Mod Reviews
Pantalion
Member Posts: 2,137
Since we don't appear to have such a thing, and I was feeling opinionated, herein lies a thread for people to wax lyrical about mods so others need not pick from them randomly. Feel free to add your own, and don't feel the need to do it in the same format as I.
BG2:
NPC mods:
Kelsey:
The mercantile sorcerer.
Overall: B- - If I were going to pick a sorcerer to fill that barren niche, I'd go with Tashia for being slightly less abusable with her one encounter per day megacat, but Kelsey's romance is pretty decent if you're running a female toon and can put up with his 7 spell slots per day and the fact he picked up Burning Hands (which overrides all other spells in the AI so he can wander into melee and use it against a Fire Elemental). Once his romance "concludes" with the traditional coitus, he becomes a lot quieter for the rest of SoA.
@Notabarbiegirl says about Kelsey:
Kelsey is pure fun for anyone who tends to get tired of Anomens attitude. There are some interesting additions with Kelsey, I recommend getting him asap. Also do not let him leave the first time he mentions going away.
Nephele
The adventuring midget grandma.
Overall: A - She's not a powergamer's choice, but I found her presence surprisingly enjoyable. Well worth a try, if you aren't fashed by the fact she's outright worse than Viconia's MR heavy self or are willing to Keeper her into something a little stronger if you are. She honestly had so much to say through her various banters and friendship tracks that I never forgot she was in the party, which is more than I could say about most characters.
Ninde:
The unapologetically evil necromancer elf.
Overall: B - Her talks have plenty of dialogue and a wide range of options which are novel, and she's refreshingly content to let you have an opinion she doesn't share, so I'd say she's worth a try, at least if you're looking for her personality, which I found quite palatable, and definitely not stupid evil. Some of the post underdark stuff got a little in-your-face for my preferences, but it had a decently rewarding post Irenicus bit which you don't often see.
Tyris Flare
Overall: B+ A solid NPC, somewhat marred by the constant, repetitive flirting and limited content.
Fade
Overall: C - I'm not big on thieves, special snowflake races, excessive emotes, dark and brooding pasts or the temptation to pick up a Fighter/Mage/Thief, skip Fade altogether and just grab her exclusive sword of timestop, so she's not really my cup of tea. She's certainly not the worst NPC mod out there by any stretch of the imagination.
Isra
Overall: A. Isra fit very naturally into my playthrough once I turned off the flirting, and it's nice to have a Paladin that I don't feel like I'm turning on Easy Mode by bringing along.
Tashia
Overall: B - I couldn't bring myself to ever use her item, but even without it Tashia felt like a solid member of the team. If only she'd shut up about poison ivy so I could cover the rest of her content.
Wings
I had high hopes for this mod, but unfortunately it conked out somewhere in the first few friendship talks preventing it from progressing. What I saw was decent, but I was forced to uninstall it to fix that up, at which point I believe it made Anomen decide to start hitting on M!CHARNAME something fierce, which was... interesting, I suppose? I'd like to give it another try to get it working sometime, at which point I'll update this.
Imoen Romance
The weird "not quite incest maybe" mod for Imoen.
Overall: B- - Some of the stuff is corny, awkward and melodramatic, other stuff is cute, fun and entertaining, while the extra dialogues and interjections are things that should really have been included in the original. A bit of a mixed bag, but overall worth a try, if only for the extra Imoen banters.
Quest and Content Mods moved for length:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/702460/#Comment_702460
BG2:
NPC mods:
Kelsey:
The mercantile sorcerer.
Plot and Immersion: B (A) - Kelsey has a lot of immersive comments, he talks to traders he knows, he greets his friends, and he shares his opinion on a lot of quests, as well as a lot of flavourful talk (and a few items) with Jan Jansen who was in my party for this runthrough. I'd even go so far as to say that though his personality comes off as a bit... Weedy, his lovetalks were for the most part pretty decent, though {some hugging} appears, it's not a huge amount in his main talk.
The reason he gets a B is that his flirts can get pretty damn creepy. Wandering around dungeons, he would periodically stop to muck with CHARNAME's hair, {shuddering} as he fingers her earlobe. Give her a "friendly kiss on the cheek" - repeatedly kissing your work colleague on the face doesn't strike me as friendly, so much as sexual harassment, but I'm British, the personal space on my character is the size of Firkraag's, so maybe that's just me. Walking next to you so he can brush your arm as he points which way to go next, while actively trying to smell your hair? Running his finger along your arm and grunting? Brrr.
It was also strange how talking to him informed CHARNAME that she felt a strong mutual attraction towards him, and that she found him uncontrollably rolling his eyes (not kidding) to be adorable. Thanks for letting me know how CHARNAME feels, Kelsey!
What's possibly worst is that his flirts progress into unsolicited makeout and groping long before the romance progresses to a place where that would be appropriate, particularly since my Wizard Slayer/Mage/Thief CHARNAME (I don't recommend it, by the way, constantly low level Wizard Slayer that can't even wear armour or bracers = Nightmare mode) always picked the rather stand-offish, ambivalent answers rather than {sweaty hugging} the red headed gentleman, but apparently after saying "Yeah, you're pretty much sticking around for the six fireballs a day" so many times, he decided that meant CHARNAME thought he was hot, grabbed her posterior and forced her to French kiss in the middle of Spellhold's dungeon.
Thankfully if you're not reviewing the mod, there is a permanent off-switch (unlike with Isra, who you can bring back online if you miss {free candy}). Without it, Kelsey gets an A for being almost offensively inoffensive.
Content and Consistency: B - While Kelsey's personality and behaviour was pretty good, and he's had a few comparatively minor plot fights so far (I'm expecting something larger come Chapter 6), there were a few niggles where the other characters were a bit off model. Jan's a little more abrasive than usual, and Anomen, who I had the curious privilege of running through the romance of with my last male elf CHARNAME, was clearly written by someone who didn't care for the cleriknight, amping his ego from "kind of has an inferiority complex but generally tries his best not to be a boob about it" to where "The Radiant Heart, of which I am a squire in my proudest achievement which means a lot to me" becomes "My own significant contributions to the Radiant Heart shall not be insulted!", rendering a realistically imperfect character into an almost cartoonish version at times.
Secondly, he doesn't really seem to take CHARNAME's class into account (though this may be different for a Sorcerous CHARNAME). How special Kelsey is is a commonplace theme, even wild mages are super dull and common compared to sorcerers in the Kelseyverse. Frequently he'll talk about protecting her with his spells and asking her if she can imagine what it's like to be able to shoot fire across the room... Sirrah, CHARNAME has three levels on you and has three fireballs prepped, pretty sure that she has an inkling.
Bonus points for Elven CHARNAME being able to point out that Kelsey will be dead and buried long, long before she manages to grow old with him, but loses a few points where he mentions her becoming a silver haired seer immediately after. Not unless you perfect lichdom, Kelsey, and even then probably not.
I was expecting some post underdark content with the Kelster, but unfortunately nothing. Maybe I broke him with my extensive polyamory?
Power Creep: D- - What is it with Sorcerers and overpowered gear? Kelsey's stats are as irrelevant as any sorcerer, but he comes replete with a cloak of 20% MR, +1 to saves, +1 to AC, casts a unique Fireshield(Green/Acid) and level 1 and level 2 spell slots... and is upgradeable with your favourite pocket imp and is usable by "Sorcerers". Yeah, it's 5% MR vs two levels of spell slots and a Fireshield off being the Cloak of Balduran. So guess what's mine as soon as I get UAI?
The other things he's granted so far are comparatively tame. A necklace of 1/day NRD, which, given he's not a Wild Mage, works about as well as one might expect. "Makeup of +2 Charisma" he decided to give 17 Cha CHARNAME (not sure if should be insulted, gave it to Jan, who rather enjoyed it), and a strobe light helmet (granted via a chat with Jan).
Melodrama: B+ - Kelsey dips into the occasional whine, and it's sad seeing him behave like a bit of a doormat at times, but generally he's pretty low drama, doesn't angst over everything, and doesn't tell me not to waste healing spells so I can waste fabric bandaging his pectorals. Some of the dialogue responses to him just wandered into absurdly hostile for no reason, though, which was just plain weird.
Bugginess: A - I didn't notice any outright glitches due to Kelsey, asides from the occasional {backrub} while I'm trying to buff up for a dungeon boss.
The reason he gets a B is that his flirts can get pretty damn creepy. Wandering around dungeons, he would periodically stop to muck with CHARNAME's hair, {shuddering} as he fingers her earlobe. Give her a "friendly kiss on the cheek" - repeatedly kissing your work colleague on the face doesn't strike me as friendly, so much as sexual harassment, but I'm British, the personal space on my character is the size of Firkraag's, so maybe that's just me. Walking next to you so he can brush your arm as he points which way to go next, while actively trying to smell your hair? Running his finger along your arm and grunting? Brrr.
It was also strange how talking to him informed CHARNAME that she felt a strong mutual attraction towards him, and that she found him uncontrollably rolling his eyes (not kidding) to be adorable. Thanks for letting me know how CHARNAME feels, Kelsey!
What's possibly worst is that his flirts progress into unsolicited makeout and groping long before the romance progresses to a place where that would be appropriate, particularly since my Wizard Slayer/Mage/Thief CHARNAME (I don't recommend it, by the way, constantly low level Wizard Slayer that can't even wear armour or bracers = Nightmare mode) always picked the rather stand-offish, ambivalent answers rather than {sweaty hugging} the red headed gentleman, but apparently after saying "Yeah, you're pretty much sticking around for the six fireballs a day" so many times, he decided that meant CHARNAME thought he was hot, grabbed her posterior and forced her to French kiss in the middle of Spellhold's dungeon.
Thankfully if you're not reviewing the mod, there is a permanent off-switch (unlike with Isra, who you can bring back online if you miss {free candy}). Without it, Kelsey gets an A for being almost offensively inoffensive.
Content and Consistency: B - While Kelsey's personality and behaviour was pretty good, and he's had a few comparatively minor plot fights so far (I'm expecting something larger come Chapter 6), there were a few niggles where the other characters were a bit off model. Jan's a little more abrasive than usual, and Anomen, who I had the curious privilege of running through the romance of with my last male elf CHARNAME, was clearly written by someone who didn't care for the cleriknight, amping his ego from "kind of has an inferiority complex but generally tries his best not to be a boob about it" to where "The Radiant Heart, of which I am a squire in my proudest achievement which means a lot to me" becomes "My own significant contributions to the Radiant Heart shall not be insulted!", rendering a realistically imperfect character into an almost cartoonish version at times.
Secondly, he doesn't really seem to take CHARNAME's class into account (though this may be different for a Sorcerous CHARNAME). How special Kelsey is is a commonplace theme, even wild mages are super dull and common compared to sorcerers in the Kelseyverse. Frequently he'll talk about protecting her with his spells and asking her if she can imagine what it's like to be able to shoot fire across the room... Sirrah, CHARNAME has three levels on you and has three fireballs prepped, pretty sure that she has an inkling.
