@Nuin I am actually going to give TWS a second look. With the K/T more attacks is indeed powerful, especially with a bard in the party. This is why it's so hard to get away from the boomerang and firetooth.
I want to beat the superiority of throwing daggers and I'm planning on longswords and scimitar. I know most people like the katana... but CF is the only one and that's boring. CF may be the best but I want to explore other avenues to see if I can top it. Daystar is quite strong and easy to reach. There are around 2000 enemies on a streamlined run-through. I was surprised to find over 250 were undead. I'll have belm and SNT most of the game along with a few other useful longswords but what I really want to get ahold of is Blackrazor. I would dual wield that with Equalizer for it's bonus on the MH (that still works in EE right?). Blackrazor will haste K/T to 5 attacks and max strength. I'll swap off the Equalizer with SNT when IHed. I'll have 18 proficiencies to play with. 5 longsword / 5 scimitar / 5 dagger / 3 tws. Maybe swap one out of TWS and into SWS for better backstabs. Not sure there yet.
Oh and I get to warp my party to the dark side. I don't know how this will turn out on NM mode, it may be too dangerous. However, I will still have the daggers to fall back on under dangerous circumstances.
Shadowdancers rulez. No matter I suck to find why they are better than anything else, I know they do.
Shadowdancers can kill anyone they want! Shadowdancers cut off heads ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this shadowdancer who was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon the shadowdancer killed the whole town.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*takes a breath and let the gentle men who work at his new house put him back into his nice with shirt with very very long sleeves, so long they need to be tied in his back, so people don't happen to walk on them*
How many playthroughs, if any, have you done on NM mode? I'm curious of the different experience levels of each player here. If you add mods, throw that in as well so I know where you're coming from.
I've played through about 20-30 times to the end - but 100s of times up to spellhold. I focus a lot on the early game and I play try to optimize for time. I consider resting to be cheesy especially in dungeons - so I try to be very very careful with my hlas/spells/consumables.
I play exclusively on nightmare mode. I've played with many of the difficulty mods but I've always found that they miss the mark (although I have tremendous respect for the creators).
My record is completing the game by 28 days 2 hours with a 4 player party in nightmare. I use 2 bgtweaks - ammo stacking - potion stacking. Although I'm considering playing without those to increase difficulty HOWEVER i really think the 80 ammo limit is just not reasonable.
I'm considering plunging into a full item revisions mod since I don't have much hope that some of the more glaring imbalances like throwing daggers will be resolved. I'm just apprehensive about some of the changes that seem unnecessary or over the top. I prefer the unmodded experience I guess because it feels cleaner.
I'm very excited to see what new difficulty setting for 2.0 will bring. The extra experience from nightmare mode tends to actually undo the hardness by allowing the party to get so much stronger faster. I try to balance this out by leaving a lot of experience behind and I don't actually level cap until late in TOB as a result.
I'd love to see a modder take on a crowdsourced project for rebalancing similar to item revisions but that tries to stay as true to the original items as possible. There is a very particular and very special atmosphere in BG2 that mixes both properly balanced elements with supremely overpowered items. Attempting to "balance" everything is IMHO a mistake as it sort of kills the specialness of the game. I think a mod that is setup like bg tweaks where you have to OK every single decision aspect would be really cool.
Sorry if that was a bit outside the scope of your question but take it for what you will!
How many playthroughs, if any, have you done on NM mode? I'm curious of the different experience levels of each player here. If you add mods, throw that in as well so I know where you're coming from.
I've done 3 full clears on Nightmare Mode now, and maybe 10 or so partials, for testing purposes.
I run with SCS cranked to 11, Item Revisions & Spell Revisions, and of course Ascension.
There's still a ton of things I'd like to test and try out, but sadly time is at a premium now for me. I have a whole catalog of classes and party setups waiting that I'm not sure when I'll get to test...
In general, though, I do feel like NM is pretty much the new paradigm for me and I will never go back to normal. Same goes for IR/SR, those mods are much, much better than the vanilla game. While I can see where @Tredvolt is coming from, for me personally the power level of the original items was just too high in general. Same with some of the spells (IH especially). A lot of the difficulty in my games now comes from IR/SR and I'm 100% fine with that. The game is a lot more enjoyable to me in that state.
