A possible Light of Selune Rev 2?

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Hi guys,

I'm looking at doing a minor revision to my Light of Selune mod before playing my next party. Nothing major, mostly dealing with the little bugs in the Class Upgrades section, plus possibly making some thoroughly non-standard tweaks to some of the lesser classes and races to make them at least a little more useful.


Before I continue, please remember that I'm limited to class-related changes that I can do within the 2DA files. Actually tweaking the feats themselves requires lower level coding changes similar to what Mindchild has done with his very interesting mod.


Let me outline some of my thoughts, and give me your feedback.

A. Remove the Reflex Save tweak to the Ranger class. This appears to be rather buggy win multi-classing situations. In lieu of this buggy tweak, I think that a far less capable version that will avoid any bugs would be to just give Rangers the Lightning Reflexes feat at creation. Honestly, I don't really like doing this, because I simply don't like "at creation" bonuses since they further encourage single level sniping. However, I don't think that there are many alternatives.

B. Remove the Ranger D8 HP tweak. I am unaware of any bugs relating to this particular tweak (though if there are, let me know). The reason that I'm thinking about removing this tweak is that simply letting Rangers have the ol' D10 HP rather than the newer D8 HP lets them be that little bit more combat capable, which is the major complaint against the Ranger class in general (combat capability, not lack of HP, I mean).

C. Increase the number of Feats for Rangers and Paladins. Of course, this is thoroughly counter to the standard rules. However, the options for improving Ranger and Paladin combat capability are rather limited when one is limited to only tweaking 2DA files. Right now, Fighters gain "bonus" feats at a rate of every 2nd level, not counting one bonus feat at creation. What I'm thinking is giving Rangers and Paladins a "bonus" feat every 4th level, which would be half the rate at which Fighters earn their bonus feats... thus retaining some advantage in this regard.

I could also do the same thing for Rogues, as a way to enhance their combat capability, since it appears that giving them access to a few more feats is one of the few ways that their combat capability can be enhanced. Remember that Rogues already have the same BAB progression (i.e. 75% of the BAB of the warrior classes) as clerics, druids, bards, and monks, so it's not as if their BAB progression is all that bad. Also, I'd suggest that using Mindchild's DLL mod can be useful here, if you use the feature that allows weapon finesse to be adjusted to allow any weapon to use it as long as you have 2 points in that weapon.

Note that I haven't mentioned increasing the number of feats for Barbarians. In part, this is because I don't recall anyone every saying that pure class barbs were underpowered. That said, they may end up feeling that way if Rangers and Pally's were getting bonus feats every 4th level and they weren't. Something to consider.


D. Consider removing the Diplomacy skill cost of 2 for sorcerers. The Diplomacy skill cost of 2 for sorcerers is entirely legit according to the 3.5ed rules. However, certain people seem to think that this is a "crippling" restriction. Not sure how one could classify this as "crippling". It's only a talking skill.

However, what I might do is go in the entire opposite direction. A gripe that I have, particularly from a replayability PoV, is that IWD2's costs for the talking skills make it almost certain that a party's talker will almost always be a sorcerer, bards, or possibly a paladin (except when wanting to accept a reward). (Rogues can great talkers, if you take a lot of levels and keep their CHA score at a decent level, since by the base rules, all 3 talking skills are in-class for rogues. But, of course, if you make a rogue capable of being the party's talker, you've also lost a fair number of stat points that will further weaken an already combat-weak class.) With perhaps a few exceptions, I'm not particularly convinced by all the class restrictions on talking skills. But furthermore, it seems to make the game more boring when you are pretty much forced to use the same classes for talking all the time, at least if you want to take advantage of those talking skills. I think that it'd be great to allow talking skills to be more widely available (i.e. at the 1 SP in-class cost), since it might encourage players to use different classes as their party talkers. Well, at least players interested in some role-playing, since I could see many power gamers not worrying about talking skills at all. Can't please everyone. Of course, if you're a power gamer, or merely a relatively aggressive min-maxer, you may have some rather low CHA scores on any non-Sorc, Bard, or Pally character. I suppose that this might somewhat encourage some people to reconsider having at least one non-standard talker class keep a decent CHA so that it could do the talking for the party.

Oh, one other thing on Skills... I'm thinking about reducing the cost of Alchemy for Rogues to make it a more accessible skill for them. As it stands now with Alchemy costing 2 SP, you can't get enough SP to meet the prereq for Envenom Weapon until near the end of normal mode. But if the cost of Alchemy is reduced to 1 SP, it makes it a more attractive option, and makes the Envenom Weapon feat reasonably attainable without having to multi-class over to a wizard to get the in-class lower SP cost. Besides, if you are a rogue and want to create your own poisoned weapons, why should alchemy be all that difficult? It seems like it should be an in-class skill for rogues. (And BTW, I realize that Envenom Weapon feat isn't exactly much to write home about. But at least this makes it a little more relevant.)


