I will leave a huge comment with bugstuff, suggestion etc. once I'm finished with the mod, but here's a possibly gamebreaking thing: the first level of kresselacks tomb in the vale of shadows has a hidden room with a mummy and a sarcophagus. That sarcophagus contains the mausoleum key to progress further into the tomb. It has a (very heavy!) lock and while I'm writing this I just realized that other keys had locks, too, this one I just couldn't open. Anyways, I suggest removing the locks from all those containers because if someone doesn't have a Thief, Wizard or Sorcerer in his team, he cannot go on with the story.
I checked the lock on the sarcophagus and its at 65 for its open lock amount, Oswald has potions of perception and lock picking in his store to help grab it, plus the only other 2 locked boxes in that map that I could find have a score of 45 which can be forced open with 19 str
I think the reason why I put 65 on the sarcophagus is because there is some good items in there, plus I think I gave Oswald a potion of frost giant str which makes it so you can bust through that sarcophagus
and to be honest the chance that someone isn't going to have a thief/mage/sorcerer/bard to get through is going to be pretty slim
also when I made this mod, I made it to kind of "punish" players who think they can solo the game, I wanted to make it so you really need a team to get through it and have to use all the advantages of all your team mates, so if you want to solo the game now, its going to be very VERY difficult especially on insane it might be just impossible to do
but its definitely a consideration, perhaps I can tone down the lock amount a little bit, actually now that I look at it, I will just move the key into the small box beneath the sarcophagus
keep the suggestions coming
UPDATE:
I only found one other container that had a key that was locked, and it was set to 50, so I toned it down to 30
Alright sounds good. I'm playing on Insane btw it's pretty good so far. One thing about the Soloing stuff. i get where you're coming from, but the amount of existing classes makes it very viable and doable to play a 6 man party without Thief/Wizard/Sorcerer, that's why I was suggesting that. But yeah, if there's the potion then it's fine. I wrote this before hitting the town up to check for Knock spells/Thieving Potions/Strength potions.
ah okay fair enough, ya I have completely restocked all of the shops in kuldahar, so it might be a good idea just to look around and see what goodies await in each shop,
also about potions:
if you pick pocket the thief guy at the inn in kuldahar I believe I gave him some potions of thievery as well
How the fuck am I supposed to kill the Giant Ice Troll? First of all his damage output is insane. I have a Dwarfen Defender onto which I dumped literally every AC item I owned + Defensive Harmony to reach -20 AC and 75% Resistance to physical attacks. This + constant healing from my Fighter Cleric was barely enough to keep him alive through the entire fight. Now on the rest of my team I put the most damage items I owned. I summoned a Nishruu and 2 Sword Spiders. I used the Wand of Paralyzation to keep that thing stunned for an entire minute, but it regenerates faster than I do damage (of course my party is hastened). Is there some trick here? Edit: There's more than 1, Jesus Christ
How the fuck am I supposed to kill the Giant Ice Troll? First of all his damage output is insane. I have a Dwarfen Defender onto which I dumped literally every AC item I owned + Defensive Harmony to reach -20 AC and 75% Resistance to physical attacks. This + constant healing from my Fighter Cleric was barely enough to keep him alive through the entire fight. Now on the rest of my team I put the most damage items I owned. I summoned a Nishruu and 2 Sword Spiders. I used the Wand of Paralyzation to keep that thing stunned for an entire minute, but it regenerates faster than I do damage (of course my party is hastened). Is there some trick here? Edit: There's more than 1, Jesus Christ
now that is interesting, because I didn't struggle that much at all against them, yes their damage is huge, which is intentional, but I took them down quick, or at least relatively quickly, but when I played I had 3 berserkers a fighter/cleric a fighter/thief and a sorcerer, so my damage output was amazing, they only have 120 HP, but their AC is -2, so it could be that you were missing a lot which doesn't help, they only have 10% resistance to damage, so they are basically taking it in full, and I think they only regenerate like 6 HP a round which isn't all that much, but if I remember correctly they might cast haste on themselves which I believe cranks their regen so perhaps try casting slow on them? slow is an absolute killer spell on anybody actually, so see if slow helps, also I don't quite remember what level I was at, at that time but I do remember my sorcerer having improved haste, but im not to sure if I was at 750 000 XP by then)
I'm even more surprised that you are struggling against those guys the most, I found dragon's eye to be insanely difficult ( or at least the 2 levels that had the yuan-ti) those yuan-ti mages were mind boggling brutal, and the marileth was no cake walk either, but of coarse this is insane difficulty so it does live up to it's name, and I did beat every single battle in the game to make sure it was doable
my suggestion would be to hammer them with slow spells, to calm down their natural 3 attacks per round ( perhaps even a ray of enfeeblement to lower their 19 STR) and after that, just haste away with some fire elementals I suppose ( remember that bandoth sells the elemental summoning spells for wizards and those elementals don't go berserk on you)
Yuan-ti were alright i had no troubles with them, the marileth was insane but due to some AI bug/clunkness it didnt follow me only all its lackeys followed me, so i beat all of them and was solo vs the marileth + its revenants but even then i had to rest away its buffs...yxunomei, giant ice trolls and the first battle in easthaven cave were the 3 battles so far that need to be toned down imho i will try to slow down the giant ice troll now..my party btw is dwarven defender, cavalier, archer, dragon disciple, fighter/cleric & swashbuckler so there should be enough damage output
I beat them and im pretty sure their regen is bugged...they go from injured to barely injured in 1 second etc i constantly pump out 15-20 damage with every party member and even when i stun them they just dont go down, i needed to crank down from insane to hard
I will likely finish the game on sunday and then post a very detailled review/bug report/suggestion thing
ah so the marileth is still broken, hmm I thought I fixed that one, might have to check up on that, but also remember, when fighting against baddies with buffs, dispel magic is your friend, in IWD dispel magic works without fail so your fighter/cleric can use it, and your DD could use it as well if you have it, in fact in chapter 6 some fights will just be impossible without it
also remember insane difficulty is meant to be incredibly hard, I do believe if you go to the in game difficulty settings it has a warning that insane is not for the soft of heart sort of speak, because I have also programed it that difficulty effects the amount of baddies/ items used by baddies/ and how much spell casting they do, so a battle may be brutal on insane, but if you do it on hard instead, it will be a different scenario, there is actually quite a difference between hard and insane, and even more of a difference between normal and hard
also I think another reason why some battles may seem arbitrarily difficult is because you can't meta game something you haven't played before, I bet if you played my mod on insane for a couple of years, you would be able to cake walk those battles just from meta game alone, so I do think insane difficulty is right where I want it to be, for people who were casual insane difficulty players for IWD, playing my mod on hard would fit that bill better
Alright, I just finished the game on Insane and it was very good. Many of the battles were very challenging, but never frustratingly difficult except for 4 battles (2 of those are justified, 1 likely buggy and 1 in the beginning of the game where your options are still very limited). I made a very op party consisting of a Dwarven Defender with 18/00 STR, a Cavalier with 18/97, an Elven Archer (the most op class in the game), a Half Orc Swashbuckler, a Fighter/Cleric with 18/00 STR and a Dragon Disciple (second most op class in the game, although I chose the wrong spells not knowing what the mod would bring to the game). I only finished 2 fights with dead party members and I needed 2-5 attempts for most of the hard battles.In case you haven't tried this mod, I suggest you stop reading this soon to be spoiler-infested review and try the mod. It's good.
First section: (Possible) bugs
general: quests that you do not receive prior to completing them (like finding the caravan in easthaven for hrotghar) and quests that you can only complete without knowing about them (like finding the gnomish tools for oswald) are displayed as full exp instead of per party member, unsure if that's intended or not
I'm unable to sell any wands
Ice Storm and Cone of Cold were in my Sorcerers Spellbook twice everytime I had to pick spells from that level (I didn't get to a level where I could see if it's still in there after i picked it)
Static Charge cast by enemies hits enemies
the triggers in the entrance to upper dorns deep (where you have to step onto the 3 symbols) seem to be a bit off, i gotta walk around on them for a couple seconds now
if you buy ammunition for a character and then try to buy ammunition for a different character you cannot do that, you have to finish the trade and start another one because any ammo you try to buy has a 0 for amount
not sure about if this is a bug at all but I think I gave my Paladin with STR 18/97 a potion with +1 str and now he has 19, isn't he suppoed to get 18/00? (i mightve had an item with +1 STR on him when I made him drink it and maybe it went from [boosted] 18/00 to boosted 19 but then somehow the 19 was natural, maybe thats relevant in case its a bug)
easthaven: the ogre chieftain and the orc shaman don't follow you after you trigger the aggro while they're in fog of war
vale of shadows: battle music in vale of shadows after your rest being interrupted by monsters only starts after about 1 second and sounds like it started on mute and now suddenly is turned on (maybe I'm only slowly going insane though)
a short sword of phasing +1 found on level 2 has the description of a flaming short sword +1 (the effects are correct though)
dragon's eye: yxunomei stays behind while you get the aggro from everyone else
Severed hand: The ambush on the topside of the third level when you loot the chairs on the left side of the area and get that elven flail did not trigger correctly(the one with ogres and shamans, they always dropped a ring of +1 STR or a different item, instead there were only 2 shadowed orc shamans). instead of them appearing sort of in the middle of that hallway the 2 orc shamans spawned on the right side and the 2 ogres + orc chieftain also on the right side but with the wall between them (i can send you a picture with the marked areas if you need to)
my fighter/cleric had her strength drained by one of the shades and it didn't wear off after the symbol disappeared (it wore off eventually but only after a while)
wyrms tooth: two handed axe of giants +2 has a typo: Cold Resistance BOnus
finale: belhilfets AI is clunky and buggy as fuck (not your fault, it's how it's in vanilla). Are you able to fix him or is that beyond your abilities/hardcoded? What I'm talking about is him constantly going to corners of the room and doing nothing except when he's attacked
Second section: My impression
As someone who played IWD at least 20 times (not including the EE) I can safely say that I'm in a good position to review any mod meddling with the Difficulty of the game and I can assure you, you have done well. As noted above it was difficult but not in a frustrating way, except the first battle in Easthaven cave, Yxunomei & Belhilfet (rightfully so!) and the Giant Ice Trolls. Many things still need some polish imho, but overall I enjoyed this very, very much. I feel that some of the stuff you added could still be improved because I didn't have to change my strategy too often. The basilisks were an awesome addition but there were never so many, that I had to use Protection from Petrification for example. The dragon was awesome, too but it wasn't so strong that I had to use Protection from Fire. I think you get what I mean. Also, a lot of the standard mobs could be harder, will pinpoint them in the thread later on. Alright, let's get to the details:
general: i like the added traps and locks and gaining experience from them additional bg music is nice, sometimes there's too much of it though new items in kuldahar seem fitting and the prices are appropriate, especially the endless quivers etc. are very good because the game always lacked +1 ammo in the later stages of the game (also a nice touch to change the red dragon armor to 0 armor class for this game as -1 woulda been a bit too much) -4 ac penalty on the ring of +1 attack per round makes that OP as fuck item more balanced
temple of the forgotten gods: fight against krugg was a nice addition, maybe seperate the mages a bit more so that you cannot intercept all 4 spells from them by using 2 AoE spells fight on the way out against that doppelganger was very nice and challenging, too
dragon's eye: i like the addition of the basilisks throughout the game
the troll/sword spider/bombardeer beetle fight on level 2 when you go down is pretty tough and imho not doable without killing some stuff, retreating to the previous area, resting and killing the rest, not sure if it needs to be toned down a bit
the additional yuan-ti before yxunomeis chamber that spawn after the dialogue are well placed and make running back and preparing for her more challenging
the ogre chieftain in kuldahar before arundels house – nice
severed hand: the battle on the second level against all the wolves, nice addition of mages that are barely visible!