2 characters. Like Lord_Tansheron I spent a lot more time testing nightmare mode than actually clearing it, trying to figure out the best way to gain XP/get better gear using the least effort. Blame IWD2's HoF mode for that, I've been working on IWD2 UPPs for so long (it -was- the pinnacle of infinity engine game difficulty for over a decade) that when they introduced something similar for BG2 I simply took a similar approach.
I play both EE and the original (modded) game on and off. I hate revision mods - I prefer playing mods that add something to the game over ones that try to change base mechanics/gear in some way, with the exception of mods that try to change everything so that the game feels completely different. Currently I have weimer mods like Tactics, Ascension, SCS and various QoL(eg. BG2 tweaks)/NPC/item addition mods on my BG2 games.
I finished BG2 8 times over the course of 12 years.
1x Human Invoker(SoA only) 1x Dwarven Berserker 1x Half-Elf F/T 1x Halfling F/T 1x Elven F/M/T 3x Human K/T
My first two runs were unmodded, since then I added more and more mods with each playthrough. My last set up had SCS(full, except for pre-buffed mages and Vampire CON drain), aTweaks(full, except for fiendish summoning) and Ascension as difficulty enhancers. On top of that the usual things like fix-and tweakpacks, UB, and 9 or 10 questmods. When I play, i do it to enjoy the journey. I'm not a hardcore optimizer, for me it is more about immersing myself in the world, and enjoy some escapism. My characters don't feature "perfect" builds, I do not maximize prime attributes. That's not to say I wouldn't care about stats and mechanics. I do, and I'm not shy of using Near Infinity when I feel the need to inform myself. I have more fun with non perfect characters, it retains the tension in big encounters, and also gives more things to play with to overcome shortfalls and gives a lot of items additional value("Hey, I found a Potion of Fortitude! Niiice").
Well, since I've now found out what nightmare mode is, I've started a solo runthrough of it with a Gnome I/T, so... Great. Thanks for killing my only just regained free time? Jerks. Not sure at this point if it's my kettle of fish. It was certainly novel how different it was facing that first mephit and getting oodles of Exp out of it, but so far it's feeling more of a slog than difficult. Things hit harder, but immunities like Wraithform still ignore everything and everything still dies on shields, while the extra Exp is... Eh.
If their saving throws are different then I suppose that will make for a very different playstyle later on without my usual save-or-Xs, but otherwise not really a huge change on my standard solo strategy.
Outside of this apparent gap in my Baldurian education, I've otherwise played through all of BG1 and SoA double-digit times (and about half 95% of those times has featured some form of elf), various settings of SCS, and played through ToB twice fully with Ascension and around three times without (because Ascension bugged on me both times at the very super final battle so I have to go through it all again without it, sigh). I think at this point I've completed it with everything except single classes (except a blade) and a Cleric/Thief. Various no reloads of BG1 including solo, one no-reload of BG2, never tried on ToB.
Generally my preferred run nowadays is Core Rules, minimal reload, low resting (1/day max, not in dungeons or wilderness), no purchasing items before Chapter 3, no stealing from fences, no stacking PoMTs, full six man groups of unaltered stock NPCs rotated from quest to quest (generally leaving the rest of the party at 2e6 when CHARNAME starts getting HLAs), and no shenanigans (up to and including Wish, Spell Trap, and Mislead).
And no comment on how many uncompleted runs I've had in any of them. Restartitis is a terrible affliction.
I definitely agree that NM alone is insufficient, even tedious at times. That's my big gripe with IWD and the reason I stopped playing it. Without something else like SCS on top of it, NM alone isn't the challenge people may think it is.
That being said, if you do use the right mods, then NM makes things more enjoyable for sure. Not being able to just steamroll certain fights and go maximum offense all the way changes a lot of things, and forces a lot more diverse strategies.
On topic: - any thief kit within vanilla is miles better than the true thief - the three vanilla's kits are all viable but with metagaming and trap exploiting the Bounty Hunter is probably the best - any multi class thief combination is a lot more powerful than a single class thief - dual classing (as always) is super OP and certain combinations like Kensai-thief or Wizard Slayer-thief becomes ridiculously broken with UAI - EE's Shadowdancer was broken as well with the infinite invisibility mechanic, but now it seems a bit more balanced
I'm considering plunging into a full item revisions mod since I don't have much hope that some of the more glaring imbalances like throwing daggers will be resolved. I'm just apprehensive about some of the changes that seem unnecessary or over the top.
@Tredvolt may I ask a few examples of what you think is "over the top" within IR? Even negative feedback can be useful to me sometime.
Most of the times, those who say "IR nerfs this, SR nerfs that" haven't actually played them....have you?
I'd love to see a modder take on a crowdsourced project for rebalancing similar to item revisions but that tries to stay as true to the original items as possible.
I've tried to preserve vanilla's "feel" as much as possible. IR edits HUNDREDS of items, but 90% of them are still very very similar to what they were despite the tweaks. Only in rare cases I opted for a complete change.
Regarding the "crowdsourced project": all Revisions mods are heavily based on "gathering infos from the crowd". I may have the last word yes, but I have tweaked, refined, or even reverted some of my changes thanks to player's feedback. I really doubt you can find many other modders who spend as much time as me on the forums to discuss every single detail, brainstorming and trying to gather a consensus over any eventual change.
There is a very particular and very special atmosphere in BG2 that mixes both properly balanced elements with supremely overpowered items. Attempting to "balance" everything is IMHO a mistake as it sort of kills the specialness of the game.
IR nerfs a few OP things yes, but I fail to see how it could remove the feel of super powerful items. Every vanilla OP item is still "supremely powerful", they are just not "supremely OP" (e.g. Casomyr's 50% magic res) or broken (e.g. Staff of the Magi's "invisibility every split second").
I think a mod that is setup like bg tweaks where you have to OK every single decision aspect would be really cool.
A mod like IR would have something like 500+ components, each with multiple options, if I had to make every single change optional. Installing such mod would take hours!
@Demivrgvs As you progress through the game, you should get more powerful items. My problem with the base game is that ridiculous items to pale all others items are not only available, they are often available extremely early! I'm all for being rewarded with powerful items as I move through the game but I tend to see it your way Demirgvs, some these items need to be controlled so that more items which are currently ignored make it back into the light of consideration. I'm attempting to convince my friend to play IR and SR in our next campaign and critique it.
IR nerfs a few OP things yes, but I fail to see how it could remove the feel of super powerful items. Every vanilla OP item is still "supremely powerful", they are just not "supremely OP" (e.g. Casomyr's 50% magic res) or broken (e.g. Staff of the Magi's "invisibility every split second").
First of all, I'd like to point out that I appreciate all the hard work you have put into your mods, and apologize for going OT. There are a lot of cool ideas in them. However, I kind of understand Tredvolts stance. From my perspective, IR/SR lack a bit of consistency/coherency at times. There is nothing wrong with nerfing some OP items like Carsomyr and the likes. What's irratating, some get nerfed hard, while others experience more of a change than a real nerf. Some examples: The Ring of Gaxx has basically become a Ring of Protection +2 with some minor addtional functions in IR. The Staff of the Magi on the other hand, while losing the invisibility, gets compensated with a whopping increase in MR and a 30th lvl RM, and the absurd Spell Trap still intact. All in all this thing is just as crazily OP as before. I assume the rationale behind this is that Kangaxx is easy to cheese, hence everybody will do so, and have a very (too)powerful artifact early in the game. For those people who don't cheese him early however, and get the Ring towards the end of SoA, it can appear as a pretty underwhelming reward. Especially considering that said Ring is one of the legendary items in FR lore. Personally, as someone who likes the RoG, but doesn't use the SotM(I also wouldn't use your version of it), that's a huge no-no. Then there are things I'd call pseudo-nerfs which are potential buffs in disguise, like the Maulers Arm. A huge nerf maybe, when you were used to give it to Viconia to overcome her strength issues early in the game. A cheap way to 20STR for Minsc/Anomen right off exiting CI, on the other hand. Bottom line, it all comes down to personal preferences regarding "rebalancing" mods. Some people will like most of the changes, and thus consider it a huge improvement, others will have too many conflicting issues to call it worthwhile. This is why I'm not surprised seeing people asking for a modular set up, so they can choose they changes they like. Of course you are right, given the scope, that is not feasible at all. They should just go and use NI for themselves, if they only want a few changes here and there. It's really not that difficult to change item or spell properties.