Bonus points for Elven CHARNAME being able to point out that Kelsey will be dead and buried long, long before she manages to grow old with him, but loses a few points where he mentions her becoming a silver haired seer immediately after. Not unless you perfect lichdom, Kelsey, and even then probably not.
I was expecting some post underdark content with the Kelster, but unfortunately nothing. Maybe I broke him with my extensive polyamory?
Power Creep: D- - What is it with Sorcerers and overpowered gear? Kelsey's stats are as irrelevant as any sorcerer, but he comes replete with a cloak of 20% MR, +1 to saves, +1 to AC, casts a unique Fireshield(Green/Acid) and level 1 and level 2 spell slots... and is upgradeable with your favourite pocket imp and is usable by "Sorcerers". Yeah, it's 5% MR vs two levels of spell slots and a Fireshield off being the Cloak of Balduran. So guess what's mine as soon as I get UAI?
The other things he's granted so far are comparatively tame. A necklace of 1/day NRD, which, given he's not a Wild Mage, works about as well as one might expect. "Makeup of +2 Charisma" he decided to give 17 Cha CHARNAME (not sure if should be insulted, gave it to Jan, who rather enjoyed it), and a strobe light helmet (granted via a chat with Jan).
Melodrama: B+ - Kelsey dips into the occasional whine, and it's sad seeing him behave like a bit of a doormat at times, but generally he's pretty low drama, doesn't angst over everything, and doesn't tell me not to waste healing spells so I can waste fabric bandaging his pectorals. Some of the dialogue responses to him just wandered into absurdly hostile for no reason, though, which was just plain weird.
Bugginess: A - I didn't notice any outright glitches due to Kelsey, asides from the occasional {backrub} while I'm trying to buff up for a dungeon boss.
Overall: B- - If I were going to pick a sorcerer to fill that barren niche, I'd go with Tashia for being slightly less abusable with her one encounter per day megacat, but Kelsey's romance is pretty decent if you're running a female toon and can put up with his 7 spell slots per day and the fact he picked up Burning Hands (which overrides all other spells in the AI so he can wander into melee and use it against a Fire Elemental). Once his romance "concludes" with the traditional coitus, he becomes a lot quieter for the rest of SoA.
@Notabarbiegirl says about Kelsey:
Kelsey is pure fun for anyone who tends to get tired of Anomens attitude. There are some interesting additions with Kelsey, I recommend getting him asap. Also do not let him leave the first time he mentions going away.
Nephele
The adventuring midget grandma.
Plot and Immersion: A- - Nephele talks, and shares her opinion, constantly. In fact, her interjections are almost too frequent in a few talks, where she takes over a the conversation a little.
There were a few niggles where she started teaching CHARNAME how to cast Mage spells, which was coming on a little strong considering Mage CHARNAME learned from CHARNAME, but generally she was a delight, mothering Imoen and CHARNAME, making her presence felt and generally chipping in for all sorts of quests, making her presence very much known, without being a know-it-all most of the time, though she's a little more quiet in the underdark.
Content and Consistency: B - While she has a lot to say, Nephy doesn't have any unfinished quests I've seen so far, making her content pretty much non-existent, unless she's holding out for Chapter 6.
Power Creep: A+ - Her stats are beyond mediocre for BG2, with the highest being Wisdom at 15. She gets no earth shattering equipment, no mind boggling necklace of immortality, just a single class cleric with a hidden kit, the Cleric of Yondalla, which has granted thus far: Goodberries as an innate, Zone of Sweet Air, and Entangle. Zone is situationally handy to have as an innate, but Nephele is if anything too modest to be mucking it up in BG2's high level environment.
Melodrama: A - Drama free, angst free, {shivery hugs} free, and angst-ridden backstory free. She's a halfling widow with grandkids and wanderlust. It's refreshing to see an older character getting such a solid representation.
Bugginess: A- - Her kit doesn't have a kit description or show up on her character record. Other than that, she's pretty much glitch free aside from the odd typo.
There were a few niggles where she started teaching CHARNAME how to cast Mage spells, which was coming on a little strong considering Mage CHARNAME learned from CHARNAME, but generally she was a delight, mothering Imoen and CHARNAME, making her presence felt and generally chipping in for all sorts of quests, making her presence very much known, without being a know-it-all most of the time, though she's a little more quiet in the underdark.
Content and Consistency: B - While she has a lot to say, Nephy doesn't have any unfinished quests I've seen so far, making her content pretty much non-existent, unless she's holding out for Chapter 6.
Power Creep: A+ - Her stats are beyond mediocre for BG2, with the highest being Wisdom at 15. She gets no earth shattering equipment, no mind boggling necklace of immortality, just a single class cleric with a hidden kit, the Cleric of Yondalla, which has granted thus far: Goodberries as an innate, Zone of Sweet Air, and Entangle. Zone is situationally handy to have as an innate, but Nephele is if anything too modest to be mucking it up in BG2's high level environment.
Melodrama: A - Drama free, angst free, {shivery hugs} free, and angst-ridden backstory free. She's a halfling widow with grandkids and wanderlust. It's refreshing to see an older character getting such a solid representation.
Bugginess: A- - Her kit doesn't have a kit description or show up on her character record. Other than that, she's pretty much glitch free aside from the odd typo.
Overall: A - She's not a powergamer's choice, but I found her presence surprisingly enjoyable. Well worth a try, if you aren't fashed by the fact she's outright worse than Viconia's MR heavy self or are willing to Keeper her into something a little stronger if you are. She honestly had so much to say through her various banters and friendship tracks that I never forgot she was in the party, which is more than I could say about most characters.
Ninde:
The unapologetically evil necromancer elf.
Plot and Immersion: B - Asides from the usual "late NPC syndrome", Ninde is plenty chatty, has quite a few banters, and actively sabotages the player at least once that I've come across, forcing them down the evil path purely because she was feeling bratty (a little IC annoyance never hurts).
Otherwise, she's happy to spread a little fatalistic cheer in banters and dialogues (plenty of which occur in the underdark, which is nice considering that's just where a lot of vanilla NPCs turn quiet). She noticably has no dialogue with the Phaere encounter (unusual for a romance partner, though to be fair it may just be her entirely characteristic apathy towards the notion), and she gives plenty of scope for CHARNAME to run a gamut of characterisations, which is the kind of RP heavy interaction I prefer, and while her Player-Initiated-Dialogues included {flirty activities}, they also included a wide range of conversation options to ask her about herself, to which she shares a short reply.
One thing of note is that in two places it felt like I skipped a conversation or two explaining what her deal was, first one being her first recruitment where she refers to Lassal as "late", second when she leapt into revealing her mysterious malady before I even knew she had a malady in the first place.
Content and Consistency: B - A bit of a mixed bag. Generally, Ninde strikes me far more as chaotic evil than neutral. She's capricious, changeable and mischievous, disloyal and thoroughly self-interested - consistently so, but at odds with her character sheet. At one point CHARNAME, an elf, dissed elves as a species and made fun of Ninde's pointy ears. Later she talks about how she's an elf raised by humans and CHARNAME gets to say they're an elf, but... Apparently forgets that the entire population of Candlekeep is human or doppleganger, or that they're bizarrely underage, missing out an interesting avenue of interaction.
Otherwise, purists might have trouble with the fact that Ninde mentions stories when she was a fifteen year old elfin child which, for elves, even human raised ones, is probably still pre-pubescent unless you happen to be a Bhaalspawn, but easily enough ignored.
I haven't noticed any particular quests or other content for Ninde, though she's happy enough to pipe up during other questlines.
Power Creep: A+ - She has a unique amulet that grants Negative Plane Protection, Protection from Evil and such, which isn't world shaking considering you have to have an amulet of power guaranteed at this point and probably won't have your mage in melee range anyway, particularly in return for an unusable amulet slot.
In terms of her class, not only does Necromancy lock her out of some of the best mage spells, she gets none of the boosts that Edwin enjoys for his magery, leaving her with a decent but not fantastic, intelligence, wisdom and charisma and pretty middling stats.
I actually Keepered her into a Fighter/Mage in my game to make use of a bow (since a pure cleric, sorcerer, Bard Imoen and Jan Jansen doesn't make for the most balanced of parties), and never once felt like she was pushing the envelope.
Melodrama: A - Ninde is cheerfully fatalistic about your shared fate of dooooooom.
Bugginess: B - One underdark lovetalk crashed my game, but sleeping mid conversation, while perhaps a little rude, got around the bug with no console editing necessary. Otherwise there are a few typos, but nothing extreme.
Otherwise, she's happy to spread a little fatalistic cheer in banters and dialogues (plenty of which occur in the underdark, which is nice considering that's just where a lot of vanilla NPCs turn quiet). She noticably has no dialogue with the Phaere encounter (unusual for a romance partner, though to be fair it may just be her entirely characteristic apathy towards the notion), and she gives plenty of scope for CHARNAME to run a gamut of characterisations, which is the kind of RP heavy interaction I prefer, and while her Player-Initiated-Dialogues included {flirty activities}, they also included a wide range of conversation options to ask her about herself, to which she shares a short reply.
One thing of note is that in two places it felt like I skipped a conversation or two explaining what her deal was, first one being her first recruitment where she refers to Lassal as "late", second when she leapt into revealing her mysterious malady before I even knew she had a malady in the first place.
Content and Consistency: B - A bit of a mixed bag. Generally, Ninde strikes me far more as chaotic evil than neutral. She's capricious, changeable and mischievous, disloyal and thoroughly self-interested - consistently so, but at odds with her character sheet. At one point CHARNAME, an elf, dissed elves as a species and made fun of Ninde's pointy ears. Later she talks about how she's an elf raised by humans and CHARNAME gets to say they're an elf, but... Apparently forgets that the entire population of Candlekeep is human or doppleganger, or that they're bizarrely underage, missing out an interesting avenue of interaction.
Otherwise, purists might have trouble with the fact that Ninde mentions stories when she was a fifteen year old elfin child which, for elves, even human raised ones, is probably still pre-pubescent unless you happen to be a Bhaalspawn, but easily enough ignored.
I haven't noticed any particular quests or other content for Ninde, though she's happy enough to pipe up during other questlines.
Power Creep: A+ - She has a unique amulet that grants Negative Plane Protection, Protection from Evil and such, which isn't world shaking considering you have to have an amulet of power guaranteed at this point and probably won't have your mage in melee range anyway, particularly in return for an unusable amulet slot.
In terms of her class, not only does Necromancy lock her out of some of the best mage spells, she gets none of the boosts that Edwin enjoys for his magery, leaving her with a decent but not fantastic, intelligence, wisdom and charisma and pretty middling stats.
I actually Keepered her into a Fighter/Mage in my game to make use of a bow (since a pure cleric, sorcerer, Bard Imoen and Jan Jansen doesn't make for the most balanced of parties), and never once felt like she was pushing the envelope.
Melodrama: A - Ninde is cheerfully fatalistic about your shared fate of dooooooom.
