Rats in Candlekeep, Seriously?

Synergetic

I got a Dwarven defender with a war hammer hitting these things and they are resisting 90% of my damage on Throne of Bhaal difficulty. Both my weapons have broken from hitting them a million times. Why are they resisting CRUSHING damage exactly? How was this not picked up on beta testing?

Please fix this, it's funny getting my ass kicked by rats but this is just dumb for them to resist crushing damage.

Kilivitz

The 90% resistance has always been there, probably to avoid the chunking animation. It's not a problem when they only have 1 HP, but combining that resistance with the extra HP from the Legacy of Bhaal mode indeed makes the (pseudo-)encounter a bizarre experience.

Synergetic

Well it appears they are also resistant to SLASH and PIERCING as well! That's cute - so Beamdog apparently thinks by just adding immunities and resistances to things that it's going to make it harder. Well they are right, but it's the kind the artificial kind that will frustrate you and make you want to rage. It's working.

Dear journal,
I was given a quest to clear out some rats by Reevor in the storehouse today, simple enough. - Upon entering I was immediately overwhelmed by them! They came at me from all sides cornering me while i swung at them furiously with my war hammer of bad assery! The battle raged on for several hours before my weapon would break, but i was determined to finish what I began! I clenched my fists tightly and began punching at the vermin, blood being drawn by both of us before i began to succumb to my wounds! Like a coward I would retreat, barely managing to escape with my life! I am now recovering from my wounds at Candlekeep inn, my gold is running low and my spirit lies broken - I don't feel like I can go on, assassin's are out to kill me, the rats are out to kill me, I do not know if I can face what is to come outside these walls.

elminster

Legacy of Bhaal is largely just Heart of Fury from Icewind Dale (but without the added XP)

YupImMadBro

Sounds like a good story in the making!

Synergetic

I've played HOF and beat it with a lot of trial and error, However I can tell you LOB mode in this game so far feels terrible, solo or with a party. I decided to kill off the damage multiplier and see how that goes.

Insultion

Synergetic said:

Well it appears they are also resistant to SLASH and PIERCING as well! That's cute - so Beamdog apparently thinks by just adding immunities and resistances to things that it's going to make it harder. Well they are right, but it's the kind the artificial kind that will frustrate you and make you want to rage. It's working.

Resistances that are varied tend to be the good sort of difficulty. Flat number increases are a boring sort. Perhaps the rats should be weak to slashing.

illathid

The issue I believe is that LoB just adds a flat amount of HP to every possible enemy in the game. If they scaled it by hit dice it would result is less absurd results.

The_Cheeseman

The rat damage resistance is just a carry-over from the normal version, as somebody else has mentioned. Not all rats are like that, only those in Candlekeep, and no other MOBs have been given damage resistance. Those rats always had the resistance, it's just more obvious now that they have around 83 HP each.

Honestly, I don't bother killing them in LoB mode, it's simply too time-consuming. I just Ctrl+Y them and move on with my life. Any of the regenerating familiars can tank them basically forever, so I don't exactly consider sitting in that warehouse for 10min waiting on them to die to much of a "tactical challenge."

That being said, I HIGHLY recommend going into the baldur.lua file and enabling the nightmare mode exp bonus, as it makes the advanced difficulty mode much more fun and rewarding. Unless you find enjoyment in kiting every single gibbering you encounter for several minutes over the course of the entire game. I prefer to nuke the exp cap and level more quickly, treating the Legacy of Bhaal mode more like a high-level campaign (well, you start at low-level level, but don't stay there for very long). As your characters' abilities advance to more closely match the foes, you end up with a game that feels balanced, but with more substantial enemies that actually require you to use the skills and abilities you possess. You know, rather than ending up with a bag full of potions and wands you never actually needed to use.

Ark_Tolei

I'd like to mention that the rats are not at all indicative of what you can expect in Legacy of Bhaal mode. I put in a feature request to fix them, because the 5 rats have more effective hitpoints than the final fight of the game. Each rat has about 50% more EHP than the final boss has on the same difficulty, and you're fighting 5 of them with a single level 1 character.

The issue is that the rats DR was implemented by the original developers with the assumption that they would have 1 hp, and thus that it had no mechanical impact. It was presumably an aesthetic choice to prevent the rats from being "chunked" when killed. With LoB mode that ludicrous DR increases their effective hp by a factor of 10.

In reference to Illathid's comment, the formula is (HP*3)+80. This leads to the difficulty having a flat baseline, but also gives a substantial scaling component. The result is that the strongest enemies in the game have roughly 5x the hp of enemies like shank, instead of closer to 40x in the original game.

Synergetic

I decided to just forgo the LOB difficulty for insane instead - I get more things to fight, more difficult, and overall just feels better in terms of the rhythm of combat. I never cared for MEATSHIELDs with the added HP to creatures or humanoids. So far, so good. After i do a play through on norm I plan on just reinstalling my mods. c: