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Are druids worth playing in SCS?

The main reason for playing a druid seemed to me to be the spell Insect Plague. Druid spell level 1, 2 and 3 are worse than Cleric, but at level five you're rewarded with this awesome mage nuke, so they're an interesting alternative. Or so I thought.

Now in SCS I learned (thanks JMerry) about all the nerf that has been applied to Insect Plague. If I understand correctly:

- Destroyed by Death Spell (I don't know if this works in vanilla)
- No effect on undead
- Hits as a non-magical weapon, no effect if no hit
- Fire shields retaliate against the caster even without installing the component that makes the mage outright immune with it
- Even if you somehow still damage a mage through all of his stoneskins, mantles and fire shields, the mage still gets a saving throw against spell interruption

I understand that the vanilla Insect Plague may have been OP. But with all of these changes, I don't see how it is worth using at all, especially against mages. For a level 5 spell, it has been reduced to trash tier. If you can hit a mage with normal weapons, doing that is going to be more effective.

What is the reason for such an extreme nerf? And who is still playing druids in SCS? It makes me sad, I am greatly enjoying SCS as a whole, but I don't see how this improves the game. Isn't it possible to find a more balanced way to alter the spell, such that it is still worth casting at least?
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Comments

  • OrlonKronsteenOrlonKronsteen Member Posts: 905
    The Insect Plague nerf is an optional component. It can be disabled by editing the SCS ini file before installing SCS (which means, unfortunately a reinstall if you're eager to get rid of it).
    borntodieReticent
  • whalewerewhalewere Member Posts: 14
    Okay, it has admittedly been some months now since I played SCS, but is it really all that bad? Insect Plague still has its uses. That said, druidic shapeshifting is greatly improved, to the point where it's an a vital part of their arsenal, and they get some badly needed spells, including some protective spells. I never used SCS Cern, but Jaheira was powerful and actually very fun to use, and that's more important than anything, I feel.

    Ultimately mages probably come out on top, but what else is new?
  • jmerryjmerry Member Posts: 3,822
    Who's playing druids in SCS? I am. My current party has both Jaheira and Cernd, with no cleric. No complaints here. Of course, they spend most of their time fighting shapeshifted and hardly ever cast spells...

    Incidentally, I discovered that fireshield bit when my Avenger cast IP against an enemy Avenger in BG1 (mod content). Enemy shifts into fire salamander form, so do I, and many packets of fully resisted fire damage bounce back and forth. It is subject to the usual fireshield range limits, so it only becomes an issue if the insect caster closes to melee range with the target.
    borntodiewhalewere
  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    The way SCS treats anti-mage measures is really crappy. If something works as a counter to a mage, its nerfed to oblivion. The author of SCS really had a hard on for mage duels, because its the only viable way to counter a mage in SCS.
    Druids get their shapeshifting buffed and the addition of IWD divine spells gives them more variety, but anti-mage measures was one of their big class draws.
  • borntodieborntodie Member Posts: 199
    edited August 2020
    ThacoBell wrote: »
    The way SCS treats anti-mage measures is really crappy. If something works as a counter to a mage, its nerfed to oblivion. The author of SCS really had a hard on for mage duels, because its the only viable way to counter a mage in SCS.
    That's putting it bluntly, but it is what I feared. Mage chess is fun, but other countermeasures need to exist, to balance the raw cheese of the mage class. That's why I did not install the inquisitor nerf, either. If your class is only good at one thing, you should excel in it.

    My perfect mod would have a nerf to insect plague, but a mild nerf. For example, if we take the vanilla Insect Plague, allow mages to kill it with a Death Spell and a saving throw for the spell failure, and maybe add undead immunity, that sounds much better balanced. A real hindrance for the mage, but not an outright death sentence. And saving throws are nice because they are level dependent, so it works better against Davaeorn than it does against Elminster.