Bugginess: B - One underdark lovetalk crashed my game, but sleeping mid conversation, while perhaps a little rude, got around the bug with no console editing necessary. Otherwise there are a few typos, but nothing extreme.
Overall: B - Her talks have plenty of dialogue and a wide range of options which are novel, and she's refreshingly content to let you have an opinion she doesn't share, so I'd say she's worth a try, at least if you're looking for her personality, which I found quite palatable, and definitely not stupid evil. Some of the post underdark stuff got a little in-your-face for my preferences, but it had a decently rewarding post Irenicus bit which you don't often see.
Tyris Flare
Plot and Immersion: B - Pretty well done for a canon crossover, Tyris pipes up in a few quests, such as the Planar Sphere - particularly with a mage CHARNAME. Periodically she'll have a "flirt" conversation trigger when she gets near enough to CHARNAME, heavy on action tags, and for me, frequently repeated. I'm not much of a {hugger}, so that didn't add much for me, nor did the various action tag "flirts" your character could perform while speaking to her.
Content and Consistency: C - Her romance is pretty straight forward and pretty short. I had covered the entirety in Chapter 2, and though her banters with the vanilla NPCs typically felt in character and her dialogue well written, she has comparatively few interjections once it's over with, which left her as one of the quietest members of the party. There were a few conversations where I didn't feel she was representing her middling wisdom and charisma stats, but nothing too glaring.
I will note that she doesn't have any ToB content to my knowledge, and by the time I reached the underdark I was all kinds of ready to help Tyris find her way home, though she apparently has a few more dialogues in ToB.
Power Creep: B+ - A mostly straight forward Fighter -> Mage dual class with no illegal perks and modest stats. She fills a niche that was pretty much bare in the base game, which is always a plus for me. The only extra that Tyris brings is a set of Leather which is like a diet Robe of Vecna, -1 Casting Time and not restricted to her, and can be upgraded by Cromwell to boost its AC and give it some fire resistance.
Melodrama: A - Despite losing home, friends, and family, Tyris is very low on the melodrama. She has a few moments where she worries about the life she's left behind, but generally the angst is kept to a minimum and makes up comparatively little of her dialogue.
Bugginess: A- - Besides an unfortunate tendency to flirt in the middle of dungeons, picking up imaginary objects ad nauseam and telling me incessantly how fantastic the view her armour provides,
Content and Consistency: C - Her romance is pretty straight forward and pretty short. I had covered the entirety in Chapter 2, and though her banters with the vanilla NPCs typically felt in character and her dialogue well written, she has comparatively few interjections once it's over with, which left her as one of the quietest members of the party. There were a few conversations where I didn't feel she was representing her middling wisdom and charisma stats, but nothing too glaring.
I will note that she doesn't have any ToB content to my knowledge, and by the time I reached the underdark I was all kinds of ready to help Tyris find her way home, though she apparently has a few more dialogues in ToB.
Power Creep: B+ - A mostly straight forward Fighter -> Mage dual class with no illegal perks and modest stats. She fills a niche that was pretty much bare in the base game, which is always a plus for me. The only extra that Tyris brings is a set of Leather which is like a diet Robe of Vecna, -1 Casting Time and not restricted to her, and can be upgraded by Cromwell to boost its AC and give it some fire resistance.
Melodrama: A - Despite losing home, friends, and family, Tyris is very low on the melodrama. She has a few moments where she worries about the life she's left behind, but generally the angst is kept to a minimum and makes up comparatively little of her dialogue.
Bugginess: A- - Besides an unfortunate tendency to flirt in the middle of dungeons, picking up imaginary objects ad nauseam and telling me incessantly how fantastic the view her armour provides,
Overall: B+ A solid NPC, somewhat marred by the constant, repetitive flirting and limited content.
Fade
Plot and Immersion: B+ - Fade the Fey'rii pipes up frequently, and for the most part she's well integrated (asides from the ever popular action tags), with her own side quests which fit in well with the rest of the game. Unfortunately because of her placement, a lot of her content is in the later chapters, where the plot should be racing along I found myself wandering around waiting for her romance to progress instead.
Content and Consistency: D - Fade frequently seems to pay less attention to mechanics than she should. Despite being Chaotic Neutral, her behaviour borders on Neutral Good, with a supposed temper she never actually displayed. She constantly complains about being full of dark and eeeeeevil temptations, but never actually does much along those lines.
There's a place in her plot where she is badly beaten and injured, and a whole awkward wound cleaning scene comes out of it the next time you rest - ostensibly because expending the spells (that you're about to rest and recover anyway) is a waste? But in truth because if you cast Heal, you couldn't check out her boobs while you bandage her up. There's another place where she decides to give her amulet to CHARNAME to protect him from vampires... This being directly after CHARNAME just picked up Chapter 3's free Amulet o' Power.
Finally, I had quite a bit of trouble picking an appropriately in character response a few times, including several mandatory {Hugs} during the progression of the romance and strangely placed ellipses as CHARNAME is forced into some very specific, often stilted dialogue.
Power Creep: C - Fade is a single class non-kitted thief. Thieves are pretty terrible, overall, and Fade is certainly no exception, charm and invisibility innates not-withstanding, but she does get a few powerful items I consider a little excessive. She starts with an amulet that grants immunity to charm, drain and permanent protection from evil, shortly after being made equippable by either CHARNAME or herself, an exclusive wedding ring which doubles up on the charm protection with permanent Chaotic Commands (methinks the author hated illithids?) along with being a ring of regeneration and fire resistance. Finally, she can acquire a +4 short sword with +1D4 acid damage and a 5% chance to cast a mini time stop every time she hits with it - available from the vast and difficult quest of "Checking Ribald's special stock", and upgradeable to a 5% chance to drain levels to boot.
Melodrama: E - Oh gods, the whining, the angst, the dark and tortured past. Fade starts pretty mellow but swiftly mires herself in full-on bawfest that's like the unholy lovechild of Aerie and Viconia. She even whines about her evil sword of timestop when you buy it, and some of CHARNAME's responses are outright teenage. The only thing she doesn't wax melancholic upon is CHARNAME's own, not insignificant, problem of having his soul ripped out, which she very much takes in stride with barely so much as a murmur. Thanks, Fade.
Bugginess: A - Asides from the occasional typo, I didn't see any particular glitches from Fade or her quests, though I somehow managed to trigger a random ambush that instantly lost her as a party member while I was just out of the underdark, which was just peachy.
Content and Consistency: D - Fade frequently seems to pay less attention to mechanics than she should. Despite being Chaotic Neutral, her behaviour borders on Neutral Good, with a supposed temper she never actually displayed. She constantly complains about being full of dark and eeeeeevil temptations, but never actually does much along those lines.
There's a place in her plot where she is badly beaten and injured, and a whole awkward wound cleaning scene comes out of it the next time you rest - ostensibly because expending the spells (that you're about to rest and recover anyway) is a waste? But in truth because if you cast Heal, you couldn't check out her boobs while you bandage her up. There's another place where she decides to give her amulet to CHARNAME to protect him from vampires... This being directly after CHARNAME just picked up Chapter 3's free Amulet o' Power.
Finally, I had quite a bit of trouble picking an appropriately in character response a few times, including several mandatory {Hugs} during the progression of the romance and strangely placed ellipses as CHARNAME is forced into some very specific, often stilted dialogue.
Power Creep: C - Fade is a single class non-kitted thief. Thieves are pretty terrible, overall, and Fade is certainly no exception, charm and invisibility innates not-withstanding, but she does get a few powerful items I consider a little excessive. She starts with an amulet that grants immunity to charm, drain and permanent protection from evil, shortly after being made equippable by either CHARNAME or herself, an exclusive wedding ring which doubles up on the charm protection with permanent Chaotic Commands (methinks the author hated illithids?) along with being a ring of regeneration and fire resistance. Finally, she can acquire a +4 short sword with +1D4 acid damage and a 5% chance to cast a mini time stop every time she hits with it - available from the vast and difficult quest of "Checking Ribald's special stock", and upgradeable to a 5% chance to drain levels to boot.
Melodrama: E - Oh gods, the whining, the angst, the dark and tortured past. Fade starts pretty mellow but swiftly mires herself in full-on bawfest that's like the unholy lovechild of Aerie and Viconia. She even whines about her evil sword of timestop when you buy it, and some of CHARNAME's responses are outright teenage. The only thing she doesn't wax melancholic upon is CHARNAME's own, not insignificant, problem of having his soul ripped out, which she very much takes in stride with barely so much as a murmur. Thanks, Fade.
Bugginess: A - Asides from the occasional typo, I didn't see any particular glitches from Fade or her quests, though I somehow managed to trigger a random ambush that instantly lost her as a party member while I was just out of the underdark, which was just peachy.
Overall: C - I'm not big on thieves, special snowflake races, excessive emotes, dark and brooding pasts or the temptation to pick up a Fighter/Mage/Thief, skip Fade altogether and just grab her exclusive sword of timestop, so she's not really my cup of tea. She's certainly not the worst NPC mod out there by any stretch of the imagination.
Isra
Plot and Immersion: A- - Isra introduces a few small sidequests, nothing particularly onerous, though the second quest doesn't really give much clue that you're supposed to chat to an easily ignored NPC, or mention anything in the journal to get you going if you leave it for a bit. She chats pleasantly with the vanilla and EE NPCs and is generally pretty cool to have around, though her refusal to work with Hexxat at least long enough to grab her bag is obnoxious. She also has {flirty hugs}, but they can be disabled by talking to her, and she actually has a full conversation tree in there to boot, rather than just a list of physical molestations to inflict upon her. The only thing I felt was out of place was her portrait, which looks a little cartoony compared to the regular style.
Content and Consistency: A - I didn't really have anything to complain about, which is strange considering I hate paladins. Isra has plenty of interjections, yet always manages to carry herself as a paladin without the stick and without taking the limelight, and not only do the NPCs she banters with keep their personalities straight, she even allows CHARNAME a range of responses to interacting with her that rarely made me blanch.
Power Creep: A - Isra is a Cavalier, and whatever stats she has that matter are worse than Keldorn's. Her items - a unique ring of protection +1, a cloak of +1 Charisma and Confusion resistance and a suit of dragonscale, are well in keeping with existing gear, and having a ringslot occupied by a weak ring actually makes her worse than she could be. My main concern would be more that she's too much like Keldorn, focused in two handed swords and long swords rather than bastard swords or maces.
Melodrama - A - Isra doesn't have a particularly dark and troubled past, a strange and unhealthy relationship with the opposite sex, or require CHARNAME to soothe her broken heart and save her with his genitals.
Bugginess: B - Isra suffered a bug in her quest which required some googling and console commands to resolve, but generally nothing insurmountable.
Content and Consistency: A - I didn't really have anything to complain about, which is strange considering I hate paladins. Isra has plenty of interjections, yet always manages to carry herself as a paladin without the stick and without taking the limelight, and not only do the NPCs she banters with keep their personalities straight, she even allows CHARNAME a range of responses to interacting with her that rarely made me blanch.
Power Creep: A - Isra is a Cavalier, and whatever stats she has that matter are worse than Keldorn's. Her items - a unique ring of protection +1, a cloak of +1 Charisma and Confusion resistance and a suit of dragonscale, are well in keeping with existing gear, and having a ringslot occupied by a weak ring actually makes her worse than she could be. My main concern would be more that she's too much like Keldorn, focused in two handed swords and long swords rather than bastard swords or maces.
Melodrama - A - Isra doesn't have a particularly dark and troubled past, a strange and unhealthy relationship with the opposite sex, or require CHARNAME to soothe her broken heart and save her with his genitals.
Bugginess: B - Isra suffered a bug in her quest which required some googling and console commands to resolve, but generally nothing insurmountable.
Overall: A. Isra fit very naturally into my playthrough once I turned off the flirting, and it's nice to have a Paladin that I don't feel like I'm turning on Easy Mode by bringing along.
Tashia
Plot and Immersion: B - This gets a lower score because I simply couldn't get her plotline to progress beyond a single random encounter with some goons, probably because of the same bug that caused her to keep repeating a conversation about poison ivy ad nauseam, She has a quirk that her romance track and plot both stop at some point in Chapter 2, and won't resume until you progress into the later chapters, which as with the other late chapter NPCs is a little jarring when you're supposed to be chasing after your immortal soul, but generally not {hugging}, {kissing} and {tap dancing} more than makes up for that for me.
Her portraits did feel a little out of place for me, but the alternative, non-digital, portrait fit at least well enough to not be distracting.
Content and Consistency: A - Tashia asks riddles, talks to the other NPCs without derailing them, develops a little buddyship with Imoen, and doesn't she occasionally pipes up with her opinion without hogging the spotlight. Generally she fits her alignment and stats (though the flirt menu in the force talk is a little creepy to do to a person you just met), and she had plenty of friendship/romance chats before the glitch hit me and locked me into talking about poison ivy. I perhaps might have preferred there to be a short timer break between her riddles to stop me from going through the lot of them all at once, but overall there's plenty of Tashia-talky going on.
Power Creep: D - Tashia is a sorcerer, a powergamer's favourite, with almost perfect stats for it - 19 Dex and 15 Con who cares about the rest you're a sorcerer. What's more, she starts out with a "Scrimshaw Figurine", an exclusive once per day summoning item that summons Peanawlwaiahan or whatever. Paen is a 20 Strength, 0 THAC0, 3 APR, -7 AC abomination with immunity to magic, acid, lightning, and Timestop, not to mention 90% resistance to physical damage, so its 20 HP might as well be 200 unless it's facing off against those rare opponents with MR bypassing fire or cold damage. She also apparently picks up a frost resisting cloak of protection +1 that gives three Frost Wand charges per day, though I think that's a romance thing I couldn't get thanks to the glitch.
Melodrama: B - Tashia starts out gloomy and morose, complains at length about her troubled past with her abusive ex-Bhaalspawn and so on, but she more or less gets over it and never really chews the scenery or has deep shuddering sobs requiring CHARNAME to salve her broken heart, which is oh so very refreshing.
Bugginess: C - Tashia's talks stalled a few times, the last of which was fatal, at least to the ongoing quest and romance, but even without it she was still capable of getting through the whole game, just with less content than she should have.
Her portraits did feel a little out of place for me, but the alternative, non-digital, portrait fit at least well enough to not be distracting.
Content and Consistency: A - Tashia asks riddles, talks to the other NPCs without derailing them, develops a little buddyship with Imoen, and doesn't she occasionally pipes up with her opinion without hogging the spotlight. Generally she fits her alignment and stats (though the flirt menu in the force talk is a little creepy to do to a person you just met), and she had plenty of friendship/romance chats before the glitch hit me and locked me into talking about poison ivy. I perhaps might have preferred there to be a short timer break between her riddles to stop me from going through the lot of them all at once, but overall there's plenty of Tashia-talky going on.
Power Creep: D - Tashia is a sorcerer, a powergamer's favourite, with almost perfect stats for it - 19 Dex and 15 Con who cares about the rest you're a sorcerer. What's more, she starts out with a "Scrimshaw Figurine", an exclusive once per day summoning item that summons Peanawlwaiahan or whatever. Paen is a 20 Strength, 0 THAC0, 3 APR, -7 AC abomination with immunity to magic, acid, lightning, and Timestop, not to mention 90% resistance to physical damage, so its 20 HP might as well be 200 unless it's facing off against those rare opponents with MR bypassing fire or cold damage. She also apparently picks up a frost resisting cloak of protection +1 that gives three Frost Wand charges per day, though I think that's a romance thing I couldn't get thanks to the glitch.
Melodrama: B - Tashia starts out gloomy and morose, complains at length about her troubled past with her abusive ex-Bhaalspawn and so on, but she more or less gets over it and never really chews the scenery or has deep shuddering sobs requiring CHARNAME to salve her broken heart, which is oh so very refreshing.
Bugginess: C - Tashia's talks stalled a few times, the last of which was fatal, at least to the ongoing quest and romance, but even without it she was still capable of getting through the whole game, just with less content than she should have.
Overall: B - I couldn't bring myself to ever use her item, but even without it Tashia felt like a solid member of the team. If only she'd shut up about poison ivy so I could cover the rest of her content.
Wings
I had high hopes for this mod, but unfortunately it conked out somewhere in the first few friendship talks preventing it from progressing. What I saw was decent, but I was forced to uninstall it to fix that up, at which point I believe it made Anomen decide to start hitting on M!CHARNAME something fierce, which was... interesting, I suppose? I'd like to give it another try to get it working sometime, at which point I'll update this.
Imoen Romance
The weird "not quite incest maybe" mod for Imoen.
Plot and Consistency: B- - There's a few weird things in this mod. Imoen apparently plays guitar and sings - gods I hate singing and poetry, Jaheira tells you it's unnatural to have feelings for a foster sister - who as far as she should know is, y'know, just an attractive woman your own age who grew up in the same castle and who lived with an Innkeeper who was your neighbour. The starting dreams are pretty weird in and of themselves, particularly since they're lengthy and unskippable, which makes me die a little bit inside.
A lot of the interactions with Imoen are both {huggy} and, at times, downright silly, though CHARNAME can get in on the fun at times with some irreverent banter they share between one another. There's also some nice friendship track stuff in there with none of the awkwardness of the romance itself, and it helps give Imoen more interactions, more personality and just generally *more* of everything that she sorely lacked in the vanilla games, and yes, you can point out that it's ridiculous to be "siblings" from two different species.
On consistency, there seems to be a strange amount of "what will people think" in the romantic tracks, because either apparently people can tell on sight that a dwarf and a human walking together are spiritually related or because Imoen is strongly against interracial relationships. Likewise we already know how Imoen acts after being molested and tortured for long periods of time, since vanilla already has her suffer through both in the prologue, so her far stronger reaction to a far shorter time period comes off a little strange.
Power Creep: B - While Imoen is largely unchanged, she can pick up a supposedly but not really exclusive bracelet with the new content by trolling around Athkatla if you've got the right variables achieved. This double speed ring of regeneration gives +1 Dexterity and a +2 Casting Speed bonus, which on a Mage/Thief with the Robe of Vecna and Amulet of Power means casting Horrid Wiltings as fast as everyone else is dropping Magic Missile. Still, it's not dropping Timestops every other round or an unkillable tiger summon, so I was pretty much okay with it.
Melodrama: D - While Imoen is generally a fun loving, easy-going sort, her romance gets pretty overwrought at times. A big deal is made out of the "incestuous" aspects, despite the "completely different species with no shared genetics" thing, and "friends raised by two different people in the same small town" gets stretched into lengthy conversations about being siblings, and turning into an emotional wreck about going to face Irenicus because of all the torture in Spellhold "because you took too long to get there" (aka 10 days because Irenicus escapes at the beginning of the mandatory tenday boat trip). Honestly I'd have given her a pass for a little angsting, given the whole "soul torn out, tortured for an extra week" deal, but the fact she's only an emotional wreck during the romance is just eyerolling.
Bugginess: B - Thanks, presumably, to my lengthy time spent paused without playing, Imoen managed to exhaust all her underdark dialogue and invite me to camp out in that nice field at the underdark exit shortly before I entered Ust Natha for the first time. That stopped the game entering Chapter 6 for a bit and generally got a bit strange, but it worked itself out in the end by travelling back there, so not a deal breaker.
A lot of the interactions with Imoen are both {huggy} and, at times, downright silly, though CHARNAME can get in on the fun at times with some irreverent banter they share between one another. There's also some nice friendship track stuff in there with none of the awkwardness of the romance itself, and it helps give Imoen more interactions, more personality and just generally *more* of everything that she sorely lacked in the vanilla games, and yes, you can point out that it's ridiculous to be "siblings" from two different species.
On consistency, there seems to be a strange amount of "what will people think" in the romantic tracks, because either apparently people can tell on sight that a dwarf and a human walking together are spiritually related or because Imoen is strongly against interracial relationships. Likewise we already know how Imoen acts after being molested and tortured for long periods of time, since vanilla already has her suffer through both in the prologue, so her far stronger reaction to a far shorter time period comes off a little strange.
Power Creep: B - While Imoen is largely unchanged, she can pick up a supposedly but not really exclusive bracelet with the new content by trolling around Athkatla if you've got the right variables achieved. This double speed ring of regeneration gives +1 Dexterity and a +2 Casting Speed bonus, which on a Mage/Thief with the Robe of Vecna and Amulet of Power means casting Horrid Wiltings as fast as everyone else is dropping Magic Missile. Still, it's not dropping Timestops every other round or an unkillable tiger summon, so I was pretty much okay with it.
Melodrama: D - While Imoen is generally a fun loving, easy-going sort, her romance gets pretty overwrought at times. A big deal is made out of the "incestuous" aspects, despite the "completely different species with no shared genetics" thing, and "friends raised by two different people in the same small town" gets stretched into lengthy conversations about being siblings, and turning into an emotional wreck about going to face Irenicus because of all the torture in Spellhold "because you took too long to get there" (aka 10 days because Irenicus escapes at the beginning of the mandatory tenday boat trip). Honestly I'd have given her a pass for a little angsting, given the whole "soul torn out, tortured for an extra week" deal, but the fact she's only an emotional wreck during the romance is just eyerolling.
Bugginess: B - Thanks, presumably, to my lengthy time spent paused without playing, Imoen managed to exhaust all her underdark dialogue and invite me to camp out in that nice field at the underdark exit shortly before I entered Ust Natha for the first time. That stopped the game entering Chapter 6 for a bit and generally got a bit strange, but it worked itself out in the end by travelling back there, so not a deal breaker.
Overall: B- - Some of the stuff is corny, awkward and melodramatic, other stuff is cute, fun and entertaining, while the extra dialogues and interjections are things that should really have been included in the original. A bit of a mixed bag, but overall worth a try, if only for the extra Imoen banters.
