Baldur's Gate & Baldur's Gate II Mod Thread

[octavius]

I tried Sunray, but no effect; I think it was blocked by Prot vs Magic Energy.
I even tried Turn Undead, but that too had no effect.

Against the Drow, I found the Firestorm spell very effective, since it seems to ignore magic resistance.
The House Ja'Ellat is one of the most difficult encounters in the whole Underdark, with a virtual army of hard hitting Drow. The house Guards must have a THAC0 of -10 or something, 'cause they hit 19 out of 20 times, even against AC -10.
I had to do max buffing, and summon Ultroloth. With two Firestorms my party prevailed, but had to chug an awful lot of healing potions.

While I'm at it, is there any reason not to go with Two Weapon Style for all characters? When high level enemies have so good THAC0 that they hit anyway, a shield is rather useless unless it has special properties, like the Shield of Harmony.

 

[agris]

Sigourn

I've used ATI cards for a decade or so, and I think I've had and solved your issue. From an old .txt

make sure TRIPLE BUFFERING is DISABLED
force highest quality texture for 32bit world

You will do that through your ATI/AMD/radeon control panel. If you don't know how to do it per-game, set it globally for your GPU before the game launches.

 

[Sigourn]

Sigourn

I've used ATI cards for a decade or so, and I think I've had and solved your issue. From an old .txt

make sure TRIPLE BUFFERING is DISABLED
force highest quality texture for 32bit world

You will do that through your ATI/AMD/radeon control panel. If you don't know how to do it per-game, set it globally for your GPU before the game launches.

I can't seem to make it work. I don't know if I mentioned I'm using Windows 8.1, which may be to blame.

 

[agris]

Sigourn

I've used ATI cards for a decade or so, and I think I've had and solved your issue. From an old .txt

make sure TRIPLE BUFFERING is DISABLED
force highest quality texture for 32bit world

You will do that through your ATI/AMD/radeon control panel. If you don't know how to do it per-game, set it globally for your GPU before the game launches.

I can't seem to make it work. I don't know if I mentioned I'm using Windows 8.1, which may be to blame.

What do you mean by "I can't seem to make it work."?

 

[Sigourn]

What do you mean by "I can't seem to make it work."?

I went to my Catalyst Control Center, disabled Triple Buffering, but it makes no difference. The glitches are still there.

 

[anvi]

Had a bug already, still haven't left Irenicus's Dungeon yet. Not a good sign. Hopefully a one off.

 

[octavius]

What bug?

 

[SCO]

Isn't there a fixpatch for the EE games already? I know there is a tweak one. Maybe it's too early.

 

[Axie]

I'm sure there are ways to fix Sigourn's graphic problems with BG2.
But I doubt there's a way to fix the bluriness of the "enhanced" editions.

Yeah, the EE has a lot of blur everywhere in that bitch. Between mangled spell effects and fog of war and blur everywhere, I'd rather have the mangling. When I'm not so busy I'll see if I can find a solution.

But have you tried different render in options? In Graphics enable Nearest Neighbor Scaling as opposed to Linear and it should remove EE blur. If we talk the same thing.

 

[anvi]

What bug?

In Irenicus's dungeon there is a Djinn that pops up when you reach a certain point. He appeared and gave me the quest as normal. But then I was passing by that place later and a second one appears, and then I passed again and a third guy appeared. And then when I went to the basement through the locked door and you are out on weird platforms, I reach the end and the same djinn is there with the same quest. I completed it once so all is good, but seeing him 4 times was weird.

Having a lot of fun though. Nearly out of the dungeon.

 

[octavius]

I'm about to face Bodhi, and suddenly Liches and Ilithids are looking less scary than they used to, so I decided to explore more of the sewers, thanks to the Sewer Key I got from Tazok.

Planar Travel is a SCS ability that the Ilithids have, which makes it useless to rely on the old tactic of using Skeletal Warriors and Fiends, since they just planar travel to the party. But DavidW seems to have forgotten (?) to give the same ability to the Alhoon in the sewers. 1 Ultroloth, 1 Pit Fiend and 3 Skeletal Warriors only managed to make a small dent in it, but when the last of them was killed Alhoon was out of spells and easy prey for my party.
I was surprised I only got 10,000 XP, though. Maybe I overestimated the brainiac?
Someone described it as an Undead Mind Flayer. Does that mean an Prot vs Undead would have worked against it (forgot to test it myself)?

 

[octavius]

Damn, that Insect Plague spell is powerful!
It worked on both Irenicus in Spellhold and against Firkraag. The latter actually turned yellow.