The second battle in solonor tower, jesus christ that shit was hard. thank you for this, I always wished for those Shadowed Elf battles to be hard
pseudonatural wraith spider – top notch
music in the top of the towers is very fitting upper dorns deep: that random fucking red dragon jesus christ. That shit threw me off guard big time and was perfectly placed in that cave with all the bones
terikan was good
the bronze sentries are a bit tough tbh..i have a dwarfen defender with 75-85% DR for physical damage on his stance and i still had to lure the first of the 4 away and kill solo and then deal with the last 3 by first distracting them with 6 summons, but i guess they aren't too tough since in the vanilla they were already one of the hardest things to deal with
lower dorns deep: that random fucking lich, dude
finale: pomab battle was nice, but I missed those continuous lightning bolts
what I didn't like: basically only one thing: using bg sprites for monster that were in iwd (umber hulks, elementals, iron golems, drow, etc.) that shit hurt my feelings. If you make this mod WeiDu compatible you definitely need an option that keeps the old sprites.
Third section: Suggestions
general:
not sure if that's hardcoded but making the chance for an uninterrupted rest higher would be nice, since you have to rest after almost every battle, especially in the vale of shadows and dragon's eye levels 1 & 2, but basically really anywhere
please add 1 or 2 items to Bandoth in Dorns Deep...after all the shopkeepers getting a couple items I was very excited for what he had in store....gloves or boots maybe, at this point those are some items i still dont have enough of (many of the scarce vanilla boots are garbage, too)
temple of the forgotten gods: the bg music in front of the temple is pretty unfitting imo wyrm's tooth: the first bugbear priest (if you go there from the bottom side) drops a huge/heavy flail +1...i'd make it +3 or +4 maybe...it feels like a weapon with potential but it needs to be +3 to be useful edit: there's more than 1 priest, maybe give one of them a +3/+4 one
lower dorns deep: could you buff the rhino beetle shield dirty lev makes for you? At this point of the game a +1/+1 shield is garbage (i know its vanilla content)
also, he made me this one shield but i dont get anymore options now, didn't he make unlimited umber hulk armor and rhino beetle shields for you as long as you had the raw material and money needed?
Reduce Item Drops:
Temple of the Forgotten Gods: Temple Library Fight (boots of moander, badge of the brave and boots of the many paths from *one* encounter), Second Floor of the Temple (i'd remove an item from one of the 4 chests), Krugg Battle (I got 3 major items, 2 would be more appropriate) All in all that's ~3 items too many imho, I would maybe remove 1 or 2 of those and/or move them to the last battle on floor 2 (has 0 drops) and/or the doppelganger battle (has 0 drops, too [or 0 major ones]) so that they're spread out better
Severed Hand: Getting all 3 items from the Severed Soul and the Serrated Skeleton seems a bit overkill, how about 2?
getting all items from kaylessa – again, a bit overkill
Upper Dorn's Deep: krilag dropped like 5 weapons (on top of that a ring and a necklace) and 3 of those weapons were really, really strong - overkill
orrick the grey all 3 items for mythal theory book, this is the second one you definitely need to reduce to at least 2/3 (this and the temple library fight are imho the ones that need 1 item less the most)
Item prices: Returning Dagger Acidtooth +1 is way too expensive, i'd lower the price from the 38k (17 charisma) to 5 or 6k tops since it's merely a +1 weapon with 1 additional elemental damage
Make the following encounters/enemies harder [in these brackets I will include specific suggestions]:
Vale of Shadows: Yeti Chieftain, Terikan, Lysan Temple of the Forgotten God: Verbeegs [Thaco, HP] Dragon's Eye: Lizard King Battle, Yuan-Ti/Archers/Elites Severed Hand: All Shadowed Goblins & Orcs, Armored Skeletons (I know they weren't much of a threat in the vanilla, but if you wanna make things harder buff em) [give them buffs and more HP, maybe more Damage, too] Upper Dorn's Deep: Blue Mykonids, Ettins (those are a complete joke), All Neo-Orogs, Krilag Wyrm's Tooth: Greater Ice Trolls, Ice Trolls, Frost Salamanders Lower Dorns Deep: Fire Salamanders, Fleezum & Flozem, Thieves, Elementals, Umber Hulks, Blind Minotaurs, Iron Golems, Archers in the Watchtower
Make the following encounters/enemies easier:
Easthaven: First major battle in the Cave (vs. Orc Chieftain, Shaman and many, many Archers. Imho there's just too many archers so you cannot kite at all, I would like to know how you managed to beat those) [less Archers] Dragon's Eye: Yxunomei (I had to abuse her buggy/clunky AI and after defeating all her posse I had to rest/wait out her defensive spells, didn't use Dispel Magic like a dumbass...like all game, that spell would've made the game a tad easier for me XD) Wyrm's Tooth: the giant ice troll is a joke and not a funny one at that (heavy bug suspicion there as I already stated; he regenerates from Badly Wounded to Uninjured within seconds)
I hope I didn't forget anything.
Edit: Two questions. 1.) Does this mod affect HoW/TotL? 2.) Will this work in multiplayer if all parties have this installed?
excellent stuff, so you finished IWD but now you need to try HoW and also see how that plays as well
so lets go over all the things:
when you have 18/xx strength and get +1 it will automatically go to 19, that is just how the engine works, in the original IWD if you used DuHM then your max would be 18/00 for "balance" purposes, but ever since beamdog made the EE they basically transferred everything BG2 over to IWD and now the game runs more like BG2, so that is why that is happening
when it comes to dead team mates I was able to do every single fight in the game without losing a single team mate, but then again, I did remember to use dispel magic when the time came
Quest XP bug:
this behaviour is intentional, some quests will give XP per character some quests will give a set amount of XP, I did this more for the fact that if people played solo it would make it so you couldn't power level like a boss, and also this helps make it so if you have a team less than 6, your average levels wont go through the roof
unable to sell wands:
this is also intentional, because during my play through I found wands to be SUPER OP, wands were just destroying enemies without a hitch, and the bigger problem is when you do the "recharge" they come in at 100 charges and I couldn't figure out how to make so if you were to buy them back they would only come back with like 5 or 10 charges, so wands are now more of a mystical item that require careful planning before use
static charge hits enemies:
im assuming its because in the spell description it says if you cast it and don't use it within a few rounds it casts automatically on the user itself, since some areas can be loaded with enemies one of the problems could have been is that the enemy cast static charge and couldn't get to your team in time, so then it discharged this could also be because the path finding at times can be complete garbage and i have no idea how to fix the path finding ( don't even think that is possible to be honest which is unfortunate)
the triggers for the 3 symbols on the ground, now that one i have no idea, because i didn't change anything in that area except for the addition of some golems, and when i went to that area it worked 100 % fine with me ( or at least when was there it seemed to work fine) so i will have to take another gander at that i suppose
if you buy ammunition for a character and then try to buy ammunition for a different character you cannot do that, you have to finish the trade and start another one because any ammo you try to buy has a 0 for amount:
this might actually be and engine bug, i recall when trying to buy bigger stacks of ammo sometimes it would arbitrarily only allow me to buy say 10, when i could actually buy 30, i wonder if that has something to do with it? i will have to do a play test for it to see if it happens to me the way it happens to you, but if it's doing it the way it did before i made this mod then unfortunately this could be an engine problem and unfortunately i don't have enough modding sorcery to fix engine bugs
already talked about the STR increase, but to reiterate: if you have 18/ anything and get +1 it will be increased to 19 no matter what, which is intentional
easthaven: the ogre chieftain and the orc shaman don't follow you after you trigger the aggro while they're in fog of war:
good to know, will have to fix that AI
vale of shadows: battle music in vale of shadows after your rest being interrupted by monsters only starts after about 1 second and sounds like it started on mute and now suddenly is turned on (maybe I'm only slowly going insane though):
i believe this is another engine bug which they fixed in the 2.xx versions of the bgee's i tried tinkering with it in IWD but for the life of me couldn't figure out why, what happens is that all music files are actually a pack of like 30-40 sound bits, and for some reason v 1.4 of IWDEE will start on the 2nd sound bit, so i have no idea on how to fix that
a short sword of phasing +1 found on level 2 has the description of a flaming short sword +1 (the effects are correct though):
definitely a bug, im going to assume the sword has the wrong dialogue string so i will have to change that
dragon's eye: yxunomei stays behind while you get the aggro from everyone else:
yeah i noticed this when i did my play through as well, i thought i fixed it, but i guess not, will have to update that AI so she follows you even if you run away
Severed hand: The ambush on the topside of the third level when you loot the chairs on the left side of the area and get that elven flail did not trigger correctly(the one with ogres and shamans, they always dropped a ring of +1 STR or a different item, instead there were only 2 shadowed orc shamans). instead of them appearing sort of in the middle of that hallway the 2 orc shamans spawned on the right side and the 2 ogres + orc chieftain also on the right side but with the wall between them (i can send you a picture with the marked areas if you need to):
don't really know whats going on here, from what i recall it worked fine for me, but yeah if you have a picture to reiterate on what's happening then i can see what you mean
my fighter/cleric had her strength drained by one of the shades and it didn't wear off after the symbol disappeared (it wore off eventually but only after a while):
im assuming i put the wrong timer on the screen icon of "ability score drained" i will double check to make sure the timer is set to wear off when the drained strength wears off
wyrms tooth: two handed axe of giants +2 has a typo: Cold Resistance BOnus:
oops a doopsy, i guess sometimes that happens when you're pumping hour 16+ hahaha, will definitely have to fix that typo ( i think it was around 2am when i was at that part of the game)
finale: belhilfets AI is clunky and buggy as fuck (not your fault, it's how it's in vanilla). Are you able to fix him or is that beyond your abilities/hardcoded? What I'm talking about is him constantly going to corners of the room and doing nothing except when he's attacked:
actually i can fix this up and just get rid of him bouncing around, i think i kept that in there because if he didn't do that, he was just impossible to kill, although as you say he does stand there until he is attacked, perhaps i can come down how often he teleports out, maybe once every minute instead of like once every 2 rounds, and even after he attacks i can try and make it so he will actually attack afterwards, one thing i don't like about that battle is that it can be kind of a double edged sword where either you just straight up cant win, or you just straight up cant lose, so i will tinker with his AI some more
upper dorns deep: that random fucking red dragon jesus christ. That shit threw me off guard big time and was perfectly placed in that cave with all the bones:
that is exactly what i was aiming for, and you only face him on insane difficulty ( on lower difficulties it's different baddies) but at the same time, i didn't want to make him outrageously powerful ( he basically has the same script and "items" that the red dragon has from bg2) because even though we are great at the mechanics of IWD other players might not be, my aim every time i added those extra baddies in, was to make them just the right kind of difficult for their situation
the bronze sentries are a bit tough tbh..i have a dwarfen defender with 75-85% DR for physical damage on his stance and i still had to lure the first of the 4 away and kill solo and then deal with the last 3 by first distracting them with 6 summons, but i guess they aren't too tough since in the vanilla they were already one of the hardest things to deal with:
for me, i didn't find these guys that hard, but my AC's where crazy low for my melee guys ( i think i was pumping -12/ -14 at that point without buffs) so i didn't struggle too bad against them, even though they do hit hard and fast, its only on insane difficulty they are that crazy, on lower difficulties they don't use as many crazy abilities and plus i think that fight is intentionally supposed to be difficult
lower dorns deep: that random fucking lich, dude:
hahhahaha, ah, another one of those surprise battles, that one i like a lot because that will throw anyone for a loop, and especially on how brutal that guy's tactics are, more icing on the cake, although his items are worth it, if you can beat him, but the best part is: you can only fight against him on insane, any difficulty lower and he will not appear
finale: pomab battle was nice, but I missed those continuous lightning bolts:
now this is ironic because the one thing i hated about that battle was the continuous lightning bolts, so instead i wanted to make the battle more interesting also this is one of those battles depending on what difficult you play on determines how much XP he gives you when you defeat him ( if you fight against him on a lower difficulty he will give you less XP) yxunomei is the same way
the troll/sword spider/bombardeer beetle fight on level 2 when you go down is pretty tough and imho not doable without killing some stuff, retreating to the previous area, resting and killing the rest, not sure if it needs to be toned down a bit:
this is actually from the original game, i didn't add anything here at all
the additional yuan-ti before yxunomeis chamber that spawn after the dialogue are well placed and make running back and preparing for her more challenging:
this is also from the original game, although the one yuan-ti champion that accompanies them will only appear on insane difficulty which is my doing
not sure if that's hardcoded but making the chance for an uninterrupted rest higher would be nice, since you have to rest after almost every battle, especially in the vale of shadows and dragon's eye levels 1 & 2, but basically really anywhere:
i did notice that the rest spawn rate did seem a little high, ( the game has a really weird way on how rest spawning works) but the thing is, if people don't play on insane then they probably won't need to rest as much, and plus i wanted to make it so you couldn't rest without a worry or care, plus there are some NPC's they will watch over you while you rest, and there are a few safe areas to rest in as well, so i don't think it's too terribly much of an issue
please add 1 or 2 items to Bandoth in Dorns Deep...after all the shopkeepers getting a couple items I was very excited for what he had in store....gloves or boots maybe, at this point those are some items i still dont have enough of (many of the scarce vanilla boots are garbage, too):
i actually did add a bunch of stuff to his store ( way more potions and possibly spells) i wanted to keep the theme of him only selling that sort of stuff
temple of the forgotten gods: the bg music in front of the temple is pretty unfitting imo:
it does sound a little out of place, but i was also trying my best to not make it so i wasn't using the same track over and over and over again, so i was trying to add more selection to the music as best i could
wyrm's tooth: the first bugbear priest (if you go there from the bottom side) drops a huge/heavy flail +1...i'd make it +3 or +4 maybe...it feels like a weapon with potential but it needs to be +3 to be useful edit: there's more than 1 priest, maybe give one of them a +3/+4 one:
this is just more for a novelty than to be something extremely useful, i originally wanted to make it a two handed flail but the problem is; there is no animation for such a weapon so that couldn't work, plus the thing about that flail, it has a high base damage, so i have to be careful about making higher enchanted ones, but as i said its more for the novelty then for something that needs to be crazy good, just like the +2 two handed axe that the slave guard has, it's more of a novelty axe than something that needs to be super good
lower dorns deep: could you buff the rhino beetle shield dirty lev makes for you? At this point of the game a +1/+1 shield is garbage (i know its vanilla content):
actually you can already buff the shield already, if you take that shield to orrick he can upgrade it to a +2 or +3 shield i believe
also, he made me this one shield but i dont get anymore options now, didn't he make unlimited umber hulk armor and rhino beetle shields for you as long as you had the raw material and money needed?:
this i am not sure, this could be something that was implemented in the EE's, i didn't do anything to dirty lew's dialogue tree so whatever he did in the original EE he will be doing here, so i think this is an EE implementation
Item Drops:
it may seem like overkill on the item drops but that is because you are playing on insane difficulty, insane difficulty has more baddies and those stronger baddies have those better items, so on lower difficulties you will fight against less of those stronger baddies hence you wont be getting those items, and for the baddies that you fight on all 5 difficulties, there items will also be reduced depending on difficulty as well, so on insane yes it may seem high, but on the lower difficulties they will drop less ( you HAVE to play the game on insane to get all the really good items, this is the only way)
Item prices: Returning Dagger Acidtooth +1 is way too expensive, i'd lower the price from the 38k (17 charisma) to 5 or 6k tops since it's merely a +1 weapon with 1 additional elemental damage:
the are a few reasons why this items is so expensive: it has infinite ammo, you can add your strength bonus to damage, it gives you an extra attack per round, and it almost trivializes battles with trolls because of that extra acid damage and my belief is that trolls were supposed to be annoyingly difficult, plus a kensai can use this weapon, and they are DEADLY with it so, the price does work, plus remember when your REP starts hitting over 14 you start getting discounts at shops, so that helps make the price less and in my mod you can hit 20 REP alone just from donating at temples ( if you want to do it that way)
Make enemies/encounters more difficult:
the ironic thing is, i did make all those encounters more difficult, every singe one that you mentioned ( except for some trivial enemies perhaps) but the thing is, i have to be careful on how i do it, it's not necessary to make absolutely every single enemy in the game a death machine, and also depending on team composition some battles will be easier for others while some battles with be more difficult for others, like how you struggled against the giant ice trolls and i basically ran them over with my group, so we have to remember just because we are top notch at playing this game, other players may not be, so i tried my best to have a happy medium between the two
make the following encounter easier: easthaven cave-
the mage spell Sleep is your friend here ( which can be found in the first town) or even Command if you have a cleric, and i did my best to make it so kiting doesn't work, i hate cheese tactics and i want players to explore more options, and remember you played that cave on insane difficulty, if you were to play it on hard instead, it would be a whole different ball game, ironically i didn't struggle all that much in that cave with my team ( but again 3 berserkers go a long way, especially at lower levels, that berserk ability is just too good) plus the temple in easthaven has potions and scrolls that can be bought if needed ( plus some NPCs can be pick pocketed for some semi decent items as well) so if someone plays the game with no clerics or mages im not going to give them any mercy for unnecessarily crippling themselves, insane difficulty is made for veterans players, it is definitely not made for casuals
make the following encounter easier: yxunomei
yeah, this battle is definitely a doozy, but there are a few reasons why its as hard as it is: again her awesomeness is based on difficulty, the higher the difficulty the more brutal her abilities will be, second, she is supposed to be a threat to belhilfet, although its kind of arbitrary to have such a powerful enemy of her calibre so early in the game but i wanted her to still have merit for that reason, next, the amount of XP she gives you is dependent on difficulty as well, the higher the difficulty the more XP she gives you ( and her XP reward definitely is worth the struggle) and based off that, in the original she gives 46 000 which is the 2nd highest XP reward for killing a bad guy in the entire game, so i really wanted to reflect on the fact that she is definitely suppose to be brutal, but i do have to rework her AI a bit so then you can't rest her spells away, because remember; on insane, dispel magic is definitely your friend
make the following encounter easier: giant ice trolls
and here the irony keeps coming, another one of the situations where you struggled at something that i didn't stuggle at, at all, yes they did dish out some serious damage if they could, but i was able to take them down without much of a hitch, so i will have to do another play through after i fix all the other things and see whats going on with those guys and see if they are acting as intentional ( i think what might be happening is that on insane they use haste and it hastes their regeneration - which is an engine bug - and since i use the slow spell like its going out of style, this could be the reason why i didn't struggle that much against them)
the thing we need to remember a well, is that this is your first time playing IWD with this mod, so some things may seem a bit more difficult ( because you can't metagame something you don't know) but i still appreciate all comments you have to say
so with that being said, starting tomorrow i will get to bug squishing (yum) and fix this stuff up, and hopefully you get time to play HoW, because HoW has been completely revamped ( TotLM as well) so hopefully you enjoy what the expansion brings
the triggers for the 3 symbols on the ground, now that one i have no idea, because i didn't change anything in that area except for the addition of some golems, and when i went to that area it worked 100 % fine with me ( or at least when was there it seemed to work fine) so i will have to take another gander at that i suppose
Maybe I played the original game so much, that the EE hasn't left any memory in my head. That'd explain how I thought so much stuff was from your mod xD
Severed hand: The ambush on the topside of the third level when you loot the chairs on the left side of the area and get that elven flail did not trigger correctly(the one with ogres and shamans, they always dropped a ring of +1 STR or a different item, instead there were only 2 shadowed orc shamans). instead of them appearing sort of in the middle of that hallway the 2 orc shamans spawned on the right side and the 2 ogres + orc chieftain also on the right side but with the wall between them (i can send you a picture with the marked areas if you need to):
don't really know whats going on here, from what i recall it worked fine for me, but yeah if you have a picture to reiterate on what's happening then i can see what you mean
didnt have a savegame so ill upload a picture...green circle is where the ambush should've been (at least in regular iwd) and orange circles is where they actually were
actually i can fix this up and just get rid of him bouncing around, i think i kept that in there because if he didn't do that, he was just impossible to kill, although as you say he does stand there until he is attacked, perhaps i can come down how often he teleports out, maybe once every minute instead of like once every 2 rounds, and even after he attacks i can try and make it so he will actually attack afterwards, one thing i don't like about that battle is that it can be kind of a double edged sword where either you just straight up cant win, or you just straight up cant lose, so i will tinker with his AI some more
I agree, that battle would be pretty insane if he didn't port at all. some sort of compromise would be best.
the troll/sword spider/bombardeer beetle fight on level 2 when you go down is pretty tough and imho not doable without killing some stuff, retreating to the previous area, resting and killing the rest, not sure if it needs to be toned down a bit:
this is actually from the original game, i didn't add anything here at all
this is very weird. You didn't even buff any of those creeps? I really don't recall having had problems with those even after the EE made them all come at once and I played on Insane, too. Guess I'm really slowly going insane.
