Find Familiar on Legacy of Bhaal difficulty?

Adaon

The monster hit point increase on Legacy of Bhaal difficulty seems to extend to summoned familiars -- e.g. the Imp familiar has 56 HP rather than the usual 18, and therefore grants the mage an additional 28 HP when summoned. Is this intended?

This also seems to be true in BG:EE, and it seems very strange to me if it's working as intended for a first level mage to be able to gain 28 bonus HP when they'd ordinarily have, like, 4 or 5.

(Also, the Max HP For NPCs component from the BG2 Tweak Pack, if set to 'all creatures' or 'non-joinable NPCs only', was increasing the familiar's HP -- for example, I was getting an imp with 132 HP on Legacy of Bhaal in BG1.)

DevardKrown

Well Familiars should have 12hp in BG1(9imp) 24in BG2(18imp) and 48 in tob (all even the imp has it now yay)

if they have more its a Bug , write a bugreport if they can reproduce it its gonna be fixed within the next patch

JuliusBorisov

LoB increases summons' HPs according to this formula:

Summons' HP * 2 + 20

A familiar is a summon, and a mage gets half of the familiar's HPs. The question is whether the mage getting more HPs on the LoB difficulty because of the increase of the summons' HPs is an intended behavior.

Adaon

JuliusBorisov said:

A familiar is a summon, and a mage gets half of the familiar's HPs. The question is whether the mage getting more HPs on the LoB difficulty because of the increase of the summons' HPs is an intended behavior.

Precisely. The HP calculations are correct (although, as an independent issue, some mod component was throwing them off), but the question is whether increased bonus HP is intended behavior -- if it is, then there's no bug report to file. It's just weird to me that a first-level mage can cast a spell that more than quintuples their starting HP, permanently; that doesn't seem likely to be intended.

Adaon

So I actually got started on that Legacy of Bhaal game, and then I got eaten by the rats in Candlekeep.

Twice.

I am suddenly much less certain that gaining this many bonus HP is a bug -- I have no idea how else a first-level mage is supposed to survive Candlekeep, let alone the Sword Coast. Legacy of Bhaal is not playing around.

Doubledimas

Adaon said:

So I actually got started on that Legacy of Bhaal game, and then I got eaten by the rats in Candlekeep.

Twice.

I am suddenly much less certain that gaining this many bonus HP is a bug -- I have no idea how else a first-level mage is supposed to survive Candlekeep, let alone the Sword Coast. Legacy of Bhaal is not playing around.

The rats are a special case which are awfully hard on LoB, not necessarily representative of the rest of BG with LoB on.

Adaon

Now I'm getting a weird error where, after loading, I sometimes cannot select my familiar and thus cannot control my familiar -- the cursor is always the dialogue cursor, even after I put the familiar in my pack and release it again, and 'select all' no longer selects the familiar. The only fix I've found so far is to either reload an earlier save or kill the familiar and summon a new one, but sometimes earlier saves become affected as well. When this happens the familiar AI stops working -- so if a monster starts attacking it, it won't fight back even with Party AI turned on.

I'm also working on narrowing down which mod component is responsible for the compounded HP error I mentioned above (the 132-HP imp) -- to my surprise, it seems to be something from BG2Tweaks, not SCS. The only tweak I've eliminated as the culprit as of this writing is Add Bags of Holding, since I didn't want to lose my stuff while I test; when I figure it out -- or if messing with mods solves the familiar selection issue -- I'll edit the OP in case someone else has the same problem in the future.

EDIT: Figured out which mod component was increasing the HP beyond even the LoB number.

Catalyst

Just started my first LoB difficulty game of BG:EE. Casted Find Familiar which granted me an additional 22 HP... which led me to this post via Google search. The math for the HP increase is accurate with the formula given by @JuliusBorisov - but was this deemed intended behavior for LoB difficulty?

JuliusBorisov

Still to be triaged.

https://support.baldursgate.com/issues/32610

StummvonBordwehr

JuliusBorisov said:

Still to be triaged.

https://support.baldursgate.com/issues/32610

I hope they dont change a thing. Enemies get a substantial boost to apr and thaco. A 12 HP familiar wont survive one hit if not boosted...

A mage in PnP could give its familiar some magical items (I guess), but this is not possible in the game we have.

If people want a tough game they can add SCS, Tactics, Atweak, Ascension or some of OlvynChuru‘s work and play on LoB.

Catalyst

Thank you for the response. While I agree that more of an HP boost is helpful with LoB at the start, a bonus of +22 just seemed high when I'm used to +6. Will just edit HP in Keeper if it feels too OP.

jjstraka34

Summons and little quirks like this are practically the only way to survive Legacy of Bhaal early on, at least if you aren't interested in kiting things for hours on end.