I’ve never had a monk in my squad where I’ve felt that he was actually pulling his weight: sure, he can use darts, slings, or Firetooth, but a thief does almost as well with those and has utility besides.
I would never compare monk with a thief - they cover two completely different niches. Monk to me is somebody who can deal good amount of damage with a high number of attacks per round without help from GWW or Improved Haste, while at the same time being immune to almost all of the disabling magics anything can throw at it. In that respect, they are far more useful than thieves and druids. That's about the only thing they do - they seem boring to me and I've never played one, but there is no denying that good damage dealers with high magic resistance are very useful for a party.
Raise Dead, Hold Person, Silence, Remove Paralysis, Animate Dead, Holy Smite and Remove Fear, but a lot of that loses its luster by the end of SoA, and then.
I have completely opposite opinion. Many people think these spells lose utility towards the end of BG2, but I don't see why. Holy Smite, for example, does 5-20 damage when you just get it and 20-80 (so, 50 on the average and 25 when saved) when you reach level 20. That's more than fireball and (nerfed) skull trap. While being party friendly and having possibility to blind. Late game Animate Dead gives you 90% magic resistant summon. Remove Fear never goes out of style and high level cleric will cast it at such high level than nothing is likely to dispel it. Remove Paralysis becomes, if anything, more useful as you encounter more dangerous enemies than can stun party members (such as improved mind flyers). Late game Dispel Magic from a cleric will almost always succeed, perk of fast leveling of clerics. DUHM gives you +6 in STR, DEX and CON later in the game. And so on. I think clerics are good precisely because even their low level spells scale well quite far into the game.
Call Woodland Beings, Iron Skins, Pixie Dust, Fire Elementals, Insect Plague, Creeping Doom and Nature’s Beauty
As cool as CWB is, it gives you low level casting of spells that a cleric will have in abundance. Fire Elementals are weaker than Aerial Servants in many respects. They benefit from fire resistance, so I would say they are overall around the same in terms of usefulness as Aerial Servants and in many cases actually weaker. IP and CD are heavily nerfed in SCS, as discussed here. So that leaves Iron Skins, Pixie Dust and Nature's Beauty as truly good spells that clerics don't have. To compensate for that, clerics get tons of buff and damage spells. In fact, I would say clerics are better in every respect than druids (from weapon selection, armour selection, buff spells, damage spells, party buffs, melee fighting, tanking...) apart from enemy debuffing.
. but then again, a single Fighter with Pro. From Undead and the Mace of Disruption does an equally good job for the heavier undead infestations.
Correct, but two problems here. Firstly, there are only 2 Protection from Undead scrolls in the game, so it is not like a fighter can constantly run around with them and kill undead. Secondly, we shouldn't get into that when comparing clerics and druids. Otherwise, why using Pixie Dust when mages can cast Mass Invisibility which is much better?
Unless SCS takes out a lot more than I remember, or I just never used that component, I recall there being at least 10 Pro. from Undead scrolls. Regardless...
Some of the way I compare things is how easy it is to replicate something's niche with. For example, Bard's Song is basically un-replaceable and a good effect: on the other hand, something like Remove Fear can be replaced by a Bard's song, or Resist Fear, a level 2 Arcane spell. So while having Remove Fear on a Cleric is nice, it's very easily covered by other party members. Same reasoning goes for Undead killing: the game throws ways of dealing with them (iMoD, Azuredge) at you to the point where, while a high level Cleric is certainly the quickest way to deal with them, you don't really have to go out of your way to find other ways to deal with them. Also the same with Animate Undead, TBH: while yes, a Cleric has much easier access to the spell, I'm almost always running some Arcane spellcaster anyways, so if I desperately need level 15 Skeleton Warriors, I can summon them regardless. Same goes for Dispel/Remove Magic, though slightly less true if my main mages are multiclass as that happens depressingly often for me.
On the other side of that argument, Pixie Dust. I agree that its niche can be filled with Invisibility 15" as a prebuff, but Pixie Dust can be cast in-combat if necessary for an escape option, and if your Mage's aura is clouded (I've escaped fights using this before). It's also not an Arcane spell, so doesn't trigger Cowled Wizards when traveling invisibly to avoid ambushes.
As I said before, I just don't think Cleric buff spells on themselves are worthwhile, for at least single class Clerics: short-ish durations (DuHM is only a Turn long), low APR (6 if you're using either Lathandar or Helm kits, on top of an Improved Haste). And then there's the fact that a number of Cleric spells are reactive, so if you're in melee combat and need to throw a Remove Paralysis onto something, there's a much higher chance to get disrupted. Yes, it's nice to have the option to melee, I just think it's a terrible option for non-multis or duals.
As for Insect Plague, being nerfed from "immediate win vs mages" doesn't mean it's a bad spell all of a sudden. It's still a very solid spell that becomes a bit more niche: it still auto-wins vs other spellcasters, and still wrecks havoc on anything without a Fireshield up, and it's still good vs Warriors, which is something that people don't really bring up. The constant damage tick causes them to stutter-step, can cause them to run in fear, and while a ton more niche, can reveal the position of invisible units by the cloud of insects around them.
I'm rambling: let me try to close up.
Advantages I'd give the Cleric, no question: Holy Smite, Raise Dead (can technically be replaced by Rod of Resurrection or cash, but really good until HLAs come up unless you're playing very safe), Remove Paralysis, Holy Word, Sanctuary, Silence, Shield usage, and Turn Undead, and an easier way to get to Animate Dead.
Advantages I'd give the Druid: Insect Plague, Call Woodland Beings (yes, a Cleric can cast all of the spells in question, but summoning 5 of them at once can very easily overwhelm the saving throws of non-immune creatures), Pixie Dust, Iron Skins, Insect Plague, Fire Seeds (even without a WS, the damage can interrupt spells for mages under PfMW), Dolorous Decay (guaranteed Slow for 2 rounds, no save, at the very least), Nature's Beauty, Creeping Doom, and while not as impactful, can use their attacks for Darts of Stunning or Wounding, or just attempt to interrupt spells with Firetooth Dagger.
It's not an overwhelming advantage in favor of Druid for me: I still prefer them, but I also like having a Cleric with me, which is why I so often have both Aerie or Anomen and Cernd or Jaheira on my teams.
I am, however, 100% committed in my dislike for Monks: there's never been a time where I've had a monk on my team that I haven't thought that its job could be better replaced by almost any other class in the game. A melee fighter that can lose half its health in a single attack simply isn't good.
Hmm.. I didn't realize it's possible to pass shapeshift tokens to other characters. Is that intended?
It's not intended: the idea is that you can only use your own shapeshift token, and I think it's normally obvious to people swapping them around that it's an exploit. As jmerry says, I don't block exploits (where my rough definition of an exploit is: something you probably aren't going to do by accident, but only knowing that it's exploiting a game loophole). Several people have had fun with that exploit; who am I to stop them.
(BUT: this still isn't officially how they're supposed to work. There's no completely trivial way to restrict tokens to their creator, otherwise I probably would have done so to begin with.)
On druids (or clerics, come to think about it): any thoughts so far as to which of the IWD spells, if any, are competitive with the best BG2 spells? My algorithm for choosing enemy spells is mostly 'is this spell good enough to be interesting' rather than 'is this spell the best possible choice' so I haven't thought that much about the min/max aspects.
@Neverused "As for Insect Plague, being nerfed from "immediate win vs mages" doesn't mean it's a bad spell all of a sudden."
I'd say that it is, actually. It was DESIGNED as a hard counter to mages (who are insanely overpowered even in vanilla). SCS mages always have protections up that block. I have yet to run into a single mage that doesn't immiedieatly pop up a stoneskin and fireshild. So for the purpose that insect plague was designed for, it is effectively useless.
@Neverused "As for Insect Plague, being nerfed from "immediate win vs mages" doesn't mean it's a bad spell all of a sudden."
I'd say that it is, actually. It was DESIGNED as a hard counter to mages (who are insanely overpowered even in vanilla).
I would be very surprised if that is true. There is very little evidence that the spell system in the BG series had any systematic attention paid to balancing. Most of the spells are very faithful adaptations from 2nd edition AD&D. The core effects of Insect Plague, including spellcasting failure, are taken pretty directly from the AD&D Players' Handbook. The fact that druids have one or two very cool spells and a lot of weak ones is very unlikely to be deliberate design and very likely to be an automatic consequence of that faithful adaptation, and the spell system in 1st/2nd edition AD&D also paid fairly little attention to balancing. (I speak with affection, having played a lot of PnP D&D in those systems, many years ago.)
