My idea for a “rebalanced” Heart of Fury mode

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First off, this post is not meant to offend any of my hardcore, powergaming colleagues on BoM. There are many of you out there, and I very much respect and enjoy your detailed analysis of the game. In fact, your analysis was very helpful to me in formulating the idea I share here. With that out of the way….

Background Information -- Skip this section if you are from the TL;DR crowd.

I’ve tried Heart of Fury mode a couple of times, but have never been able to muster the will to slog all the way through it. It’s not that it’s too hard for me. I used to play the Improved Anvil mod for Baldur’s Gate II, which is the most challenging IE gaming experience that I’m aware of. But that was a good 6 years ago, and since that time I’ve gone from having 1 child to 2, and then 3, and my career is more demanding than it has ever been. Heart of Fury isn’t “hard” in the sense that Improved Anvil is… a better word is tedious. It requires constant, time consuming buffing fiestas against even what should be trivial foes. I really don’t have the time, patience, or interest to play a game like that anymore. However, I do have an interest in gaming through HoF so that I can see some of that uber HoF loot and raise my characters to the highest levels.

I’m also a roleplayer at heart, and it kills me that in HoF mode AC really has no meaning… except for with those bizarre “decoy” characters that feel more like walking mathematical equations than they do heroes of legend. I mean, a Deep Gnome Monk16/Rogue1/Dreadmaster of Bane1/Illusionist12 with 5 STR, 1 CHA and 89 AC buffed surely gets the job done, but this character would get me laughed away from my gaming table with my PnP friends, and perhaps even lynched! I want AC to matter, but I don’t want to have to run a character that is nothing short of a roleplaying drug trip to accomplish that!

What I want is Heart of Fury mode, using the party that I want to run, where mechanics like AC matters like they should, and where the overall gameplay experience is closer to that of normal mode. Most of all, I want my epic level party to feel like an epic level party when they encounter a group of Orcs or Bugbears. Yeah, I can cast mass heal 4 times if need be, and then rest for the next encounter, but dammit I don’t want to!! Not against lowly Orcs, at least.

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Some Details About Heart of Fury (HoF) mode -- More important than the background information, but a possible TL;DR candidate as well, depending on how much time you have

So I present here my current “experiment”, a rather simplistic rebalancing of my characters in order to bring them closer in line with the enemies in HoF. First let’s reiterate what HoF does to enemies:
** It gives them triple base hitpoints
** It gives them +20 to their attack bonus (but no additional attacks per round)
** It gives them +6 to all of their base stats, and all of the associated bonuses that come with higher stats (e.g. higher saves, attack bonuses, damage, etc.)
** It gives them a +10 bonus to saving throws
** It gives them +200% damage (meaning triple damage from what they did in normal mode)!

Above and beyond this, enemies are leveled scaled based on the level of the player’s party. So a level 17 party is going to face a much tougher goblin than a level 1 party would. The above bonuses are applied to the tougher, level scaled goblin.

*Thanks to Sir Rechet’s JUPP for the HoF information.*

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My HoF party creation details -- This is what I consider to be the meat of my post, so if you don’t want to read this, well, then this post is truly dead to you.

So here’s what I have done in response, using Dale Keeper, in order to bring back a balance that more closely resembles that of normal mode:
1) I have given all of my party members +20 to their base AC. This will still allow very few of them, if any, to reach the “ideal” AC of 73, which is where they won’t get hit on anything but a critical even from the toughest foes, but that’s okay. Getting hit by enemies is supposed to be part of the experience! Here I have essentially negated the +20 to attack given to enemies.
2) I have given my party members anywhere from 5 – 10 damage reduction against slashing, bludgeoning, piercing and missile damage. Mages get 5, Healers get 8 and tanks get 10. This doesn’t nearly make up for the fact that enemies will be doing triple damage, but it should mean that the insane damage from enemies is a bit more manageable. These values are my starting values, and might require some tweaking to achieve the balance I am looking for.
3) I have granted each of my characters 8 stat bonuses to apply. They can put up to 4 in a primary stat and up to 2 in a secondary stat (e.g. a fighter could pump either CON or STR by 4, and any other stat by 2, but could only spend 8 total points). Not quite the +6 given to each stat for the enemies, but this is a nod to the fact that in HoF I’ve entered a more uber realm, and so I’m uberizing my guys a bit too.
4) I also took some liberties with feats here and there. For example, bards shouldn’t need to invest feats to cast spells with light armor. To my understanding, they can do that natively, so my bard started with 3 ranks in armored arcana. Nothing too dramatic here, but I thought that I’d point it out.

