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

I applied all of Sitra Achara's fixes after I cleared out the moathouse but before I started the moathouse respawn. Could this be the reason why the Guardsman showed up in the moathouse respawn in my game?

General Ghoul, you make a good point about the Drow party's formation, but I would rather have a more challenging combat than a more realistic one. Considering that the Drow party was performing a sacrificial ritual, you would expect the Drow Cleric and Drow Wizard to be right next to the sacrificial altar because they would be the ones performing the evil ritual, while you would expect the Drow warriors to guard them from any random encounters. Drow aren't stupid - they are one of the most cunning monsters in D&D. When I used to play PnP D&D, the Dungeon Master always had Drow ambushing us with poison weapons and casting Darkness spells on us. You would expect Drow to detect an adventuring party well before the adventuring party knew of the Drows' existence.

Hedrack's Plate Boots, Hedrack's Plate Helmet, and Hedrack's Plate Gloves are already identified when you loot them from his corpse.

Could you please include the information that Hedrack's Shield +3 is a metal shield in the item's long description?

Hedrack's Full Plate Armor +3 is only worth approximately 1000 GP (see screenshot below). It should be worth thousands more GP.

Hedrack's Shield +3 is only worth approximately 1100 GP (see screenshot below). It should be worth thousands more GP.

Hedrack's Warhammer +2 is a LARGE weapon. It is not a warhammer. Hedrack's weapon should be renamed Hedrack's Greathammer +2, and the mouse-hover description and the item's long description should have their damage and weapon type and weapon name corrected accordingly (see screenshots below).

I killed Hedrack in the first round of combat, so Iuz and St. Cuthbert never showed up in my game. Is my game stuffed or is it okay if this happens?

 

Killing Hedrack quickly wont ruin the game. It may not mention Iuz in the end credits/slides if you kill Zuggy though.

 

Gazra -

That was indeed a bug.

Posted a fix here.

 

I'm having a hard time finding where the slave quest is at. I accepted it and looked everywhere in town. The quest log doesn't give any hits on where its at, and I wasn't really paying attention to the dialog when I got the quest.

 

Look in my profile and ye shall have thy answer.

 

After spending a lot of time on vanilla toee tests, I decided to give the 5.9.2 NC a try.
I'm at the beginning of the game, doing a few quests to lvl up before I go to the moathouse..
and I'm sad to say there are already a few things I don't understand:
1. Why reduce the exp rewards from quests from 420 to 360?
2. Why raise the skill levels needed for conversations? [diplomacy checks etc.]
3. Why remove some of the standard character picture from the party creation menu?
I don't mind having more to choose from but leave all the original ones.
4. Why was the goblin removed? [Thus eliminating the Black Jay's ring quest]
That's like changing the core of the game in a way "it will be more balanced now because we know better than the original developers" if you catch my drift :/

 

1. The XP reward is based on CR, so if you are a higher level, you get less experience.
2. Maybe to make skill choices more important?
3. Which ones? They added so many I can't keep track. Maybe some are now used on new NPCs.
4.The ring is still in the game, but at another location.

Speaking of the original developers, they put out a game that originally cost $50, yet didn't work out of the box. Even after 3 patches, it still crashed way too often. So I would hold them in such high regard.

 

You have to remember that NC stands for new content and there is a lot. No vanilla content was deleted, just re-located, so to speak. BlackJays ring is still out there.
The combatvars was changed from .7 to .6 sometime ago so the xp will be a little less.
The only portrait removed was the drow, now the drowleader later in the game. There is no drow pc class in the game, so no need for a pc portrait.

 

Moradin's Soulhammer +1 and Hedrack's Warhammer +2 are both LARGE weapons (i.e. a medium-sized character can only wield them 2-handed) that use the Warhammer martial weapon proficiency. There is no greathammer in D&D 3.5 but I would argue that these 2 magical weapons should be renamed greathammers to distinguish them from warhammers which do 1d8 damage and are medium-sized weapons (i.e. medium-sized characters can wield them 1-handed). I haven't checked yet whether those 2 magical weapons do 1d8 or 1d12 damage. I will check next time I play the game. In the meantime, those 2 magical weapons need their long descriptions and mouse-hover information corrected so that the damage matches and there is no ambiguity about them not being warhammers (see screenshot below).

