[mod] Of Paths and Ways

LavaDelVortel

This mod adds some new kits for your characters to pick (in BGEE, BG2EE and IWDEE). They may seem a bit more unusual than the vanilla options; however, they were created for my future runs. I am unsure if these will be used in a different way, such as part of an NPC mod, but I've decided to release them separately for now.

The current version of the mod includes 12 kits:

Arcane Trickster - a thief with a selection of arcane tricks, mostly from illusion spell school;
Divine Trickster - a thief with a selection of divine tricks, quite effective in fights against undead creatures;
Wilderness' Trickster - a thief with a druidic twist, as he may gain trickery allowing to cast a limited selection of druidic spells;
Arcane Chef - a bard that won't let your team starve, and instead shall provide magically created meals;
Fleshshaper - a bard that specializes in the evil art of shaping the flesh of both living and the dead;
Magivore-Infected - a sorcerer that gained special abilities as they were infected by mysterious magivore spores;
Honey-Sipper - a lightly-armored paladin that specializes in commanding bees, which may also produce honey when summoned;
Hallowed Reconnoitrer - a paladin that may wear up to medium armors, specialized in the art of reconnaissance and gathering information;
Rose Blade Monk - a monk that specializes in fighting katanas and scimitars and is attuned to nature;
Night Challenger - a ranger focused on roaming the roads during the night and throwing challenges at other adventurers;
Lucky Tusks - a thief of half-orcish blood, that trifle with luck and is quite good at direct combat;
3-Foot-Tall Fury - a fighter of the halfling heritage, stronger than most of their kin, ready for all sorts of battles.

To see the kit descriptions, see the "kits' descriptions" file in the mod folder.

As you may know, I focus more on stories, quests, relationships, so technical mods like this one will be most likely less often getting an update and there may be a chance they won't be perfectly balanced, but I guess some of them may still be fun to use.

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Special thanks to @TheArtisan, @morpheus562, @CamDawg and Soul.

Acifer

Congratulations on the release! These are very creative kits that will enrich BG&IWD in many ways.

LavaDelVortel

Thank you!

hakinaro

So is this not eet compatible?

LavaDelVortel

I think it should be fine, but I don't use EET myself so I haven't tested it on the Trilogy.

ar0n

Hello @LavaDelVortel ,

First of all, I wanted to thank you for all your work and effort you've put in creating IE mods - I genuinely think your additions add a lot of unique flavour to the game, making me want to return to playing IWD after 20 years.

Just to let you know, after installing OPaW mod on my IWDEE copy I've encountered the following issues with the honey sipper kit:
- exquisite honey: no matter how often do I use the abilities, I never get it;
- swirling hive: instead of damaging foes when being hit (like fireshield), being hit results in creation of a huge yellow cloud dealing piercing damage to everyone inside (resulting in all my party being dead in a couple of rounds);
- hive form: the chance of stunning the target seems to be much higher than the 3%, more like 100% - but I think that's actually fine (although I would personally prefer to have like 20% chance of stunning and 100% chance of poisoning the target, instead); love the ability btw.

I know it's easy to suggest and you probably have the limited amount of time, but I'd certainly love if you'd at least consider the following suggestions:
- it would be cool for shooting sting to have either a damage-over-time or paralysis poison ability;
- pestering bee seems to be somewhat useless at the higher levels - would you consider giving it some progress, like e.g. spell failure and Thac0 penalty, maybe small damage over time to affected target, or even chance of poison (paralysis) on a failed saving throw?
- by accident I've found the IE giant bee animation integration mod - maybe it's worth to consider adding a giant bee HLA summoning, it would be super cool!: https://github.com/thisisulb/ModResource_BeeAnimation;
- seems to be logical to add conjuring insect spells to spell list of this paladin.

One other thing re fleashaper - not sure if this was intentional, but the resistance is only lowered once (i.e. it is not cumulative).

I think bearing in mind severe penalties (esp. with respect to armor) these changes should not make this kit imbalanced. I absolutely love it btw and would love to use it for my next playthrough. Once again, thank you very much for your work!

LavaDelVortel

Hi!

Thanks for your kind words. I spent some time today to check things. The Swirling Hive indeed had some troubles when installed on IWDEE. I fixed it. I think that may have caused the whole ability to work some bizarre ways.

As for creating honey -- sorry, I could not reproduce that -- it was created literally the first time I used the ability. Remember that the chance of creating honey is still rather low:


As for changes, I do not intend to change it right now. I think it already provides a lot of bonuses; there are plenty of ways to improve their AC, and the ability to change into a hive can also serve as an important way to escape. The honey the abilities create can also be a huge aid not only to the Sipper, but also to other party members -- even more with the extra spell slots the kit gets.

As for the animation -- it's from WoW and I avoid using resources from such products. Besides, those kits do not really have unique HLA.

I hope you will still have fun with this kit. If you really wish to boost it, remember you may use Near Infinity to boost some of the boons locally The version with fixed Swirling Hive is up, though.

PS. Fleshshaper's song was never supposed to stack

Cheers!

ar0n

Thank you very much! And totally understood. Please keep up the good work!

LavaDelVortel

Thanks!