Horrid Wilting and Incendiary Cloud AoE radius decreased in 2.5 patch?

Rik_Kirtaniya

According to the IWD:EE manual, Horrid Wilting has an AoE radius of 35 ft, while Incendiary Cloud is 18 ft. Now, I was in the middle of a solo Dragon Disciple run, when the 2.5 patch came out, and only now have I got access to level 8 spells for the first time ever (this is the first time I've progressed this far in IWD:EE). And I notice that in the in-game description, Horrid Wilting has a radius of 17 ft , while Incendiary Cloud is only 6 ft!

My question is, are these the original EE values, or have these been recently decreased and balanced by the 2.5 patch?

It's a little disappointing to find them less than what I saw in the manual, but I guess this makes it more challenging.

kjeron

Functionally, the spells have not changed.
Previously, 99% of spells listed the size of their diameter, but claimed it was the radius.
Now they list their actual radius.

Most of the spells in-game are (and always were) implemented at half of their original PnP size, for technical reasons if nothing else.
28ft (default visual range) is the maximum radius the engine can properly handle for ongoing area-effect spells (such as incendiary cloud).

Rik_Kirtaniya

Now, I finally used Horrid Wilting, and it's radius is so small compared to BG2! The spell's animation doesn't allow me to clearly understand how wide the area of effect actually is, but considering the number of monsters affected (in a saturated, densely-packed crowd), it appears to be roughly the same as Incendiary Cloud. I guess Skull Trap is a better substitute for it, considering that they are both user-unfriendly spells in IWD, and Skull Trap is 5 levels lower than Horrid Wilting but does nearly the same damage over what appears to be a wider radius. (Lower casting time of Skull Trap and its ability to be set as traps is also to be taken into account.)

It's really surprising to me to find a spell so powerful in BG2, to be so crippled in IWD!

Quartz

Rik_Kirtaniya said:

It's really surprising to me to find a spell so powerful in BG2, to be so crippled in IWD!

To be fair, there's a lot of spells where the opposite is true.

Balrog99

Sleep and Insect Swarm are two more spells that are awesome in BG and meh in IWD. The extra druid spells make up for that imho though.

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SomeSort

Balrog99 said:

Sleep and Insect Swarm are two more spells that are awesome in BG and meh in IWD. The extra druid spells make up for that imho though.

Web also receives two nerfs in IWD, one relatively minor and one extremely substantial.

First, the minor nerf: IWD's Web has a slightly smaller radius, (I believe, descriptions are a bit fuzzy but it feels a little bit smaller in practice), and lacks the -2 save penalty. Not a huge deal, but like I said, a minor nerf.

Second, the extremely substantial nerf: IWD's Web is ugly. Really, really, really ugly. It's glowy and obtrusive and looks goofy and I don't like casting it a lot just because it makes me sad to look at it.

Quartz

SomeSort said:

IWD's Web is ugly. Really, really, really ugly. It's glowy and obtrusive and looks goofy

You just described 90% of the spells in IWD.