i actually did add a bunch of stuff to his store ( way more potions and possibly spells) i wanted to keep the theme of him only selling that sort of stuff
Fair enough
wyrm's tooth: the first bugbear priest (if you go there from the bottom side) drops a huge/heavy flail +1...i'd make it +3 or +4 maybe...it feels like a weapon with potential but it needs to be +3 to be useful edit: there's more than 1 priest, maybe give one of them a +3/+4 one:
this is just more for a novelty than to be something extremely useful, i originally wanted to make it a two handed flail but the problem is; there is no animation for such a weapon so that couldn't work, plus the thing about that flail, it has a high base damage, so i have to be careful about making higher enchanted ones, but as i said its more for the novelty then for something that needs to be crazy good, just like the +2 two handed axe that the slave guard has, it's more of a novelty axe than something that needs to be super good
totally get that, I just really wanted to use that Flail but at that point I had a couple better Flails (+3 with effects)
Make enemies/encounters more difficult:
the ironic thing is, i did make all those encounters more difficult, every singe one that you mentioned ( except for some trivial enemies perhaps) but the thing is, i have to be careful on how i do it, it's not necessary to make absolutely every single enemy in the game a death machine, and also depending on team composition some battles will be easier for others while some battles with be more difficult for others, like how you struggled against the giant ice trolls and i basically ran them over with my group, so we have to remember just because we are top notch at playing this game, other players may not be, so i tried my best to have a happy medium between the two
yeah, i totally get that. I didn't mean to buff them up so they're equal to the rest just maybe a slight buff here and there..overall most of them were fine but a small amount of encounters where really underwhelming, specifically the Verbeeg and the Archers in the Watchtower since they were rather tough in the Vanilla
make the following encounter easier: easthaven cave-
the mage spell Sleep is your friend here ( which can be found in the first town) or even Command if you have a cleric, and i did my best to make it so kiting doesn't work, i hate cheese tactics and i want players to explore more options, and remember you played that cave on insane difficulty, if you were to play it on hard instead, it would be a whole different ball game, ironically i didn't struggle all that much in that cave with my team ( but again 3 berserkers go a long way, especially at lower levels, that berserk ability is just too good) plus the temple in easthaven has potions and scrolls that can be bought if needed ( plus some NPCs can be pick pocketed for some semi decent items as well) so if someone plays the game with no clerics or mages im not going to give them any mercy for unnecessarily crippling themselves, insane difficulty is made for veterans players, it is definitely not made for casuals
my bad, when I start with a sorcerer I always automatically sell the spells from Pomabs shop and from habit take magic missile and identification x)
I will definitely play both Add-Ons, but this time unlikely within a week and also maybe not on insane since they're by nature harder than the main game and I also don't have that much knowledge about them
Btw: Having finished the main game, I'd rate your mod 9/10 so far.
Edit 2: Completely forgot to upload the picture, sorry.
Oh man IM liking this more and more while trying not to read the spoilers...except that I might need dispel magic but I always like to have that ready to go if needed. Great team @Armanz92 and think you put together the best classes. Glad HOW/TOTLM is also modded too Sarevok
@Armanz92 im in the middle of big fixing/squishing and im up to chapter 6 and I figured out what you were talking about while playing and here is the result:
the ogres and chieftan by default are supposed to warp in there, but what they are supposed to do afterwards is come at your party,
so when I altered their scripts I forgot to put in the "go after party when warped in" but that should be fixed now, and also all the other monsters that didn't come running in when they should have I have also tested and fixed them as well
@brunardo indeed, dispel magic is MVP in this mod ( or at least on insane difficulty anyways)
im playing this whole mod again looking for bugs ( which I have found new ones and fixed them) and some battles are a lot harder than I remember them being ( although the giant ice trolls still didn't give me that much hassle, weird eh? )
but so far, I am able to finish every battle in the game without having anyone dead at the end on insane, so it is doable
after I have finished chapter 6 I will update my mod/dialogue file in my original post, and after that I will give HoW another go, and when Armanz92 and I finishes HoW I will attempt to make a weidu version afterwards
Since I'll play quite irregularly from now on with university starting again, I'll post the bugs I encounter regularly in this post and once I'm finished I'll post my Impression and Suggestions again.
(possible) bugs:
my fighter/cleric has the Animate Dead Spell from lvl 3 (with the same text etc as the original spell) twice in her lvl 7 spellbook
the tough fight in gloomfrost outside against the mage etc. When the mage casts timestop everything gets blurry (fog of war has no nuance, becomes simply black, my web, cloudkill spells etc are just black blobs) until his timestop ends. Unfortunately i had made a screenshot only to realize i can't paste ingame screenshots into anything i have and i dont have the save anymore
polar bears in gloomfrost do not attack and when they're attacked they do nothing or flee (not sure if it's in the original, I very rarely play HoW, it's been some years)
when i talk to tiernon after creating the items for me, i have 4 (or was it 3?) talking options and the last 2 are both the same: Just checking on you, Tiernon. Farewell. The first of the 2 identical options is actually the one that lets him enhance my Aihonen blade
my fighter/cleric has the Animate Dead Spell from lvl 3 (with the same text etc as the original spell) twice in her lvl 7 spellbook:
I can't seem to duplicate this bug for cleric types, I've tried a fighter/cleric and the cleric/ranger and they don't have any animate deads in their spell book for level 7, what is your race and alignment? ( and to be honest I don't even know why that's happening, I did add 2 "animate dead" type spells to the game but they are level 5 and 6, so I find it strange that you are getting 2 extra level 7 animate deads)
the tough fight in gloomfrost outside against the mage etc. When the mage casts timestop everything gets blurry (fog of war has no nuance, becomes simply black, my web, cloudkill spells etc are just black blobs) until his timestop ends. Unfortunately i had made a screenshot only to realize i can't paste ingame screenshots into anything i have and i dont have the save anymore:
ah the gloomfrost, this area was just full of nightmares, I think just be default this area is bugtastic, im thinking what is happening is that it's another one of those engine bugs, and unfortunately I have no idea on how to fix actual engine bugs, I even looked at all the scripts and spells to make sure there wasn't anything whacky, but I couldn't find anything, it's kind of funny actually, this is the only area in the game ( where I have timestop used) where timestop seems to do that, just bizarre
polar bears in gloomfrost do not attack and when they're attacked they do nothing or flee (not sure if it's in the original, I very rarely play HoW, it's been some years):
yeah, as I said this area was just bugtastic ( I don't know what was going on, but the original scripts in this area where causing some serious problems every where) but luckily I was able to fix it and now all baddies will attack when they see you instead of just sitting there doing nothing
when i talk to tiernon after creating the items for me, i have 4 (or was it 3?) talking options and the last 2 are both the same: Just checking on you, Tiernon. Farewell. The first of the 2 identical options is actually the one that lets him enhance my Aihonen blade:
this for the life of me I can't figure out, it's like the game itself is deliberately refusing to work properly with his script, first of all what is supposed to happen is that if you have the sword then you are supposed to have the farewell option that upgrades it for you, and if you don't have the sword its suppose to give you the farewell version that terminates dialogue, but no matter what I do, you either get both options, or none of the options, even when I switched it so that if you had the upgraded version of the sword it still didn't make a difference, I think the problem might be one of the global variables might be messing it up, but then the problem is if I go to change that, then I have to change EVERY SINGLE trigger/response and all that jazz, and he has 100s of those, and for some reason the game is very VERY picky on what responses are in what order, and if one of them is off by one, then the whole dialogue chain becomes a big mess ( I learned this the hard way with conlan on making that armor for you, that was just a bitch to figure out, and it was a bitch to make it work, took me around 12 hours, just to add a couple of lines) but then again I am using NI, and NI is great in practically every way except for the dialogue trees, so unfortunately I don't think im going to be able to fix this one, unless somehow im told otherwise of a much easier way of doing so, im also thinking this is an original bug since I didn't alter teirnon's dialogue at all when I made this mod
also what difficulty are you playing on? im thinking at least on hard since you fought the humanoid party in the gloomfrost, and make sure that when you win at the barbarian camp that you go back to lonelywood and talk to the little Halfling guy inside the inn, he will start up the ToTLM expansion, you will want to do that before you go to the final island area of the game, plus it will be nice to see if you find more bugs along the way
my cleric is female, chaotic good half-elf and i don't seem to have lvl 5 and 6 animate dead versions
Im still playing on Insane, HoW isn't very difficult so far except for the bonus encounters you added. I know about ToTLM and will go for that next I just finished the map with Tiernon and will go to ToTLM now.
my cleric is female, chaotic good half-elf and i don't seem to have lvl 5 and 6 animate dead versions
Im still playing on Insane, HoW isn't very difficult so far except for the bonus encounters you added. I know about ToTLM and will go for that next I just finished the map with Tiernon and will go to ToTLM now.
for the life of me, I just cannot seem to duplicate the animate dead bug you are having, I wonder why you are getting it but not me?
On a sidenote: Where you able to duplicate the Ice Storm/Cone of Cold Sorcerer bug? Edit: one of the 2 spells you created has a typo: Denomic instead of Demonic
Edit: Maybe my game files are buggy? I just made a random Cleric of Lathander picked a random race gender etc and leveled him to max lvl with cheats and he has the animate dead spells in the lvl 7 slots again. Edit³: Hosts of the Damned doesn't work. I cast it and nothing happens after the animation is finished. The other one works properly.
The first Ice Storm says Quick Spell when I hover my mouse over it (it's the regular Ice Storm though). I assume that the same thing happens if I pick both Cones of Cold with my Sorcerer.
I have fixed the ice storm/ cone of cold duplication in fact, the first one that shows up in the sorcerer selection list is actually a trap I made ( I just copy pasted the spell itself and added my only little vendetta to it) but sometimes if the spell tag is "wizard" then it will show up in a sorcerer spell book, so I changed it to innate and now it doesn't show up anymore
but the animate deads, this is absolutely bizarre, I still can't duplicate the problem, although I do remember when I first made those spells they were in the level 7 selections, and they didn't work, and then I changed them over to level 5 and 6 and they both worked there, but I couldn't change the quick cast bam so I disabled them from player use, I have no idea how you have the original version of those spells when I had the corrected versions in my mod pack
I've updated my mod pack a few days ago, so perhaps trying downloading it again and copy over the over ride folder and see if that fixes the problem, because for the life of me, my game refuses to do that bug
im pretty sure you should be able to, that updated mod pack has all the IWD fixes in it ( and the ice storm/cone of cold fix) and hopefully it has the animate dead fix as well
I don't see any reason why it would affect your HoW game (in a negative way at least)
Alright, I installed this mod and a bunch of other mods after it, and started a new game. Let's see how it goes. Two things I noticed already:
1) The changes you made to CHARSND.2DA make it impossible to install any soundset from the Awesome Soundsets Mods Master Thread after your mod. They all fail with the WeiDU error: Cannot append column-wise because there are 49 lines in CHARSND.2da but I was only given 36 things to appendAfter deleting your version of CHARSND.2DA from the override folder, those mods install fine.
2) Your mod contains a bunch of files with the non-ASCII letter "µ" in their filename: µbja1.bam µbjca.bam µbjgh.bam µbjsc.bam µbjsl.bam µbjtw.bam
µbja1e.bam µbjcae.bam µbjghe.bam µbjsce.bam µbjsle.bam µbjtwe.bam
µbja2.bam µbjde.bam µbjgu.bam µbjsd.bam µbjsp.bam µbjwk.bam
µbja2e.bam µbjdee.bam µbjgue.bam µbjsde.bam µbjspe.bam µbjwke.bamI don't know if this causes any problems for the game, but I do know that WeiDU can't handle such files on Linux (no idea about other platforms). So if you ever turn this into a WeiDU mod, they'll cause a headache. Is it not possible to stick to ASCII letters?
as for 1) the only difference I made to this file was my jon irenicus voice set, so it would have subtitles ( this is the file you need to alter to give subtitles for voice sets) other than that, I didn't alter anything else, so I don't know why weidu doesn't recognize all 49 lines( it could be because perhaps the original IWD only uses 36, but because of the EE's it uses all of SoA's 49 lines )
and for 2) I just deleted those files, im thining originally they were for the goblin shaman, I don't remember, and as far as I know I used different bams for goblin shamans, and only kept those in just in case, but they are gone now so hopefully is doesn't cause any bugs
Sarevok57, thanks so much for this mod. The difficulty adjustments especially look really great.
