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The new difficulty setting

tobajastobajas Member Posts: 77
edited April 2016 in The Road to v2.0
Okey I just gotta say DAYUM what is this new difficulty setting. So today after deciding to start a playthrough from BGEE - SoD - BG2EE I started my run through BG2EE and decided to do it heavily modded with BWS.

Most of my mods just adds flavor NPC's a ton of new quests and some difficulty increase in mostly the way of SCS. The tactical mods I am using almost all of them simply makes enemy AI better, adds new abilities/spells but most of all it upps the enemy encounter for instance starting dungeons goblins are switched from goblins to duergars and encounter with 3 normal trolls turns into 3 normal trolls and 2 spirit trolls, well you get the picture.

Anyhow in my naivity I decided to try out the new hardest difficulty settings on top of this. I just gotta say I was very much suprised about the difficulty jump to say the least. To make an example the duergars in the starting area jumped from normal games lvl 5 fighters 29 hp 3/2 attacks 4 AC and 13 thaco to lvl 17 fighters 161 hp 7/2 attacks 4 ac and 8 thaco. So what this meant was that my characters with around 2 AC were getting hit on every roll by the enemies of 6 or above was hitting my characters and the melee duergars had +3 on these rolls and ranged once had +1 and yeah of course because of the higher lvls the saving throws are much higher.

To top it off the normal hits were between 15-30 dmg on average long story short they were just slaughtering my characters in the first encounter because of me underestimating them. Even after getting out of there I stated noticing all my characters that didn't prevent critical hits exploded into meat paste when an enemy got a critical hit.

So my final say on this is good job on making a harder difficulty settings, it is actually so hard and slow for me with to many reloads that I decided that this difficulty setting is not something you start even if you got the new starting experience of a SoD character ( starting at around 500 000xp). I'll try again once my character has finished BG2EE once and then restart with the high leveled characters to try again.

Overall what you can expect from the diffiulty setting is overall enemies at 3-4 times higher lvl then normal, 3-5 times more hp, more then twice their normal dmg and much much better saving throws. I haven't seen any gear change so for most characters they have no better AC then usual or dmg reductions they do however have much better thaco to some degree that I think a full player made party or NPC's upgraded/changed through EE keeper is the only way to playthrough the diffculty fairly smoothly. Any character that cant cast stoneskin on themselves will possibly melt within seconds.

Comments

  • GrimLefourbeGrimLefourbe Member Posts: 637
    It's not a difficulty setting like the others, it's like the mod in IWD.
    JuliusBorisov
  • tobajastobajas Member Posts: 77
    edited April 2016

    It's not a difficulty setting like the others, it's like the mod in IWD.

    I am guessing you mean Heart of Fury, which is pretty much the same as this. But it is not a mod but just like this a difficulty setting or "difficulty mode" it's simply a setting that is permanent for the whole game.

    Far as I've seen though Legacy of Bhaal is different from Heart of Fury in the way that Legacy gives the same kind of difficulty setting however it does not bump up the items the same way as Heart of Fury does where every item in the game pretty much get's extended lore and get's an increase in power.
  • SirBatinceSirBatince Member Posts: 882
    Think "Nightmare!" skill from the old Doom games. It's not supposed to be fair.
  • tobajastobajas Member Posts: 77
    Well the post wasn't suppose to be a complaint, it was more me being suprised in a positive way since I like a challenge :smiley:
    GoturalJuliusBorisovmonico
  • WanderingScholarWanderingScholar Member Posts: 17
    I think I'll just stick to SCS if I want a difficulty increase. I recently watched a video online of someone playing on LOB difficulty just to get an idea of how it was. It shows them getting repeatedly killed and knocked unconscious by rats in that one house at candlekeep. Seeing this alone really turned me off to LOB mode. One thing SCS does so well is that it gives a great tactical challenge that is believable and rarely breaks immersion. I wonder if this mod will ever be brought to SOD?
    JuliusBorisov
  • GrimLefourbeGrimLefourbe Member Posts: 637
    LoD isn't meant to be like SCS, all ennemies have 3 times their health and a flat 80 on top of that.

    It's meant to be like HoF mode in IWD.

    If you're more of an scs player, you should stick to insane with damage increase disabled imo.
    JuliusBorisov
  • DoubledimasDoubledimas Member, Mobile Tester Posts: 1,286
    There was a post somewhere where somebody explained the problems with the rats + LoB. Apparently, for other enemies it does scale but at a supposed rate, but for some weird combination of effects the rats become monstrous rats of doom and destruction.
    JuliusBorisovArunsun
  • FranpaFranpa Member Posts: 637

    There was a post somewhere where somebody explained the problems with the rats + LoB. Apparently, for other enemies it does scale but at a supposed rate, but for some weird combination of effects the rats become monstrous rats of doom and destruction.

    https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/49777/remove-candlekeep-rat-damage-resistance
    Doubledimas
  • ArunsunArunsun Member Posts: 1,592
    Well it's not meant to be easy but with a fairly experimented team you can get them quite easily. 500,000 exp means you will have, for example 3 (4 if specialist) stoneskins as a mage and 6 as a sorcerer, which is enough to tank them for a while.
    Or a shadowdancer might still get them down one by one. It'll take time but it will work.
    Just need to adapt to your team I guess, as always.
  • FranpaFranpa Member Posts: 637
    How do you get 500,000XP (more than the cap allows) at the start of Baldur's Gate/before leaving Candle Keep?
  • GrimLefourbeGrimLefourbe Member Posts: 637
    The rats only attack very rarely, they're not difficult to kill, just very very tedious. Your weapon will probably break 10 times before you kill them. An end game character imported in Candlekeep can easily take care of them.
  • GrimLefourbeGrimLefourbe Member Posts: 637
    @Franpa you can import characters that were previously above the cap, they'll be capped but they will retain their stats.
  • 00zim0000zim00 Member Posts: 267
    edited April 2016
    Does anyone know if LoD also artificially raises the spell level of spells opponents cast? Or even there Actual level not just there HP, Saves, etc. I'm finding Dispel Magic to be working way less often then I remember.
  • chaos286chaos286 Member Posts: 21
    00zim00 said:

    Does anyone know if LoD also artificially raises the spell level of spells opponents cast? Or even there Actual level not just there HP, Saves, etc. I'm finding Dispel Magic to be working way less often then I remember.

    Yes, LOB increases the creature's level by 12. Among other effects, that effectively eliminates turning undead as a character ability.
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