 

[Sykar]

IIRC the Planetars' deadliest melee weapon is their Globe of Blades ability which can deal ridiculous damage to all surrounding characters. Best way to deal with them is to have multiple fully buffed characters attack them at once and hope you kill them before they use Heal. If Globe of Blades proves too damaging, you can always move your characters away every few seconds after the ability activates, since it only does so once per round IIRC. It's quite a lot of micromanagement, but can save your ass in the toughest fights.

Of course, once you reach HLA levels, you can counter their Planetars with your own.

Or have a Sorcerer with Imprisonment. Problem solved.

 

[anvi]

Stuff has changed or I forgot a lot! My first visit to the inn in the slums, someone called Hexxat was rambling about Dragomir's Tomb. I wanted to go but I already have a party I made myself and it seemed to not let me go without her. Can I just go there myself? Or should I ditch someone and go with her?

Also, whoops... A mean man in the inn was mean to me and made me sads so I battled him in the ring. First time he owned me because I'm only a low level wizard. Second time my chromotic orb seemed to fuck him up good and he stopped moving. So I unloaded all my remaining spells on him and he died. I feel terrible but the big chunk of exp made it worthwhile, but I am curious if I was to finish him with a punch instead, would I be able to repeat it for more gold or something?

p.s. Woah Irenicus is voiced by the photographer from The Omen.

 

[octavius]

Holy shit, that fight against Tahazzar and his small army of SCS + aTweaks demons.
Two things saved my ass: The Storm of Vengeance spell that insta killed most of the small and medium demons and the Succubus if lucky. And the Silver Vorpal Sword which works well against the big demons, even big Mr T himself.

What makes this battle so hard is that it's impossible to prepare for it, so you start "naked". The designers really went out of their way to prevent any possible buffing. Had to try several times and the winning tactic was to cast Storm of Vengeance and have Keldorn, Jaheira and Anomen gang up on Tahazzar, while CHARNAME and Aerie started with Remove Fear and Haste, before starting to spam Holy Smite. Imoen is pretty useless when she can't backstab (still waiting for her first HLA), which is the case when facing Glabrezu with their constant True Seeing.

Overall the difficulty of Wathers' Keep is rather uneven. The Statues on lvl 1 were much harder than the weak Chromatic Demon on lvl 2. And then of course lvl 3 really increases the difficulty.

 

[santino27]

Stuff has changed or I forgot a lot! My first visit to the inn in the slums, someone called Hexxat was rambling about Dragomir's Tomb. I wanted to go but I already have a party I made myself and it seemed to not let me go without her. Can I just go there myself? Or should I ditch someone and go with her?

Also, whoops... A mean man in the inn was mean to me and made me sads so I battled him in the ring. First time he owned me because I'm only a low level wizard. Second time my chromotic orb seemed to fuck him up good and he stopped moving. So I unloaded all my remaining spells on him and he died. I feel terrible but the big chunk of exp made it worthwhile, but I am curious if I was to finish him with a punch instead, would I be able to repeat it for more gold or something?

p.s. Woah Irenicus is voiced by the photographer from The Omen.

Hexxat is new... added as part of BG2:EE, which is why you don't remember her from vanilla. You do need her in your party if you want to do her quest.

 

[octavius]

The second demon boss on the Maze level of WK was easier than Tahazzar, and I beat him and his minions on first try, but they gated in so many Abishai that at the end of the battle it looked more like a good days work in Diablo than BG 2.

Most annoying encounter by designer bastards was the room with dead magic, fiends with Fear aura and lots of traps. All my character ran around like headless chickens setting off traps and there was nothing I could do about it.

 

[anvi]

This game is so damn good, I hate stories and dialogue in games but only because I never feel interested in it. But this game is an extremely rare exception for me. There is just zero unnecessary lore, they will tell you whatever you ask them but it never rambles. It also feels more realistic how they talk, more like talking to a real person, less like lines of dialogue written by a wannabe writer. And there is a lot of flavor and stuff to learn about the people and the world but it just never seems to get in my face. POE was the opposite of this, I was constantly given walls of text to read and I really hated it. Somehow this game just balances the pace of everything. Brief chat to an NPC, explore some, fight stuff, brief chat, explore some, fight stuff. It is how it should be.

Even the dialogue options are better. There is rarely only a few options, usually more, so I can always say what I would want to say. Nowadays it seems you only really get 3 options: 1) Yes sir I will do what you ask. 2) Ha fuck you, I kill you and your family and steal everything ha! 3) I must leave. But in this game you get more options, and more logical options.

