HLA achieved (Hexxat is OP as heck)
FredN
Member Posts: 506
Well, I didn;t think I'd get HLAs until ToB, but I hit the 300,000 experience mark in Chapter 6 of SoA. Needless to say, I immediately took Enhanced Bard Song. Seriously, is there any reason to take anything else? Magic Flute is decent, and it will be the next one I take, but the buffs from Enhamced Song are just too good to pass up. 
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Oh, for a non-bard thief type I definitely agree. But they can't get the Enhanced version of Bard Song. This is so much better than the standard version.
Vanilla bard song: fear immunity, +3 luck at level 20+. That much luck is a very big deal; some parties might not want to give it up. You'll do it most of the time, but it's not a no-brainer.
Blade song: fear immunity, +1 luck. EBS is a huge improvement.
Jester song: no ally effects, debuffs enemies. EBS basically destroys the kit's identity, so you won't take it at all. (It shouldn't be allowed for this kit, but it is.)
Skald song: at level 20+, it's +4 AC, +4 to hit, +4 damage, and immunities to fear, stun, and confusion. EBS is an improvement (normal weapon immunity, better AC for the bard), but it's pretty minor. On a skald, I'd definitely take UAI first so I could wear stuff like helmets and archmage robes.
- Bards don't have a sneak attack multiplier. Assassinate would be useless.
- Bards don't get Assassinate as an option. Neither do swashbucklers.
>Level 21-30: shadows. Unlike regular shadows, these have no on-hit effect, but they can cast 5x Magic Missile, 5x Mirror Image, 2x Fireball, 1x Hold Person (wizard), 2x Lightning Bolt, 2x Dimension Door, 2x Polymorph Other, 1x Animate Dead (wizard), 1x Cloudkill, 1x Shadow Door, 1x Monster Summoning III, 1x Chaos, 1x Invisible Stalker, 1x Globe of Invulnerability and 1x Flesh to Stone. These spells are cast at the minimum level possible, as the shadows have no arcane caster levels, but their summoning ignores the party's summoning limit (although their summons will count against said limit if your party members want to summon more creatures themselves), meaning it's possible for them to produce an entire army of summons, with some of them lasting even longer than the shadows themselves, like the invisible stalkers, that last for 9 hours.<
.....Well, bug or not, I can do it. If the designers didn't forsee this happening, then hey! Not my problem. Suck it up bozos!
Also, why would you say this is a bug? Hexxat's summoned Shadow's abilities are so very detailed, I have a hard time imagining this was the result of some weird programming glitch, and not an intentional buff. I mean, how many parties keep Hexxat around that long? And if you do, you deserve some sort of reward.
.....Seriously, would you have me beieve that some designer stood around saying "By all the gods of Chaos!! I inputted *&24! instead of *&34! Oh dear, now Hexxat's Shadows will be totally overpowered, and I can't do anything about it!. Oh, the horror!" Umm, are you implying that the designers are incapable of correcting their own errors? Because that's what it sounds like to me.
And then that clone gets cloned, and any mistakes that were made propagate.
As best we can tell, Vellin Dahn is the origin of these spells. He's a wizard that monologues to you and then teleports away, never to be seen again; he's not actually scripted to use them. So he was cloned to the basic shadow, changing all the important stuff but leaving alone the stats, alignment, class (FIGHTER), kit, and spells.
Then that basic shadow was cloned to all of the other shadow variants, and we have this situation where any shadow you manage to gain control of has a bunch of spells they shouldn't have. Oops.
.....Sheesh. And nobody reviewed the results and said "Wait a minute; this isn't what we intended"? So, if I sonehow got the ability to summon shadows, they would be similarly powerful? And why don't the shadows we meet in game as enemies have spell abilities? I don't know squat about programming, so this is all rather confusing to me.