Oh, and one last thing regarding feats. Over the years, some people have felt that the Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization feats have seemed relatively weak. I've written code that would change WF and WS from simply +1 to-hit for WF and +2 damage for WS to +1 to-hit AND +2 damage for WF, and then a further +1 to-hit and +2 damage for WS (i.e. an overall +2 to-hit and +4 damage).



Regarding races, I have a couple of minor tweaks that I'm considering.

1. Half-Elves: In addition to the +2 Diplomacy bonus I already gave them in LoS rev 1, I was thinking about giving them a +2 Bluff bonus as well. It's not much, but it's a little something.

2. Halflings and Rock Gnomes: According to the 3.5ed manual, Halflings and Gnomes should get a +1 AC bonus and a +4 Hide bonus*, due to their small size. Now, I know how create a racial specific skill bonus, but for the life of me, I have no clue how Deep Gnomes get their own special AC bonus. However... I do know how to produce a +1 AC bonus for Halflings and Rock Gnomes except to simply give them the Dodge feat at creation for free.

* Interestingly, the 3.5ed manual says nothing about the halfling's +1 Move Silently skill bonus, but does talk about the +4 Hide bonus (due to their small size).


Items: I'm not particularly interested in creating any additional new items for LoS. I'd actually like this revision to be fairly quick to do, and creating a bunch of new weapons for LoSr2 would take more time than I'm really interested in investing at this point.



Those are all the ideas I have for now. So, feel free to fire away.

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FYI, I've already coded up all of the above described ideas. All of them involved nothing more than edits of the LoS installation (tp2) file to control the editting of various 2DA files within the game. But as of the writing of this post, I haven't yet tested the new tp2 file.

 

I like the ideas you've got. Special thanks for restoring the sorcerer's talking skills.

Regarding warrior feats: Giving them some more feats would make them surpass fighters, since they will be able to take all useful feats, and also have innate abilities that fighters don't have. The less useful feats that fighters are left with, aren't any good. What I'd suggest, is allow rangers and paladins to eventually be able to take Weapon Specialization. Can you perhaps code it to allow 3 weapon feat slots after 4 fighter AND ALSO say, after 10 ranger/paladin levels? Or is that the wrong kind of coding again? I suggest it, because it seems that if you can change the weapon feats' damage and AB, you could also change their requirements...

And if you're busy enabling class skills, give druids Alchemy. It makes sense.

 

Frankly, I saw nothing wrong with it. At least according to the 3.5ed rules, it was entirely legit that sorc's shouldn't have diplomacy as an in-class skill. But then again, I have considerable issues with this in-class or cross-class thing where the talking "skills" are concerned. It's my belief that all of the talking skills should be treated as in-class skills with very few exceptions. (Oh, I suppose that I could see Diplomacy as a cross-class skill for barbarians, for example.)

I realize that that may be the effect. But the fact remains that rangers and, for many people, paladins are not particularly powerful as pure class characters. And the tweaking options that I have available to me are very limited. Adding skills has a VERY limited effect on combat effectiveness, and for some classes no effect at all. That tends to leave me only with adding feats. And remember that for the most part, I'm stuck with the feats as they currently exist.

Yes, "wrong kind of coding". It would require coding changes similar to what Mindchild does.

It might seem that way, but it's not the case. It's just serendipity that the values for the effects of weapon prof., focus, and specialization happen to exist within an editable 2DA file, rather than being hardcoded. I only re-learned this a few hours ago.

I'm not sure how much sense it makes. Why would a druid need to care about alchemy? To the best of my knowledge, druids aren't going to be brewing magical potions, like a mage would, or poisons like a rogue would logically seem to. From a raw gaming standpoint, I can see where it'd be useful to have some class other than wizard or sorcerer to to alchemy for the purposes of the Dragon's Eye quest ... but I suppose that the same argument could be made of any class.

(As an aside, it's a shame that it's not possible to break down skill costs by "kit". It doesn't seem to make sense to me that Lorekeepers should get a +1 Alchemy bonus, but be forced to treat Alchemy as a cross-class skill. Oh well. Seems to make Lorekeeper Alchemy bonus entirely useless.)


BTW, coin, I have no intention of changing Light of Selune's version of Cera Sumat. It bugs the heck out of me that the official version of it is used as nothing more than a spell resistance "shield" by paladin wannabes (aka sorc X/pal 1 builds). But if I were to make a change, it would be to remove its spell resistance entirely to prevent its use as a cheesey SR "shield" by those wannabe paladins. IMHO, a Holy Avenger sword should be a weapon for true paladins , not a bunch of wannabes.

 

I don't think it would be a good idea to allow specialization for other classes than fighters. This would make the entire fighter class pointless.

Making specialization better is not such a bad move however.

Druids should know of herbs and medicines so I can understand Coin's point. Still, it is quite clear that alchemy is a mage skill used for potion brewing. That's part of the limitations of the game.