I second two of the requests made by others, both of which would make the mod more accessible, more convenient, and more widely used. (a) If you make use WeiDu, it will be easier/safer to use it with other mods, and (b) it would be great if you could split up the components so that we can install some components and not others (for example, I really want to use the difficulty setting, but I prefer some other mods for adjustments to proficiencies and attributes).
Thanks for your hard work to make this game continue to be fun!
Since I don't see myself finishing the game in the near time, I'll add the few suggestions and impressions I so far had, just so you have them. (I always disliked HoW and only played TotL once and just don't have the motivation to play more of it.)
Again, I really liked your additions very much (as I previously said I continued on maximum difficulty) and they kept the game so far from being a borefest since I just mindlessly plowed through anything you didn't add.
I finished Burial Isle and did Gloomfrost outside and the first entire floor of the cavern itself.
First of all the Bone Golem additions are very nice and spice up the Burial Isles a bit since the rest is yawn inducing. The vampire encounter was really challenging at the first attempts, nice one. (Are they immune to missile weapons or just require +3?) The enemy party outside of gloomfrost was really, really well done.
What is lacking though is the ability for liches and other casters to deal with summons. Hakeashars pretty much trivialize any caster battle.
I would maybe add some more stuff to Burial Isles or buff the trashmobs a tad more. That's pretty much all I got to say about what I played so far, I'm not the best tester for HoW, I can't stress enough how I don't really like it xD
Since I don't see myself finishing the game in the near time, I'll add the few suggestions and impressions I so far had, just so you have them. (I always disliked HoW and only played TotL once and just don't have the motivation to play more of it.)
Again, I really liked your additions very much (as I previously said I continued on maximum difficulty) and they kept the game so far from being a borefest since I just mindlessly plowed through anything you didn't add.
I finished Burial Isle and did Gloomfrost outside and the first entire floor of the cavern itself.
First of all the Bone Golem additions are very nice and spice up the Burial Isles a bit since the rest is yawn inducing. The vampire encounter was really challenging at the first attempts, nice one. (Are they immune to missile weapons or just require +3?) The enemy party outside of gloomfrost was really, really well done.
What is lacking though is the ability for liches and other casters to deal with summons. Hakeashars pretty much trivialize any caster battle.
I would maybe add some more stuff to Burial Isles or buff the trashmobs a tad more. That's pretty much all I got to say about what I played so far, I'm not the best tester for HoW, I can't stress enough how I don't really like it xD
indeed, the vampires require +3 weapons or better to hit, and as for the other baddies on the burial isle, I actually did buff them up a bit, I completely revamped all the shamans and I made it so the wailing virgins did their special attacks more often, and gave the other undead baddies an extra ability or two
one thing that is going to be tough is the hakeashar/nishruu, they are one of those summons that are very difficult to balance, although I did look at their weapons and they count as +0, so usually spell casters have mantles/protection from magical weapons up, but if the hakeashar is making mage battles trivial then that is a serious problem, any ideas on what would balance that issue?
and I would agree on HoW being a little luck luster in general and I wasn't much of a fan of it myself, infact half the reason why I made this mod was to liven up HoW and ToTLM
Being immune to Hakeashars/Nishruus attacks doesn't take away the fact that they waste their spells on them. Shouldn't stuff like Wail of the Banshee and Death Spell kill them despite MR? At least that's what I remember from BG2 Liches, some of their Death spells killed the summons. Apart from that maybe give them Spell Sequencers with some powerful Summons that deal with the Nishruus. Third option would be to
change all Mage/Lich encounters in HoW to party battles because the Fighters etc from the parties easily kill the Nishruus/Hakeashars due to their poor combat stats. (the allround party in Gloomfrost outside was really strong, I'd like to see more of that).
I have more stuff to say, but it seems that the ability score changes are not fully implemented. Although the relevant .2da files have been updated to account for STR scores over 25, it is still not possible to actually hit 26 STR or higher in the game. The 25 cap is still in place.
Supreme Mastery also does not appear to grant any APR bonuses beyond Grandmastery.
Comments
the first level of kresselacks tomb in the vale of shadows has a hidden room with a mummy and a sarcophagus. That sarcophagus contains the mausoleum key to progress further into the tomb. It has a (very heavy!) lock and while I'm writing this I just realized that other keys had locks, too, this one I just couldn't open. Anyways, I suggest removing the locks from all those containers because if someone doesn't have a Thief, Wizard or Sorcerer in his team, he cannot go on with the story.
I think the reason why I put 65 on the sarcophagus is because there is some good items in there, plus I think I gave Oswald a potion of frost giant str which makes it so you can bust through that sarcophagus
and to be honest the chance that someone isn't going to have a thief/mage/sorcerer/bard to get through is going to be pretty slim
also when I made this mod, I made it to kind of "punish" players who think they can solo the game, I wanted to make it so you really need a team to get through it and have to use all the advantages of all your team mates, so if you want to solo the game now, its going to be very VERY difficult especially on insane it might be just impossible to do
but its definitely a consideration, perhaps I can tone down the lock amount a little bit, actually now that I look at it, I will just move the key into the small box beneath the sarcophagus
keep the suggestions coming
UPDATE:
I only found one other container that had a key that was locked, and it was set to 50, so I toned it down to 30
also about potions:
Edit: There's more than 1, Jesus Christ
I'm even more surprised that you are struggling against those guys the most, I found dragon's eye to be insanely difficult ( or at least the 2 levels that had the yuan-ti) those yuan-ti mages were mind boggling brutal, and the marileth was no cake walk either, but of coarse this is insane difficulty so it does live up to it's name, and I did beat every single battle in the game to make sure it was doable
my suggestion would be to hammer them with slow spells, to calm down their natural 3 attacks per round ( perhaps even a ray of enfeeblement to lower their 19 STR) and after that, just haste away with some fire elementals I suppose ( remember that bandoth sells the elemental summoning spells for wizards and those elementals don't go berserk on you)
i will try to slow down the giant ice troll now..my party btw is dwarven defender, cavalier, archer, dragon disciple, fighter/cleric & swashbuckler so there should be enough damage output
I beat them and im pretty sure their regen is bugged...they go from injured to barely injured in 1 second etc i constantly pump out 15-20 damage with every party member and even when i stun them they just dont go down, i needed to crank down from insane to hard
I will likely finish the game on sunday and then post a very detailled review/bug report/suggestion thing
Edit! (in the spoiler tag)
also remember insane difficulty is meant to be incredibly hard, I do believe if you go to the in game difficulty settings it has a warning that insane is not for the soft of heart sort of speak, because I have also programed it that difficulty effects the amount of baddies/ items used by baddies/ and how much spell casting they do, so a battle may be brutal on insane, but if you do it on hard instead, it will be a different scenario, there is actually quite a difference between hard and insane, and even more of a difference between normal and hard
also I think another reason why some battles may seem arbitrarily difficult is because you can't meta game something you haven't played before, I bet if you played my mod on insane for a couple of years, you would be able to cake walk those battles just from meta game alone, so I do think insane difficulty is right where I want it to be, for people who were casual insane difficulty players for IWD, playing my mod on hard would fit that bill better
but please, keep bringing in the feedback
First section: (Possible) bugs
general: quests that you do not receive prior to completing them (like finding the caravan in easthaven for hrotghar) and quests that you can only complete without knowing about them (like finding the gnomish tools for oswald) are displayed as full exp instead of per party member, unsure if that's intended or not
I'm unable to sell any wands
Ice Storm and Cone of Cold were in my Sorcerers Spellbook twice everytime I had to pick spells from that level (I didn't get to a level where I could see if it's still in there after i picked it)
Static Charge cast by enemies hits enemies
the triggers in the entrance to upper dorns deep (where you have to step onto the 3 symbols) seem to be a bit off, i gotta walk around on them for a couple seconds now
if you buy ammunition for a character and then try to buy ammunition for a different character you cannot do that, you have to finish the trade and start another one because any ammo you try to buy has a 0 for amount
not sure about if this is a bug at all but I think I gave my Paladin with STR 18/97 a potion with +1 str and now he has 19, isn't he suppoed to get 18/00? (i mightve had an item with +1 STR on him when I made him drink it and maybe it went from [boosted] 18/00 to boosted 19 but then somehow the 19 was natural, maybe thats relevant in case its a bug)
easthaven: the ogre chieftain and the orc shaman don't follow you after you trigger the aggro while they're in fog of war
vale of shadows: battle music in vale of shadows after your rest being interrupted by monsters only starts after about 1 second and sounds like it started on mute and now suddenly is turned on (maybe I'm only slowly going insane though)
a short sword of phasing +1 found on level 2 has the description of a flaming short sword +1 (the effects are correct though)
dragon's eye: yxunomei stays behind while you get the aggro from everyone else
Severed hand: The ambush on the topside of the third level when you loot the chairs on the left side of the area and get that elven flail did not trigger correctly(the one with ogres and shamans, they always dropped a ring of +1 STR or a different item, instead there were only 2 shadowed orc shamans). instead of them appearing sort of in the middle of that hallway the 2 orc shamans spawned on the right side and the 2 ogres + orc chieftain also on the right side but with the wall between them (i can send you a picture with the marked areas if you need to)
my fighter/cleric had her strength drained by one of the shades and it didn't wear off after the symbol disappeared (it wore off eventually but only after a while)
wyrms tooth: two handed axe of giants +2 has a typo: Cold Resistance BOnus
finale: belhilfets AI is clunky and buggy as fuck (not your fault, it's how it's in vanilla). Are you able to fix him or is that beyond your abilities/hardcoded? What I'm talking about is him constantly going to corners of the room and doing nothing except when he's attacked
Second section: My impression
As someone who played IWD at least 20 times (not including the EE) I can safely say that I'm in a good position to review any mod meddling with the Difficulty of the game and I can assure you, you have done well. As noted above it was difficult but not in a frustrating way, except the first battle in Easthaven cave, Yxunomei & Belhilfet (rightfully so!) and the Giant Ice Trolls. Many things still need some polish imho, but overall I enjoyed this very, very much. I feel that some of the stuff you added could still be improved because I didn't have to change my strategy too often. The basilisks were an awesome addition but there were never so many, that I had to use Protection from Petrification for example. The dragon was awesome, too but it wasn't so strong that I had to use Protection from Fire. I think you get what I mean. Also, a lot of the standard mobs could be harder, will pinpoint them in the thread later on. Alright, let's get to the details:
general:
i like the added traps and locks and gaining experience from them
additional bg music is nice, sometimes there's too much of it though
new items in kuldahar seem fitting and the prices are appropriate, especially the endless quivers etc. are very good because the game always lacked +1 ammo in the later stages of the game (also a nice touch to change the red dragon armor to 0 armor class for this game as -1 woulda been a bit too much)
-4 ac penalty on the ring of +1 attack per round makes that OP as fuck item more balanced
temple of the forgotten gods: fight against krugg was a nice addition, maybe seperate the mages a bit more so that you cannot intercept all 4 spells from them by using 2 AoE spells
fight on the way out against that doppelganger was very nice and challenging, too
dragon's eye: i like the addition of the basilisks throughout the game
the troll/sword spider/bombardeer beetle fight on level 2 when you go down is pretty tough and imho not doable without killing some stuff, retreating to the previous area, resting and killing the rest, not sure if it needs to be toned down a bit
the additional yuan-ti before yxunomeis chamber that spawn after the dialogue are well placed and make running back and preparing for her more challenging
the ogre chieftain in kuldahar before arundels house – nice
severed hand: the battle on the second level against all the wolves, nice addition of mages that are barely visible!
