Improved Invisibility + Backstab don't work in EE?
Vael
Member Posts: 3
I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find the answer (the search in this forum is quite the handfull).
Is Improved Invisibility nerfed when it comes to backstab?
I played the original Icewind Dale not so long ago, and I still have the saves here for testing. I had a Fighter/Mage/Thief that casted Improved Invisibility on herself, and then went on a killing spree backstabing everyone. I had to move her around, as when enemies turned to attack her she would no longer be able to backstab, but I could quickly go to another distracted enemy and backstab him before he reacted. All of this on a single Improved Invisibility cast.
Now, reading here and there, I don't see anyone talking about this, but about Mislead. As I started a Heart of Fury run with a Thief > Fighter (counting on being able to be casted Improved Invisibility by my Mage), I'm a bit worried that this doesn't work and I have a really, really expensive thief (planning on going lvl 21 assassing, and then fighter), as Mislead only works on the caster.
I went and downloaded EE Keeper to try it out, and I'm not being able to backstab more than once with Improved Invisbility. The thing is, this is both with EE Keeper (which, even if it just change some character stats, is still a mod), and on very poor testing conditions (on Easthaven, on those goblins), so I would like a kind of "official" confirmation.
Does Improved Invisibility work with backstab so you can make more than 1 backstab?
PD: It is a real pain to find the differences with the original game. I have to go around looking for forum posts, and some faqs, and mostly looking on BG2 stats to try to figure out how does something work on the EE. Would it be so difficult to have some kind of "Diff Sheet" for each game? Or at least 1 diff sheet for BG2, and the other expanding upon that?
Is Improved Invisibility nerfed when it comes to backstab?
I played the original Icewind Dale not so long ago, and I still have the saves here for testing. I had a Fighter/Mage/Thief that casted Improved Invisibility on herself, and then went on a killing spree backstabing everyone. I had to move her around, as when enemies turned to attack her she would no longer be able to backstab, but I could quickly go to another distracted enemy and backstab him before he reacted. All of this on a single Improved Invisibility cast.
Now, reading here and there, I don't see anyone talking about this, but about Mislead. As I started a Heart of Fury run with a Thief > Fighter (counting on being able to be casted Improved Invisibility by my Mage), I'm a bit worried that this doesn't work and I have a really, really expensive thief (planning on going lvl 21 assassing, and then fighter), as Mislead only works on the caster.
I went and downloaded EE Keeper to try it out, and I'm not being able to backstab more than once with Improved Invisbility. The thing is, this is both with EE Keeper (which, even if it just change some character stats, is still a mod), and on very poor testing conditions (on Easthaven, on those goblins), so I would like a kind of "official" confirmation.
Does Improved Invisibility work with backstab so you can make more than 1 backstab?
PD: It is a real pain to find the differences with the original game. I have to go around looking for forum posts, and some faqs, and mostly looking on BG2 stats to try to figure out how does something work on the EE. Would it be so difficult to have some kind of "Diff Sheet" for each game? Or at least 1 diff sheet for BG2, and the other expanding upon that?
1
Comments
In practice, there are essentially two different effects to Improved Invisible. The first effect makes it so enemies can't see you, (we'll call this "actual invisibility"). The second is the -4 to enemy rolls / you cannot be the target of spells combo.
Regular old invisibility just applies the Actual Invisibility effect without the -4 to rolls effect, and any hostile action dispels the Actual Invisibility.
Improved Invisibility applies both the Actual Invisibility and the -4 to rolls. Hostile action dispels the Actual Invisibility effect, (so enemies can see you again), but not the -4 to rolls, which persists for the duration of the spell.
In order to backstab, your thief needs to be Actually Invisible. So Improved Invisibility and regular Invisibility both give you one backstab per cast, because you only get one "actually invisible" effect per cast. The only difference between them with respect to backstabs is after you backstab from Improved Invisibility you still have a nice defensive buff making you harder to hit / target.
Mislead is a different animal entirely. As long as your clone is around, Mislead *continually reapplies the Actual Invisibility effect*. Take a hostile action, dispel the actual invisibility, and then it immediately gets put right back on. So you can go on a massive backstab spree until the spell runs out.
The one possible explanation I can come up with for why Improved Invisibility let you go on a backstabbing spree before, (which it definitely, positively, under no circumstances should have done), is that you had the game set to use Sneak Attack instead of Backstab. In order to Backstab you need to be actually invisible, but in order to Sneak Attack you just need to be behind the enemy. You can be perfectly visible and it'll still work fine.
I can actually do it right now on my old Icewind Dale game. I still have the game installed and I keep the saves, and I tried it before posting. I positively did x5 damage (as stated by the ingame log) every single time. Whenever the enemy turned around, I stopped backstabbing; as soon as I arrived to another enemy that wasn't attacking me (while the other enemy was still following me to attack me), I backstab it. I did this repeteadly during the game, although only on really though, mage-heavy combats.
I can also point you to an old post from another forum explaining this tactic on old Icewind Dale.
Really, these games should have some kind of "Diff sheet" or something to avoid these things. I have a lvl 15 thief on a Heart of Fury run thinking that this works, and who knows when will I face a problem like this in future runs, as most FAQs and guides are for vainilla IWD, or also keep these kind of misconceptions.
Monsters affected by Sleep woke up when you hit them in vanilla IWD and not in vanilla BG1/BG2, for instance. Web had a different radius in IWD, (in addition to a different animation and a different save penalty). It's entirely possible that Improved Invisible backstabs is another such example, in which case merging the two games onto the same engine could easily result in unanticipated behavior changes as one game suddenly adopted the other's behavior.
I don't remember Improved Invisibility backstabs being a thing, but it's been a while since I've played vanilla IWD and the difference between Sneak Attacks and Backstabs is marked clearly enough in the display that if OP is saying that's the behavior he or she is observing, I believe that's what's happening.
Unfortunately, it'd be pretty hard to document a full list of those kinds of spell behavior changes, since I'm not sure anyone has ever dug into the difference in a rigorous way before.