As you can see (if you’re paying close attention, that is), I have not attempted any sort of 1 to 1 matching of character bonuses, so the HoF enemies should be significantly more difficult than normal mode enemies were, relatively speaking. But I have “hopefully” made AC meaningful again, and lessened the impact of crazy damage foes somewhat. My party is more powerful than there were in normal mode, so I’m counting on my improved abilities, spells, feats and equipment to compensate for a good portion of the remaining gap in relative power.

Additionally, when I first created my characters in normal mode I actually rolled honest to goodness dice (anyone remember those?), using a generous rolling system that I have commonly used with my PnP friends. Namely, roll 4d6 6 times and drop the lowest die each time. Do this 3 times, and pick your favorite of the 3 sets of rolls. Assign values to whichever stat you wish. This generally results in some nice, powerful characters. Further, for a couple of key characters I assigned stats based on the roleplaying concept I had for them (I’ll share more about my party in a separate post). Again, I used Dale Keeper to make those changes.

I have just defeated the Goblin attack at the palisade. So far things have been nice and easy, as I would expect. The difficulty of enemies will ramp up quickly from here, so the real testing is soon to begin. Here’s to hoping that this will make HoF as enjoyable as the normal mode of play!

I welcome any comments on my approach from board members.

 

What you're asking for is something that's different from HoF, more like an actual Improved Anvil for IWD2. Which is good, since I think HoF was actually designed to be tedious. The thing is, however you wanna RP it, a goblin (in rags) with as much as HP as the typical one has in HoF is never going to be PnP-friendly.

The way HoF was designed, martial classes lose much of their edge in HoF (enemy AC doesn't improve much) and this never really gets addressed. Instead they simply decided to give some of the martial classes even more spells, because this is what HoF is basically about - it is an exercise on (very specific) tactical use of spells and equipment. Which is why there are parties which can breeze through HoF easy, and a lot of them don't even need to rely on high AC or buffing fiestas.
Bottomline, I think HoF is ultimately about building the right party (with classes ranked based on their spellcasting/equipment value). It does not actually focus in improving difficulty across the board. Something that does the latter for IWD2 would be nice.

 

Well guess what, I'm choosing to view this from a glass half full perspective. Rather than focusing on what still might not be right, I'm going to try to focus on what will "hopefully" be an improvement over previous HoF experiences. You're right of course, Goblins aren't supposed to be anywhere close to this powerful, but that just doesn't matter. As long as these uncommonly powerful minions are a bit more in balance with my my party, all will be well. And hey, I've never been this far north before. Whose to say that Orcs living in such inhospitable climes haven't had to become a lot tougher than their cousins to the south, just to survive.

Really, that is more or less how 3ED was designed in my experience. Spellcasters tended to grow in relative power over melee classes. HoF takes that further and way too far I'm sure, but whatever. I'm hoping to even the scales somewhat with this current experiment. I'm not opposed to buffing my primary tank a bit more if it seems that he's still too far behind.

I'm hoping that this time I will do just fine with the party I want to use, vs. the HoF party I "ought" to use. Time will tell. The experiment has only yet to begin.


By the way, here is a link to more specifics on my adventuring party, for those who might be interested.

 

Good ideas, Marceror.

It really bothered me when I counted Stubnok's hit-points in HoF mode once, and it tallied over 1200 hp, if I remember correctly.

What really irritates me about HoF is the damage factor. It is easy for a goblin in Targos, let alone "fighter-types" in the later part of the game, to hit a PC for 40-50 points of damage pretty much every time they hit a PC. But my PCs still aren't doing that much damage unless they get really lucky and/or manage to roll a critical. In above fight with Stobnok, he hit my fighter-paladin 4 times in a row for over 75 points of damage each time. My fighter-paladin was not dishing reciprocal damage out (though my fighter-barbarian with a 32 STR, WF/WS, and the Big Axe could do more damage than the ftr-pal).

And the buffs/summons. Man, if you ran out of summoning spells, it was time to go home and rest. 'Cause that last Mass Heal spell didn't mean as much as having the ability to summon a 900-hp frost giant.

I still play HoF, but yeah, it gets very tedious, especially since the plot of the game doesn't change much. I'd like to see less powerful opponents, but many more of them and perhaps more tactically intellligence enemies. For example, on the plains outside the Horde Fortress, why not true hordes of 50 goblins with, say, 8 spell-casters supporting them, and goblin-worgs flanking from the side, instead of 5 300-hp goblins who run straight on at your party like they always do?

 

I am guessing here, but wouldn't that really tax the Game engine or possibly the PC? Which is why, IMO, they put a limit on summons.

