Gay Lord, on 18 Dec 2016 - 01:15, said:
1) Recommend Wild Mage Additions component 4 (Rhialto) be changed from Maximal to Tactical. He's a L30 mage who is scripted to die (as opposed to defeating normally), in order to pass on his stuff (which is OP for a L1 party). Having an opponent that you are supposed to defeat through scripting (which has failed before because of SCS and other mods), or through metaknowledge is a tactical combat, not a normal one.
Rhialto by default appears the first time the party rests outdoors. The "haughty-pansy mode" component places Rhialto outside Candlekeep, so it is actually "easier" than the default behavior (since you can choose when you encounter him). I believe the better solution for Rhialto is to patch the mods that break his scripts so the original author's intent can be seen. I recently patched SCS to skip Rhialto when changing mage AI -- untested so far.
Gay Lord, on 18 Dec 2016 - 01:15, said:
2) There's an opponent called "The Arch Druid" who appeared at the beginning of the final map of Cloakwood, don't know which mod he's from. IMO this guy is also OP, being tougher and giving more xp than Davaeorn himself. He appears to be L13 which, while do-able, is still too much. If he's so tough, why hasn't he stormed the mines already? Having a surprise opponent that's harder than the miniboss is imbalanced. I recommend he also be moved to Tactical installation.
Highlight the NPC and press CTRL+M and your dialogue window will display some info including the resource file (ABCDEF.cre), making it easier to identify which mod added it.
Gay Lord, on 18 Dec 2016 - 01:15, said:
3) I've been looking at some of the mods from subtledoctor, and wondering why they aren't part of the Maximal install. I see Might and Guile is, but Scales of Balance and Tome and Blood aren't. SOB has no comments underneath, while TAB says EET is preferred. Since I play with the original BG and not EE, I'm wondering if TAB is being ignored for EET, and then EET is not included for original, so TAB just never gets selected.
Tome and Blood was marked Expert until a few days ago. When I incorporated subtledoctor's hotfixes into the Fixpack, I neglected to change its pre-selection settings, so it's available but not selected by default. Just an oversight.
Gay Lord, on 18 Dec 2016 - 01:15, said:
4) This leads to another question, is there a way to find out WHY mods are marked expert? Sometimes I can look on bitbucket and see a reason why something is marked, but not always. It would be helpful for those willing to playtest a mod to know what we're looking for. For example, if a mod was marked expert because of old reports of a bug, we could install and see if the bug is still there, or if it was marked expert because of a conflict with another mod, we can see if the conflict still happens. I've currently installed the bigg's 3E stats which were marked expert, but I dont' know why.
I created a forum thread a while ago to explore this question. Perhaps you could revive it? www.shsforums.net/topic/58417-why-are-these-mods-expert-mods
BWS is maintained mostly by ALIEN and me, and given how much work it is, we sometimes fail to fully document our changes. Feel free to question anything that isn't clear to you, as you're doing here. Over time, my goal is to ensure that every mod/component marked expert has a clear explanation ... although lately with my improving WeiDU skills I've taken to fixing problems directly when I can instead of marking them expert.
Edited by agb1, 18 December 2016 - 06:10 PM.