@RVNS I could release the mod once I'm done with the base game, though it will take some more time. Even after I finish the Belhifet fight, I will still have to modify the rest of the items in the base game.
(Belhifet is a level 30/30/30 fighter/mage/cleric. He has plenty of high level spells at his disposal, though aside from the prebuff he only casts protection spells like Stoneskin one other time in the fight. I ended up making a lot of unique spells for the enemies in this fight.) (Belhifet has gelugon allies instead of cornugons. The gelugons can cast Stygian Ice Storm, another spell from Planescape Torment. There were some occasions when the gelugons killed Everard in the cutscene when he was going up to seal the portal. In vanilla, Chapter 6 Everard has 1000 hit points to prevent him from dying, but he doesn't have a Min HP 1 item. The gelugons here were sometimes able to deal over 1000 damage to him before he could reach the portal, mainly because they slowed and staggerlocked him. I had to give Chapter 6 Everard a Min HP 1 item.)
Some of Belhifet's signature spells, cast with Infernal Conveyance: (The spell in the above picture is Hellball, based on the 3E epic spell. It affects a 60 foot radius, though it hadn't yet spread out all the way in this picture.)
(For context, Apocalyptic Boneguards are level 30 undead that can cast spells like Comet, Earthquake, and Storm of Vengeance.)
The good news about Belhifet is that he is not immune to all spells in this mod. He still has high Magic Resistance (which you can lower with Lower Resistance) and great saving throws (which you can lower with Greater Malison and similar spells), and he's immune to any effect that would completely trivialize the fight (e.g. stun), but he's not impervious to anything a mage could do to him.
After a few hours of my playtesting team getting repeatedly slaughtered by Belhifet, I managed to beat him! And I did so without any party members dying, and without any cheese!
Here are some screenshots of my playtesting team right before the final boss.
Nice party, so many barbarians and berserkers. BTW, are u planning to add more throwing weapons to the game or modify existing +2 axe and +4 dagger?
Yeah. The Lover is now a +5 weapon, and I added a +4 returning throwing hammer, a +5 returning dart, and +1 quivers for arrows, bolts and bullets. I also put in Big Black Flying-Death from Icewind Dale 2.
Hi, I just discoverd this thread, because I was looking for some new mods for one of my favorite games. So far I used to look down a little bit on all the enhanced editions. I rather liked to mix up my personal best of mods with the original game. But your mod sounds like a fantastic improvement to the original game in the HoF difficulty. The moment you will release your mod I will definitly buy a copy (or download) of the ehhanced edition. Keep going, I'm really looking forward to the result.
(Enemies in this mod tend to have very good THAC0, comparable with Throne of Bhaal enemies and sometimes a bit better. However, it is much easier to get a really low AC here. If your character has -20 AC or better, even late-game enemies will miss them some of the time.)
Anti-creature type weapons are made MUCH cooler:
(Some items have extra stat requirements, but only when the item is awesome enough to warrant them. You can get a lot of stat-increasing books in the game, so you could have a character read some of the them so they'd have the stats to use an item.)
(The mod also moves items around the game. There are a lot more good items to buy in stores.)
(The chess piece items can be used once per day.)
(The Staff of Moradin's Breath lets you cast Resurrection twice per day. It requires 25 Wisdom to wield.)
Revised spell screenshots:
(The point of my spell revisions is to increase the power of weak spells (sometimes significantly) but leave good spells mostly the same.)
Yeah, that looks like a lot of creative work. Look forward to former "trash" spells like shillelagh. I think that will open up your tactical possibilities very early on in a game a lot. Keep going man, thanks so far.
By this point, I am pretty much done modifying creatures, items and spells (at least for the base game, not so for Heart of Winter).
This mod patches the creatures, items and spells in the game individually (using the built-in WeiDU functions), rather than overwriting them. As a result, there were a LOT of errors where the items and spells weren't patched the way I wanted them to be. Last night, I went through all the patched item and spell files with NearInfinity and edited my mod's script to fix all the errors I found. Surprisingly, I think that bug-fixing the items and spells this way is actually more efficient than testing the items and spells in-game. There were several items my playtesting team used for much of the game that had errors I didn't catch when I was using them.
The last thing I'm going to do before I release the mod is to go through certain parts of the game again with an overpowered debug character, just to see if the creatures and AI are working like they should. It shouldn't take too long. After that, I will be ready to release the first version of the mod (base game only).
The first version of the mod is out! Currently it only really modifies the base game (with just a handful of HoW modifications so far), and the whole mod is in a single component. I started working on a TRA file for the mod, but it's incomplete right now, so the mod isn't ready to be translated.
Tried a bit along the breakfast and these beetles ? in tavern dungeon were a completely different story and eaten my Dwarven defender alive in seconds. Looking forward to cook em properly
@olegbenloleg I edited the first post on this thread to include a link to the GitHub repository where you can download the mod. You can also get there using the link below. Once you get to GitHub, click "Clone or Download" -> "Download ZIP".