I'm also really surprised to hear vanilla mages called 'insanely overpowered'. One of the main reasons I got into AI modding at all was that the mages in BG and BG2 were so pathetically ineffectual. Mostly that's down to AI... but even with better AI, Breach+a couple of melee fighters is instant death for most mages.
I have yet to run into a single mage that doesn't immiedieatly pop up a stoneskin and fireshild.
Sorry, I missed this. You may have been unlucky. About one quarter of SCS mages of sufficient level have a Fire Shield memorised. (Necromancers carry FS:Blue about half the time; Invokers carry FS: Red about half the time; Enchanters and Conjurers don't use it.) Of the 20-odd defensive Spell Sequencers I use, about a quarter have Fire Shield in; of the 20-odd defensive Spell Triggers I use, a bit under half do. It's hard to give a really reliable estimate of how often Fire Shield is used, but I'd be surprised if you see it in more than 25% of wizards of level 8-13, or more than a third or so of wizards of level 14-17. (Stoneskin I use basically all the time, of course.)
It's also worth saying that requiring a mage to fire off her defensive sequencer, and use up a round of action and a bunch of other defenses, is itself a meaningful move in a combat. That round where the mage uses a defensive sequencer to clear insects is a round when she's not casting Symbol of Stun on your front-line fighters. Not only mages can play mage chess!
I like the old system to just breach mages stoneskin and cheat from magical weapons (i know its came from thayan adnd book). But not the fail of scs mod, that bg2 has lots of single mage encounters, rather than full parties. Scs done good job to improve ai. But my preference is to re-desing some spells to my own taste or weaken it.
As for the topic, nerfing insect plague was not a bad idea, but bad the nerfing attributes. Fire shield to counter it is good one, but the others should be discussed, if DavidW open to suggestions. But after all the whole scs is his work and he can has the right to do things alone.
I'm also really surprised to hear vanilla mages called 'insanely overpowered'.
This refers to mages as a possible player class, as opposed to mages as in enemy mages. I think pretty much everyone agrees they are by far the most powerful of any single class characters and the ones with whom you can most easily win largest percentage of battles all alone.
Fire shield to counter it is good one, but the others should be discussed, if DavidW open to suggestions. But after all the whole scs is his work and he can has the right to do things alone.
I'm definitely open to suggestions, though ultimately I have to go with my own judgement. I'm unlikely to do a non-bugfix release of SCS for a few months but I'll revisit this thread next time I do.
I'm also really surprised to hear vanilla mages called 'insanely overpowered'.
This refers to mages as a possible player class, as opposed to mages as in enemy mages. I think pretty much everyone agrees they are by far the most powerful of any single class characters and the ones with whom you can most easily win largest percentage of battles all alone.
Sure... but ThacoBell was talking about Insect Plague as a hard counter to 'insanely overpowered' mages, and that doesn't really make sense if we're talking about PC mages... I mean, yes, the occasional priest casts Insect Plague at you, but it's scarcely a common occurrence!
On druids (or clerics, come to think about it): any thoughts so far as to which of the IWD spells, if any, are competitive with the best BG2 spells? My algorithm for choosing enemy spells is mostly 'is this spell good enough to be interesting' rather than 'is this spell the best possible choice' so I haven't thought that much about the min/max aspects.
Any of those would be challenging options on AI Druids.
Especially Sunscorch, Static Charge, Giant Insects, and Stalker, depending on the level of the encounter. Alicorn Lance, in comparison to other level 2 Druid spells anyway.
Comments
Shapeshift tokens can be used by any druid, shaman, monk, or rogue with UAI.
I would never compare monk with a thief - they cover two completely different niches. Monk to me is somebody who can deal good amount of damage with a high number of attacks per round without help from GWW or Improved Haste, while at the same time being immune to almost all of the disabling magics anything can throw at it. In that respect, they are far more useful than thieves and druids. That's about the only thing they do - they seem boring to me and I've never played one, but there is no denying that good damage dealers with high magic resistance are very useful for a party.
I have completely opposite opinion. Many people think these spells lose utility towards the end of BG2, but I don't see why. Holy Smite, for example, does 5-20 damage when you just get it and 20-80 (so, 50 on the average and 25 when saved) when you reach level 20. That's more than fireball and (nerfed) skull trap. While being party friendly and having possibility to blind. Late game Animate Dead gives you 90% magic resistant summon. Remove Fear never goes out of style and high level cleric will cast it at such high level than nothing is likely to dispel it. Remove Paralysis becomes, if anything, more useful as you encounter more dangerous enemies than can stun party members (such as improved mind flyers). Late game Dispel Magic from a cleric will almost always succeed, perk of fast leveling of clerics. DUHM gives you +6 in STR, DEX and CON later in the game. And so on. I think clerics are good precisely because even their low level spells scale well quite far into the game.
As cool as CWB is, it gives you low level casting of spells that a cleric will have in abundance. Fire Elementals are weaker than Aerial Servants in many respects. They benefit from fire resistance, so I would say they are overall around the same in terms of usefulness as Aerial Servants and in many cases actually weaker. IP and CD are heavily nerfed in SCS, as discussed here. So that leaves Iron Skins, Pixie Dust and Nature's Beauty as truly good spells that clerics don't have. To compensate for that, clerics get tons of buff and damage spells. In fact, I would say clerics are better in every respect than druids (from weapon selection, armour selection, buff spells, damage spells, party buffs, melee fighting, tanking...) apart from enemy debuffing.
Correct, but two problems here. Firstly, there are only 2 Protection from Undead scrolls in the game, so it is not like a fighter can constantly run around with them and kill undead. Secondly, we shouldn't get into that when comparing clerics and druids. Otherwise, why using Pixie Dust when mages can cast Mass Invisibility which is much better?
Some of the way I compare things is how easy it is to replicate something's niche with. For example, Bard's Song is basically un-replaceable and a good effect: on the other hand, something like Remove Fear can be replaced by a Bard's song, or Resist Fear, a level 2 Arcane spell. So while having Remove Fear on a Cleric is nice, it's very easily covered by other party members. Same reasoning goes for Undead killing: the game throws ways of dealing with them (iMoD, Azuredge) at you to the point where, while a high level Cleric is certainly the quickest way to deal with them, you don't really have to go out of your way to find other ways to deal with them. Also the same with Animate Undead, TBH: while yes, a Cleric has much easier access to the spell, I'm almost always running some Arcane spellcaster anyways, so if I desperately need level 15 Skeleton Warriors, I can summon them regardless. Same goes for Dispel/Remove Magic, though slightly less true if my main mages are multiclass as that happens depressingly often for me.
On the other side of that argument, Pixie Dust. I agree that its niche can be filled with Invisibility 15" as a prebuff, but Pixie Dust can be cast in-combat if necessary for an escape option, and if your Mage's aura is clouded (I've escaped fights using this before). It's also not an Arcane spell, so doesn't trigger Cowled Wizards when traveling invisibly to avoid ambushes.
As I said before, I just don't think Cleric buff spells on themselves are worthwhile, for at least single class Clerics: short-ish durations (DuHM is only a Turn long), low APR (6 if you're using either Lathandar or Helm kits, on top of an Improved Haste). And then there's the fact that a number of Cleric spells are reactive, so if you're in melee combat and need to throw a Remove Paralysis onto something, there's a much higher chance to get disrupted. Yes, it's nice to have the option to melee, I just think it's a terrible option for non-multis or duals.
As for Insect Plague, being nerfed from "immediate win vs mages" doesn't mean it's a bad spell all of a sudden. It's still a very solid spell that becomes a bit more niche: it still auto-wins vs other spellcasters, and still wrecks havoc on anything without a Fireshield up, and it's still good vs Warriors, which is something that people don't really bring up. The constant damage tick causes them to stutter-step, can cause them to run in fear, and while a ton more niche, can reveal the position of invisible units by the cloud of insects around them.
I'm rambling: let me try to close up.
Advantages I'd give the Cleric, no question: Holy Smite, Raise Dead (can technically be replaced by Rod of Resurrection or cash, but really good until HLAs come up unless you're playing very safe), Remove Paralysis, Holy Word, Sanctuary, Silence, Shield usage, and Turn Undead, and an easier way to get to Animate Dead.
Advantages I'd give the Druid: Insect Plague, Call Woodland Beings (yes, a Cleric can cast all of the spells in question, but summoning 5 of them at once can very easily overwhelm the saving throws of non-immune creatures), Pixie Dust, Iron Skins, Insect Plague, Fire Seeds (even without a WS, the damage can interrupt spells for mages under PfMW), Dolorous Decay (guaranteed Slow for 2 rounds, no save, at the very least), Nature's Beauty, Creeping Doom, and while not as impactful, can use their attacks for Darts of Stunning or Wounding, or just attempt to interrupt spells with Firetooth Dagger.
