What is the max damage reduction power in game from feat or spell?
Calgacus
Member Posts: 273
I am interested in making the Greater Magic Weapon spell give an adequate bonus to overcome any DR that players and standard monsters can get from spell or feat - except Epic Warding. I'm guessing the epic dragon shape gets the top at 40/+6 - I am mostly interested in the second part - that +6. Also what is the max DR the standard monsters can get?
I'm thinking maybe changing the Greater Magic Weapon spell enhancement bonus to an Attack Bonus and making it (1 per 2 full levels) so a spell scroll of level 15 will give +7 AB. Or making it 1 + (1 per 3 full levels) so that same scroll would only give +6 AB. I am thinking here in the context of a low-magic item setting. I am also thinking of making a collection of scripts or a hak pak that I could use to modify my own playing experience in various mods.
I don't like playing mods that are so loaded with magic items i end up playing the items and never using my class abilities. In HotU I played a RDD/Sorcerer to level 13 Sorcerer and had so many scrolls and wands etc that I never cast any of my own spells - all Sorcerer levels after the first were a total waste.
Maybe i could make a hak pak (that I could include in any single player mod I want to play) that would allow me to sell off items I find in mods to a stingy merchant and then use a modified crafting system to make my own that would follow certain restrictions that suite my own preferred play style: ( no perm effect items - all should use charges and not have a million of them, buff spells should not have a full day long duration so I will have to carefully decide when to buff rather than just auto-buffing after every rest, some spells n feats could be re-scripted to be more useful in some cases or nerfed in some others ).
I'm thinking maybe changing the Greater Magic Weapon spell enhancement bonus to an Attack Bonus and making it (1 per 2 full levels) so a spell scroll of level 15 will give +7 AB. Or making it 1 + (1 per 3 full levels) so that same scroll would only give +6 AB. I am thinking here in the context of a low-magic item setting. I am also thinking of making a collection of scripts or a hak pak that I could use to modify my own playing experience in various mods.
I don't like playing mods that are so loaded with magic items i end up playing the items and never using my class abilities. In HotU I played a RDD/Sorcerer to level 13 Sorcerer and had so many scrolls and wands etc that I never cast any of my own spells - all Sorcerer levels after the first were a total waste.
Maybe i could make a hak pak (that I could include in any single player mod I want to play) that would allow me to sell off items I find in mods to a stingy merchant and then use a modified crafting system to make my own that would follow certain restrictions that suite my own preferred play style: ( no perm effect items - all should use charges and not have a million of them, buff spells should not have a full day long duration so I will have to carefully decide when to buff rather than just auto-buffing after every rest, some spells n feats could be re-scripted to be more useful in some cases or nerfed in some others ).
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Players on the other hand can get DR from a variety of sources but it can vary based on what items the mod creators have put into the game, what feats they take and what changes the mod creators have made to feats spells and even the level cap.
On my old PW we scaled the greater magic weapon spell (and magical vestment) up to +1 per 5 caster levels for a total of +8 at caster level 40. Basically at lower levels it was weaker (by default you'd cap out at +5 at lvl 15 while on our server you didnt hit +5 till caster level 25), but it had the potential to become stronger in epic levels. It also provided a bit of a bonus to those casters who didn't multi-class since only they could cast the most potent buffs.
The same concept was used for modifying the Premonition spell. At level 30 our Premonition provided 30/+6 DR, at 35 it gave 30/+7 DR and at 40 it gave 30/+8 DR. Again it allowed the spell to keep pace with epic gear on our server (which topped out at +8), and also provided some benefit to not multi-classing.
The Epic Damage Reduction feats cannot be overcome with weapon enchants. They are flat out damage mitigation vs. physical damage, with no way to circumvent them. The maximum you can get this way is 9/- so its not a huge amount but those feats do stack with barbarian and dwarven defender DR which can result in considerable damage reduction. No +value will help here. Your only hope is to hit them hard enough that you actually do some damage beyond what their DR can absorb. A level 30+ Dwarven Defender with all the epic DR feats would have a 30/- DR which makes them incredibly resilient and no greater magic weapon spell is going to help you overcome it. In that case you'll likely have to resort to elemental or magical damage to bypass it.
I think all the changes you're looking for are basically scripting so a hak pack shouldn't be necessary. A hak would be more for adding custom models or changing 2da's. It sounds to me though that you'd be quite at home on many of the RP persistent worlds that make changes to the spells along the lines of what you're looking for (reducing summon durations for example), and those servers often do "low magic" items so gear is rarely crazy powerful.
Why so concerned about dealing with DR? If you're only doing the original campaigns, the gear you find will be more than adequate for anything you encounter. And if you play a caster, then typical DR would be ignored by your spell damage anyway. The default greater magic weapon at +5 value will bypass anything the original campaigns throws at you.
If you want this for player this probably won't help you much. If you want this for NPC, this can be useful.
Alternatively you can apply attack penalty effect manually when equipping or when spawned (NPC), in such case however AFAIK the +20 ab cap will be still "fully used" and further bonuses to ab will have no effect so this is not really usefull for players (note that the itemproperty attack penalty has same disadvanatage, so adding +5 attack bonus and -5 attack penalty = virtual reduction of +20 cap to +15.
Custom content notes: if you are thinking about something like PnP damage reduction, then you should check @ShadowM 's HCR I don't know how exactly he coded it but he claims to have such system in place
and if this is for a PW and you can use NWNX, then there it would be possible to do this though I am not sure if any plugin that allows this exists yet, but I had this for 1.69 so it is possible to do
Please add imprisonment/freedom to the game thx by.
ShadowM, that sounds like what I am looking for, but as Shadooow has suggested - if I give an item both a +20 AB and a -20 AB will that mean the player using the sword can no longer benefit from other AB bonuses - from strength or whatever (will test in toolset later tonight)?
Shadooow - did you open source your Community Patch code? It would be very interesting to see. Will you be continuing that project for EE?
Drewbert - I too love the old 1st Ed spells, I wish they could give us Magic Jar for instance.
Tresset - Yes but that one I'm not too worried about as mages can still be dealt with when warded and i can easily mod that one script if needed ( I assume it's just another spell script), I would probably just reduce the duration if warranted. I guess I am mainly thinking of solo gaming too but for multiplayer I would probably be ok with just reducing the duration if it is too long.
Anyway to answer it: it was never "hardcoded" in first place. It was just compiled in a bif file because that was the only way how to make it work as a patch - lot of cpp haters will therefore claim it couldn't be edited but that is false, all the files were accessable in toolset or via nwn explorer and exporting the bif file. On top of that most of the cpp resources such as 2das and spellscripts are externalized and distributed standalone withing cpp to make modding of cpp content easier. Anyway - this changed with NWN:EE as NWN:EE brought a new way how to make files have lowest priority - so the CPP for EE is no longer packaged in bif and all files are unpacked and therefore can be edited easier than files from CEP/PRC.
The only hardcoded part of cpp was a nwncx plugin that was distributed with the 1.72 beta version which was providing fixes to nwn client and additional features. This plugin is not part of CPP for EE since the nwnx situation with EE is bit complicated. And the main reason it ws hardcoded was from security - the plugin for server's source was (and still is) published on github.
And yes CPP is there for EE in special version (excluding the former nwnx reuiring features) and is still being developed.
BTW: I am not 100% sure of that but IIRC the ShadowM's suggestion will not work. The attack (and enhancement) penalty itemproperty doesn't work with values greater than 5. If it was community patch would included higher numbers.
Granted they still get the bonuses from the spell but, whats the point of npcs having DR if you're just going to let people ignore it? Wouldn't it just be easier to remove DR properties/spells from the creatures and play in a "no DR" environment?
Nic - Losing DR would be easier but is not what I want. I want players to need to make tough decisions such as - do I use up this item in this battle or save it for a tougher battle later.
Maybe I could hak the standard Items somehow and give the standard weapons charges and some sort of an onHit script that drained the charges.
It does pretty much what you want and it fulfills your desire for tough decision making. A wand with 5 charges of GMW would leave me very on the fence about if or when I should use it. It seems like you're looking for a very complicated solution when there's a simple one right there in front of you.
I'm just confused... if DR is an issue for you and you're looking to bypass it entirely, why not just remove DR? If you want to keep DR because of the challenge it offers, and want players to have a limited method of overcoming it, why not use the simple method suggested above?
It feels like you're trying to put a fire out with buckets of water from a nearby river when there's a perfectly good fire extinguisher (with limited charges!) within arms reach.
In my old PW we weren't exactly "low magic" but we didn't want any perma-haste or perma-immunity items, so we had all custom loot and set up our loot tables using only that loot. We also weren't set in the Forgotten Realms so default loot descriptions would have been out of place in our world too. You could do something as simple make weapons that can cast GMW and have just three charges (for example) to cast it and put those on your loot tables instead of full-fledged permanent magic weapons.