Since the summer, when we first finished off the BG2 Style THACO display, Scient and I have spent a crapload of time trying to figure out why, it seemed almost randomly, some PC's would fail to get any improvement to their THACO from most weapons that were supposed to improve it. Lemme tell ya, it has not been fun.
And tonight, we finally figured out why. It's the Ice Knife spell. Specifically, the version that I inherited from Platter's Fixpack. It's one of the few fixes I copied over without fully understanding first. Naturally, it's therefore one of the few with a really big problem.
From Platter's Fixpack:
The "Ice Knife" spell caused a permanent decrease in To Hit when a party member was hit by it which lasted until the character was killed and resurrected. This fix prevents the To Hit effect of "Ice Knife" from working on your party at all.
Platter's Fixpack's solution was to add an "Immunity to Effect" to the spell's effect list, making the target immune to the effect "Base THACO Bonus". The problem? Most items that grant a THACO bonus use the same effect. And the immunity effect was every bit as permanent as Ice Knife's penalty - any PC hit with Ice Knife was stuck with immunity to weapon THACO bonus until he/she died and was resurrected.
Since LOTS of creatures cast Ice Knife - it may in fact be the most popular spell among spell-casting antagonists in the game - odds were -very- high that several of your PC's would get stuck with this and lose all THACO bonuses from magical weapons, quite possibly till the end of the game.
I'm fairly sure now that this was the cause of Ingress's Teeth not giving its THACO bonus to Morte (I had thought it was a problem specific to teeth weapons at the time, Morte must've been the only PC I had with the effect at the time), so once this is resolved, I'll be rolling back the workaround I had implemented for that item.
Anyways, scient is looking at it and trying to see if he can resolve in the engine the problem that Platter's Fixpack was attempting to fix that caused this issue (in other words, have Ice Knife apply its -2 THACO penalty but -not- have it be permanent). But I thought I'd post this so you all know that, if you've always only played this game with Platter's or my Fixpack, you've probably never been getting any THACO bonus from your weapons (and some tattoos like Tattoo of Accuracy), but now, finally, you will! Yay!
Qwinn
Edited by Qwinn, 06 January 2010 - 03:16 PM.