Do you intend to make traps even deadlier? That would make a strong case for including rogues in any party.

 

I thought druid Alchemy was fairly self-evident: The whole mythology of turning lead into gold, the mystical druids, etc. But maybe I'm just remembering old british stories...
Alchemy and transmutation are somewhat linked, as the quest in the underdark testifies. And druids are essentially arcane transmuters, if you ask me.. Call lightning, shapeshifting, nature magic, etc.

 

Carad,

A. I have no plans to do this, and ...

B. It could only be done thru something like Mindchild's Custom DLL mod. The Fighter class-Weapon Specialization linkage is not something controlled by 2DA files.

Well, it's really making both focus and specialization better.

I really don't have any intention of making this change. I suppose that I can see the argument, but I'm not sure that I'd say that a druid's knowledge of herbs and medicines translates into magely potion brewing.

In truth, I'm not so sure that I'd say that even a Rogue's potential knowledge of creating poisons translates into potion brewing either. However, the rules do require Rogues to use the Alchemy skill as a prereq for the Envenom Weapon feat. It occurs to me that all in all, it might be better if Alchemy remained a 2 SP cross-class skill for rogues, but the Envenom Weapon feat's alchemy prereq was cut in half, with the net effect being that it would be similarly "easy" to meet the EW prereq, but would still make it very difficult for a rogue to ever get enough SP in Alchemy to use in the Dragon's Eye lab. However, this change would need to be made in a Mindchild-like DLL. And in the shorter term, it's easier to simply cut cost of the Alchemy skill for rogues.

It has not been my intention to make traps even deadlier, mostly because I haven't really wanted to invest the time required to do so. There are about 32 SPL files that would have to be edited to do this.

That said, maybe I'll take a look at those files and see what could be done with minimal effort. No guarantees though.

---------- Added 13 hours, 27 minutes and 12 seconds later... ----------

Carad, as I said earlier, it hadn't been my intention to make the traps nastier. However, upon further reflection and some quick analysis of the trap SPL files, I decided that it wouldn't be particularly difficult to make the traps more difficult, as long as I only made the existing effects more powerful.

Thus, what I've done is to increase the power of nearly all traps by 50%. Damaging traps will do 50% more damage. Traps that have some effect that is timed (like being held for X amount of seconds) have had their duration increased by 50%. If the trap was a killing trap ... well, I don't think that I can make you 50% more dead , so I left those as is.

---------- Added 23 hours, 30 minutes and 52 seconds later... ----------

I'm in the process of testing LOS rev 2, and have come across a somewhat annoying problem with WeiDU. It turns out the the latest rev of WeiDU, rev 211, is incompatible with LOS, or rather it's incompatible with the IWD2 CRE file format. (I've reported this in the WeiDU forum over at Pocket Plane.)

I can ship LOS with the old rev of WeiDU that LOS rev 1 uses (WeiDU rev 198), and things will work fine. The problem occurs with the Widescreen mod which happens to use WeiDU rev 211. You can load Widescreen mod after all other mods and it'll install properly. HOWEVER, if you should need to uninstall/reinstall the core Light of Selune mod, it WILL fail, since installing the Widescreen mod happens to upgrade all other instances of WeiDU to the highest revision (which would be Widescreen's WeiDU rev 211).

The PROPER fix will be for the WeiDU people to fix their IWD2 CRE file format issue. But in the shorter term, about the best suggestion that I will be able to make when I release LOS rev2 is that use of the Widescreen mod will cause problems unless you install it LAST, or if you happen to need to uninstall/reinstall LOS after Widescreen has been installed.

Just thought that I'd mention this little annoyance that I've run across during my testing... argh.

---------- Added 21 hours, 4 minutes and 41 seconds later... ----------

Well, in the process of testing LOS-r2, I've come to the conclusion that the racial skill bonuses that I've added into the proper skills 2DA file are being completely ignored. Thus, it appears that the racial skill bonuses that are already in the game must be hardcoded. However, the racially linked +1 AC (via a Dodge feat) for Rock Gnomes and all Halflings was accepted properly. Strange.

Also during my testing, I determined that the archery +1 AB/+1 damage every 3rd level for Rangers also never really worked properly. Oh, the game actually does try to properly apply the special SPL file to the ranger, but for some reason the bonuses don't seem to be properly accepted. Sigh.

As a result of these mildly annoying discoveries, I'm removing the related code from the Class Upgrades section, as there's no point in leaving useless code in the installation file to clutter up an already long file.

I have verified that the additional bonus feats for certain other classes are being properly handled, and given at the appropriate level ups. It's nice that some of the upgrades actually work, even if a small handful of additional feats is a relatively meager improvement for paladins, rangers, and rogues.

Oh, I've also verified that the changes to weapon focus and weapon specialization worked properly.


Moving on ...

 

Maybe try another option to improve your Archer's ranged damage, like a luck effect, or ignoring DR...