No Water Elementals in BG:EE´s?

Tarlugn

Hello!

While playing Black Pits 2, I was picking maybe lvl 5 or 6 spells for my sorcerer. When reading the spell list, there are elemental summons for fire, eart and air, but water isn´t available. Is there soem particular lorewise reasoning for them to be left out, or is it just mechanical, as in way back the just didn´t make water elementals sprites due to time limits or dwindling budget or some such reason?

lunar

There are water elemental enemies with new sprites in tob. It may be budget/time issues they were not in soa, and there was no summon spell for them:come tob, they had the sprites but simply did not want to add water elemental summoning spells.

Actually in pnp lore a water elemental can not get far away from a large pool of water for a long time. Not too practical for dungeon-exploring. The water elementals you face in tob are near pool-water areas. They are more watery-shapeless looking creatures that seem like the extension of a large water pool. Iwd games and now the SoD also have humanoid shaped water elementals that I find rather lackluster and too generic. In iwd games there are water elemental summoning spells that summon those humanoid-golem shaped water elementals.

Also, don't pick elemental summonings for a sorcerer, they are terrible, mages can not control elementals instantly and has to spend 3 rounds in mental combat. If you do this in bp2, your sorc will be slaughtered. Druids are excellent elemental summoners, their fire elementals are very strong.

Chnapy

Kamigoroshi

Well, at least we got Beer Elementals in BG:EE. They call themselves "dwarves".

Lord_Tansheron

Kamigoroshi said:

Well, at least we got Beer Elementals in BG:EE. They call themselves "dwarves".

I strongly object to this kind of racial profiling.

Many dwarves prefer spirits.

OlvynChuru

It's not just Baldur's Gate; for some reason, quite a few DnD games like to leave out one type of elemental. In the Icewind Dale games, there are pretty much no air elementals, and in Neverwinter Nights 1, there are barely any earth elementals.

semiticgoddess

I never used Water Elementals in IWD. The druid's Water Elemental shapeshift ability is incredible, but the Water Elemental summons themselves are identical to Earth Elementals in terms of stats, and both are inferior to Fire Elementals, as they have no special resistances or abilities that a Fire Elemental does not.

Still, they do look really cool.

Noon

Remember that water elementals from BG2 are cobra-like creatures with ranged attacks and they can't move from their positions. I think it may cause some bugs with players swapping forms.

lunar

Noon said:

Remember that water elementals from BG2 are cobra-like creatures with ranged attacks and they can't move from their positions. I think it may cause some bugs with players swapping forms.

Oh well, even the normally immobile things can 'walk' if given script to do so. I casted an ice storm on the shrieker fungus in the druid groove. They are normally immobile. However thanks to scs script or some other mod, (My editted ice storm either blinds or slows enemies, so blindness may be the cause) they pulled their skirts up and actually walked out of the storm slowly. It was quite surreal.

And I have seen greater water elementals and water weirds with that cobra like features float around too, but perhaps that's from a mod as well. (atweaks, I suspect)
Anyway, it is still quite doable, bg2 just did not want to include water elementals as summons.