Quest and Content Mods moved for length:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/702460/#Comment_702460
Post edited by Pantalion on
7
Comments
What versions of these mods did you use? There is a new beta version of Ascension now available for EE and Imoen Romance was recently updated also.
Also, were you using the latest BiG World Fixpack patches for these mods?
For Isra's portrait, I usually use the one from PaintBG.
If you have anything you would like to see in the mod, or something that you think should be changed, please post in the Tome and Blood forum and I'll see what I can do. Who knows what the future will hold? Perhaps a Monk/Sorcerer is already waiting in the wings...
Tower of Deception
The supposedly short quest mod, I've dabbled in it, but not gone any deeper than the first two maps at this point.
Plot: Pretty simple fair, overall, go find a magic book in a tower on a deserted island.
Loot: Fairly modest, overall, a Ring of Protection +2, a few potions, and random drops... except for THE BLADE, "The Warblade of Twilight" is a +5 two handed sword with a 5% chance of causing berserk if the wielder is hit and -1 Dexterity when wielded.
That's the downside. The plus side is: 30% MR, two casts of DUHM per day, +5 damage against chaotic evil, and the TWoT functions as a mini Alacrity, allowing the wielding to cast two spell per round.
As you might gather, the TWoT is ridiculous. It should never be used in melee, but nothing else compares for a backliner mage (though it requires a dual or a multiclass to have one that can use it, Jan's bad vanilla self can UAI it.
Enemies: Asides from the -11 AC, 5 APR "Baloar" as the tower's first encounter, there's a Lich with double contingency Mislead, a Marilith with SI: Divination, contingencied invisibility and all the usual protections, and a few group encounters. There didn't appear to be any rest encounters or random spawns.
Locks and Traps: Trivial. There are a few container traps only, and no locks, either to progress or on containers.
Difficulty: I rolled in with a non-optimised party with 3e6ish Exp as the last thing before facing Irenicus and managed with little difficulty. Generally the encounter should be avoided until at least later in Chapter 2, level 10+, since there's no escape until you finish the content, nowhere to retreat and recover your resources if you take a beating, and if you don't have the gear to pierce through weapon immunities or handle half a dozen salamanders.
NB: If you don't have the capacity to cast fireball, you'll miss out on some content. This mod cannot be completed by a solo Wizard Slayer.
Overall: B- - The quest isn't bad, though it felt like a bit of a slog at times. The blade, however, is potentially an absolute gamebreaker, letting you get 70-75% MR (95% if you "borrow" Kelsey's cloak from his mod) while doubling your casting rate, and there's no way the quest is either long or hard enough to justify that.
Content Mods:
Ascension
The quintessential ToB overhaul, this added cheap battles, extra Bhaal powers, and more roleplaying options to the ToB aspect of the game.
Immersion: B - This would be a D for Draconis' infinite invisibility spam, Abazigal's illegal wyvern posse and all the other shenanigans, but honestly I really liked some of the things it added for Imoen and CHARNAME as each came into their own in terms of powers, as well as the whole Sarevok plotline.
Bugginess: C - I experienced a repeated bug where it was both impossible to save during the lulls in the final battle and during the encounter with the five the map would change to the pocket plane with no selectable characters, requiring a reload and rerunning of the entire thing multiple times to get anywhere. This, coupled with the occasional absurdity of the encounters, eventually forced me to remove the whole thing just so I could end the game and stop playing ToB.
Overall: B - There were some frustrating hoops to jump through at times, but generally I'd recommend this just for the alignment based Bhaalspawn powers you can pick up to feel a bit more "Ascendy".
Tome and Blood
Generally for kit and content packs like this, I'm more interested in what shenanigans I can set up with Keeper for interesting new character archetypes I haven't played to death, rather than the "intended use", but generally I found this to add a lot of interesting choices, particularly to sorcerers. The Magus kit, in particular, stands out as an interesting concept as a Fighter/Sorcerer without the THAC0 or, despite the kit description, the attacks. I also liked the Divine/Arcane spell overlaps, which was a cool concept, and having Tashia play Groveborn Sorcerer - a Druid/Sorcerer hybrid, was pretty awesome.
Still holding out for that Monk/Sorcerer hybrid though, just saying.
Overall: B+ - There are a few kits I could never see myself using, and some of the features (like mages wearing helmets while thieves still couldn't) I could do without, but there's some solid options in here that really opened up sorcerers to me, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Might and Guile
A complete overhaul with kits and all.
Weapon Styles:
TWF making your main hand attack worse makes a lot of sense (though I'd have liked to have seen "parrying" be more of a thing with your offhand, since that's a lot of what offhand dangers are about). This makes every pip in TWF style worthwhile, which is great.
Single Weapon Style (Finesse) is still underpowered compared to every other style at present, since the additional 5% crit chance doesn't compensate for the loss of AC or damage output from having a two handed weapon, second weapon, or a shield. It could probably use an extra bonus for specialisation in the style, perhaps an extra 1/2 APR.
Sword and Shield gives AC and crit chance, making it actually worth taking, while zweihander style gives potent damage bonuses for specialisation, making it worth the second pip for a change.
Unfortunately these changes come part and parcel with the proficiency overhaul, and this I couldn't get along with. Since the system ties APR to specialisation pips it removed a standard strategy of switching to unfamiliar weapons (say, untrained flails to handle Clay Golems), since even my fighters were stuck at 1 APR with them. Overall it worked out as giving fewer attacks per round in a more limited range of weapons than the default, as well as a nerf against Fighter/Mages, F/M/Ts and Fighter/Clerics by taking away their 1/2 APR from specialisation, though this is apparently a bug, rather than intentional.
The kits were interesting, the most intriguing being the Multiclass sets, though hardcoded engine limitations stopped the Bladesinger from being all it could be. There's also some strangeness about who can use the kits (by the rules a multiclass kit can be useable by any combination, so an F/M/T should be able to pick up an F/T, F/M or M/T kit, while UAI, obviously, lets them use any of the multikit tokens which can get a little weird), and I never quite figured out where to find the kit tokens - nor liked that humans got to multiclass as a result of the change.
In the end I had to uninstall the whole thing multiple times trying to remove the proficiency system and never reinstalled it (and the descriptions of which refuse to get off my game even after wiping my override folder and reinstalling everything from scratch), but hopefully later versions will tweak things a bit, since the saves, HP and stat revisions were all things I'd like to make part of my regular game (and styles too, if they can be separated from the rest of the proficiency system).
Not rated due to bug trouble. Potentially an A for some of the content if it gets fixed to work as intended.
BiG World Fixpack included patches are listed here: https://github.com/BiGWorldProject/BiG-World-Fixpack/blob/master/BiG World Fixpack/_BWP fixes.txt
Tyris - no patches yet
Fade - 2 patches
:: Argent77's missing WAV uninstall fix
:: micbaldur's AR0900 script typo fix
Isra - 2 patches
:: dialogue token fix (incorrect pronoun)
:: Roxanne's looping dialogue fix
Tashia - 5 patches
:: Lollorian's corrected "LE#tbody " -> "LE#tbody" typos - LE#Cleanse.baf
:: the bigg's KIT.IDS ToBEx compatibility fix
:: Lollorian's missing final battle pep-talk fix
:: Lollorian's fix for bug in TOB dialogue
:: lynx's looping cutscene fix
Wings - no patches yet
Imoen Romance - no patches yet
NOTE: Imoen Romance v3.3 is currently available (newer than what you used) -- http://imoen.blindmonkey.org/downloads.php (it says 3.2 on the page but the version is 3.3)
Regarding the Imoen Romance, yeah, might have been 3.2 I was on, I was just going from the Readme's version number, which says 3.0 at present. I'll try redownloading it at some point.
Isra's glitch was during her questline:
I looked for Valen, but alas I couldn't find an EE compatible version.
Kelsey, however, I have grabbed. I shall be bringing Anomen and the ginger sorcerer along together for some of those Critically Acclaimed Arguments.
Tower of Deception installed.
Might and Guile grabbed - This looks very promising to me, opening up combat (and apparently higher APR?) to the non-fighter classes as well as Bladesinger some interesting item and engine changes (I steered clear of some of the more extreme ones, like MR being done away with), Bladesinger weapon changes, and some interesting kits... Like Bladesinger.
And since I'll have a spare slot or two, I'll also pick up Nephele and Ninde (and continue mucking with variables to follow her romance track at the same time). I considered trying to grab Chloe to review as well, the legendary kensai with 25 Dexterity, but strangely nobody seems to have bothered to update her to EE yet.
Anyway, don't be shy about giving your own reviews on any mods you run through, I'll be happy to put them into the original post with your name attached.
Kelsey:
The mercantile sorcerer.
The reason he gets a B is that his flirts can get pretty damn creepy. Wandering around dungeons, he would periodically stop to muck with CHARNAME's hair, {shuddering} as he fingers her earlobe. Give her a "friendly kiss on the cheek" - repeatedly kissing your work colleague on the face doesn't strike me as friendly, so much as sexual harassment, but I'm British, the personal space on my character is the size of Firkraag's, so maybe that's just me. Walking next to you so he can brush your arm as he points which way to go next, while actively trying to smell your hair? Running his finger along your arm and grunting? Brrr.
It was also strange how talking to him informed CHARNAME that she felt a strong mutual attraction towards him, and that she found him uncontrollably rolling his eyes (not kidding) to be adorable. Thanks for letting me know how CHARNAME feels, Kelsey!
What's possibly worst is that his flirts progress into unsolicited makeout and groping long before the romance progresses to a place where that would be appropriate, particularly since my Wizard Slayer/Mage/Thief CHARNAME (I don't recommend it, by the way, constantly low level Wizard Slayer that can't even wear armour or bracers = Nightmare mode) always picked the rather stand-offish, ambivalent answers rather than {sweaty hugging} the red headed gentleman, but apparently after saying "Yeah, you're pretty much sticking around for the six fireballs a day" so many times, he decided that meant CHARNAME thought he was hot, grabbed her posterior and forced her to French kiss in the middle of Spellhold's dungeon.
Thankfully if you're not reviewing the mod, there is a permanent off-switch (unlike with Isra, who you can bring back online if you miss {free candy}). Without it, Kelsey gets an A.
Content and Consistency: B - While Kelsey's personality and behaviour was pretty good, and he's had a few comparatively minor plot fights so far (I'm expecting something larger come Chapter 6), there were a few niggles where the other characters were a bit off model. Jan's a little more abrasive than usual, and Anomen, who I had the curious privilege of running through the romance of with my last male elf CHARNAME, was clearly written by someone who didn't care for the cleriknight, amping his ego from "kind of has an inferiority complex but generally tries his best not to be a boob about it" to where "The Radiant Heart, of which I am a squire in my proudest achievement which means a lot to me" becomes "My own significant contributions to the Radiant Heart shall not be insulted!", rendering a realistically imperfect character into an almost cartoonish version at times.