 

Yeah, probably. I didn't think about that. At least the game engine. My PC has never struggled with IWD2 requirements.

I remember the screen being filled up with wights in IWD1, though, while in Dragon's Eye (I liked to run a thief around the entire level 3, disarm the traps, and lead the undead back to my party, where my wizards bombarded them with Fireballs and fighters tossed the potions of "burning" or whatever they are called). 20-30 wights, maybe?

 

I would guess that 8 extra spell casters with the spell animations would be the taxing part to the game engine....

 

This is a general D&D issue. In BG2 your mages were seriously overpowered too. If I want an easy time of it in ToB, I put a high level sorcerer in my party. Fighters are strong too in ToB, but get hit a lot and hard and are generally just not quite as powerful.

Back then, probably, nowadays it's no problem whatsoever. In Tutu I've used the wand of monster summoning so much that I'd have 20+ monsters on the screen, without much of a problem, even on my netbook.

So if a mod were to change HoF to be more like horde mode instead of ridiculously overpowered enemies, that would be runnable and awesome.

 

It would be cool if some enemies, like goblins and orcs would horde. More elite enemies such as Saablic Taan (sp?) and his bodyguard are better just being extra tough.

 

Good point. But that still means that at least most encounters will be hordes, which should change the dynamic of the HoF mode a lot. It would still favor spellcasters, though, as melee doesn't have the AoE effect of some spells.

 

Hordes would be a great idea, especially if your High-Level Melee combatants could have a whirlwind/multi attack ability that kills. Maybe an "Ultra-Cleave" feat. Blender-time! That would be....awesome.

 

I don't know about IWD2, but in NWN Great Cleave is pretty much all you want here

 

Marc, HOF mode is stupidly balanced. And this comes from a powergamer.

Adding 20 to your AC effectively removes the need for Deep Gnomes and/or allowing for much more relaxed take on the buffs required to keep up. It brings back an important game mechanic that just got destroyed by the HOF conversion for no good reason.

I haven't tested how far the autobalancing affects things, but it MIGHT be a possibility to tweak the EXP table so that you effectively play at +10 or +20 levels, fighting massive hordes of enemies at every turn. I know for a fact that the Restless Dead areas in Chapter 3 go from two spawns all the way up to eight per fight if you're high enough in level, but haven't tested whether you end up with twenty if you add yet another 10 levels or so. Alas, this would pretty much destroy the leveling process and you'd have to find a RP explanation for the 10 or 20 extra levels for your characters. Edit: However, most normal warriors are pretty much maxed in number of attacks per round at the end of Normal mode, so adding yet another 10-20 levels doesn't actually change much. Hmm..

There's nothing wrong with tweaking the rules if the standard HOF ruleset makes you lose interest in the game.

 

Hey Sir Rechet, I appreciate your feedback. At the moment I'm wondering if the +20 AC was a bit too much. Currently most of my part members have AC in the high 40s or low to mid 50s, and with a few buffs I can get them all into the 50s.

At the moment most of the enemies I'm fighting have an attack bonuses in the low to mid 30s, which means that they have to roll very well in order to hit my team. The end effect is that so far the prologue and the first 3 areas beyond Targos (Shaengarne River, the Logging Village and the Shaengarne Ford) have all been pretty much a breeze. I'm sure the fact that some of my guys have equipment that makes them immunue to any non-magical attacks helps to make things easier, even if I hadn't raised base AC. I've really only had to sweat once, when Leath'lanian, my Elven Rogue 2/Mage 16, started to get swarmed in the Shaengarne Ford, and I had to run a cleric over to heal him (or I could have cast invisibility or Otiluke's Resilient Sphere).

At any rate, this isn't totally wrong from an RP perspective, considering that I have a group of nearly epic level adventurers going up against some pretty inferior enemies. That said, I'm going to need more challenge than this in order to have fun over the course of the game. If things don't ramp up soon challenge wise, I will likely pull the AC bonus back by 5 or so. But so far, it seems that my experiment has gotten me a lot closer to a more traditional D&D experience, and that is promising.

 

Ha ha! My traditional DnD experience as a player generally involved my PC dying (I once played an elf Ftr/Wiz who had been Raised over 10 times, if I remember correctly).

And as a DM, I was notorious for a PC, on average, dying each gaming session. Since the 4-5 regular players ran 2 or 3 characters each, it wasn't as traumatic as it might sound.

 

Marc, the early mobs are in the +30 attack bonus range, but soon enoug (read: Chapter two) you'll start seeing +40 everywhere. Your 50 AC will suddenly feel a lot less by then. Later on, you'll be up against mobs with upper +40's all across the board, with some of the baddies reaching all the way to the low +50s.