@vitalytordek You're talking about the regular Vale of Shadows skeletons? Yeah, they hurt. They actually use the same Flame Blade you can create with the Flame Blade spell, which deals 4d8 fire damage per hit, with an additional 4d8 damage on a critical hit (the skeletons that use a cold blade do the same amount of damage, just with cold instead of fire). It shouldn't be that bad as long as you use a character with a helmet. As far as I know, additional critical hit effects don't happen if the critical hit is averted, though that may have been changed in one of the patches.
In any case, aside from their weapons, the basic skeletons aren't that different from in vanilla. If you have a druid, you could cast Wall of Moonlight to block a hallway and have all the skeletons walk into it. The wall will kill most of the skeletons in one hit.
So I tried the mod like I wanted, that means from lvl one (actualy 4/4/4 as you gave some exp at the beggining) as mage/cleric/warrior. But there is one little problem. Bugs.
I had robe with +10 vs breath but still they kill me this fast. And my Thac0 is 13 so I miss almost all the time. I can use Mirror Image and Blur but it doesn't do much. I'm playing on Heart of the Winter btw, and I remember that you said that you were playing on normal mode, so that could be it.
Comments
(Belhifet is a level 30/30/30 fighter/mage/cleric. He has plenty of high level spells at his disposal, though aside from the prebuff he only casts protection spells like Stoneskin one other time in the fight. I ended up making a lot of unique spells for the enemies in this fight.)
(Belhifet has gelugon allies instead of cornugons. The gelugons can cast Stygian Ice Storm, another spell from Planescape Torment. There were some occasions when the gelugons killed Everard in the cutscene when he was going up to seal the portal. In vanilla, Chapter 6 Everard has 1000 hit points to prevent him from dying, but he doesn't have a Min HP 1 item. The gelugons here were sometimes able to deal over 1000 damage to him before he could reach the portal, mainly because they slowed and staggerlocked him. I had to give Chapter 6 Everard a Min HP 1 item.)
Some of Belhifet's signature spells, cast with Infernal Conveyance:
(The spell in the above picture is Hellball, based on the 3E epic spell. It affects a 60 foot radius, though it hadn't yet spread out all the way in this picture.)
(For context, Apocalyptic Boneguards are level 30 undead that can cast spells like Comet, Earthquake, and Storm of Vengeance.)
The good news about Belhifet is that he is not immune to all spells in this mod. He still has high Magic Resistance (which you can lower with Lower Resistance) and great saving throws (which you can lower with Greater Malison and similar spells), and he's immune to any effect that would completely trivialize the fight (e.g. stun), but he's not impervious to anything a mage could do to him.
Here are some screenshots of my playtesting team right before the final boss.
Maybe this will even inspire me to creating new kits for IWD EE
(I'm occupied with other interests and don't plan to play this any time soon. Sowwy.)
(Enemies in this mod tend to have very good THAC0, comparable with Throne of Bhaal enemies and sometimes a bit better. However, it is much easier to get a really low AC here. If your character has -20 AC or better, even late-game enemies will miss them some of the time.)
Anti-creature type weapons are made MUCH cooler:
(Some items have extra stat requirements, but only when the item is awesome enough to warrant them. You can get a lot of stat-increasing books in the game, so you could have a character read some of the them so they'd have the stats to use an item.)
(The mod also moves items around the game. There are a lot more good items to buy in stores.)
(The chess piece items can be used once per day.)
(The Staff of Moradin's Breath lets you cast Resurrection twice per day. It requires 25 Wisdom to wield.)
Revised spell screenshots:
(The point of my spell revisions is to increase the power of weak spells (sometimes significantly) but leave good spells mostly the same.)
Keep going man, thanks so far.
Probably one or two weeks, maybe less, depending on how much time I have to work on it.
This mod patches the creatures, items and spells in the game individually (using the built-in WeiDU functions), rather than overwriting them. As a result, there were a LOT of errors where the items and spells weren't patched the way I wanted them to be. Last night, I went through all the patched item and spell files with NearInfinity and edited my mod's script to fix all the errors I found. Surprisingly, I think that bug-fixing the items and spells this way is actually more efficient than testing the items and spells in-game. There were several items my playtesting team used for much of the game that had errors I didn't catch when I was using them.
The last thing I'm going to do before I release the mod is to go through certain parts of the game again with an overpowered debug character, just to see if the creatures and AI are working like they should. It shouldn't take too long. After that, I will be ready to release the first version of the mod (base game only).
Tried a bit along the breakfast and these beetles ? in tavern dungeon were a completely different story and eaten my Dwarven defender alive in seconds. Looking forward to cook em properly
Here's another link to where you can download the mod.
In any case, aside from their weapons, the basic skeletons aren't that different from in vanilla. If you have a druid, you could cast Wall of Moonlight to block a hallway and have all the skeletons walk into it. The wall will kill most of the skeletons in one hit.
I had robe with +10 vs breath but still they kill me this fast. And my Thac0 is 13 so I miss almost all the time. I can use Mirror Image and Blur but it doesn't do much. I'm playing on Heart of the Winter btw, and I remember that you said that you were playing on normal mode, so that could be it.