Weapon Equipping

Timebomb

This is nice, and long overdue:

Players may now equip an off-hand weapon while a ranged weapon is present in a quick weapon slot (16944)

Players can now equip a weapon or shield in the off-hand slot regardless of what weapons are in the quick weapon slots (12362)

Lifat

This has already been discussed elsewhere. There is a minor group of people who are not fans of this change, but generally speaking, this is seen as an improvement and/or fix of the earlier script.

Jarrakul

The argument, as I understand it, is that two-weapon fighting is substantially superior to other fighting styles (generally true, especially at higher levels when shields become less useful), and that the one weakness of two-weapon fighting under the current system is that you can't easily switch to a ranged weapon from a two-weapon fighting setup. By removing that limitation, there is no longer any real reason not to use two-weapon fighting.

Personally, while I think the criticism of two-weapon fighting balance is very reasonable, I don't think player inconvenience is a good solution to balance issues. It's not like there's actually anything stopping a character from switching between two-weapon and ranged setups. It's just less convenient than switching between many other setups. But that's my two cents, and I don't want to devalue the original argument, even if I don't entirely agree with it.

Lifat

I have to agree with @Jarrakul on this. Player inconvenience is a terrible way to balance the game. Personally speaking, I don't see it as a huge problem that two-weapon fighting is so powerful. I always play with a full roster where I have 5 npc's, so there are always some of them using sword and shield in that setup.

dib

I solved the balance issue myself by editing stylbonu.2da, nerfing 2 weapon style and heavily boosting shields, and a slight boost to the other styles. It actually made me start using shields on some characters beyond BG1, something that was pretty much unthinkable before. Of course not everyone wants to muck about with the game files.

Chippy

There's elements of 3rd edition in BG, so don't see why editing weapon styles is out (although I expect the next point raised will be 2handed weapons 1.5dam with backstab).

From someone who played a stalker throughout the trilogy, I can say this is a welcome change. It really brings the character in line with their skillset regarding roleplaying without metagaming knowlege/items or considering playing/powergaming in other ways (such as a different race) once you've experienced a more powerful character.

It would have been nice if single weapon style was selectable alongside tw style, so can see why most fighters wont bother with it as the change is made.

moody_mage

Those people two-weapon fighting do so regardless of the current setup. However it is boring and a chore to manually equip/dequip constantly.

Quality of life improvements are well worth investing in. Having something as a tedious chore within a game should not be considered part of a balancing mechanic.

That said I would be in favour of the other weapon styles receiving an upgrade or TWF receiving some sort of additional penalty.

Dee

I wouldn't worry about us reverting this change. Like you say, it's a big quality-of-life improvement. If you haven't tried it out yet in the beta, I think you'll find that it's only a matter of time before you forget you ever had to do it differently.

The question of externalizing the style bonuses further is an interesting one, although it's beyond the scope of what's needed for current development (which doesn't mean it couldn't ever be done, but it means that doing it isn't a priority).

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T2av

dib said:

I solved the balance issue myself by editing stylbonu.2da, nerfing 2 weapon style and heavily boosting shields, and a slight boost to the other styles. It actually made me start using shields on some characters beyond BG1, something that was pretty much unthinkable before. Of course not everyone wants to muck about with the game files.

Hmmm... Post it.. I'm interested in your minimod.

Lifat

@subtledoctor: Fair enough. When I spoke of objectors, I was mostly thinking of you. But you really didn't manage to make your point of view clear. I see now that you weren't against the change, but simply would have liked more modder support at the same time. I can't fault you for that seeing as I'd like as much modder support as possible and that I know next to nothing about creating mods.
I have however used mods that overhauled the bonuses from weapon styles, so I simply assumed that there was enough support in the way the game was built for people to change stuff like that

AstroBryGuy

subtledoctor said:

Separate and apart from that, some people believe that the four fighting styles were implemented very poorly by Bioware ~15 years ago. From a game design perspective, it's terrible.