    By the way, if any anti-mage trick needs a counter, my vote would go to the fire seed + wizard slayer combo..

    Anyway, I hope this has been constructive. I still love the mod. I will play around with shapeshifting, I never used it before except against Faldorn. Then I will decide and maybe undo the IP nerf with a reinstall. Happy to hear this is possible!
    ThacoBell
  • jsavingjsaving Member Posts: 1,083
    edited August 2020
    SCS is a great mod that does what it is designed to do. The problem is people's misconceptions that SCS runs are "more difficult" (may be true or false depending on what you install), that each class is "nerfed" to some degree (true in some cases but false in others), and that the changes are "truer to tabletop" (true in some cases but false in others).

    As for druids, SCS gives them more general utility but nerfs the mage-killing role for which they are rightly prized in vanilla. I would call that a buff overall and can completely understand @jmerry's take that their improved DPS and more versatile spell list make them a decent substitute for cleric in SCS. But if you're a vanilla player who sees clerics as better pretty much across-the-board except for mage-killing, then it would probably seem quite strange to see SCS take that role away from druids, until you see just how strong other things like the shapeshifter buffs are.
    Post edited by jsaving on
  • Mantis37Mantis37 Member Posts: 1,173
    I recently did a trilogy no-reload with a druid and SCS + Spell Revisions, and the main character always had something useful to do even when other characters were stealing the glory. Just tweak SCS as you prefer, it’s pretty modular.
  • borntodieborntodie Member Posts: 199
    edited August 2020
    Mantis37 wrote: »
    the main character always had something useful to do even when other characters were stealing the glory.
    Could you please offer some more detail? ;) What were the useful things he had to do?
  • VanDerBergVanDerBerg Member Posts: 217
    edited August 2020
    The way SCS treats anti-mage measures is really crappy.

    This pretty much sums it up. As wonderful as SCS is, the nerfs it does are very strange and they are all pretty much geared towards making mages even more OP than in vanilla game. Allowing save vs spell with no penalty to negate the spellcasting disabling effect of Insect Plague is, for higher level mages, almost equivalent of disabling the effect altogether, since higher level mages will have very low save vs. spell and in 6 rounds that Insect Plague lasts, they will save almost every time. Other nerfs are equally bad, like nerfing the Inquisitors' Dispel Magic, nerfing Carsomyr and so on...Funnily, none of the mages' ridiculously OP spells like Project Image or Time Stop were nerfed.

    As for the druids, I ended my recent run of the whole trilogy with Jaheira and pretty much the only spells I remember casting were Summon Woodland Being, Iron Skins, Summon Fire Elemental and an occasional Nature's Beauty and Defensive Harmony. She was almost exclusively a frontline fighter.
    borntodieThacoBell
  • jmerryjmerry Member Posts: 3,822
    Point of order ... Insect Plague in SCS is a save vs breath at -2 to avoid the spell failure effect. Priests top out at a base save of 8, and mages at 7. They're vulnerable. Also, the damage itself can interrupt spells. The spell save is to avoid panic, and that has a -2 penalty as well.
    Insect Plague is still an excellent spell, which breaks groups and disrupts spellcasters. It's just not a universal win button.
    whalewere
  • VanDerBergVanDerBerg Member Posts: 217
    edited August 2020
    Out of curiosity, what changes did SCS make to shapeshifting?
  • borntodieborntodie Member Posts: 199
    edited August 2020
    jmerry wrote: »
    Insect Plague is still an excellent spell, which breaks groups and disrupts spellcasters. It's just not a universal win button.
    It still disrupts clerical spellcasters, no dispute there. Blade barrier doesn't interfere with Insect Plague, unlike Fire Shield.

    Mages are only disrupted if you have already broken down their defenses. If a mage can be hurt by IP, it can be hurt much more effectively by non-magical weapons and hitting with non-magical weapons will not allow any saving throws; spellcasting is disrupted, period. Non-magical weapons are not blocked by fire shield. Non-magical weapons also work on undead. Non-magical weapons are not destroyed by Death Spell, another spell that SCS mages like to spam.