Secondly, he doesn't really seem to take CHARNAME's class into account (though this may be different for a Sorcerous CHARNAME). How special Kelsey is is a commonplace theme, even wild mages are super dull and common compared to sorcerers in the Kelseyverse. Frequently he'll talk about protecting her with his spells and asking her if she can imagine what it's like to be able to shoot fire across the room... Sirrah, CHARNAME has three levels on you and has three fireballs prepped, pretty sure that she has an inkling.
Bonus points for Elven CHARNAME being able to point out that Kelsey will be dead and buried long, long before she manages to grow old with him, but loses a few points where he mentions her becoming a silver haired seer immediately after. Not unless you perfect lichdom, Kelsey, and even then probably not.
Power Creep: D- - What is it with Sorcerers and overpowered gear? Kelsey's stats are as irrelevant as any sorcerer, but he comes replete with a cloak of 20% MR, +1 to saves, +1 to AC, casts a unique Fireshield(Green/Acid) and level 1 and level 2 spell slots... and is upgradeable with your favourite pocket imp and is usable by "Sorcerers". Yeah, it's 5% MR vs two levels of spell slots and a Fireshield off being the Cloak of Balduran. So guess what's mine as soon as I get UAI?
The other things he's granted so far are comparatively tame. A necklace of 1/day NRD, which, given he's not a Wild Mage, works about as well as one might expect. "Makeup of +2 Charisma" he decided to give 17 Cha CHARNAME (not sure if should be insulted, gave it to Jan, who rather enjoyed it), and a strobe light helmet (granted via a chat with Jan).
Melodrama: B+ - Kelsey dips into the occasional whine, and it's sad seeing him behave like a bit of a doormat at times, but generally he's pretty low drama, doesn't angst over everything, and doesn't tell me not to waste healing spells so I can waste fabric bandaging his pectorals. Some of the dialogue responses to him just wandered into absurdly hostile for no reason, though, which was just plain weird.
Bugginess: A - I didn't notice any outright glitches due to Kelsey, asides from the occasional {backrub} while I'm trying to buff up for a dungeon boss.
Overall: B- - If I were going to pick a sorcerer to fill that barren niche, I'd go with Tashia for being slightly less abusable with her one encounter per day megacat, but Kelsey's romance is pretty decent if you're running a female toon and can put up with his 7 spell slots per day and the fact he picked up Burning Hands (which overrides all other spells in the AI so he can wander into melee and use it against a Fire Elemental).
Nephele
The adventuring midget grandma.
There were a few niggles where she started teaching CHARNAME how to cast Mage spells, which was coming on a little strong considering Mage CHARNAME learned from CHARNAME, but generally she was a delight, mothering Imoen and CHARNAME, making her presence felt and generally chipping in for all sorts of quests, making her presence very much known, without being a know-it-all most of the time, though she's a little more quiet in the underdark.
Content and Consistency: B - While she has a lot to say, Nephy doesn't have any unfinished quests I've seen so far, making her content pretty much non-existent, unless she's holding out for Chapter 6.
Power Creep: A+ - Her stats are beyond mediocre for BG2, with the highest being Wisdom at 15. She gets no earth shattering equipment, no mind boggling necklace of immortality, just a single class cleric with a hidden kit, the Cleric of Yondalla, which has granted thus far: Goodberries as an innate, Zone of Sweet Air, and Entangle. Zone is situationally handy to have as an innate, but Nephele is if anything too modest to be mucking it up in BG2's high level environment.
Melodrama: A - Drama free, angst free, {shivery hugs} free, and angst-ridden backstory free. She's a halfling widow with grandkids and wanderlust. It's refreshing to see an older character getting such a solid representation.
Bugginess: A- - Her kit doesn't have a kit description or show up on her character record. Other than that, she's pretty much glitch free aside from the odd typo.
Overall: A - She's not a powergamer's choice, but I found her presence surprisingly enjoyable. Well worth a try, if you aren't fashed by the fact she's outright worse than Viconia's MR heavy self or are willing to Keeper her into something a little stronger if you are.
Ninde:
The unapologetically evil necromancer elf.
Otherwise, she's happy to spread a little fatalistic cheer in banters and dialogues (plenty of which occur in the underdark, which is nice considering that's just where a lot of vanilla NPCs turn quiet). She noticably has no dialogue with the Phaere encounter (unusual for a romance partner, though to be fair it may just be her entirely characteristic apathy towards the notion), and she gives plenty of scope for CHARNAME to run a gamut of characterisations, which is the kind of RP heavy interaction I prefer, and while her Player-Initiated-Dialogues included {flirty activities}, they also included a wide range of conversation options to ask her about herself, to which she shares a short reply.
One thing of note is that in two places it felt like I skipped a conversation or two explaining what her deal was, first one being her first recruitment where she refers to Lassal as "late", second when she leapt into revealing her mysterious malady before I even knew she had a malady in the first place.
Content and Consistency: B - A bit of a mixed bag. Generally, Ninde strikes me far more as chaotic evil than neutral. She's capricious, changeable and mischievous, disloyal and thoroughly self-interested - consistently so, but at odds with her character sheet. At one point CHARNAME, an elf, dissed elves as a species and made fun of Ninde's pointy ears. Later she talks about how she's an elf raised by humans and CHARNAME gets to say they're an elf, but... Apparently forgets that the entire population of Candlekeep is human or doppleganger, or that they're bizarrely underage, missing out an interesting avenue of interaction.
Otherwise, purists might have trouble with the fact that Ninde mentions stories when she was a fifteen year old elfin child which, for elves, even human raised ones, is probably still pre-pubescent unless you happen to be a Bhaalspawn, but easily enough ignored.
I haven't noticed any particular quests or other content for Ninde, though she's happy enough to pipe up during other questlines.
Power Creep: A+ - She has a unique amulet that grants Negative Plane Protection and the like, which considering you have to have an amulet of power guaranteed and probably won't have your mage in melee range anyway, is pretty tame overall, particularly in return for an unusable amulet slot.
In terms of her class, not only does Necromancy lock her out of some of the best mage spells, she gets none of the boosts that Edwin enjoys for his magery, leaving her with a decent but not fantastic, intelligence, wisdom and charisma and pretty middling stats.
I actually Keepered her into a Fighter/Mage in my game to make use of a bow (since a pure cleric, sorcerer, Bard Imoen and Jan Jansen doesn't make for the most balanced of parties), and never once felt like she was pushing the envelope.
Melodrama: A - Ninde is cheerfully fatalistic about your shared fate of dooooooom.
Bugginess: B - One underdark lovetalk crashed my game, but sleeping mid conversation, while perhaps a little rude, got around the bug with no console editing necessary. Otherwise there are a few typos, but nothing extreme.
Overall: B - Her talks have plenty of dialogue and a wide range of options which are novel, and she's refreshingly content to let you have an opinion she doesn't share, so I'd say she's worth a try, at least if you're looking for her personality, which I found quite palatable, and definitely not stupid evil.
Tower of Deception
The supposedly short quest mod, I've dabbled in it, but not gone any deeper than the first two maps at this point.
Plot: Pretty simple fair, overall, go find a magic book in a tower on a deserted island.
Loot: Fairly modest, overall, a Ring of Protection +2, a few potions, and random drops... except for THE BLADE, "The Warblade of Twilight" is a +5 two handed sword with a 5% chance of causing berserk if the wielder is hit and -1 Dexterity when wielded.
That's the downside. The plus side is: 30% MR, two casts of DUHM per day, +5 damage against chaotic evil, and the TWoT functions as a mini Alacrity, allowing the wielding to cast two spell per round.
As you might gather, the TWoT is ridiculous. It should never be used in melee, but nothing else compares for a backliner mage (though it requires a dual or a multiclass to have one that can use it, Jan's bad vanilla self can UAI it.
Enemies: Asides from the -11 AC, 5 APR "Baloar" as the tower's first encounter, there's a Lich with double contingency Mislead, a Marilith with SI: Divination, contingencied invisibility and all the usual protections, and a few group encounters. There didn't appear to be any rest encounters or random spawns.
Locks and Traps: Trivial. There are a few container traps only, and no locks, either to progress or on containers.
Difficulty: I rolled in with a non-optimised party with 3e6ish Exp as the last thing before facing Irenicus and managed with little difficulty. Generally the encounter should be avoided until at least later in Chapter 2, level 10+, since there's no escape until you finish the content, nowhere to retreat and recover your resources if you take a beating, and if you don't have the gear to pierce through weapon immunities or handle half a dozen salamanders.
NB: If you don't have the capacity to cast fireball, you'll miss out on some content. This mod cannot be completed by a solo Wizard Slayer.
Rating pending.
Might and Guile
A complete overhaul with kits and all.
Weapon Styles:
TWF making your main hand attack worse makes a lot of sense (though I'd have liked to have seen "parrying" be more of a thing with your offhand, since that's a lot of what offhand dangers are about). This makes every pip in TWF style worthwhile, which is great.
Single Weapon Style (Finesse) is still underpowered compared to every other style at present, since the additional 5% crit chance doesn't compensate for the loss of AC or damage output from having a two handed weapon, second weapon, or a shield. It could probably use an extra bonus for specialisation in the style, perhaps an extra 1/2 APR.
Sword and Shield gives AC and crit chance, making it actually worth taking, while zweihander style gives potent damage bonuses for specialisation, making it worth the second pip for a change.
Unfortunately these changes come part and parcel with the proficiency overhaul, and this I couldn't get along with. Since the system ties APR to specialisation pips it removed a standard strategy of switching to unfamiliar weapons (say, untrained flails to handle Clay Golems), since even my fighters were stuck at 1 APR with them. Overall it worked out as giving fewer attacks per round in a more limited range of weapons than the default, as well as a nerf against Fighter/Mages, F/M/Ts and Fighter/Clerics by taking away their 1/2 APR from specialisation, though this is apparently a bug, rather than intentional.
The kits were interesting, the most intriguing being the Multiclass sets, though hardcoded engine limitations stopped the Bladesinger from being all it could be. There's also some strangeness about who can use the kits (by the rules a multiclass kit can be useable by any combination, so an F/M/T should be able to pick up an F/T, F/M or M/T kit, while UAI, obviously, lets them use any of the multikit tokens which can get a little weird), and I never quite figured out where to find the kit tokens - nor liked that humans got to multiclass as a result of the change.
In the end I had to uninstall the whole thing multiple times trying to remove the proficiency system and never reinstalled it (and the descriptions of which refuse to get off my game even after wiping my override folder and reinstalling everything from scratch), but hopefully later versions will tweak things a bit, since the saves, HP and stat revisions were all things I'd like to make part of my regular game (and styles too, if they can be separated from the rest of the proficiency system).
I suppose I have one more run through in me, so next I suppose I have to play Saerileth, Dace, Chloe and "Coondred the raccoon" or something, right?
And in the name of efficiency, Quest mods Tales of the Deep Gardens and I Shall Never Forget have been installed as well.
I also ran through TOB with Kelsey, Imoen Romance, Ninde and Nephele. Since I hate ToB I didn't, and won't, go into much detail for most of them.
