Circle of Eight Modpack 5.9.x/5.9.xNC General Commentary & Discussion Thread

5.9.1 plays really well. Terrific content, which I really like. Now if I wasn't so old and air-headed I might play a lot better.

 

A Merchant's Scale gives a +2 bonus to Appraise skill just by being in the character's inventory. This bonus stacks with the +2 bonus to Appraise skill from wearing Eyeglasses.

I am led to believe that Alira is an agent working for the Temple of Elemental Evil, who is in Nulb looking for people to recruit for the Temple. Alira has a map in her inventory which reveals the location of the Temple of Elemental Evil on the player's world map if read. If Alira was made the same faction as everybody else in the Waterside Hostel, then the player would always get to loot her map every time that the player killed Wat, Rentsch, and Darla.

There is a bug that dates all the way back to the vanilla version of this computer game:
If a healer wields a reach weapon, then the healer is able to cast healing spells up to 10 ft away from the target. If a medium-sized healer is wielding a reach weapon and has the spell Enlarge Person cast on him/her, then the healer is able to cast healing spells up to 15 ft away from the target.

Because reach weapons are too powerful in this computer game. Reach weapons are easily the deadliest melee weapons in the game, because they give you an attack of opportunity on opponents moving within the area that the reach weapon threatens, and they have the largest area that a weapon threatens (which means more attacks of opportunity than any other weapon). By not implementing the PnP disadvantage where reach weapons can't attack targets that are only 5 ft away (except for spiked chains), Troika has imbalanced the game.
This debate is most likely irrelevant at the moment anyway. I doubt that the Co8 modders would be able to change the reach weapon's area that they threaten. We'll just have to wait until DarkStorm has finished his Temple of Elemental Evil Engine Recreation Project, where he will be able to control reach weapons' area that they threaten. DarkStorm was thinking of using the Pathfinder RPG rule set anyway (instead of D&D 3.5).

 

I just did Family Turmoil and the last 2 episodes of AoH so I think i've done all the "good" quests. I'm debating on going to the nodes and endgame. Maybe the higher levels will make it a bit easier. Not for the Balor of course. Hate that thing.

 

Not really so much. The game just seems to be filling with more and more loot that I thought maybe scaling back in a few places where it made sense would be good. That's my .02 cents though.

I have two screen shots below. The first shows the tree to the left and the shadow for it is to the right of my party. The second shows where it is on the map.

 

I will agree that this is true but my response to it is: so what? (No offense). Let players loot the map. They need to get to the temple anyhow. The map stems back to vanilla and it plus a few others seem to be Troika's way of letting players get to the main areas of the game even if you go the slaughter everything route. (Burne has a map which gets you to the moathouse + Lareth's diary gets you to Nulb + Alira's map gets you to the temple). Since she is a temple agent and working with Wat, it just seems to me that it is all the more reason why she ought to join in the fight. Or would there be some way to make her flee - sort of like Gremag and Rannos?

[Sorry that I'm getting off-track from 5.9.1 new content with this]

 

Gaear, thanks for the quick reply. What about the halfling sling thing, is that also a known issue?

BTW I finally had my first bad experience with relying on quicksave. I should have heeded Co8's warning about it. *grrrr* Years of playing off and on and I dodged the bullet, but when it finally hits.... hours and hours gone to waste. Never again.

 

Ohhh... Pathfinder, me likey. Most excellent system, best use of the OGL EVER! Kudos to DarkStorm.

 

Well I do not know a whole lot about the Pathfinder rules, but have heard a lot of good about it. If the recreation can ever happen, I think would be cool to play a game with them.

 

The Balor once again convinced me not to play the nodes. The usual CTD and I quit. I'm pretty well ToEE'ed-out.

 

Pathfinder has been dubbed D&D 3.75 and improves on 3.5 about as well as Co8 has improved ToEE, which is to say, considerably (barring the unbalancing effects of the NC, which hopefully TotWC will fix nicely). It continues the D&D system along the traditional lines established with 3.0, rather then the disappointing direction 4.0 brought the game, which IMHO is basically World of Warcraft, PnP edition. It is similar enough to 3.5 that it has a shallow learning curve, yet still makes for a better system (not that 3.5 was all that bad, because it wasn't, but Pathfinder keeps pretty much all the stuff that worked well, and makes changes for the rest). All the basic mechanics of Pathfinder are all available on the website: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ so you can check it out, and even play with the system without spending the $50 for the rulebook, which I still ultimately did, for I enjoy the system so much. *plug over*

 

Ok. How about the double longspears for the skeleton guards?

Below, I'm attaching a picture of what a tree's shadow is supposed to look like. Note that I am not talking about the shadow of the branches but rather the long shadow that stretches out from the tree. As you circle around the tree, this shadow will move like the party is carrying a torch. So the shadow always stays on the opposite side of the party. In the picture of the tree with the shadow that is off, the shadow that the tree projects is off base by about 10 feet.

EDIT: I noticed that my mouse pointers are showing up in both pictures. Please disregard where they are pointing to. I think my screen captures simply centered my mouse pointers whenever I took pictures. If things are still not clear, I will see if I can draw on the pictures to better show the problem.

 

The tree's shadow is to the right. The wide 'shadow' in the lower left is where your party can't 'see'

 

LOL. Very well then - but do you see the bug that I'm trying to describe?