    The fact that the caster can be hurt by a fire shield adds insult to injury.

    In short, in the specific matchup against a magical caster, IP is a level 5 spell with an effect that is almost strictly worse than attacking with a non-magical weapon. It ironically became a bad spell against mages, although it remains a decent crowd control spell as you say.

    And that is what I find painful. The change to insect plague is a large gift to the most overpowered class, in the specific matchup against one of the underdogs (druid). Again, I would not even oppose a smaller nerf to IP, but the total package as it has been implemented is just too much imho.
    ThacoBell
  • DavidWDavidW Member Posts: 823
    edited August 2020
    I'm open to the suggestion that Insect Plague has been over-restricted. It's plausible that the more recent set of changes obviate the need for a saving throw (and I'm sympathetic to the fact that saving throws make something less useful in late game, though as jmerry points out, it shouldn't be overstated). While the 'non-magical weapons' thing was driven by PnP considerations as much as anything else, I'm also sympathetic to its being too-drastic a change.

    The problem with unmodified Insect Plague is that it basically shuts down mages without any really functional counter. (It's area effect, so it bypasses Spell Deflection; by targetting a mook it can bypass Improved Invisibility; it's high enough level to bypass Globe of Invulnerability; its effect almost completely neutralises the target.) I'm not particularly invested in mage duels per se, but I am invested in having battles with high-level spellcasters be interesting, since there are an awful lot of them in BG2, and Insect Plague makes battles with high-level spellcasters much less interesting.

    I should add that this change (as well as the Inquisitor nerf) came directly out of my own main playtest playthroughs of BG2+SCS2, which (on separate runs) had Jaheira and Keldorn in the party. In each case, nerfing made combat with spellcasters significantly more interesting (at least to me, but ultimately that's the final metric in my mod!)

    More broadly (and responding to VanDerBerg's comment): spell changes in SCS mostly aren't aimed at 'making mages more OP' or similar; they're aimed at shutting down things that make battles (mage battles in particular) unfun, and several of them weaken mages. Going through the relevant changes:
    - Breach gets blocked by Spell Turning: without this, mages can be killed almost immediately (breach, then hack). That's generally how mage battles in the vanilla game go.
    - Breach affects liches and rakshasas (note, here's an example of me making mages less 'OP'): without that, most parties have to wait out their spell defenses, which is boring
    - Elemental arrows count as 'normal' and so get blocked by Protection from Normal Missiles: this actually comes from BG1 (and, to be fair, from the pre-Stoneskin days), where my playtest experience is that mages die boringly quickly without it
    - Allow Spellstrike to penetrate a Protection from Magic scroll: without it, the scroll is pretty much an instakill against mages, which again is boring. (Yes, they can still summon, so the case isn't overwhelming.)
    - Allow antimagic attacks to penetrate Improved Invisibility: another one that weakens mages. Without this, high level mages can put up an essentially impenetrable barrier (SI:Abj, SI:Div, II) and there's nothing you can do except wait it out. Again, boring.
    - Minute Meteors become +2: in playtesting, the low-level Meteors spell was far too effective at penetrating even high-level mages' defenses, which skewed the structure of combat uninterestingly - and in any case, a 3rd level spell shouldn't create a +5 weapon. (Of course, whether this is a buff or a nerf to mages depends on which mage you ask.)
    - Insect plague nerfs, Inquisitor nerfs: see above
    - Slight increase in power of Mantle (etc): in my experience the loot curve in BG2 means that by the time you meet wizards with 7th level spells you've probably got some +3 weapons, by the time you meet wizards with 8th level spells you've probably got some +4 weapons, etc. So this tweak makes sure high-level mages still have some kind of defense. (Anyone who's had significant experience with high-level BG2 play knows that there are basically two possibilities for a mage: either they're unaffected by your weapons, or they're dead in seconds).
    - Cap Skull Trap at 12d6: again, that nerfs mages. It's there because (a) it's boring for wizards to ignore Lightning Bolt and Fireball in place of Skull Trap; (b) a Sequencer with three Skull Traps is too much of an instant-party-kill.
    - Give Carsomyr a saving throw: my playtest experience is that without this, battles with dragons are boringly fast once you get Carsomyr. (It's less of an issue with mages: if a mage is taking damage from a +5 two-handed sword wielded by someone high-enough level to kill Firkraag, their defenses probably aren't doing them that much good anyway and their life expectancy is already measured in seconds!)

    Why don't I nerf wizards' 'ridiculously OP spells'? Because I'm not very interested in between-class balance (I don't think it matters very much in a party-based, single-player CRPG) and I don't think the game would be made more interesting by nerfing the spells listed. Specifically:
    - Project Image: enemies don't use it. The party can use it if they like, but the OP ways of using it are fairly obvious exploits and I don't block exploits.
    - Time Stop: I think battles with Time Stop are more interesting than battles without Time Stop (basically because it gives a single high-level mage some way to keep up in action economy against six opponents.)

    Of course, as OrlonKronsteen point out, all SCS's changes are modular. You can disable pretty much any of them through stratagems.ini. If you try that and have a fun playthrough anyway, let me know!
    borntodiewhalewereLudwig_IIStummvonBordwehr
  • DavidWDavidW Member Posts: 823
    edited August 2020
    Sorry, I should have replied to this interesting post too:
    borntodie wrote: »
    My perfect mod would have a nerf to insect plague, but a mild nerf. For example, if we take the vanilla Insect Plague, allow mages to kill it with a Death Spell and a saving throw for the spell failure, and maybe add undead immunity, that sounds much better balanced. A real hindrance for the mage, but not an outright death sentence.
    Part of what makes IP difficult to balance (and makes the changes to IP less dramatic than they look) is that the spell failure is a double effect. You get an actual Spell Failure effect (which SCS gives a save to) but you also take damage about once every couple of seconds (faster for Creeping Doom), and that damage also disrupts your spellcasting. It's virtually impossible to get a spell off through IP even if you make your saving throw. SCS's change of the damage type to piercing aims to address this - Stoneskin now blocks the damage, but of course it's going to get burned away very quickly by that repeated damage.

    So if you're a mage hit by IP, you need to have Stoneskin up to keep spellcasting AND to make your saving throw (every round). And Stoneskin just gives you a couple of rounds to use Death Spell or Fire Shield to get rid of the insects.

    I am somewhat sympathetic to the concern that doing nonmagical damage is too much. I'll consider that.
    By the way, if any anti-mage trick needs a counter, my vote would go to the fire seed + wizard slayer combo..
    I don't actually know that combo... and that may be the point. I'm more concerned about nerfing things that happen just by using standard spells than by spotting and blocking clever combos.
    Anyway, I hope this has been constructive.
    Yes. I appreciate the feedback.
    borntodieGrond0Ludwig_IIStummvonBordwehr
  • MaurvirMaurvir Member Posts: 1,090
    As noted, Insect Plague is a very useful spell for crowd control, and many of the nerfs make sense. Fire shield SHOULD kill your insects - that's just good RP right there. I love it when Planetars fire off one of those and really shake things up in larger battles.

    The bigger issue, though still fair from an RP standpoint, is that SCS has mages pre-buff at higher difficulty levels, meaning that you can't sneak one in before an enemy mage is prepared to throw them off permanently.