Ascension: X - Even the new version conked out at the final battle with the bridges failing to appear. I'm cursed.
Nephele: A - Nephele remains just as solid as ever, with many great interjections and a nice, fitting epilogue.
Kelsey: C - Kelsey breaks into full blown novella for ToB. I was just clicking through at the end of it, trying to get through it all. Some of it wasn't bad, just so, so long I started to die a little inside.
Ninde: C - Perhaps because she was conflicting with my many romances, Ninde was pretty quiet throughout, briefly mentioning avoiding a relationship because she's done with Powerful Men controlling her life. More power to you, sister, but not great for producing much content.
Imoen Romance: A+ - I feel I should qualify this one, since there was kind of a lot of downsides for this, including some weirdly detailed fanfic backstory insert for Imoen and an all too common case where the human 20% of the way through their lifespan and the elf 2% of the way through their lifespan forget this and "live out the rest of their lives together". In the discussion as to whether CHARNAME and she should pop out a few demigod babies, I would have really liked to have seen something along the lines of "What else will I have to remember you?" or "well if you don't want to that's fine, I guess I can always remarry at two hundred" as motivators, since elven CHARNAMEs are generally guaranteed widowers before they hit full adulthood.
These, and {flirty hugs} aside, however, a stunning amount of work seems to have gone into making Imoen feel like a balanced individual who is shaped and moulded by her relationship with CHARNAME and his alignment, giving a massive range of potential epilogues depending on how attentive and affectionate you were, how you guide her through the realisation of her Bhaalspawn heritage, how comfortable she is with her divine taint, whether she's friends with Aerie or not, and whether you decide to ascend with her as your dualistic equal or with a fraction to become your "divine handmaiden". Her personality is a lot less angsty than she was during SoA, and you and she can even bicker if you offend her. It's almost a reason to play ToB in itself (but not quite, I really, really hate ToB).
Tower of Deception - B+ - In a nice, unexpected twist ToD produced a bonus encounter in Amkethran for me based on how I completed the quest. It wasn't much, loot or challengewise, but it was certainly a cool bonus.
About the OP item
But I tried to use the sword with a FMT, every few battles he become enraged and killed half of the party.
the MR that give and the other bonuses alone, in a weapon that you can not use unles soloing in an area with only enemies, and even so without control on charname, and that don't give the mini IA, don't seem to OP. I regard it as useless and don't ever carry it in my BoH.
About the challenge
I had some limited success rapid casting buffs, with which I did manage to get several off per round, but since I was running my melee heavy Wizard Slayer/M/T myself, it wasn't really suitable for testing. If it doesn't work, it's just terrible, though no big loss to lose such a gamebreaker. Maybe for a solo Ranger or Paladin.
Regardless, brief pause in reviewing thanks to having to reinstall my game until it turned out that the problem was a corrupted .cha file. Hopefully it's fixed my proficiencies at least.
The type of item is the same, the added benefits are so similar to native pally bonuses or bonuses of the pally item. On top the not working benefit and the risk of 5% chance benefit occourring to balance.
Something to run a party without paladin, and it was long before blackguards, having the benefits of a paladin.
To me the idea seem a good one and in that contest the item is not so OP or gamebreaking.
But the idea was implemented in a very bad way, by a modder that had proved elsewhere to be very capable. At the time the mod was created was something very special, a cutscene and new areas at the level of the best original ones, no recicled areas, good combat scripts and challenge, a good plot. In a time where most mods was like "let's spawn an OP stats monster in some recicled place, give him some cheating scripts and the minimum level of plot to make it all not too arbitrary and unrealistic".
When reviewing mods I think that is good to consider also this kind of things, otherway we risk to review the whole game we love so much as a lame 2D graphic, limited AI filth.*
*Telling this I don't want to decrease the value of your work, also I, as @AWizardDidIt, really enjoy these kinds of in depth reviews of mods, I really appreciate your work.
If anything, it not working would merit a slight boost in my score. It's pretty mediocre and not worth the risk for your average unarmoured mage, but it's potentially something to give Minsc (or sell as vendor trash) for its enhancement and stat boosts.
Has anyone played "Yvette", by the way? I've never heard of the mod at all, but it's apparently EE compatible and part of the Colours of Infinity collection, so I'm inclined to take her along instead of Nalia or Keldorn, neither of whom have any CoI content.
Regardless, pottering around Chapter 2 with my party of scoundrels (I remembered I had to check out Dace, so my team is 2 bards, 2 thieves, and CHARNAME right now). Here's the latest:
Amber
Plot and Immersion: B+ - Nothing hurts my immersion so much as messing with my CHARNAMEs' free will, and Amber railroads CHARNAME quite a few times in that respect. A few are just niggles, like your early choice is "Doormat Goody Goody who knows about demons", "Strangely excitable or offended guy who knows about demons", or "Jerk", with not one "Yeah, duh, you're a tiefling, I met seven this morning and a cambion. Now fall into formation with the rest of the cretins, I have banters to see".
One particularly notable example is talking about Sarevok, she asks if you grew up together and not one single option of, I believe six, allows CHARNAME to not get super defensive about it and answer the damn question, and she then informed him that he was totes repressed feelings about the whole thing, which... Isn't really the case for any of my CHARNAMEs that I've ever run so having to act that way is weird.
Fortunately she appears to have grown out of this as her plotline progressed, and what plot I've come across isn't bad so far. She's kind of like a far less annoying Hexxat. Old, mysterious, and "exotically raced". You mooch around with her finding her lost stuff, she chats with you in the standard "getting to know you" banters, some interjections for "doing the right thing", and generally being cagey, and then her romance... dies completely until you hit Chapter 3, at which point she's eerily quiet as you traipse through the various quests.
One of her nicest features in my mind is asking how she's doing has her tell you broadly what her next lovetalk needs, which saves one from having to wander around for a month doing random nonsense trying to trigger everything, like I usually have to.
Another plus is that she doesn't interrupt whatever she's doing - for example, leaving the area, picking a lock, or picking some disappearing NPC's pocket, in order to engage in {flirtatious advances}, though her dialogue is rife with unremitting {angry flashes of her smouldering eyes and flicks of her flicky tail}.
Content and Consistency: B - While what banters I've seen are pretty good, I'm not sure what it is with single class, non-kitted thieves with a fancy class acting like they're super badasses who can take on CHARNAME/the whole party/whatever. Hexxat, Amber, Fade... Seriously, non-kitted thieves are the worst, particularly non-kitted thieves wielding spears, of all things.
In terms of mechanics she's all over the place, she's illegally dualled (race and stats) Fighter 6, has invested more than 100 into both HiS and MS, has illegally allocated proficiencies all over the place, nothing beyond specialisation, including Sword and Shield specialisation - despite not being able to use real shields, but that's as much a power concern as anything else.
In terms of quest content, she's had a quest to recruit her and a quest to pick up her unique bangle of destiny, a completely unsignposted quest that takes Amber out of the party and then requires you to run through and get her back. This third one starts with a high level Cleric/Ranger rapetank, with her magical scimitar mentioned below, and maybe six guards. Not only is the C/R Min1HP'd, which glitched out more than once for me in keeping them alive and chugging their potions of "Why would the shadow thieves be interested in attacking a wizard" to keep beating your pathetic crew of bards. Spoilers: When you win, you get the option of sparing her, or denying her plea for mercy, in which case.... She goes on full HP AGAIN for no reason.
Immediately after, you get to face a level 16 Fighter "Captain", backed up by another team of half a dozen or so enemies which for me thankfully glitched with the Captain charging to attack as soon as I entered the map so I could handle him alone... Followed by a "Demon", which was actually a full strength Tanarri. All of which was heaped upon my party of Level 10/11 C/M, and some level 12 rogue types. And Petsy, who was level 9 at this point. I can't say how much I appreciated this being lumped on me based on what I could only deduce was a talk timer, since it clearly wasn't level dependent. After the tanarri held and killed everyone else in the party, I f'd that noise and went downstairs again to kite it around some tables for ten minutes.
Fun sidenote: had CHARNAME not been carrying the wardstone himself, this would have permanently locked him out of the upper floor, quest completion and his partymate's gear forever. Sigh.
But at least the Tanarri gave... Half the Exp it's supposed to, and the final battle - against a LEVEL 19 SORCERER WITH 134 HP - features an ally to help you... That instantly turns hostile if an AOE spell so much as touches them, and wilts like a leaf over the Sorcerer's Greater Yuan Ti, Umber Hulk and Wyvern support.
Best of all, resting in certain area crashed the game, so yeah, I pretty much had to iron man the rest of it solo, which I certainly didn't hate considering the Sorcerer has maze for an instant no save game over.
All in all, I'd call this a good quest, despite the no resting, if it hadn't been four major encounters one right after the other, glitch-restricted resting, didn't require mandatory lockpicking after stealing your thief from you, and didn't trigger on Day 6 with a grossly underleveled party to be taking on epic level, though thankfully terribly AI'd, Sorcerers.
Power Creep: E - Asides from showing up at level 15 (where charname was 10/11 C/M and everyone else joining at 500k or less), she gets a small bonus to fire resistance (capped out at 39% at cap), poison weapon (4 uses by cap), some save or else's with no description (though I assume Blindness, Contagion and eventually Disintegrate with a few uses per day). Blind might be pretty useful for targeting your own thieves, but I never found much use for them. In recompense, she's scripted that she can't use any armour heavier than studded leather or shields better than bucklers, even post UAI, making her actually worse than your average thief in that regard.
While it's nice that so much attention was given to keep her ogle abilities balanced, it would have been nice to just have a gimmick free, pure classed swashbuckler, which I think would have fit her thematically and worked out better mechanically than the whole... thing, she's got going on. As it is, she's slightly better than Fade everywhere it counts except for a few blocked equipment slots, some of which are best in slot anyway.
In the end I just turned her into a single class swashie and ignore her extra innates, but I certainly can't say she threatened game balance as she was, because thief.
Gearwise, however, Amber offers the most items I've seen from an NPC mod, and these can be hit or miss in terms of balance. A non-exhaustive list I found checking through the files:
The Good:
Keyring: Stores keys, which for some reason take up as much space in a bag of holding as a suit of full plate. Awesome.
Ring Book: It's not bad if you switch between rings a lot. If you don't it's just a more limited, more fiddly gem bag, but that's fine by me.
Fade's Bracelet - Permanent Luck, and irremovable Fade only, as well as fear immunity. It's powerful (see below), but it's attached to Fade, who is assuredly not.
Amulet of Opposite Alignment - Despite ostensibly being a cursed item, this has the great feature of letting Korgan swing around Azure Edge, Keldorn to equip Human Flesh, and Dorn to wield Carsomyr, as well as letting your evil mages pick up one of the more common Good aligned archmagi robes.
The Bad:
Thief Gear: Lockpicks - +20% to open locks, and they can be dual wielded, oddly enough, for 40% to open locks whenever it's required. This would have been a lot more reasonable at 5% per lockpick, as it is they made investing points into Open Locks pointless.