I am also surprised by how big it is too. When I completed it last time I was really lazy and hardly did anything outside of the main quest. This time I am doing more exploring and there is so much I didn't see before. For example the tavern that you first go to, I think I saw the brothel in the attic but in the basement is the huge slave operation and I don't think I did that before. So a whole dungeon, lots to kill, and also the quest for a sword. Also all the random houses around the place, almost every one is worth going in, most of them have a character in there which serves a purpose, or a group of baddies that need slaughtering.

The combat is the main reason I play RPGs and this game does such a nice job of it. The friendly fire makes such a big difference. I know you can enable it in some other games but in games like Dragon Age, it hardly does any damage. I also only like to play games on normal difficulty (I went with Core Rules for this), and it is never very challenging on that. I avoid hard because I don't want the tedium. But BG2 gets it right even on this standard difficulty. I can't just fireball and ice storm everything or my team gets owned by my own spells. I can use some of those big spells if I aim them carefully and have stuff pile up in front of my warrior or whatever, but usually I need to use all the other tactical options. Also the varied difficulty of the battles is nice too. A bunch of bandits attack me and 1 fireball takes them all down to near death. But occasionally there are some really tough guys that need to be carefully dealt with. I even went into a random house and there are some thieves in there protected by 2 high level mages that destroyed me, even after 5 attempts. I'll look forward to going back there after I level up.. It is crazy how high standard this was way back then, and how dumb things have gone since then.

 

[octavius]

Some levels higher after doing half the Watchers' Keep, my party finally defated the motherfucking Twisted Rune, without any real cheesing, unless you count buffing without having seen any actual enemies.
Carsomyr + WW attack was instrumental in defeating the female mage.

I noticed a very sly tactic Shangalar the Lich used to circumvent Anomen's Prot vs Undead. He summoned two Magic Swords and then cast Remove Magic on them with Anomen standing right next to them, thus dispelling the Prot vs Undead. I was impressed by this cunning. Fortunately the Lich had finally run out of Prot vs Magic Weapons spells, and was thus easy prey for the Mace of Disruption.

 

[octavius]

Well, the final fight against Irenicus in Hell sure was...binary. No buffing, and he shreds the party to pieces if allowed to cast Time Stop.
Fully buffed, and he goes down in one and a half rounds. The good thing about Slayer Jon is that he's not as well protected as his normal self, so one charge of the Wand of Spell Strike and he's wide open.

 

[virgin_newfag]

Holy shit took me all my consumables and like 30 tries to beat Centeol. In the end I did it Jaheira's root + bows
Also those respawning traps in Cloakwood should be illegal.
I think playing vanilla BG1 was a mistake, I can't alt-tab and the original Italian translation is atrocious. The satisfaction after the hard fights is what keeps me going
blog post sry

 

[anvi]

The buff thing and knowing what happens is annoying. Load into a house and get surrounded by bad guys who own my wizzies and stuff in the face. Reload, buff outside, go in and gank the entire room with ease. Game is a masterpiece but some stuff hasn't aged that well.

 

[octavius]

Hmm...I'm having a hell of time getting out of Hell. Sarevok wouldn't help me in the Spirits of Fate room. Turns out there's a bug if Imoen and Jaheira is in the party, so I ended up having to dismiss Jaheira (I will be impressed if that the harpy really makes it out of Hell to the Harper building) and CTRL-Y Imoen to make the dialogue fire. Then I was able to recruit Sarevok and resurrected Imoen.
Anyone else had this problem? It seems to be rare, but I can't see which if any mod causes it.

Anyway, IIRC the first challenge is where I aborted my last BG2 game almost 10 years ago, groaning "What...Irenicus now a-fucking-gain...?"
But my CON has increased since then.

 

[Tigranes]

I've never heard of it in all my years of aTweaks, SCS, etc.

Elfcity Irenicus can often be a pushover, really, though that depends on your mod loadout; mainchar transformed alone seems to mostly take care of him in vanilla. It's a different story in hell.

 

[octavius]

I've never heard of it in all my years of aTweaks, SCS, etc.

Elfcity Irenicus can often be a pushover, really, though that depends on your mod loadout; mainchar transformed alone seems to mostly take care of him in vanilla. It's a different story in hell.

Non-Slayer Irenicus is not that hard. Perth the Adept was actually harder than Spellhold Irenicus. The Slayer version of Irenicus if the only scary one IMO, even without the SCS component (it was removed at one point).
Bodhi in the Hell challenge was a pushover since she was now vulnerable to the Mace of Disruption, so that fight was easier than I thought. Jon cast two Time Stops, but the only scary thing he did was cast Wail of the Banshee (but all in range saved or had magic resistance.

I had to laugh at Sarevok when he turned yellow at 1/3 health when fighting against the Il-Khan Guards in Saradush. Too bad Jaheira was not there too see it; I'm sure it would have been endearing to her and brought back memories of Khalid...