On further reflection, it really may be better to move the respawn point (yes, I do know how to change it) than to make the lock trivially easy again. Cause even as it exists in the unmodded game, what's happening there makes no sense at all:
In the unmodded game, the lock difficulty on that door is trivial, and it was always true that if you get killed in the Tenement without ever opening it, your party will respawn inside that room with a locked door. It was just easily bashed. If the notion is that your party retreated to that point, that makes no sense on a number of levels (Why retreat there? How did you relock it behind you? Why? What if the only way your party -can- open it is by bashing?). The only logical reason I can see your party respawning in that room, -through- a locked door, is if the thugs -are- throwing you in there, and it makes no sense that they would "imprison" you and your party members, unguarded, in a room with a trivial lock that is easily bashed - again, what happens in the unmodded game.
On the other hand if it's possible for -any-
TNO, including a soloing
TNO mage with 9 strength and no knock spell, to get locked permanently in there, that's going to be perceived as a game-breaking bug, so I'd -have- to make it trivial, i.e. bashable by that mage.
It's hard to figure out what the intent was of the respawn point being there that makes sense. Maybe at some point they really meant it to be potentially game-ending. Or maybe there was supposed to eventually be some cutscene where the thugs come and talk to you/open the door that never got finished. If so, though, none of those potential intentions were ever followed through with.
There's also the competing design question as to why that door has a key, and getting through it gets you some (sorta) nice loot in there. Leaving the lock exactly as it is in the unmodded game - a door, automatically bashable by a 9 strength mage, also openable by a key called "Tenement Storeroom Key" on the thug sentry - doesn't make sense as far as being intended either. The existence of the key itself implies the intent for there to be SOME sort of difficulty getting through it.
So... yeah, I think moving the respawn point to the entrance to the Tenement (on the Hive side) is a good fix to do entirely outside of the content of the lock fixes. Whatever design intent there was to have the respawn point in that room appears to have been unfinished, and without finishing it, it seems broken to leave it that way.
I'll leave the lock difficulty as I'd changed it (70 difficulty, openable by beefed up Annah or
TNO thief, or via pickpocketing/killing the thug sentry for the key).
Qwinn
Edited by Qwinn, 25 December 2008 - 04:50 PM.