Find Familiar
Sanguinius
Member Posts: 4
Will this spell be implemented into BG:EE never played bg 1 with any mods or anything but surely this lvl1 spell will massively help a lvl 1 mage in terms of a hp increase plus the other benefits of a half decent support minion which while was terrible in bg2/tob for dmg could easily defeat every low level kobold with ease?
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Other than that, they aren't gamebreaking. They still tend to die if you leave them out and that's a huge hit to your HP pool as a mage. I've utilized them in BGtutu before. Never found them amazing.
while 8-12hp boost for a mage is significant within 1-3 lvl i see no reason to ban find familiar spell (or make it unavailable till later in the game).
for balancing i'd rather have mages nerfed above lvl 18 then have them even crappier at early game, as they already suck big time having 4-6 hp at the beginning....
Plus, given that the familiar bonuses don't scale up, they become less and less useful while the mage grows in power, so that at higher levels (when the mage is actually one of the most powerful classes of all) the mage doesn't get a particularly good bonus from them.
Casting Armor after that meant I could walk out the front gates with the same level of protection and *more* HP than a half-Orc barbarian.
That's a bit silly.
My best guess is that you'd be dead in max 2 rounds (two rounds AFTER having cast Armor AND Magic Missle, thrown in as a bonus), and if you're lucky you could have landend 5 or 6 damages with the staff. (Also, don't think that throwing darts from a distance could gain you any advantage, because the barbarian is even faster than you!)
On top of that, s/he levels up at 2000 XPs, you level up at 2500.
So, if there's some other consideration that I don't get, fine, but I wouldn't really be afraid that Find Familiar would be overpowering for mages or sorcerers... (Nor that it's not "realistic," because, well... Son of Bhaal and all.)
One of the biggest early weaknesses the class has is their lack of hit dice. If you give them *three to four times* as many hit points as they'd normally be allowed, you're going beyond mitigating the weakness to completely removing it.
It also trivializes the advantages of rolling a fighter (namely, higher HP pools and better damage mitigation). Who would want to roll a pure class fighter or thief when you can double or triple your HP just by casting one spell?
That's why it's silly. Endgame ToB already has far too much cheese in it. We don't need to start packing it into level 1 characters before they leave Candlekeep.
I understand now that you were talking about preserving specific class characteristics, like high HPs for fighters, and I get what you're saying (though I'm not much concerned about that aspect either, because spells tend to alter those characteristics anyway). Sorry again.
I'm only concerned with character balance as it relates to difficulty. A big HP pool on a starting mage gives them much more survivability and would make the opening game easier.
I don't want the core game to be easier. If anything, I want it to be more difficult.
Of course, in P&P there was no safe place to hide your familiar in a combat, unless you take some magical items that were designed to protect a familiar in consideration, and most players I met through the years preferred not to risk the dangers of having a familiar killed.
Testing out something else, last night I rolled an elven Fighter/Mage who ended up with 23 HP at the start of the game.
@mlnevese Does it scale with level on paper? Or is it a flat boost at level one?
If you are playing a multiplayer game where different people control their own characters (so a "real" multi game,not just a multi session where you create and control all the chars...), are mages who are not protagonists allowed to cast the find familiar spell?
This is kinda important for me. My brother and I would like to start a multi game together and both of us would like to be sorcerers...
With Tutu, I could not cast the Find Familiar spell since I wanted my dad to be the protagonist so he could experience the game from the leader position. To fix it, I hosted the game, had my mage as the protagonist, and had her cast it, put it in my pack saved and sent the file back to my dad.
Here's the rub: If he stays in my inventory it's all good. When I took him out he became the property of my dad's fighter XD
Annnd at some point he vanished because he's not in my pack anymore. XD
No, only the player considered to be the Bhaalspawn can cast Find Familiar, so only player 1.