KainenMorden
Educated
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2022
- Messages
- 938
Entropy shield is the main one that comes to mind, sun scorch early on. Beyond that, you're adding buffs you wouldn't normally have and your enemies aren't really compensated in any way. Part of the "point" of SCS is that you cant just run over everything. So your enemy is stronger but then you can buff up more so you're on "equal" footing. Well, why? The game needs to have some advantage over you to keep it interesting. I did a run with IWDification, just the arcane + divine spells and quickly realized I shouldn't use any of them and enemies did sometimes use them, especially the arcane spells but I don't think I'll ever do a run with them again.Exactly which spells from IWDification do you think give such a huge advantage to players? There's a few buffs that are good to have, but enemies in general are stronger in SCS so getting +2 THAC0 basically just balances out an enemy with 2 more AC. The non-buff spells are on average kinda mediocre imo.I'm saying that with all the respect in the world for those modders but for example, David W the creator of SCS recommended IWDification, adding iwd spells to the BG games. It is too much of an advantage to the player to have those spells, especially the Cleric spells, for a number of reasons but besides the AI not using them optimally or reacting to them well, you barely fight any Clerics and Clerics are strong enough already. To be fair to SCS, I haven't played for a year and there has been an update since then where supposedly the AI has been improved in regards to using/reacting to Cleric spells but I still don't think they belong.
SCS also nerfs a lot of abusable BG2 spells so on the whole I think spell balance is far better.
Theres still a bunch of cheese possible with SCS but I don't see how adding spells would balance it better.
I typically use Spell Revisions. To my recollection, SCS assumes the player is using Spell Revisions. I don't go past version 3. Version 4 makes too many serious departures from original BG2. Version 3 takes a few more liberties than I'd like, but overall it's a bit better balanced than version 2. The Icewind Dale spellbook was always inferior to BG. It has some fun things in it, but overall I don't consider it power creep at all to add it into the BG saga. The best thing about Icewind Dale spells were some of the animations. Chiefly the web spell.
I don't think at any time did the creator of SCS assume Spell Revisions would be installed since there are conflicts between spell modifications each made and there's been reports of the AI not reacting to SR correctly.in 2019, SCS releases had built in support for SR. SR did influence SCS design in some aspects like modifying Insect Plague.
I understand BG2 Clerics and Druids aren't quite as good as IWD Clerics and Druids but I'm fine with that and find that efforts to balance things out typically result in an overcorrection but to each his own.