Imoen damage resistance

Pingwin

Does Imoen have some weird damage resistance in BG1?

Just started a new run and completely messed up the Silke fight resulting in a lightning bolt frying Jaheira. It also hit Imoen and the log said she took 3 damage and resisted 41 damage. The rebounding lightning bolt then killed everyone else, but I'm puzzled as to why Imoen seems to have acquired some impressive damage resistance ability.

TheArtisan

Is Imoen level 1? If you are at level 1 and full HP, it is impossible to die in one hit.

Pingwin

Yes, she was level 1 and on full hp when she was hit. This probably explains it.

ThacoBell

"If you are at level 1 and full HP, it is impossible to die in one hit."

This keeps popping up. But this has NEVER been true for me. What the heck?

Grond0

@ThacoBell it is true, but there are a number of exceptions, e.g.
- by intention it doesn't apply to characters with 14 HP or more - ruling out most warrior classes.
- there has been a long-standing bug (dating back to vanilla) that meant the protection didn't work when an attack did exactly the same damage as the number of HPs available.
- a single attack that does two different types of damage (like elemental damage on top of weapon damage) will be deadly.

It's easy to miss the protection operating and mistake that for being lucky that damage was not quite enough to kill (particularly if you don't have battle text turned on). If you do have text though, check that next time the PC is reduced to a single HP - the chances are it will show something like Pingwin's example where part of the total damage rolled is resisted.

Very_BigSword

ThacoBell wrote: »

"If you are at level 1 and full HP, it is impossible to die in one hit."

This keeps popping up. But this has NEVER been true for me. What the heck?

I started a game recently on insane setting and Lvl 1/1 Montaron has been one shotted twice from full HP by trash mobs on non-critical hits. I suspect that the damage increase mechanic is to blame. Base damage less than full HP, add the 100%, interpreted as being hit twice and dying from the "second hit"?

Would be easy to confirm by experiment I suppose, let Xzar get hit by on a wolf on core then reload and same again on insane perhaps.

Chronicler

Very_BigSword wrote: »

ThacoBell wrote: »

"If you are at level 1 and full HP, it is impossible to die in one hit."

This keeps popping up. But this has NEVER been true for me. What the heck?

I started a game recently on insane setting and Lvl 1/1 Montaron has been one shotted twice from full HP by trash mobs on non-critical hits. I suspect that the damage increase mechanic is to blame. Base damage less than full HP, add the 100%, interpreted as being hit twice and dying from the "second hit"?

Would be easy to confirm by experiment I suppose, let Xzar get hit by on a wolf on core then reload and same again on insane perhaps.

It's also quite likely that they just take off the training wheels in higher difficulties.

A little extra protection from nasty surprises at low levels is welcome for people playing on Normal, but would probably just be off putting for people playing on insane.

Grond0

Hmm having said confidently it worked, I'm not so confident any more . I tried modded BGEE in a LoB game - and died. I then tried in a core game - and died. I then tried in an unmodded game - and died. I've seen the protection operate many, many times and am not quite senile enough to believe I've invented that, but it does look as though there's been a change in the game at some point to remove the protection.

I suspect the change was to v2.5 (though I don't think there was anything in the patch notes, so any change would appear to be unintended), but I don't have the previous version to check as I normally just overwrite earlier installations. The only one I still had was 1.3 - and I tested the protection works fine there. Anyone else able to test it in v2.3?

Bubb

Level and Difficulty have nothing to do with the protection. Here are the prerequisites:

1) Creature must be in the party
2) Damage dealt must be above creature's Max HP
3) Creature must have a Max HP of below 14

If these conditions are met, the game will deal (Creature's Max HP - 1) damage. At full health this will bring them to 1 HP, at anything less the damage will still kill them.

The thing to note is that this protection only has the scope of a single damage effect. If there are several individual damage sources being applied to the creature at once, it will prove fatal. Think of it like this: If you see multiple "Damage" feedback lines from a single swing / spell, it will bypass this protection.

Edit: So basically backing up what @Grond0 has already stated here. The engine is coded that way, and I have confirmed that it works as intended.

Grond0

@Bubb was that in a v2.5 installation? As noted above I tested several variants of that and the protection didn't work in any of them ...

Bubb

@Grond0: BG:EE v2.5.17.0, using Silke to cast a Lightning Bolt at Imoen on Insane difficulty. Everything works as expected:

Grond0

@Bubb hmm. I tried replicating that with Imoen - with sad results for her.

Given we had the same installation I thought the difference was probably due to one of the game options settings - and looking at those I saw I had the option enabled to turn off difficulty based damage increases. While I don't think that should affect level 1 protection, it is doing something similar so that seemed a likely culprit - and after disabling that option Montaron duly survived.

So @ThacoBell if you want to benefit from level 1 protection at the moment it looks like you need to enable difficulty based damage ...

Bubb

@Grond0: Ahhh, I should have seen that, it was staring me right in the face! The protection is directly tied to the difficulty damage-multiplier code; interesting and wacky, as all true Infinity Engine details are.

ThacoBell

Interesting. I don't mind not having the protection (I don't recall it being a thing in vanilla), I'd rather keep the difficulty damage turned off.

Pingwin

The mechanics described above don't match what I saw - Imoen was level 1 with her full 8 hp and she took just 3 damage from the lightning bolt.

kjeron

Pingwin wrote: »

The mechanics described above don't match what I saw - Imoen was level 1 with her full 8 hp and she took just 3 damage from the lightning bolt.

Did she succeed the saving throw? It reduces the damage by half, which takes place after it's reduced to (MaxHP - 1).

Pingwin

She did make her saving throw so it does all make sense now. Cheers.

parrker

This is interesting (and sounds a bit like a bug). Successful saving throw actually results in a worse result.

Pingwin

No, it all makes sense, she took something like 48 damage which got reduced to just 7 damage to stop her getting killed by a single hit. Then she made her saving throw which reduced that 7 damage by half, so she took just 3 damage.