people actually liked the fact that the world is leveled.
- Minsc is the most overrated, overblown character I have ever had the displeasure of playing as in a video game and I once save-scummed to briefly include Quayle in my party in the first Baldur's Gate. His Berserk ability has the potential for friendly fire, his constant yelling about "buttkicking for goodness" is obnoxious in the extreme and his talking to and about his hamster grated my nerves like a freaking cheese grater. The worst part is that the second game basically forces you to bring him along during the prologue and acts like the two of you are great friends and partners in fighting evil. Newsflash, BioWare: I DON'T LIKE HIM!
- The uneven priorities given to the various romances is unforgivable. Jaheira got an entire questline of her own tied intimately to the romance, while Aerie's was reduced to you telling her to quit her whining and Viconia's... the quality of hers is debatable. Meanwhile only Anomen's romance remained for the ladies, and Haer'Dalis' and Valygar's romances were straight-up left out of the game. My God, who was responsible for that?!
- Throne of Bhaal should have had more story. The most interesting and in-depth part of it is hanging out with Sarevok and possibly turning him into a good guy. A few souped-up boss battles are all well and good, but I personally would have appreciated getting to know Charname's siblings a bit more. It might make me care more about fighting them. Hell, even learning something more about Amelyssan would have been nice. And don't even get me started on some of the epilogue slides...