Download High Level ABILITIES - a ToB mod for casters

High Level Abilities

A Vilkalizer? brand mod (accept no substitutes!) for Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal

It always bugged me that HLAs for mages took up ninth-level spell slots even though they are tenth-level spells... so I decided to do something about it. (Only several years after I first thought of it...)

I don't know if something like this has already been done, but if it has, I haven't seen it, and it's not as if I spent a lot of time and effort on this anyway - it's a very simple mod. Readme follows:

Intro

This is a simple mod that turns mages' and clerics' high level abilities into innate abilities, thus freeing up the ninth- or seventh-level spell slots for actual ninth- or seventh-level spells. They now work similarly to other classes' HLAs, meaning each time you pick an ability, you get one use per day out of it. The HLA tables have been edited to allow the player to pick abilities multiple times.

Unlike other classes, casters' HLAs will still show up in their spellcasting menu, not their innate abilities menu. This was initially unintended, but makes sense seeing as they are, in fact, high level spells.

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Installation

Unpack HLAbilities.zip to the folder where you have Baldur's Gate II installed. Unless you specified another location on install, that defaults to C:\Program Files\Black Isle\BGII - SoA

Run setup-highlevelABILITIES.exe and follow the instructions.

To uninstall the mod, run the setup program again.

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Technical

"But what does it actually do?"

• It replaces patches the LU***.2DA files (the high level ability tables) for all classes with full arcane or divine spellcasting abilities in order to allow multiple picks of the same ability (for any ability that is activated on use; you can still only pick the "extra spell slot" abilities once).
  
• It patches the "spell" HLAs from the mage/cleric skill pools, changing the "spell type" attribute from "wizard" or "priest" to "innate".
  
• That's it, really.

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History

• Dec 17, 09: v.0.1: initial release.
  
• Jun 26, 10: v.1.0: re-coded by the bigg: "now completely patch-driven, making this compatible with any HLA mod under the sun".
  
• Sep 01, 10: v.1.1: bugfix (also by the bigg)