The second battle in solonor tower, jesus christ that shit was hard. thank you for this, I always wished for those Shadowed Elf battles to be hard
pseudonatural wraith spider – top notch
music in the top of the towers is very fitting
upper dorns deep: that random fucking red dragon jesus christ. That shit threw me off guard big time and was perfectly placed in that cave with all the bones
terikan was good
the bronze sentries are a bit tough tbh..i have a dwarfen defender with 75-85% DR for physical damage on his stance and i still had to lure the first of the 4 away and kill solo and then deal with the last 3 by first distracting them with 6 summons, but i guess they aren't too tough since in the vanilla they were already one of the hardest things to deal with
lower dorns deep: that random fucking lich, dude
finale: pomab battle was nice, but I missed those continuous lightning bolts
what I didn't like: basically only one thing: using bg sprites for monster that were in iwd (umber hulks, elementals, iron golems, drow, etc.) that shit hurt my feelings. If you make this mod WeiDu compatible you definitely need an option that keeps the old sprites.
Third section: Suggestions
general:
not sure if that's hardcoded but making the chance for an uninterrupted rest higher would be nice, since you have to rest after almost every battle, especially in the vale of shadows and dragon's eye levels 1 & 2, but basically really anywhere
please add 1 or 2 items to Bandoth in Dorns Deep...after all the shopkeepers getting a couple items I was very excited for what he had in store....gloves or boots maybe, at this point those are some items i still dont have enough of (many of the scarce vanilla boots are garbage, too)
temple of the forgotten gods: the bg music in front of the temple is pretty unfitting imo
wyrm's tooth: the first bugbear priest (if you go there from the bottom side) drops a huge/heavy flail +1...i'd make it +3 or +4 maybe...it feels like a weapon with potential but it needs to be +3 to be useful edit: there's more than 1 priest, maybe give one of them a +3/+4 one
lower dorns deep: could you buff the rhino beetle shield dirty lev makes for you? At this point of the game a +1/+1 shield is garbage (i know its vanilla content)
also, he made me this one shield but i dont get anymore options now, didn't he make unlimited umber hulk armor and rhino beetle shields for you as long as you had the raw material and money needed?
Reduce Item Drops:
Temple of the Forgotten Gods: Temple Library Fight (boots of moander, badge of the brave and boots of the many paths from *one* encounter), Second Floor of the Temple (i'd remove an item from one of the 4 chests), Krugg Battle (I got 3 major items, 2 would be more appropriate)
All in all that's ~3 items too many imho, I would maybe remove 1 or 2 of those and/or move them to the last battle on floor 2 (has 0 drops) and/or the doppelganger battle (has 0 drops, too [or 0 major ones]) so that they're spread out better
Severed Hand: Getting all 3 items from the Severed Soul and the Serrated Skeleton seems a bit overkill, how about 2?
getting all items from kaylessa – again, a bit overkill
Upper Dorn's Deep: krilag dropped like 5 weapons (on top of that a ring and a necklace) and 3 of those weapons were really, really strong - overkill
orrick the grey all 3 items for mythal theory book, this is the second one you definitely need to reduce to at least 2/3 (this and the temple library fight are imho the ones that need 1 item less the most)
Item prices: Returning Dagger Acidtooth +1 is way too expensive, i'd lower the price from the 38k (17 charisma) to 5 or 6k tops since it's merely a +1 weapon with 1 additional elemental damage
Make the following encounters/enemies harder [in these brackets I will include specific suggestions]:
Vale of Shadows: Yeti Chieftain, Terikan, Lysan
Temple of the Forgotten God: Verbeegs [Thaco, HP]
Dragon's Eye: Lizard King Battle, Yuan-Ti/Archers/Elites
Severed Hand: All Shadowed Goblins & Orcs, Armored Skeletons (I know they weren't much of a threat in the vanilla, but if you wanna make things harder buff em) [give them buffs and more HP, maybe more Damage, too]
Upper Dorn's Deep: Blue Mykonids, Ettins (those are a complete joke), All Neo-Orogs, Krilag
Wyrm's Tooth: Greater Ice Trolls, Ice Trolls, Frost Salamanders
Lower Dorns Deep: Fire Salamanders, Fleezum & Flozem, Thieves, Elementals, Umber Hulks, Blind Minotaurs, Iron Golems, Archers in the Watchtower
Make the following encounters/enemies easier:
Easthaven: First major battle in the Cave (vs. Orc Chieftain, Shaman and many, many Archers. Imho there's just too many archers so you cannot kite at all, I would like to know how you managed to beat those) [less Archers]
Dragon's Eye: Yxunomei (I had to abuse her buggy/clunky AI and after defeating all her posse I had to rest/wait out her defensive spells, didn't use Dispel Magic like a dumbass...like all game, that spell would've made the game a tad easier for me XD)
Wyrm's Tooth: the giant ice troll is a joke and not a funny one at that (heavy bug suspicion there as I already stated; he regenerates from Badly Wounded to Uninjured within seconds)
I hope I didn't forget anything.
Edit: Two questions.
1.) Does this mod affect HoW/TotL?
2.) Will this work in multiplayer if all parties have this installed?
so lets go over all the things:
when you have 18/xx strength and get +1 it will automatically go to 19, that is just how the engine works, in the original IWD if you used DuHM then your max would be 18/00 for "balance" purposes, but ever since beamdog made the EE they basically transferred everything BG2 over to IWD and now the game runs more like BG2, so that is why that is happening
when it comes to dead team mates I was able to do every single fight in the game without losing a single team mate, but then again, I did remember to use dispel magic when the time came
Quest XP bug:
this behaviour is intentional, some quests will give XP per character some quests will give a set amount of XP, I did this more for the fact that if people played solo it would make it so you couldn't power level like a boss, and also this helps make it so if you have a team less than 6, your average levels wont go through the roof
unable to sell wands:
this is also intentional, because during my play through I found wands to be SUPER OP, wands were just destroying enemies without a hitch, and the bigger problem is when you do the "recharge" they come in at 100 charges and I couldn't figure out how to make so if you were to buy them back they would only come back with like 5 or 10 charges, so wands are now more of a mystical item that require careful planning before use
static charge hits enemies:
im assuming its because in the spell description it says if you cast it and don't use it within a few rounds it casts automatically on the user itself, since some areas can be loaded with enemies one of the problems could have been is that the enemy cast static charge and couldn't get to your team in time, so then it discharged this could also be because the path finding at times can be complete garbage and i have no idea how to fix the path finding ( don't even think that is possible to be honest which is unfortunate)
the triggers for the 3 symbols on the ground, now that one i have no idea, because i didn't change anything in that area except for the addition of some golems, and when i went to that area it worked 100 % fine with me ( or at least when was there it seemed to work fine) so i will have to take another gander at that i suppose
if you buy ammunition for a character and then try to buy ammunition for a different character you cannot do that, you have to finish the trade and start another one because any ammo you try to buy has a 0 for amount:
this might actually be and engine bug, i recall when trying to buy bigger stacks of ammo sometimes it would arbitrarily only allow me to buy say 10, when i could actually buy 30, i wonder if that has something to do with it? i will have to do a play test for it to see if it happens to me the way it happens to you, but if it's doing it the way it did before i made this mod then unfortunately this could be an engine problem and unfortunately i don't have enough modding sorcery to fix engine bugs
already talked about the STR increase, but to reiterate: if you have 18/ anything and get +1 it will be increased to 19 no matter what, which is intentional
easthaven: the ogre chieftain and the orc shaman don't follow you after you trigger the aggro while they're in fog of war:
good to know, will have to fix that AI
vale of shadows: battle music in vale of shadows after your rest being interrupted by monsters only starts after about 1 second and sounds like it started on mute and now suddenly is turned on (maybe I'm only slowly going insane though):
i believe this is another engine bug which they fixed in the 2.xx versions of the bgee's i tried tinkering with it in IWD but for the life of me couldn't figure out why, what happens is that all music files are actually a pack of like 30-40 sound bits, and for some reason v 1.4 of IWDEE will start on the 2nd sound bit, so i have no idea on how to fix that
a short sword of phasing +1 found on level 2 has the description of a flaming short sword +1 (the effects are correct though):
definitely a bug, im going to assume the sword has the wrong dialogue string so i will have to change that
dragon's eye: yxunomei stays behind while you get the aggro from everyone else:
yeah i noticed this when i did my play through as well, i thought i fixed it, but i guess not, will have to update that AI so she follows you even if you run away
Severed hand: The ambush on the topside of the third level when you loot the chairs on the left side of the area and get that elven flail did not trigger correctly(the one with ogres and shamans, they always dropped a ring of +1 STR or a different item, instead there were only 2 shadowed orc shamans). instead of them appearing sort of in the middle of that hallway the 2 orc shamans spawned on the right side and the 2 ogres + orc chieftain also on the right side but with the wall between them (i can send you a picture with the marked areas if you need to):
don't really know whats going on here, from what i recall it worked fine for me, but yeah if you have a picture to reiterate on what's happening then i can see what you mean
my fighter/cleric had her strength drained by one of the shades and it didn't wear off after the symbol disappeared (it wore off eventually but only after a while):
im assuming i put the wrong timer on the screen icon of "ability score drained" i will double check to make sure the timer is set to wear off when the drained strength wears off
wyrms tooth: two handed axe of giants +2 has a typo: Cold Resistance BOnus:
oops a doopsy, i guess sometimes that happens when you're pumping hour 16+ hahaha, will definitely have to fix that typo ( i think it was around 2am when i was at that part of the game)
finale: belhilfets AI is clunky and buggy as fuck (not your fault, it's how it's in vanilla). Are you able to fix him or is that beyond your abilities/hardcoded? What I'm talking about is him constantly going to corners of the room and doing nothing except when he's attacked:
actually i can fix this up and just get rid of him bouncing around, i think i kept that in there because if he didn't do that, he was just impossible to kill, although as you say he does stand there until he is attacked, perhaps i can come down how often he teleports out, maybe once every minute instead of like once every 2 rounds, and even after he attacks i can try and make it so he will actually attack afterwards, one thing i don't like about that battle is that it can be kind of a double edged sword where either you just straight up cant win, or you just straight up cant lose, so i will tinker with his AI some more
upper dorns deep: that random fucking red dragon jesus christ. That shit threw me off guard big time and was perfectly placed in that cave with all the bones:
that is exactly what i was aiming for, and you only face him on insane difficulty ( on lower difficulties it's different baddies) but at the same time, i didn't want to make him outrageously powerful ( he basically has the same script and "items" that the red dragon has from bg2) because even though we are great at the mechanics of IWD other players might not be, my aim every time i added those extra baddies in, was to make them just the right kind of difficult for their situation
the bronze sentries are a bit tough tbh..i have a dwarfen defender with 75-85% DR for physical damage on his stance and i still had to lure the first of the 4 away and kill solo and then deal with the last 3 by first distracting them with 6 summons, but i guess they aren't too tough since in the vanilla they were already one of the hardest things to deal with:
for me, i didn't find these guys that hard, but my AC's where crazy low for my melee guys ( i think i was pumping -12/ -14 at that point without buffs) so i didn't struggle too bad against them, even though they do hit hard and fast, its only on insane difficulty they are that crazy, on lower difficulties they don't use as many crazy abilities and plus i think that fight is intentionally supposed to be difficult
lower dorns deep: that random fucking lich, dude:
hahhahaha, ah, another one of those surprise battles, that one i like a lot because that will throw anyone for a loop, and especially on how brutal that guy's tactics are, more icing on the cake, although his items are worth it, if you can beat him, but the best part is: you can only fight against him on insane, any difficulty lower and he will not appear
finale: pomab battle was nice, but I missed those continuous lightning bolts:
now this is ironic because the one thing i hated about that battle was the continuous lightning bolts, so instead i wanted to make the battle more interesting also this is one of those battles depending on what difficult you play on determines how much XP he gives you when you defeat him ( if you fight against him on a lower difficulty he will give you less XP) yxunomei is the same way
the troll/sword spider/bombardeer beetle fight on level 2 when you go down is pretty tough and imho not doable without killing some stuff, retreating to the previous area, resting and killing the rest, not sure if it needs to be toned down a bit:
this is actually from the original game, i didn't add anything here at all
