3-5 bugs per minute
Alonso
Member Posts: 806
I'm fighting
[BUG 1] Aerie gets hit (presumably by a poisoned weapon) and after that she keeps getting poison damage each round. However, her record screen says nothing about her being poisoned.
[BUG 2] Aerie puts on the Periapt of proof against poison, thus becoming immune to poisoning. After that she doesn't get any more poison damage. However, the combat log still says every round "Alu-fiend: Aerie was immune to my damage" like the poisoning was still there somehow. Plus, she keeps complaining like she was still receiving damage.
[BUG 3] Worst of all, when she tries to cast a spell, her spell gets disrupted by the non existent damage.
[BUG 4]My mage is protected by Spell deflection. An Alu-fiend casts Charm person at him. The spell bypasses Spell deflection and my mage gets charmed.
[BUG 5] The log says my mage is "Dire charmed", which suggests the spell used was probably Dire charm rather than Charm person.
Depending on how you count, that's between 3 and 5 bugs (allowing for the possibility that there is a weird but valid explanation for one of them, and that it can be argued that 2 and 3 are actually the same bug). All of that happens in less than one minute of real time, which gives us a count of somewhere between three and five bugs per minute.
the succubus and the alu-fiends in Watcher's Keep
[BUG 1] Aerie gets hit (presumably by a poisoned weapon) and after that she keeps getting poison damage each round. However, her record screen says nothing about her being poisoned.
[BUG 2] Aerie puts on the Periapt of proof against poison, thus becoming immune to poisoning. After that she doesn't get any more poison damage. However, the combat log still says every round "Alu-fiend: Aerie was immune to my damage" like the poisoning was still there somehow. Plus, she keeps complaining like she was still receiving damage.
[BUG 3] Worst of all, when she tries to cast a spell, her spell gets disrupted by the non existent damage.
[BUG 4]My mage is protected by Spell deflection. An Alu-fiend casts Charm person at him. The spell bypasses Spell deflection and my mage gets charmed.
[BUG 5] The log says my mage is "Dire charmed", which suggests the spell used was probably Dire charm rather than Charm person.
Depending on how you count, that's between 3 and 5 bugs (allowing for the possibility that there is a weird but valid explanation for one of them, and that it can be argued that 2 and 3 are actually the same bug). All of that happens in less than one minute of real time, which gives us a count of somewhere between three and five bugs per minute.
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Comments
2. This is arguably an oversight. The Periapt of Proof Against Poison only grants immunity to the poison opcode and 100% resistance to poison damage. The former will successfully prevent Aerie from being poisoned from any further Darts of Wounding, while the latter will merely reduce existing poison effects to zero damage. You could change this by adding a "Cure Poison" opcode to the Periapt of Proof Against Poison item file, but the item description doesn't actually say it cures existing poisons, so you could reasonably argue that this is intended behavior.
3. This is not a bug. This is long-standing behavior dating to vanilla BG1, way back in 1998. Zero-damage disruption has always been part of the game, though people have made mods and such to prevent it from happening. Anything that causes the damage animation can disrupt a spell.
4. Alu-Fiends do not use the level 1 mage spell "Charm Person." They use a unique special ability which strikes as a level zero spell and therefore bypasses spell protections. Since Alu-Fiends are extraplanar critters, their spells do not come from the Weave or a god, and so they do not operate like regular spells, just like a mind flayer's Psionic Domination. In PnP, this would be known as a "supernatural ability" instead of a spell. This is not a bug; this is very much intended behavior.
5. There is no actual difference between "dire charm" and "charm." Charm, "dire" charm, and domination all use the same opcode (opcode 5), and while that opcode uses different parameters that can apply slightly different charm effects, the only difference between the "dire charm" and the "charm" parameters is that they display a different message. Since there is no impact on gameplay, this is at most a minor cosmetic oddity.
Use Chaotic Commands to block charm effects and drink an Antidote or Elixir of Health to remove existing poisons, and you should be fine.
The Charm ability could use renaming, something like "Demonic Charm". Possibly also change it's type from "Wizard" to "Innate" to remove the "Casts ..." from it's activation line.
Did you know that
- Rogue HLA "Assassination" is a combat protection and is removable by Breach?
- almost none of ToB demonic Charms, gazes etc. are actually disables
- "Resist magic" HLA is a level 1 spell protection removable by Spell Thrust
- Beholder spell turning cannot be removed by spell protection removals
This is pretty much all fixed in Spell Revisions, but remains in non-modified game.
In the case at hand (2), the description of the periapt of proof against poison says "Equipped abilities: Immunity to poison". Still, Aerie complains about the non existent poison damage ("zero damage" is just a fancy way of saying "no damage") and her movement, spell casting, etc., is disrupted by the damage she is NOT taking. That is most definitely NOT being immune to poison. You have investigated the bug, and managed to understand its origin in detail, when it happens and when it doesn't, etc. That's great work and it brings you very close to a fix. However, the fact that you understand it doesn't mean it stops being a bug.
1. It is not just cosmetic, it's very much functional. Since I didn't see any poisoning effects in the record screen I thought "all clear, let's move on to cast a defensive spell". But since the poisoning was actually there, the casting of the defensive spell gets disrupted by the poison damage. It happens to be the last defensive spell Aerie had available, so now, due to this bug, she's defenceless. Definitely not cosmetic.
2. See above.
3. There's also the misconception that if a bug has existed and has been known for a very long time, then somehow at some point it just ceases to be a bug. Here you have some examples of bugs that took more than thirty years to fix. Old doesn't mean fixed.
4. From the description of Spell deflection: "All spells that target the caster are deflected". Also, see above.
Apart from that, according to @kjeron, when the combat log says "casts", like in this case, it "means it was a legitimate, proper spell casting". Since this not "a legitimate, proper spell casting", but rather "a unique special ability", I guess this rises the bug count to 6.
5. What @kjeron said.
All in all, this looks like a case of 6 BPM (Bugs Per Minute).
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/74889/understanding-the-combat-log/p1
if the alu-fiend charm is an innate ability and not a spell then:
1. there is a bug, in the report screen that tells "cast", not in the innate ability ignoring the spell deflection
2. @kjeron was wrong saying what i quote now, and i am sure is the thing that @Alonso was referring at.
There are a few other "level 0 spells", but none of them are ordinary abilities that might be used by a monster. Only succubi have their abilities handled this way; there are some other level zero monster abilities, but they're innate like a dragon's wing buffet.
In order to match original intent of what the monster should be, those succubus abilities should be made into innate abilities.
to have all the innate abilities but the ones of the succubus coded in a certain way can be misleading as "cast" don't shows up in the log for other innate abilities.
by the way i agree with you about the fact that it would be a waste of resources, but not because it can not be useful for some players, only because the players that want to use that level of finesse in their game play and don't use modding tools to gather information are very few, and other things like the way the simulacrum retains the spells have precedence as it affects more players.
in an hypothetical perfect world where the developers have infinite time to spend to make a game perfect i would like to have both the things fixed, in the real word the simulacrum and other issues imho have precedence.