The Ugly:
Blade of Roses +4 - Made out of Fade's bracelet and the thing you brandish at people to make them give you a discount, the +4 version has no particular usage restrictions and gains the Luck and Fearlessness of her bracelet, making the sword arguably the best weapon in the game. +1 to every die you roll, -1 to every non-weapon damage die your opponents roll, without changing the maximum or minimum. So:
You cannot roll a 1: You cannot critically miss or critically fail a save.
Effectively a +5 sword with a doubled crit chance (only +50% if you already have an extended crit range), and +1 to all saves.
+1 to minimum damage for both wielded weapons (I believe it's just +1 to one of the two, but Angurvadal etc should get the boosted minimum on the elemental damage as well).
+1 minimum damage to snares and spells, so 10D6 fireball becomes 20-60 damage if you cast it, 10-50 damage if you're hit by it, +/- 0.5 average damage per die, and this is the only way I know of to actually boost spell damage, and it's useable by everyone except Clerics and pure mages. That's effectively around 15% resistance to every type of damage except straight up weapon hits.
If this was the best of it, I'd give her a pass, because while it's potentially best in slot for most characters, it's done in an interesting way (and doesn't cast timestop), but then there's:
The Broken:
Mielekki's Gift - This is sole the reason it gets a lower score than the two sorcerers. Mielekki's Gift is a +3 scimitar with a 100% no save entangle (the thing that that +5 dagger gives a 15% chance of) on hostiles that lasts multiple rounds (I counted five in a quick test on a guard). It's very much as crazy as it sounds. Most enemies are more dangerous in melee (or "if allowed to run") than range, probably dislike being entangled in the middle of a cloudkill, and even archers can't do jack when you have can lock them out of sight range and hit them with snares or AOEs from out of sight.
Difficulty in acquiring: Pick an obnoxious boss NPC's pocket as they leave, with no penalties for pick pocket failure so you can just pause and retry until you get it.
And... The Hilarious:
Abyssal Pipe - Cloudkill 2 per day. While infinite daily cloudkills is pretty crazy powerful, the restrictions bear note: Not usable by Good... Or elves. Elves... apparently aren't manly enough to smoke? I don't even know what was going on there.
Melodrama: B- - "I am a mysteeeeeerious good aligned drow tiefling who suffers from the bad rep of my fellows" is in full force, but part of the mystery means that she's not actually whined about anything yet, which is nice, and hasn't made it "all about her", which is also nice. Unfortunately part of the railroading is a mandatory, inescapable argument you cannot help but cause and perpetuate where she whines about being seen as evil, which was pretty tedious.
Bugginess: B - During one of her quests, a plot enemy decided to turn into immortal on me, necessitating a reload, and resting crashed the game. Otherwise, a few of the dialogue entries are a little... strangely worded, that's about it.
Overall: B- - I may be prejudiced against tiefling thieves with god tier weapons, but her writing is pretty inoffensive overall, at least when she isn't forcing CHARNAME into things, which I loathed. I also loathed not being able to just murder her for the weapon upgrade she hogged until chapter 6, but c'est la vie.
Dace:
Another major issue for me was her flirts. Not only are they full of a bunch of {stuff}, they're incredibly repetitive, including a particularly obnoxious one which involves at least five Continues before plot can resume, happens randomly to interrupt whatever she was doing, happens inside dungeons, and makes me roll my eyes every time it happens. Even the least obnoxious ones are "One Introductory Paragraph On The Romance So Far" and then anything from two to five dialogue lines to skip through. Stop giving me bacon and go disarm the trap already, woman!
Content and Consistency: B - I've not come across any quests or such for her, yet for content, but Dace is definitely consistent in her inconsistency, pulling off a slightly amoral Chaotic Neutral with little penchant for morality and a disdain for rules, and her banters with vanilla NPCs all felt solidly in character to me. Also she has just decided to to start calling me Ducky. For no apparent reason. It got a little grating, which I believe is in character, but honestly wasn't to my taste.
Power Creep: A+ - A single class bounty hunter that you keep is pretty awesome, all things considered, but she's outright worse than the Yosh in everything that matters (13 vs 17 Str, 17 vs 18 Dex, 15 vs 16 Con), and starts having forgotten that Bounty Hunters need points in "Set Snare". Actually she's so much worse that making the choice of keeping her over him kind of a meta-decision since Yoshimo is a total bro.
In terms of extras, she has an illegal 2 pip proficiency in short swords, and a +1 Shortsword that gives her +1 APR, but can't be a fourth +APR offhand because it's bound to one of her main hand slots. I didn't see any quest content (I have an inkling she may predictably betray you if you don't sweep her off her feet, though), but generally I prefer my Bounty Hunters dualled out before their traps become zero damage wastes of maximum traps in the area.
Melodrama: B+ - Dace is very low drama, gets along with everyone, and is angst free, even when she's covering things like the death of family, though her flirts constantly include things like {looks at you with a gaze tinged with sadness and even wonder} which again, eye rolling.
Bugginess: B - While I've not come across any bugs so I actually had to console Dace in to start with, since (potentially due to a mod clash) she didn't appear in my game at all, and then console her again to change both her appearance and gender from "male". She did eventually turn up near the Adventure Mart, so... Yeah, double Dace'd.
Overall: B+ - Like Nephele, she's not got her own huge drama going on or terrible backstory to work through with CHARNAME, she's just got a good personality, decent writing and is just barely mechanically viable enough to keep her around to appreciate it. If only she stopped with the unbearable War and Peace length "flirtations".
Petsy:
Unfortunately she doesn't really seem to follow through as the game drags on. She has a few one line responses here or there to remind you that she's still around, but her chats are fairly short and simple, and she doesn't have a lot of them, nor did she have a response to going Slayer, which makes me wonder if the romance didn't break on me, despite having the option to "end this thing between us" still in her PIDs (eventually as the only option).
Content and Consistency: B - Petsy comes complete with two quests and, as far as quests go, both were pretty straight forward. When the first said quest triggered, she mentioned that the 500 GP she wanted was tiny compared to what the party had... namely about 1200 GP on day 3, which was either classic Petsy or the game was assuming far, far longer between chats than I was getting.
Power Creep: C - Petsy is an illegal halfling bard, with an illegal alignment, an illegally high proficiency with Clubs (also making her have 1 proficiency pip more than legal), and her stats are an oddly consistent 12/17/12/17/12/17. She also has a "trick", an innate Colour Spray she appears able to use multiple times a day. Too bad it's not PnP colour spray, which is awesome, but BG2 Colour Spray, which may as well not exist.
Anyway, from a power gaming perspective she sucks. She starts at level 5, she's a bard, she doesn't have the stats for melee or to be a decent slinger without a strength item (not that she starts proficient in anything except crossbows and clubs) one quickslot is blocked by a junk item and again, Clubs. She's 500,000 Exp behind the rest of the group and was very much babysat for most of the early quests until she finally hit double digits.
Gift and gearwise, she introduces an early wand of polymorph to a CHARNAME that's nice to her, and starts with a +2 Club of 20% of 1 acid damage and 10% knockdown (which is currently bugged to instantly end on damage, making it pretty pointless). Her later quest has a pretty nifty ghost summoning violin that is supposed to spawn three (but typically spawns only one or two) "dancing ghosts", fairly weak fodder, but a pretty neat concept and probably my favourite part of her content, but it's her second quest that gives her a low score here in the form of a +4 zweihander:
Durlag's Pride:+4 two handed sword. kills trolls on hit if they don't save at -4, +2 AC vs trolls and dopplegangers, 5% chance per hit of 20 acid damage, breath save for half.
Durlag's Thought: Amulet of Confusion immunity.
Kiel's Helmet: Yep, the good ol' hat of fear immunity.
Yet Another Army Scythe - That makes three.
Asides from being an overladen grab bag of abilities (and trivialising all future troll encounters), it's ridiculously easy to obtain the sword. If I'd remembered I had the quest, I could have had this quest over and done with in early chapter 2, which is indeed when it's expected to be do the quest, since Petsy's romance track stops dead until it's complete, and her later talks revolve around going to rescue Imoen - a poor bit of design overall considering I'd already saved her awhile back.
Melodrama: A? - If anything, it's CHARNAME given the opportunity to be melodramatic, talking to Petsy who just can't help but fail time and again to approach anything involving tact.
Bugginess: B- - While Petsy doesn't have many bugs, per se, she has completely locked me out of using the Five Flagons (repeating dialogue with the barman) and I'm pretty sure she repeated the same banter with Nalia multiple times as time went on. There's also a large number of typos and what I can only describe as "translation errors" marring Petsy's dialogue.
Overall Rating: D - I want to like a shorty romance, because shorties need love too, but after a decent start in Chapter 2, Petsy's dialogue gets less and less polished and more and more simplistic, edging at times into outright incoherent as time goes on.
Keto
Content and Consistency: C+ - Her additional banters with Kelsey were in character, as were her inter party banters. I'm still mad about her "quest" though, which was achingly tedious for all the benefits of 3000 Exp for what felt like thirty minutes waiting for text to slog by. At least the end of her quest - if you make the right pick - gets a reasonably satisfying conclusion to her plotline, but woe be upon you if you muck it up, because then you'll have to put up with the whole thing again.
Power Creep: A+ - She's a bard. With two backpack slots blocked with junk items, middling stats and few redeeming features. Unless someone springs a +5 vorpal sword on her the biggest problem is why you'd allow a cowardly drunkard who can't fight, thieve or scribe reliably into your group.
Melodrama: A- - Minor amounts of "Oh I have no memory, woe is me! Oh I killed him, waaah." but nothing that made me want to put her out of her misery.
Bugginess: B - While she was pretty much bug free throughout, when I finally removed her, she gave me a parting gift of her undroppable, useless, wine. I was not thrilled.
Overall Rating: C+ She's overall pretty quiet, asides from her stories and the whole bardic meet, and while I didn't find anything, except her poetry jam, particularly offensive. I felt like I'd covered everything worth covering for her by the end of that quest and didn't care enough about her to let her stick around, so maybe I'm missing something epic?
I Shall Never Forget - I've not gone deep into this (since I've seen that Foundling and Yvette are both part of the CoI project I was going to make my next run a @LavaDelVortel run and maybe include the Eilistraee's Song mod as well), but I think it deserves an honourable mention already for some of the items I've seen it add so far.
Composite Bow of Protection from Petrify - Pretty pointless, but neat nonetheless.
Heart of the Sanctuary: A usable per day that gives a 25% chance of wish rest for the wearer? That's pretty awesome.
A +3 Sword of Rakshasa Slaying (+2 to hit against them).
Ring: +1 THAC0, +15 HP, wearer suffers wild surges, Arcane casters only.
Elephant Totem: 65% physical damage resistance for 5 rounds a day.
Interesting mechanics, interesting backstories, and in that elusive goldilocks zone between being powerful enough I want to own it, and weak enough it doesn't eclipse every other choice. I'm most interested in seeing what else it has to offer.