the additional yuan-ti before yxunomeis chamber that spawn after the dialogue are well placed and make running back and preparing for her more challenging:
this is also from the original game, although the one yuan-ti champion that accompanies them will only appear on insane difficulty which is my doing
not sure if that's hardcoded but making the chance for an uninterrupted rest higher would be nice, since you have to rest after almost every battle, especially in the vale of shadows and dragon's eye levels 1 & 2, but basically really anywhere:
i did notice that the rest spawn rate did seem a little high, ( the game has a really weird way on how rest spawning works) but the thing is, if people don't play on insane then they probably won't need to rest as much, and plus i wanted to make it so you couldn't rest without a worry or care, plus there are some NPC's they will watch over you while you rest, and there are a few safe areas to rest in as well, so i don't think it's too terribly much of an issue
please add 1 or 2 items to Bandoth in Dorns Deep...after all the shopkeepers getting a couple items I was very excited for what he had in store....gloves or boots maybe, at this point those are some items i still dont have enough of (many of the scarce vanilla boots are garbage, too):
i actually did add a bunch of stuff to his store ( way more potions and possibly spells) i wanted to keep the theme of him only selling that sort of stuff
temple of the forgotten gods: the bg music in front of the temple is pretty unfitting imo:
it does sound a little out of place, but i was also trying my best to not make it so i wasn't using the same track over and over and over again, so i was trying to add more selection to the music as best i could
wyrm's tooth: the first bugbear priest (if you go there from the bottom side) drops a huge/heavy flail +1...i'd make it +3 or +4 maybe...it feels like a weapon with potential but it needs to be +3 to be useful edit: there's more than 1 priest, maybe give one of them a +3/+4 one:
this is just more for a novelty than to be something extremely useful, i originally wanted to make it a two handed flail but the problem is; there is no animation for such a weapon so that couldn't work, plus the thing about that flail, it has a high base damage, so i have to be careful about making higher enchanted ones, but as i said its more for the novelty then for something that needs to be crazy good, just like the +2 two handed axe that the slave guard has, it's more of a novelty axe than something that needs to be super good
lower dorns deep: could you buff the rhino beetle shield dirty lev makes for you? At this point of the game a +1/+1 shield is garbage (i know its vanilla content):
actually you can already buff the shield already, if you take that shield to orrick he can upgrade it to a +2 or +3 shield i believe
also, he made me this one shield but i dont get anymore options now, didn't he make unlimited umber hulk armor and rhino beetle shields for you as long as you had the raw material and money needed?:
this i am not sure, this could be something that was implemented in the EE's, i didn't do anything to dirty lew's dialogue tree so whatever he did in the original EE he will be doing here, so i think this is an EE implementation
Item Drops:
it may seem like overkill on the item drops but that is because you are playing on insane difficulty, insane difficulty has more baddies and those stronger baddies have those better items, so on lower difficulties you will fight against less of those stronger baddies hence you wont be getting those items, and for the baddies that you fight on all 5 difficulties, there items will also be reduced depending on difficulty as well, so on insane yes it may seem high, but on the lower difficulties they will drop less ( you HAVE to play the game on insane to get all the really good items, this is the only way)
Item prices: Returning Dagger Acidtooth +1 is way too expensive, i'd lower the price from the 38k (17 charisma) to 5 or 6k tops since it's merely a +1 weapon with 1 additional elemental damage:
the are a few reasons why this items is so expensive: it has infinite ammo, you can add your strength bonus to damage, it gives you an extra attack per round, and it almost trivializes battles with trolls because of that extra acid damage and my belief is that trolls were supposed to be annoyingly difficult, plus a kensai can use this weapon, and they are DEADLY with it so, the price does work, plus remember when your REP starts hitting over 14 you start getting discounts at shops, so that helps make the price less and in my mod you can hit 20 REP alone just from donating at temples ( if you want to do it that way)
Make enemies/encounters more difficult:
the ironic thing is, i did make all those encounters more difficult, every singe one that you mentioned ( except for some trivial enemies perhaps) but the thing is, i have to be careful on how i do it, it's not necessary to make absolutely every single enemy in the game a death machine, and also depending on team composition some battles will be easier for others while some battles with be more difficult for others, like how you struggled against the giant ice trolls and i basically ran them over with my group, so we have to remember just because we are top notch at playing this game, other players may not be, so i tried my best to have a happy medium between the two
make the following encounter easier: easthaven cave-
the mage spell Sleep is your friend here ( which can be found in the first town) or even Command if you have a cleric, and i did my best to make it so kiting doesn't work, i hate cheese tactics and i want players to explore more options, and remember you played that cave on insane difficulty, if you were to play it on hard instead, it would be a whole different ball game, ironically i didn't struggle all that much in that cave with my team ( but again 3 berserkers go a long way, especially at lower levels, that berserk ability is just too good) plus the temple in easthaven has potions and scrolls that can be bought if needed ( plus some NPCs can be pick pocketed for some semi decent items as well) so if someone plays the game with no clerics or mages im not going to give them any mercy for unnecessarily crippling themselves, insane difficulty is made for veterans players, it is definitely not made for casuals
make the following encounter easier: yxunomei
yeah, this battle is definitely a doozy, but there are a few reasons why its as hard as it is: again her awesomeness is based on difficulty, the higher the difficulty the more brutal her abilities will be, second, she is supposed to be a threat to belhilfet, although its kind of arbitrary to have such a powerful enemy of her calibre so early in the game but i wanted her to still have merit for that reason, next, the amount of XP she gives you is dependent on difficulty as well, the higher the difficulty the more XP she gives you ( and her XP reward definitely is worth the struggle) and based off that, in the original she gives 46 000 which is the 2nd highest XP reward for killing a bad guy in the entire game, so i really wanted to reflect on the fact that she is definitely suppose to be brutal, but i do have to rework her AI a bit so then you can't rest her spells away, because remember; on insane, dispel magic is definitely your friend
make the following encounter easier: giant ice trolls
and here the irony keeps coming, another one of the situations where you struggled at something that i didn't stuggle at, at all, yes they did dish out some serious damage if they could, but i was able to take them down without much of a hitch, so i will have to do another play through after i fix all the other things and see whats going on with those guys and see if they are acting as intentional ( i think what might be happening is that on insane they use haste and it hastes their regeneration - which is an engine bug - and since i use the slow spell like its going out of style, this could be the reason why i didn't struggle that much against them)
the thing we need to remember a well, is that this is your first time playing IWD with this mod, so some things may seem a bit more difficult ( because you can't metagame something you don't know) but i still appreciate all comments you have to say
so with that being said, starting tomorrow i will get to bug squishing (yum) and fix this stuff up, and hopefully you get time to play HoW, because HoW has been completely revamped ( TotLM as well) so hopefully you enjoy what the expansion brings
the triggers for the 3 symbols on the ground, now that one i have no idea, because i didn't change anything in that area except for the addition of some golems, and when i went to that area it worked 100 % fine with me ( or at least when was there it seemed to work fine) so i will have to take another gander at that i suppose
Maybe I played the original game so much, that the EE hasn't left any memory in my head. That'd explain how I thought so much stuff was from your mod xD
Severed hand: The ambush on the topside of the third level when you loot the chairs on the left side of the area and get that elven flail did not trigger correctly(the one with ogres and shamans, they always dropped a ring of +1 STR or a different item, instead there were only 2 shadowed orc shamans). instead of them appearing sort of in the middle of that hallway the 2 orc shamans spawned on the right side and the 2 ogres + orc chieftain also on the right side but with the wall between them (i can send you a picture with the marked areas if you need to):
don't really know whats going on here, from what i recall it worked fine for me, but yeah if you have a picture to reiterate on what's happening then i can see what you mean
didnt have a savegame so ill upload a picture...green circle is where the ambush should've been (at least in regular iwd) and orange circles is where they actually were
actually i can fix this up and just get rid of him bouncing around, i think i kept that in there because if he didn't do that, he was just impossible to kill, although as you say he does stand there until he is attacked, perhaps i can come down how often he teleports out, maybe once every minute instead of like once every 2 rounds, and even after he attacks i can try and make it so he will actually attack afterwards, one thing i don't like about that battle is that it can be kind of a double edged sword where either you just straight up cant win, or you just straight up cant lose, so i will tinker with his AI some more
I agree, that battle would be pretty insane if he didn't port at all. some sort of compromise would be best.
the troll/sword spider/bombardeer beetle fight on level 2 when you go down is pretty tough and imho not doable without killing some stuff, retreating to the previous area, resting and killing the rest, not sure if it needs to be toned down a bit:
this is actually from the original game, i didn't add anything here at all
this is very weird. You didn't even buff any of those creeps? I really don't recall having had problems with those even after the EE made them all come at once and I played on Insane, too. Guess I'm really slowly going insane.
i actually did add a bunch of stuff to his store ( way more potions and possibly spells) i wanted to keep the theme of him only selling that sort of stuff
Fair enough
wyrm's tooth: the first bugbear priest (if you go there from the bottom side) drops a huge/heavy flail +1...i'd make it +3 or +4 maybe...it feels like a weapon with potential but it needs to be +3 to be useful edit: there's more than 1 priest, maybe give one of them a +3/+4 one:
this is just more for a novelty than to be something extremely useful, i originally wanted to make it a two handed flail but the problem is; there is no animation for such a weapon so that couldn't work, plus the thing about that flail, it has a high base damage, so i have to be careful about making higher enchanted ones, but as i said its more for the novelty then for something that needs to be crazy good, just like the +2 two handed axe that the slave guard has, it's more of a novelty axe than something that needs to be super good
totally get that, I just really wanted to use that Flail but at that point I had a couple better Flails (+3 with effects)
Make enemies/encounters more difficult:
the ironic thing is, i did make all those encounters more difficult, every singe one that you mentioned ( except for some trivial enemies perhaps) but the thing is, i have to be careful on how i do it, it's not necessary to make absolutely every single enemy in the game a death machine, and also depending on team composition some battles will be easier for others while some battles with be more difficult for others, like how you struggled against the giant ice trolls and i basically ran them over with my group, so we have to remember just because we are top notch at playing this game, other players may not be, so i tried my best to have a happy medium between the two
yeah, i totally get that. I didn't mean to buff them up so they're equal to the rest just maybe a slight buff here and there..overall most of them were fine but a small amount of encounters where really underwhelming, specifically the Verbeeg and the Archers in the Watchtower since they were rather tough in the Vanilla
make the following encounter easier: easthaven cave-
the mage spell Sleep is your friend here ( which can be found in the first town) or even Command if you have a cleric, and i did my best to make it so kiting doesn't work, i hate cheese tactics and i want players to explore more options, and remember you played that cave on insane difficulty, if you were to play it on hard instead, it would be a whole different ball game, ironically i didn't struggle all that much in that cave with my team ( but again 3 berserkers go a long way, especially at lower levels, that berserk ability is just too good) plus the temple in easthaven has potions and scrolls that can be bought if needed ( plus some NPCs can be pick pocketed for some semi decent items as well) so if someone plays the game with no clerics or mages im not going to give them any mercy for unnecessarily crippling themselves, insane difficulty is made for veterans players, it is definitely not made for casuals
my bad, when I start with a sorcerer I always automatically sell the spells from Pomabs shop and from habit take magic missile and identification x)
I will definitely play both Add-Ons, but this time unlikely within a week
Btw: Having finished the main game, I'd rate your mod 9/10 so far.