    Honestly, the nerfs on IP make sense to me, and I have them enabled. I don't have the nerfs on Inquisitor dispel installed, though, because that is part of what makes the class worthwhile. Inquisitors don't otherwise have any divine magic, so nerfing their dispel would make them pointless.
  • borntodieborntodie Member Posts: 199
    Thanks so much for listening. I am certain that it is possible to find a perfectly balanced solution, but for now I am just hoping Semitic God takes the bite and explains the deadly Fire Seeds / Wizard Slayer combo. I first heard about it from him. This is the smelliest anti-mage cheese in the history of the Sword Coast, worse than anti-magic scroll and vhailor's helmet. :smiley: In other words: it is awesome, everyone needs to know about it.

    No pressure, Semitic God. :D
  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    Insect Plague already had a long cast time AND travel time. This combined with mages prebuffing and every mage and their grandma packing stoneskin and fireshield just makes the spell useless. If you can peel a casters defenses enough to land an insect plague, you're better off hitting them with other things. It also does so little damage that even a mage is in no danger of dying to it.

    Being forced to mage chess every battle just isn't fun. Insect Plague is (was) a good way around that IF you could get the spell off in time, which isn't guaranteed. Mages shouldn't be the only or best way to fight other mages.

    I'd love if the insect plague nerf was an optional component.
  • DavidWDavidW Member Posts: 823
    ThacoBell wrote: »
    Being forced to mage chess every battle just isn't fun.
    At some level, the answer to that is going to be: don't install SCS's Smarter Mages component (or else lower its difficulty setting very substantially). The need to strip off a mage's defenses is just a conceptually core feature of how that component of SCS is coded.
    I'd love if the insect plague nerf was an optional component.
    From your point of view (given that you know about the insect plague nerf and have decided you don't like it) is there really a meaningful difference between 'it's an optional component' and 'it can be disabled via the ini'?
  • jmerryjmerry Member Posts: 3,822
    I don't mage chess every battle. In fact, I do it pretty rarely. They come prepared for chess, but I brought a rugby team.

    My current party ... the usual approach is to hit them with a Remove Magic (either instant-cast level 31 from the sorcerer protagonist or level 40 from the bard) and burn them with Incendiary Clouds. Less often, I just don't bother with any of that - focus on the warriors, tank whatever offensive spells the mages throw out, and wait out their defenses. They genuinely consider warriors to be a bigger threat than mages - the fire giants in Yaga-Shura's temple forced the party to retreat and heal more than once, while I just auto-attacked the fire lich.
  • Grond0Grond0 Member Posts: 7,305
    borntodie wrote: »
    Thanks so much for listening. I am certain that it is possible to find a perfectly balanced solution, but for now I am just hoping Semitic God takes the bite and explains the deadly Fire Seeds / Wizard Slayer combo. I first heard about it from him. This is the smelliest anti-mage cheese in the history of the Sword Coast, worse than anti-magic scroll and vhailor's helmet. :smiley: In other words: it is awesome, everyone needs to know about it.

    No pressure, Semitic God. :D

    Fire seeds are created by druids, but can be passed to any other characters (including wizard slayers). If they are thrown at a target they can hit, they do damage not just to that target but to anything in the burst area of effect (whether or not those targets could be hit directly by the fire seed). This offers a wizard slayer a way to bypass PfMW and similar protections and the spell failure they cause is spread through any area effect of a weapon (arrows of explosion can be useful from that point of view).

    To my mind this is more of an interesting niche application of a pretty sub-par spell rather than anything really game changing - particularly as it takes a while to throw enough fire seeds to cause total spell failure (even if a target is not moving around, which SCS enemies usually are). If playing unmodded then insect spells are better at controlling casters. If you do have SCS installed then even full spell failure doesn't entirely nerf arcane users (divine casters are unaffected anyway of course) as they still have access to use of items, special abilities and, in some cases, forced spell casts.
  • DavidWDavidW Member Posts: 823
    Sounds great. I wouldn't want to give the impression that I have any problem with this style of play.