.....I didn't write all that descriptive stuff myself. There are a couple of on-line references with basically the same information. Several folks clearly did a fair amount of research in order to clarify exactly what Hexxat's ability did. I would think that somewhere along the line one or more developers would have come to the realization of what was going on. I first encountered the game 8-9 years ago when V 1.3 was in use. Clearly there have been multiple revisions since then, but apparently nobody caught on to this anomaly to correct it. Again, I suspect that it's because they considered Hexxat to be a minor recruitable NPC, whom most parties would not keep around for long.
.....I find this to be rather short sighted of them. Recruitable thieves in SoA are in seriously short supply. Unless the MC wants to play a thief variant or thief multiclass themselves. there are really only 2 choices: Jan and Hexxat. And don't hand me any of that garbage about Nalia and Imoen. They are not thieves, they are mages who took an elective class in Thieving 101 while in Mage school, and ended up with a couple of minor thief abilities.
.....Ok, to be fair, a lot of folks want to do a good-neutral group run. Anomen, Keldorn and Mazzy are all powerful NPCs, and none of them will tolerate Hexxat in their group. But that's no excuse for being sloppy when designing Hexxat's abilities. Some folks want to do a neutral-evil run. Dorn with Ir'revrykal is every bit as powerful as Keldorn with Carsomyr ... and his ToB quest is totally epic! ... Viconia IMO is better than Anomen due to her magic resistance, and Edwin is literally twice the mage Nalia or Imoen is. Hexxat fits right in with that bunch.
It’s all a bit of a monster. But that’s among the things that keep it fascinating.
Combat scripts in this game can only use a spell if there's code in there specifically for that spell. Spellcaster scripts go "if I have spell X and condition Y is true, I cast spell X". Party member scripts do that for a very long list of spells and get quite large, because you can memorize anything. Non-party scripts trim that down to a much shorter list, because they don't need to know how to use the spells they don't have. And scripts for non-caster creatures can get very simple - the standard melee combat script generic shadows use has four blocks and usually boils down to "attack the nearest enemy".
Well, that's discouraging to hear. SoA has so much more content than ToB, with a much less linear plotline, that I assumed the designers were a lot more careful than what you imply here. You two guys seem to have a lot of knowledge about the game's programming. Where did you even find all this stuff out? I haven't done extensive research, but I have read a bit, and never came across any of this stuff.
For another thing, we can look at the game's resources and make inferences. We have tools for that. And there's a lot you pick up if you get into the modding community. That community - which I am part of at this point - has done a whole lot to figure out the game over the years.
.....Since no enemies in the game carry stakes or holy water, Hexxat cannot die permanently. Also her coffin doubles as a 100 capacity Bag of Holding. Jan comes with ... some sort of cyberpunk techno crossbow and goggles? Not nearly as useful.
I think it actually makes the game an even more amazing accomplishment. That things came together so well, and you can go from freedom to being on rails from one section to the next. It encompasses so much of what I always loved about gaming (starting with friends in high school around 1978); story, characters, imagination... You can go from a helpless rookie to a power in the universe. Just a wonderful run. To me, its the pinnacle of AD&D in a CRPG.
.....Shadowrun Hong Kong boasts one of the few intentional 3 way combat scenarios I have ever seen in a computer RPG. Usually you might be in a combat and some rando monster walks in and attacks whoever is nearest. Here, we have your own party vs two totally organized groups who a) want to grab the girl you are escorting, and will happily kill you to do so, and b) hate each other's guts much more than they hate you. You even have the option of turning the girl over to one of them, but that is totally a wimp move that automatically fails the entire mission. You are badly outnumbered, but if you do the smart thing, you can ace the mission and get serious props as a reward.
.....Note that in Shadowrun, while there is magic, there is no such thing as resurrection spells, so you have to be careful during combat to make sure to heal folks who are badly wounded. The NPC pool is limited, and in all of the games, you do NOT want to face the final Bosses with an underpowered crew. On the other hand, finding out that your playful puppy ... and you have a bag of puppy biscuits you can feed him during the game to gain his loyalty .... can, in the end game scenario, transform into a ravening monster (a Hellhound) that you can control is seriously amusing.