Project Delicate Rebalancement: Tales of the Wild Coast

Re: Game Difficulty: Are The New Mods Making The Game Unbalanced?

A little of everything until it's right. One bite at a time. Easy for me to say, since I won't be dining all that much. And you'll notice I selected from the African proverb of "How to eat an Elephant". I'd suggest beginning with the least intrusive method, then moving on to harder ones.

Edit: Oh, and I never use the NPC's, but do multi-class a lot.

 

Re: Game Difficulty: Are The New Mods Making The Game Unbalanced?

Ted, I believe the Skeleton Priest has a use scroll entry in its strategy that doesn't do anything until its script adds the scroll to its inventory. Once added, the strategy entry makes it use the scroll.

If anyone cares to try out the reduced XP award ( lowered from the stock 70% to 50%) it is attached below. Extract the .rar file to your ToEE root directory after 5.0.x is the last mod launched with Front End.

 

Re: Game Difficulty: Are The New Mods Making The Game Unbalanced?

Not bad. It would make Temple levels 1-3 balanced. Level 4 would still suffer though (perhaps even more, as you'll be buffing HB/Vbbc/Moat respawns with even tougher creatures). I think if you combined it with Aeroldoth's alarm status idea it might work there as well. Specifically in level 4, there's that Higher Temple barracks with lots and lots of toughened ogres and bugbears and a few ettin. By itself, it's yet another encounter full of fireball fodder (or cloud kill fodder) at that point in the game, even in vanilla ToEE, especially when you bottleneck them by just standing in the corridor. When the Temple goes into alarm mode, they could join Hedrack in the main hall, removing the bottleneck "exploit" and toughening up that encounter at the same time.

 

Re: Game Difficulty: Are The New Mods Making The Game Unbalanced?

Ok. Just cut the original story before the final battle, insert the addon and place the key to final battle at the end of this addon.
But it would be nice if there (both in addon and "original) were more enemy spellcasters with not just magic missiles or fireballs, but with web, glitterdust, stinking cloud or cloudkill spells, summoning monsters.

 

For the record, I'd rather that we not do these:

# We could give some battles/areas artificially low CR & XP.
# We could make crafting harder.

Lowering XP rewards across the board I don't really mind. Still, I'd like to see everything in ToEE as close to 3.5 as it can be. Messing with individual bits here and there seems more of a departure than a flat "You just get 50% XP".

Crafting's lack of a time requirement is a cheat, but adding a time requirement without timed quests is pointless, and I don't want to see crafting disabled.

 

The problem i'm having is player intent. If an individual intends to play thru to end game and the nodes then they need all the help they can get. The lvl4 Hedrack encounter will always turn out the same. The final with Zugg is iffy. I'm not sure if it really matters if your lvl 10 or 12 at Zugg time because you did the addon mods. The endgame credits will say the same thing. I'll play what ever is produced and enjoy it.

 

Strict component enforcement is not actually all that D&Dish in play. The component rules are there, but iirc the default is that Wizards are considered to carry a "component pouch", and that you're assumed to have any components you need as long as you've paid the gold and the GM doesn't decide to make the search for components part of an adventure. In keeping with the original design of the game and the component pouch idea, you could make it so that every casting of a spell costs at least 1 gold, in the same way that casting Identify requires 100 gold rather than an actual crushed pearl.

Also, it would piss me off as a player to have to fill my inventory with junk if I wanted to play a wizard.

 

I think I do remember this conversation. If I only needed to find the material component for Spell X once, and could cast it whenever I wanted forever after, and it didn't take up space in my inventory, then yes, I'd be very happy and it would make for great treasure, in the same way that spell scrolls make great treasure.

If on the other hand there were only X number of non-respawning rare components for Polar Ray in the game, I probably wouldn't waste space in my spellbook on Polar Ray. My Sorcerer certainly wouldn't waste a slot on it. There's bound to be something almost as good or better I could memorize that day instead, without using an exceptionally difficult to replace item.

Again, not trying to trash talk the idea; this is just how I'd feel about it as a player. Finding the rare gem that lets you learn and cast Spell X as treasure is a great and balanced idea, and I'd get a kick out of it. Having to devote bunches of inventory slots to those gems or worse not being able to use the spell more than a few times in the game would bug me.

 

I think we need temple respawns, like a group of bugbears waiting in the will'o wisp's room after you've been to lvl 4, or someone in the hedrack room for when you come out of the nodes. a group of brigands in the enterance to the temple maybe or a group in the escape tunnel who have ben away on a raid and who's party leader is to stupid to believe you that you are a friend of lareth and he's upstairs (or if you aren't) anyway its an unavoidable fight.

I think the most inportant thing to remember with high level encounters is for the enemies to have a really high tohit/BAB cos who doesn'y try to max out their characters AC, and on that note give them a high AC as well.