I'll address your points and reply in full when I have some time to delve into specific examples. Hopefully later today schedule permitting. Just wanted to reiterate that you and your mod are awesome - so while I may disagree with some parts (and I will try to back that all up soon) just keep in mind I'm some some random guy with opinions.
On a related note - is there a master version readme of ALL changes to IR? I've found bits and pieces through changelogs and old readmes(version 2) but i want to make sure I'm looking at the most recent stuff. I went to the github link and downloaded the lin-item_rev-v3.0.17.tar.gz but even that one has a readme that links to version 2 and the changelog isn't a full list or revisions but just changes in that particular version.
It is possible that it is staring me in the face but I'm just not seeing it.
Comments
I am actually going to give TWS a second look. With the K/T more attacks is indeed powerful, especially with a bard in the party. This is why it's so hard to get away from the boomerang and firetooth.
I want to beat the superiority of throwing daggers and I'm planning on longswords and scimitar. I know most people like the katana... but CF is the only one and that's boring. CF may be the best but I want to explore other avenues to see if I can top it. Daystar is quite strong and easy to reach. There are around 2000 enemies on a streamlined run-through. I was surprised to find over 250 were undead. I'll have belm and SNT most of the game along with a few other useful longswords but what I really want to get ahold of is Blackrazor. I would dual wield that with Equalizer for it's bonus on the MH (that still works in EE right?). Blackrazor will haste K/T to 5 attacks and max strength. I'll swap off the Equalizer with SNT when IHed. I'll have 18 proficiencies to play with. 5 longsword / 5 scimitar / 5 dagger / 3 tws. Maybe swap one out of TWS and into SWS for better backstabs. Not sure there yet.
Oh and I get to warp my party to the dark side. I don't know how this will turn out on NM mode, it may be too dangerous. However, I will still have the daggers to fall back on under dangerous circumstances.
And yeah, Longswords are significantly better than Katana in my book. Daystar and Blackrazor are both just awesome.
Shadowdancers can kill anyone they want! Shadowdancers cut off heads ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this shadowdancer who was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon the shadowdancer killed the whole town.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*takes a breath and let the gentle men who work at his new house put him back into his nice with shirt with very very long sleeves, so long they need to be tied in his back, so people don't happen to walk on them*
You need a lot of time to kill something, but hey, you're invincible!
How many playthroughs, if any, have you done on NM mode? I'm curious of the different experience levels of each player here. If you add mods, throw that in as well so I know where you're coming from.
I play exclusively on nightmare mode. I've played with many of the difficulty mods but I've always found that they miss the mark (although I have tremendous respect for the creators).
My record is completing the game by 28 days 2 hours with a 4 player party in nightmare. I use 2 bgtweaks - ammo stacking - potion stacking. Although I'm considering playing without those to increase difficulty HOWEVER i really think the 80 ammo limit is just not reasonable.
I'm considering plunging into a full item revisions mod since I don't have much hope that some of the more glaring imbalances like throwing daggers will be resolved. I'm just apprehensive about some of the changes that seem unnecessary or over the top. I prefer the unmodded experience I guess because it feels cleaner.
I'm very excited to see what new difficulty setting for 2.0 will bring. The extra experience from nightmare mode tends to actually undo the hardness by allowing the party to get so much stronger faster. I try to balance this out by leaving a lot of experience behind and I don't actually level cap until late in TOB as a result.
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I'd love to see a modder take on a crowdsourced project for rebalancing similar to item revisions but that tries to stay as true to the original items as possible. There is a very particular and very special atmosphere in BG2 that mixes both properly balanced elements with supremely overpowered items. Attempting to "balance" everything is IMHO a mistake as it sort of kills the specialness of the game. I think a mod that is setup like bg tweaks where you have to OK every single decision aspect would be really cool.
Sorry if that was a bit outside the scope of your question but take it for what you will!
I run with SCS cranked to 11, Item Revisions & Spell Revisions, and of course Ascension.
There's still a ton of things I'd like to test and try out, but sadly time is at a premium now for me. I have a whole catalog of classes and party setups waiting that I'm not sure when I'll get to test...
In general, though, I do feel like NM is pretty much the new paradigm for me and I will never go back to normal. Same goes for IR/SR, those mods are much, much better than the vanilla game. While I can see where @Tredvolt is coming from, for me personally the power level of the original items was just too high in general. Same with some of the spells (IH especially). A lot of the difficulty in my games now comes from IR/SR and I'm 100% fine with that. The game is a lot more enjoyable to me in that state.
I play both EE and the original (modded) game on and off. I hate revision mods - I prefer playing mods that add something to the game over ones that try to change base mechanics/gear in some way, with the exception of mods that try to change everything so that the game feels completely different. Currently I have weimer mods like Tactics, Ascension, SCS and various QoL(eg. BG2 tweaks)/NPC/item addition mods on my BG2 games.
1x Human Invoker(SoA only)
1x Dwarven Berserker
1x Half-Elf F/T
1x Halfling F/T
1x Elven F/M/T
3x Human K/T
My first two runs were unmodded, since then I added more and more mods with each playthrough. My last set up had SCS(full, except for pre-buffed mages and Vampire CON drain), aTweaks(full, except for fiendish summoning) and Ascension as difficulty enhancers. On top of that the usual things like fix-and tweakpacks, UB, and 9 or 10 questmods.
When I play, i do it to enjoy the journey. I'm not a hardcore optimizer, for me it is more about immersing myself in the world, and enjoy some escapism. My characters don't feature "perfect" builds, I do not maximize prime attributes. That's not to say I wouldn't care about stats and mechanics. I do, and I'm not shy of using Near Infinity when I feel the need to inform myself.
I have more fun with non perfect characters, it retains the tension in big encounters, and also gives more things to play with to overcome shortfalls and gives a lot of items additional value("Hey, I found a Potion of Fortitude! Niiice").
If their saving throws are different then I suppose that will make for a very different playstyle later on without my usual save-or-Xs, but otherwise not really a huge change on my standard solo strategy.
Outside of this apparent gap in my Baldurian education, I've otherwise played through all of BG1 and SoA double-digit times (and about half 95% of those times has featured some form of elf), various settings of SCS, and played through ToB twice fully with Ascension and around three times without (because Ascension bugged on me both times at the very super final battle so I have to go through it all again without it, sigh). I think at this point I've completed it with everything except single classes (except a blade) and a Cleric/Thief. Various no reloads of BG1 including solo, one no-reload of BG2, never tried on ToB.
Generally my preferred run nowadays is Core Rules, minimal reload, low resting (1/day max, not in dungeons or wilderness), no purchasing items before Chapter 3, no stealing from fences, no stacking PoMTs, full six man groups of unaltered stock NPCs rotated from quest to quest (generally leaving the rest of the party at 2e6 when CHARNAME starts getting HLAs), and no shenanigans (up to and including Wish, Spell Trap, and Mislead).
And no comment on how many uncompleted runs I've had in any of them. Restartitis is a terrible affliction.
That being said, if you do use the right mods, then NM makes things more enjoyable for sure. Not being able to just steamroll certain fights and go maximum offense all the way changes a lot of things, and forces a lot more diverse strategies.
