How to revert sword spiders to doing poison damage?

alastair93

Hey,

Does anyone have a mod or override to make sword spiders do poison damage, like the old versions? I miss my Avenger doing poison attacks when shapeshifted into sword spider form.

Thanks!

gorgonzola

i don't and i have no experience on ee modding tools, but i have a little experience about how to do it in the original game.
i suppose that you can do it by yourself. the procedure should be something like extract from the game the sword spider creature, or the shapeshifted sword spider if is a different one, then add to him the proper opcode. in the end you will have in the override folder a sword spider with poisoning attack and the game will use it instead of the actual one.
a quick search on the internet will bring you to tutorials that will suggest you the proper modding tools you have to download and how to use them. i am far from being a coder or programmer and i am absolutely not able to create a mod, but in a couple of hours from when i begun my googling i was able to produce such simple modifications to the original game.

alastair93

Thanks for comment. I might give it a try, but I struggle even to get my work emails working on my phone... I'm very technologically challenged.

gorgonzola

so you have about my same level of knowledge, i started to use computers when i was over 40, to use a modern cell phone i have to carefully read the instructions to use the basic functions and i am all oriented towards manual works like woodturning and woodworking with machines and traditional hand tools, i am surely not a computer geek, but finding the right tutorials it is not so difficult.
give it a try, maybe ask advice to the modders opening in the modding section a topic that links here, as double posting is not allowed and makes the discussions extremely difficult to follow as you have to continuously skip from a place to an other and other problems are generated.

good luck!

Gusinda

@alastair93, I am also not a coder like the experts in this forum, but I have played with a little hacking (used NI). I have made some adjustments to the attack item used by the Shapeshifted Sword Spider to add Poison damge.

I didn't play the Druid Avenger in the original (and didn't think that it had poison) so I am guessing what type of poison damage. The damage type I used was 1 damage / 3 seconds over 30 seconds. If the original game was different, please let me know and I can change to to suit (or if you are keen, you can have a look at the file, once seen it miight be a little better).

Just place the unpacked file into your override folder and give it a test. It shouldn't affect the Sword Spider in the game, only the shapeshift.

Hope this is what you are looking for
Gus

Edit: Did some followup, it appears that the Avenger shapechanged Sword Spider did poison damage in the original but the creature itself didn't. No description of what that poison damage was though, so I would have to install BG2 Classic to see.

Edit2: OK, the actual poison damage that was done by the Shapeshifted Sword Spider was 1 damage / 3 seconds over 36 seconds. I have updated the attachment, again just unpack into override folder.

Gusinda

@alastair93, updated the attachment above for original BG2 poison damage.

Gus

alastair93

@Gusinda you hero!!! Thank you so much. This is for (yet) another no-reload run attempt of mine. If he makes it to the end it'll be all down to you!

@gorgonzola From reading your very detailed, nuanced posts on the forum (which I very much love and look forward to, btw) I think you'd be quicker to get the hang of it than me Trust me I'm terrible with computers. Even my microwave perplexes me, let alone Near Infinity hah.

gorgonzola

you are lucky as someone much more capable to deal with computers then both of us saved you.
about my prolix and sometimes boring and pedant posts i apologize
as you noticed them, sometimes length and quantity works better then quality, you probably have noticed like my approach to the game is an empirical one, experience gained trying my own tactics instead of following pre made recipes from other players, and also how sometimes i give completely wrong information as i misinterpret the results of my experiments, i am really as bad as you are with computers and how to properly code for me is some sort of arcane magic.

alastair93

gorgonzola wrote: »

you are lucky as someone much more capable to deal with computers then both of us saved you.
about my prolix and sometimes boring and pedant posts i apologize
as you noticed them, sometimes length and quantity works better then quality, you probably have noticed like my approach to the game is an empirical one, experience gained trying my own tactics instead of following pre made recipes from other players, and also how sometimes i give completely wrong information as i misinterpret the results of my experiments, i am really as bad as you are with computers and how to properly code for me is some sort of arcane magic.

Noooo... they're the opposite of boring. Seriously, I had a train journey by myself the other day and your posts were super interesting and made it go much quicker; in fact it was your recent post on the druid thread that made me want to try an Avenger again (even though I think you argued for a F/D!). I think yours and @Pantalion 's posts are the ones where I think "ooooo...this is gonna be good", and make myself comfortable for some BG geeking.

Slightly off-topic but...For me, at least, the planning & research is almost as fun as the game itself.

gorgonzola

also for me, usually my approach to the game is to plan a party, the moment i will recruit every member to maximize the xp as your xp is relevant to the one the npcs have and as multi and mages benefit more of the xp then the fighters that after lev 20 have capped the thac0 and gain only some more hp and hla.
then i test the party reloading each hard battle more times and testing all the tactics i can perform to see the true potential of that party. i enjoy also the research on cheese and exploits, even if i try my best to not depend on them.
EDIT: also i like much @Pantalion posts, sadly i find few of them lately, maybe we use different sections of the forums, i read almost only the bg2 one and general discussion.