    My general impression is that by mid-to-late Throne of Bhaal, mages are speed bumps unless they have HLAs. Certainly it's very hard (even with HLAs) for a solo mage to challenge a party - mages are still dangerous as part of a larger group, e.g. Yaga-Shura and his allies.

    And that's fine. It's important that play style and what counts as a threat changes as you get more powerful - it's what makes levelling meaningful and not just a shift in the numbers.
    Grond0
  • borntodieborntodie Member Posts: 199
    okay, first of all, I said it before but I will say it again: it is kind of you to listen to fan complaints such as mine and I feel guilty about critizing your creation while consuming it for free.

    In addition, I have exaggerated with the title of this theead and possibly sounded like an arrogant prick, I think part of it is that the internet tends to do that.

    So I humbly suggest some possible ways to change the IP spell, because as hard as it may seem to balance, there is always a way.

    Yes, I understand that it seems like an all or nothing thing, because in vanilla you (as the mage) or the mage monster just dies without any chance to fight back. Such hard-to-balance mechanics can be found in many games. But if you have a good look, there are nearly always numbers that you can tweak. And if you can tweak a number, with a clearly OP value and a clearly underpowered value, you know there must be a value where it is roughly perfect.

    Back to insect plague. What numbers can be tweaked about it?

    - duration
    - Saving throw bonus
    - Level of the spell
    - max number of affected creatures
    - damage per tick
    - ticks per round

    This gives us a universe of at least six dimensions of possible modifications, and most of them are not specific to mages.

    Now consider the saving throws, for example. What if you receive a +n bonus to them? If the bonus is 100, spells never fail.
    If the bonus is -100, spells always fail. In between there must be a bonus value that makes IP neither useless against mages, nor a straight kill. It would then become a very level dependent matter, where IP kills low-level mages without remorse, but high level mages laugh it off.

    That's just one possiblity. What if the duration was shorter? At some point, a mage (or priest) will be hampered but not dead. What if IP was a level 7 spell?

    One final idea: if a flame aura kills insects, how about a blade barrier? That way priests would have their own defense.

    Hope this was of use.
    Grond0
  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    edited August 2020
    "My current party ... the usual approach is to hit them with a Remove Magic (either instant-cast level 31 from the sorcerer protagonist or level 40 from the bard) and burn them with Incendiary Clouds. Less often, I just don't bother with any of that - focus on the warriors, tank whatever offensive spells the mages throw out, and wait out their defenses."
    "My general impression is that by mid-to-late Throne of Bhaal, mages are speed bumps unless they have HLAs. Certainly it's very hard (even with HLAs) for a solo mage to challenge a party - mages are still dangerous as part of a larger group, e.g. Yaga-Shura and his allies."

    Great, that's 1% of the game. What about the other 99%?


    So my choices are to be near the level cap WITH ANOTHER MAGE CLASS (because only mages are allowed to counter other mages apparently), or stand around waiting for buffs to expire. Why is it so important to nerf other classes when part of their design is specifically to counter mages?


    "From your point of view (given that you know about the insect plague nerf and have decided you don't like it) is there really a meaningful difference between 'it's an optional component' and 'it can be disabled via the ini'?"

    One is obvious when installing the mod, the other I didn't even know was an option until just now. So, clarity, I suppose. And of course this asks the question, why does Inquisitor dispel get a side component, but Insect Plague doesn't?


  • DavidWDavidW Member Posts: 823
    borntodie wrote: »
    okay, first of all, I said it before but I will say it again: it is kind of you to listen to fan complaints such as mine and I feel guilty about critizing your creation while consuming it for free.

    In addition, I have exaggerated with the title of this theead and possibly sounded like an arrogant prick, I think part of it is that the internet tends to do that.
    Don't worry, you're fine. I like feedback, and I am used to the internet! (And to the fact that 90% of people are much more polite once you engage them - not that you were particularly rude to start with.)