- any thief kit within vanilla is miles better than the true thief
- the three vanilla's kits are all viable but with metagaming and trap exploiting the Bounty Hunter is probably the best
- any multi class thief combination is a lot more powerful than a single class thief
- dual classing (as always) is super OP and certain combinations like Kensai-thief or Wizard Slayer-thief becomes ridiculously broken with UAI
- EE's Shadowdancer was broken as well with the infinite invisibility mechanic, but now it seems a bit more balanced
Off topic... @Tredvolt may I ask a few examples of what you think is "over the top" within IR? Even negative feedback can be useful to me sometime.
Most of the times, those who say "IR nerfs this, SR nerfs that" haven't actually played them....have you?
Regarding the "crowdsourced project": all Revisions mods are heavily based on "gathering infos from the crowd". I may have the last word yes, but I have tweaked, refined, or even reverted some of my changes thanks to player's feedback. I really doubt you can find many other modders who spend as much time as me on the forums to discuss every single detail, brainstorming and trying to gather a consensus over any eventual change. IR nerfs a few OP things yes, but I fail to see how it could remove the feel of super powerful items. Every vanilla OP item is still "supremely powerful", they are just not "supremely OP" (e.g. Casomyr's 50% magic res) or broken (e.g. Staff of the Magi's "invisibility every split second"). A mod like IR would have something like 500+ components, each with multiple options, if I had to make every single change optional. Installing such mod would take hours!
As you progress through the game, you should get more powerful items. My problem with the base game is that ridiculous items to pale all others items are not only available, they are often available extremely early! I'm all for being rewarded with powerful items as I move through the game but I tend to see it your way Demirgvs, some these items need to be controlled so that more items which are currently ignored make it back into the light of consideration. I'm attempting to convince my friend to play IR and SR in our next campaign and critique it.
BTW @Tredvolt , respond to Demivrgvs here so we stay on topic in this thread: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/48193/rebalance-and-improved-challenge-mods-opinions#latest
From my perspective, IR/SR lack a bit of consistency/coherency at times. There is nothing wrong with nerfing some OP items like Carsomyr and the likes. What's irratating, some get nerfed hard, while others experience more of a change than a real nerf.
Some examples: The Ring of Gaxx has basically become a Ring of Protection +2 with some minor addtional functions in IR. The Staff of the Magi on the other hand, while losing the invisibility, gets compensated with a whopping increase in MR and a 30th lvl RM, and the absurd Spell Trap still intact. All in all this thing is just as crazily OP as before.
I assume the rationale behind this is that Kangaxx is easy to cheese, hence everybody will do so, and have a very (too)powerful artifact early in the game. For those people who don't cheese him early however, and get the Ring towards the end of SoA, it can appear as a pretty underwhelming reward. Especially considering that said Ring is one of the legendary items in FR lore.
Personally, as someone who likes the RoG, but doesn't use the SotM(I also wouldn't use your version of it), that's a huge no-no.
Then there are things I'd call pseudo-nerfs which are potential buffs in disguise, like the Maulers Arm. A huge nerf maybe, when you were used to give it to Viconia to overcome her strength issues early in the game. A cheap way to 20STR for Minsc/Anomen right off exiting CI, on the other hand.
Bottom line, it all comes down to personal preferences regarding "rebalancing" mods. Some people will like most of the changes, and thus consider it a huge improvement, others will have too many conflicting issues to call it worthwhile.
This is why I'm not surprised seeing people asking for a modular set up, so they can choose they changes they like. Of course you are right, given the scope, that is not feasible at all.
They should just go and use NI for themselves, if they only want a few changes here and there. It's really not that difficult to change item or spell properties.
I'll address your points and reply in full when I have some time to delve into specific examples. Hopefully later today schedule permitting. Just wanted to reiterate that you and your mod are awesome - so while I may disagree with some parts (and I will try to back that all up soon) just keep in mind I'm some some random guy with opinions.
On a related note - is there a master version readme of ALL changes to IR? I've found bits and pieces through changelogs and old readmes(version 2) but i want to make sure I'm looking at the most recent stuff. I went to the github link and downloaded the lin-item_rev-v3.0.17.tar.gz but even that one has a readme that links to version 2 and the changelog isn't a full list or revisions but just changes in that particular version.
It is possible that it is staring me in the face but I'm just not seeing it.