It's not an overwhelming advantage in favor of Druid for me: I still prefer them, but I also like having a Cleric with me, which is why I so often have both Aerie or Anomen and Cernd or Jaheira on my teams.
I am, however, 100% committed in my dislike for Monks: there's never been a time where I've had a monk on my team that I haven't thought that its job could be better replaced by almost any other class in the game. A melee fighter that can lose half its health in a single attack simply isn't good.
Again, just talking about my preference- not judging how others view it.
It's not intended: the idea is that you can only use your own shapeshift token, and I think it's normally obvious to people swapping them around that it's an exploit. As jmerry says, I don't block exploits (where my rough definition of an exploit is: something you probably aren't going to do by accident, but only knowing that it's exploiting a game loophole). Several people have had fun with that exploit; who am I to stop them.
(BUT: this still isn't officially how they're supposed to work. There's no completely trivial way to restrict tokens to their creator, otherwise I probably would have done so to begin with.)
I'd say that it is, actually. It was DESIGNED as a hard counter to mages (who are insanely overpowered even in vanilla). SCS mages always have protections up that block. I have yet to run into a single mage that doesn't immiedieatly pop up a stoneskin and fireshild. So for the purpose that insect plague was designed for, it is effectively useless.
I would be very surprised if that is true. There is very little evidence that the spell system in the BG series had any systematic attention paid to balancing. Most of the spells are very faithful adaptations from 2nd edition AD&D. The core effects of Insect Plague, including spellcasting failure, are taken pretty directly from the AD&D Players' Handbook. The fact that druids have one or two very cool spells and a lot of weak ones is very unlikely to be deliberate design and very likely to be an automatic consequence of that faithful adaptation, and the spell system in 1st/2nd edition AD&D also paid fairly little attention to balancing. (I speak with affection, having played a lot of PnP D&D in those systems, many years ago.)
I'm also really surprised to hear vanilla mages called 'insanely overpowered'. One of the main reasons I got into AI modding at all was that the mages in BG and BG2 were so pathetically ineffectual. Mostly that's down to AI... but even with better AI, Breach+a couple of melee fighters is instant death for most mages.
Sorry, I missed this. You may have been unlucky. About one quarter of SCS mages of sufficient level have a Fire Shield memorised. (Necromancers carry FS:Blue about half the time; Invokers carry FS: Red about half the time; Enchanters and Conjurers don't use it.) Of the 20-odd defensive Spell Sequencers I use, about a quarter have Fire Shield in; of the 20-odd defensive Spell Triggers I use, a bit under half do. It's hard to give a really reliable estimate of how often Fire Shield is used, but I'd be surprised if you see it in more than 25% of wizards of level 8-13, or more than a third or so of wizards of level 14-17. (Stoneskin I use basically all the time, of course.)
It's also worth saying that requiring a mage to fire off her defensive sequencer, and use up a round of action and a bunch of other defenses, is itself a meaningful move in a combat. That round where the mage uses a defensive sequencer to clear insects is a round when she's not casting Symbol of Stun on your front-line fighters. Not only mages can play mage chess!
As for the topic, nerfing insect plague was not a bad idea, but bad the nerfing attributes. Fire shield to counter it is good one, but the others should be discussed, if DavidW open to suggestions. But after all the whole scs is his work and he can has the right to do things alone.
This refers to mages as a possible player class, as opposed to mages as in enemy mages. I think pretty much everyone agrees they are by far the most powerful of any single class characters and the ones with whom you can most easily win largest percentage of battles all alone.
Sure... but ThacoBell was talking about Insect Plague as a hard counter to 'insanely overpowered' mages, and that doesn't really make sense if we're talking about PC mages... I mean, yes, the occasional priest casts Insect Plague at you, but it's scarcely a common occurrence!
Sunscorch
Alicorn Lance
Mold Touch
Spike Growth
Stormshell
Static Charge
Smashing Wave
Giant Insects
Spike Stones
Entropy Shield
Impervious Sanctity of Mind
Stalker
Any of those would be challenging options on AI Druids.
Especially Sunscorch, Static Charge, Giant Insects, and Stalker, depending on the level of the encounter. Alicorn Lance, in comparison to other level 2 Druid spells anyway.