Hedrack has Hedrack's Shield +3 (which is a metal shield, by the way). It is impossible for him to wield his shield and Hedrack's Warhammer +2 (which is a 2-handed weapon for medium-sized characters) at the same time!

The Headband of Intellect +4 in the Chest in the Earth Node is already identified when you loot it.

In the Air Node, when Ashrem (Cleric) joins the player's party, he has no Domain spells (see screenshot below).

In the Earth Node, when Sargen (Wizard) joined my party, he had 2 Mage Armor spells in effect on him at the time that he joined my party (see screenshot below).

The 2 Windwalkers and the Vapor Rats in the Air Node are not KOS (see screenshots below).

One time, when I initiated dialogue with Otis, he said "You killed the lich!". Surely Otis shouldn't be saying that considering that he doesn't live in Hommlet.

In the Earth Node and Air Node, my game froze (locked up) quite a few times while my party was moving around the maps. Sometimes, the game would resume normally after being frozen for approximately half a minute to a minute. I reduced all of my graphical settings and this may have improved game stability in the Nodes for me.

I think the combat with Hedrack and his allies would be much more difficult (it was too easy for my party) if the 2 Ettins were repositioned alongside Hedrack so that they could help Hedrack survive longer and they could attack in the first round of the combat instead of wasting a round doing nothing other than moving into melee range of the player's characters.

My experience of playing this game is that the game is most fun when the player's characters are between level 1 and about level 6. This is because the game is challenging at those character levels! Above about character level 6, the rest of the game becomes a cakewalk (but only if you fight the various opponents around the game world in the right order). With all of the new content, the player's characters become too high a level to clear out the Temple of Elemental Evil while the game remains challenging. I think that this game balance problem would be completely solved by reducing the Experience Point multiplier (or gain rate) to a much lower value than it currently is. The vanilla game only allowed the player's characters to reach a maximum character level of 10, so all of the content lower down in the Temple of Elemental Evil is designed for level 10 characters to fight. The problem is that characters above level 10 have too easy a time clearing out the lower levels of the Temple of Elemental Evil. Reducing the XP multiplier would cause the player's characters to start clearing out the Temple of Elemental Evil at a much lower character level which would balance the game difficulty (because the game difficulty in the Temple of Elemental Evil is WAY too easy the way that it is at the moment!).

 

Well known issue dating back to vanilla.

Another known issue

I fear reducing the XP modifier too much will make the early game too difficult for most people.

 

Just a shout out of Thanks to Gaear, Sitra, and the many other modders who are constantly updating the games and being willing to answer our questions. I am looking forward to both 5.93 and 6.0 when they are available, but am more than willing to wait till they are available. :hug:

 

The xp multiplier was reduced to .6 a long time ago. It's basically a non-factor now with all the new content. It can be adjusted/edited with Notepad if so desired. I run my game at 1.00 to get max xp. I feel cheated at .6 or .7. But, that's just me.

 

The SRD doesn't have stats for greathammers. According to a google search, stats for greathammers are in the monster manual 4, accompanying the greathorn minotaur. Indeed, their "possessions" line says "greathammer," and the stats given are as follows:

Code:

DMG (M): 1d12
Critical: 19-20/x4
Weight: 30 lb.
Type: bludgeoning

It doesn't specifically say it's two handed, but I think it's pretty safe to assume, since these are being weilded by large size minotaurs. It also says it's treated as an exotic weapon for non-minotaurs.

Anyhow, if Hedrack's weapon is a greathammer, he probably shouldn't be able to use it with a shield (other than a buckler), unless he has feats/size that allow him to do so. If he's using both, that probably means it's one handed, and should just be a d8, x3 warhammer.

I assume the problem is that the game doesn't really have separate greathammers? Just warhammers that do d12 instead of d8? Are the other greathammers you mentioned also 1-handed?