    I won't reply in detail to the suggestions for IP but I'll think about them. (This isn't going to change till I release v34, which is probably a few months away anyway.)

    oh, except this:
    One final idea: if a flame aura kills insects, how about a blade barrier? That way priests would have their own defense.

    That's nice actually. (Albeit it's yet one more nerf!) Protecting clerics is a perennial problem for me, though IWD spells have helped a bit.
    Ludwig_IIStummvonBordwehr
  • DavidWDavidW Member Posts: 823
    ThacoBell wrote: »
    So my choices are to be near the level cap WITH ANOTHER MAGE CLASS (because only mages are allowed to counter other mages apparently), or stand around waiting for buffs to expire.
    It's certainly true that SCS assumes party play, and a balanced party at that. A party without a mage (or a cleric or a couple of front line fighters) is probably going to struggle or be creative (or want different install options, come to that.)

    Why is it so important to nerf other classes when part of their design is specifically to counter mages?
    I've answered that in quite a lot of detail so I'm not sure I can add much else. But the one-sentence version is: because if 'counter' means 'shut down entirely', it makes mage fights boring. (And the second-sentence supplement is: if you disagree, customise your install to remove those nerfs.)

    And of course this asks the question, why does Inquisitor dispel get a side component, but Insect Plague doesn't?

    Because SCS AI assumes the Insect Plague changes, but not the Inquisitor changes. (For instance, mages will cast Fire Shield or Death Spell if they're afflicted by insects.) It's unmanageable to make the AI sensitive to all the possible choices of SCS spell tweaks, so I need a default install. (The readme goes into a bit more detail about this.)

    Grond0Ludwig_II
  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    @DavidW "It's certainly true that SCS assumes party play, and a balanced party at that. A party without a mage (or a cleric or a couple of front line fighters) is probably going to struggle or be creative (or want different install options, come to that.)"
    There's a big difference between having a balanced party, and outright requireing a mage to fight a mage. Druids and Inquisitors are made to fight mages, with ways of taking away their advantage. Removing it jsut seems to serve the purpose of making mages even more overpowered than they already were. What's next? Locks that can only be opened with a knock spell?
  • DavidWDavidW Member Posts: 823
    I think you are grossly overestimating the sophistication of the original game's design choices. And as I've said before, I think 'overpowered' makes fairly little sense in a single-player party-based game.

    Beyond that, I don't think there's much I can say to further explain the rationale here. Since it doesn't work for you, if you want to use SCS you should probably disable insect plague and put up with the minor AI infelicities that result, and also avoid the inquisitor nerf. Not everyone has to like my design choices, and SCS is as modular as possible consistent with the constraints of manageable code.
    Grond0
  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    How do I disable the insect plague nerf? If I knew how, I would have just done so.

    Pretty much everything else about SCS is great. The rationale for going out of the way to nerf the very few effective ways to take away a mage's advantage just seems like justification after the fact to me.
  • DavidWDavidW Member Posts: 823
    edited August 2020
    Check the readme. (But basically: edit stratagems.ini in a text editor and set 'no_initial_change_insect_plague' to 1)

    I don't know what you mean by "justification after the fact" in this context. As I note above, the insect plague and inquisitor nerfs are a direct result of my own playtesting, where I found that - at least for my playstyle - that insect plague made mage combats boring. (If you check the ancient history of the mod, you'll see that the insect plague nerf wasn't even in SCSII until 2 years after it was released.)
  • Mantis37Mantis37 Member Posts: 1,173
    borntodie wrote: »
    Mantis37 wrote: »
    the main character always had something useful to do even when other characters were stealing the glory.
    Could you please offer some more detail? ;) What were the useful things he had to do?

    They play a decent support role. Buffing, healing, summoning and the like. In no-reloads personal protection for Charname is paramount and since druids have access to death ward, iron skins, and other protective spells they’re not too bad an option. If you want them to be more offensive you may find the various mods that affect their shapechanging powers useful - e.g.

    https://artisans-corner.com/house-rules/

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