I think you'd have to lay that one on the authors of Combat & Tactics. Bioware took the weapon styles, actually made TWF harsher and Single-weapon and Two-handed styles slightly better (adding crit threat) than in PnP. The styles that got shafted were ranged (not implemented) and sword n' board (no shield bashing).

Dragonspear

Chippy said:

There's elements of 3rd edition in BG, so don't see why editing weapon styles is out (although I expect the next point raised will be 2handed weapons 1.5dam with backstab).

From someone who played a stalker throughout the trilogy, I can say this is a welcome change. It really brings the character in line with their skillset regarding roleplaying without metagaming knowlege/items or considering playing/powergaming in other ways (such as a different race) once you've experienced a more powerful character.

It would have been nice if single weapon style was selectable alongside tw style, so can see why most fighters wont bother with it as the change is made.

A stalker was my first Baldur's Gate character, and I definitely feel like this makes me want to play one again. I like the change purely to make my life easier and get to enjoy some flavor from the start of my characters.

My bards always start Longsword/crossbow and then my blade goes into DW. It'll be nice to occasionally remember those roots.

Chippy

I'm rusty now (have bought but yet to play EE's), but remember my first runthrough as a Stalker to TOB. It seemed that all party memebers had a role, and my protagonist just became the 'hit everything hard and fast with whirlwind attack' guy. Which was a bit of a dissapointment because I was really into the roleplaying aspect of the class.

I do remember how important it was to get more apr to such an extent that I didn't even bother with single and 2H style.

There's nothing more dissapointing that being so engaged in a trilogy, getting to the end, and realising that your main guy is the 5th wheel.

Dragonspear

Chippy said:

There's nothing more dissapointing that being so engaged in a trilogy, getting to the end, and realising that your main guy is the 5th wheel.

@Chippy

/joke

Did you try adding a 6th party member?

/endjoke

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IchigoRXC

@subtledoctor what currently can be done with weapon styles and what would you like opened up more? I assume there is probably a feature request for this somewhere?

Dee

Currently a fighting style can give bonuses or penalties to each of the following:
- Main-hand Damage
- Main-hand THAC0
- Off-hand Damage
- Off-hand THAC0
- AC
- AC vs. Missile Weapons
- Speed Factor
- Critical Range

Which is substantial, but what @subtledoctor would prefer is the ability to run these effects through (I imagine) SPL files, so that modders could change them to whatever effect they like.

Which isn't a bad idea, but I imagine it's also non-trivial to change it.

Jarrakul

For the record, give me options to add APR and resistances to fighting styles and I'd be happy. Not sure how easy that is.

Speaking of which, anyone know if it's possible to modify the base APR of different classes? I'd like to experiment with giving everyone fighter base APR and see what that does to game and fighting style balance.

Dee

CLSWPBON.2da, first column: "GETS_PROF_APR". Set it to 1 for any class you want to use the warrior's APR progression.

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Chippy

I'd be interested in seeing how this could be handled by a mod. I could take the view that fighter HLA essentially made weapon prof's redundant - take something like critical range:

Sucked in NWN because you could build a character that crit with every hit, and essentially only missed at high levels with feats, where you'd hit at low levels without them. Not even going to mention the high level/epic crit feats.

Sucked slightly less in KOTOR because you had to actively select the skill instead of it being passive - which I kind of liked, but was a pain, and at higher levels was again pointless.

If I was a modder I might try to plan a system that took weapon profs further and did away with HLA's for fighters - maybe expand individual weapons with the 3.5 edition features such as critical range, threat, damage, etc. Assuming it was possible.

mounthunderage

An aside,

I never liked how my two weapon fighter had the same APR as my shield or THW user when using HLA whirlwind styles. I never liked the HLA's after the, this-is-really-cool-cause-its-new faze wore off, and would have way rather have seen them increase the power of weapon styles.

Anyways, I just spent too much time reading through all this not to at least say something.