Hold Person "Held" message
jmerry
Member Posts: 3,901
(Observed in BGEE 2.6. Mac, GoG version)
I've noticed some oddities around Hold Person in my latest playthrough - particularly, the "Held" message.
First, whenever the spell is successful, the log prints two of those messages per victim.
Second, I tried the spell against the "Thayan Bodyguards" from Neera's quest; they're barbarians and were raging at the time, so it didn't do anything. Except for dumping a "Held" message in the log.
Looking at the details, Hold Person has five effects. There's the actual opcode 175 Hold, the casting sound effect, the portrait icon, the overhead visual effect, and a "Held" message (string 31799).
Barbarian rage blocks opcode 175, the portrait icon, the visual effect, and string 31799, among many other things.
So, then, where's the second "Held" message coming from? As far as I can tell, it's being generated by the system when the target fails their save without regard to any immunity effects.
I've also used the mage Hold Undead spell; that generates a single "Held" message as it should. That spell doesn't have an explicit effect for the message, instead only using the system-generated one.
Additional testing: the double messages are also present in 2.5. The spells in question were not changed between versions.
I've noticed some oddities around Hold Person in my latest playthrough - particularly, the "Held" message.
First, whenever the spell is successful, the log prints two of those messages per victim.
Second, I tried the spell against the "Thayan Bodyguards" from Neera's quest; they're barbarians and were raging at the time, so it didn't do anything. Except for dumping a "Held" message in the log.
Looking at the details, Hold Person has five effects. There's the actual opcode 175 Hold, the casting sound effect, the portrait icon, the overhead visual effect, and a "Held" message (string 31799).
Barbarian rage blocks opcode 175, the portrait icon, the visual effect, and string 31799, among many other things.
So, then, where's the second "Held" message coming from? As far as I can tell, it's being generated by the system when the target fails their save without regard to any immunity effects.
I've also used the mage Hold Undead spell; that generates a single "Held" message as it should. That spell doesn't have an explicit effect for the message, instead only using the system-generated one.
Additional testing: the double messages are also present in 2.5. The spells in question were not changed between versions.
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Comments
The string it returns is currently defined in ENGINEST.2da, [row #35|STRREF_EFFECT_HOLD], ignoring header rows.
Those two opcodes also ignore any entry for themselves in EFFTEXT.2da, which otherwise does the same (defines a string to return whenever a specific opcode is applied).
Before editing Hold Person:
Actually, it seems the other issue I had is that some op267 effects aren't working right. Because rage should block the "Rigid Thinking" string as well as the effect, as seen in the second of those shots.
(The effects in that range are all cosmetic; immunities to strings and to the Horror visual effect. The BG2EE version of barbarian rage is already properly ordered.)
And ... might as well. Here's a quick fix for the issues discussed here.