Edit 2: Completely forgot to upload the picture, sorry.
the ogres and chieftan by default are supposed to warp in there, but what they are supposed to do afterwards is come at your party,
so when I altered their scripts I forgot to put in the "go after party when warped in" but that should be fixed now, and also all the other monsters that didn't come running in when they should have I have also tested and fixed them as well
@brunardo indeed, dispel magic is MVP in this mod ( or at least on insane difficulty anyways)
im playing this whole mod again looking for bugs ( which I have found new ones and fixed them) and some battles are a lot harder than I remember them being ( although the giant ice trolls still didn't give me that much hassle, weird eh? )
but so far, I am able to finish every battle in the game without having anyone dead at the end on insane, so it is doable
after I have finished chapter 6 I will update my mod/dialogue file in my original post, and after that I will give HoW another go, and when Armanz92 and I finishes HoW I will attempt to make a weidu version afterwards
(possible) bugs:
the tough fight in gloomfrost outside against the mage etc. When the mage casts timestop everything gets blurry (fog of war has no nuance, becomes simply black, my web, cloudkill spells etc are just black blobs) until his timestop ends. Unfortunately i had made a screenshot only to realize i can't paste ingame screenshots into anything i have and i dont have the save anymore
polar bears in gloomfrost do not attack and when they're attacked they do nothing or flee (not sure if it's in the original, I very rarely play HoW, it's been some years)
when i talk to tiernon after creating the items for me, i have 4 (or was it 3?) talking options and the last 2 are both the same: Just checking on you, Tiernon. Farewell. The first of the 2 identical options is actually the one that lets him enhance my Aihonen blade
my fighter/cleric has the Animate Dead Spell from lvl 3 (with the same text etc as the original spell) twice in her lvl 7 spellbook:
I can't seem to duplicate this bug for cleric types, I've tried a fighter/cleric and the cleric/ranger and they don't have any animate deads in their spell book for level 7, what is your race and alignment? ( and to be honest I don't even know why that's happening, I did add 2 "animate dead" type spells to the game but they are level 5 and 6, so I find it strange that you are getting 2 extra level 7 animate deads)
the tough fight in gloomfrost outside against the mage etc. When the mage casts timestop everything gets blurry (fog of war has no nuance, becomes simply black, my web, cloudkill spells etc are just black blobs) until his timestop ends. Unfortunately i had made a screenshot only to realize i can't paste ingame screenshots into anything i have and i dont have the save anymore:
ah the gloomfrost, this area was just full of nightmares, I think just be default this area is bugtastic, im thinking what is happening is that it's another one of those engine bugs, and unfortunately I have no idea on how to fix actual engine bugs, I even looked at all the scripts and spells to make sure there wasn't anything whacky, but I couldn't find anything, it's kind of funny actually, this is the only area in the game ( where I have timestop used) where timestop seems to do that, just bizarre
polar bears in gloomfrost do not attack and when they're attacked they do nothing or flee (not sure if it's in the original, I very rarely play HoW, it's been some years):
yeah, as I said this area was just bugtastic ( I don't know what was going on, but the original scripts in this area where causing some serious problems every where) but luckily I was able to fix it and now all baddies will attack when they see you instead of just sitting there doing nothing
when i talk to tiernon after creating the items for me, i have 4 (or was it 3?) talking options and the last 2 are both the same: Just checking on you, Tiernon. Farewell. The first of the 2 identical options is actually the one that lets him enhance my Aihonen blade:
this for the life of me I can't figure out, it's like the game itself is deliberately refusing to work properly with his script, first of all what is supposed to happen is that if you have the sword then you are supposed to have the farewell option that upgrades it for you, and if you don't have the sword its suppose to give you the farewell version that terminates dialogue, but no matter what I do, you either get both options, or none of the options, even when I switched it so that if you had the upgraded version of the sword it still didn't make a difference, I think the problem might be one of the global variables might be messing it up, but then the problem is if I go to change that, then I have to change EVERY SINGLE trigger/response and all that jazz, and he has 100s of those, and for some reason the game is very VERY picky on what responses are in what order, and if one of them is off by one, then the whole dialogue chain becomes a big mess ( I learned this the hard way with conlan on making that armor for you, that was just a bitch to figure out, and it was a bitch to make it work, took me around 12 hours, just to add a couple of lines) but then again I am using NI, and NI is great in practically every way except for the dialogue trees, so unfortunately I don't think im going to be able to fix this one, unless somehow im told otherwise of a much easier way of doing so, im also thinking this is an original bug since I didn't alter teirnon's dialogue at all when I made this mod
also what difficulty are you playing on? im thinking at least on hard since you fought the humanoid party in the gloomfrost, and make sure that when you win at the barbarian camp that you go back to lonelywood and talk to the little Halfling guy inside the inn, he will start up the ToTLM expansion, you will want to do that before you go to the final island area of the game, plus it will be nice to see if you find more bugs along the way
Im still playing on Insane, HoW isn't very difficult so far except for the bonus encounters you added.
I know about ToTLM and will go for that next I just finished the map with Tiernon and will go to ToTLM now.
Edit: one of the 2 spells you created has a typo: Denomic instead of Demonic
Edit: Maybe my game files are buggy? I just made a random Cleric of Lathander picked a random race gender etc and leveled him to max lvl with cheats and he has the animate dead spells in the lvl 7 slots again.
Edit³: Hosts of the Damned doesn't work. I cast it and nothing happens after the animation is finished. The other one works properly.
The first Ice Storm says Quick Spell when I hover my mouse over it (it's the regular Ice Storm though).
I assume that the same thing happens if I pick both Cones of Cold with my Sorcerer.
but the animate deads, this is absolutely bizarre, I still can't duplicate the problem, although I do remember when I first made those spells they were in the level 7 selections, and they didn't work, and then I changed them over to level 5 and 6 and they both worked there, but I couldn't change the quick cast bam so I disabled them from player use, I have no idea how you have the original version of those spells when I had the corrected versions in my mod pack
I've updated my mod pack a few days ago, so perhaps trying downloading it again and copy over the over ride folder and see if that fixes the problem, because for the life of me, my game refuses to do that bug
I don't see any reason why it would affect your HoW game (in a negative way at least)
1) The changes you made to CHARSND.2DA make it impossible to install any soundset from the Awesome Soundsets Mods Master Thread after your mod. They all fail with the WeiDU error:
Cannot append column-wise because there are 49 lines in CHARSND.2da but I was only given 36 things to appendAfter deleting your version of CHARSND.2DA from the override folder, those mods install fine.2) Your mod contains a bunch of files with the non-ASCII letter "µ" in their filename:
µbja1.bam µbjca.bam µbjgh.bam µbjsc.bam µbjsl.bam µbjtw.bam µbja1e.bam µbjcae.bam µbjghe.bam µbjsce.bam µbjsle.bam µbjtwe.bam µbja2.bam µbjde.bam µbjgu.bam µbjsd.bam µbjsp.bam µbjwk.bam µbja2e.bam µbjdee.bam µbjgue.bam µbjsde.bam µbjspe.bam µbjwke.bamI don't know if this causes any problems for the game, but I do know that WeiDU can't handle such files on Linux (no idea about other platforms). So if you ever turn this into a WeiDU mod, they'll cause a headache. Is it not possible to stick to ASCII letters?good to know thanks
as for 1) the only difference I made to this file was my jon irenicus voice set, so it would have subtitles ( this is the file you need to alter to give subtitles for voice sets) other than that, I didn't alter anything else, so I don't know why weidu doesn't recognize all 49 lines( it could be because perhaps the original IWD only uses 36, but because of the EE's it uses all of SoA's 49 lines )
and for 2) I just deleted those files, im thining originally they were for the goblin shaman, I don't remember, and as far as I know I used different bams for goblin shamans, and only kept those in just in case, but they are gone now so hopefully is doesn't cause any bugs
I second two of the requests made by others, both of which would make the mod more accessible, more convenient, and more widely used. (a) If you make use WeiDu, it will be easier/safer to use it with other mods, and (b) it would be great if you could split up the components so that we can install some components and not others (for example, I really want to use the difficulty setting, but I prefer some other mods for adjustments to proficiencies and attributes).
Thanks for your hard work to make this game continue to be fun!
Again, I really liked your additions very much (as I previously said I continued on maximum difficulty) and they kept the game so far from being a borefest since I just mindlessly plowed through anything you didn't add.
I finished Burial Isle and did Gloomfrost outside and the first entire floor of the cavern itself.
The vampire encounter was really challenging at the first attempts, nice one. (Are they immune to missile weapons or just require +3?)
The enemy party outside of gloomfrost was really, really well done.
What is lacking though is the ability for liches and other casters to deal with summons. Hakeashars pretty much trivialize any caster battle.
I would maybe add some more stuff to Burial Isles or buff the trashmobs a tad more.
That's pretty much all I got to say about what I played so far, I'm not the best tester for HoW, I can't stress enough how I don't really like it xD
indeed, the vampires require +3 weapons or better to hit, and as for the other baddies on the burial isle, I actually did buff them up a bit, I completely revamped all the shamans and I made it so the wailing virgins did their special attacks more often, and gave the other undead baddies an extra ability or two
one thing that is going to be tough is the hakeashar/nishruu, they are one of those summons that are very difficult to balance, although I did look at their weapons and they count as +0, so usually spell casters have mantles/protection from magical weapons up, but if the hakeashar is making mage battles trivial then that is a serious problem, any ideas on what would balance that issue?
and I would agree on HoW being a little luck luster in general and I wasn't much of a fan of it myself, infact half the reason why I made this mod was to liven up HoW and ToTLM
Apart from that maybe give them Spell Sequencers with some powerful Summons that deal with the Nishruus.
Third option would be to
Supreme Mastery also does not appear to grant any APR bonuses beyond Grandmastery.