Workaround for the spell effect stacking bug (mod)

[henk brouwer]

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
.. So, if I understand it, you have basically made the spells act like 'Skills',.. hmmm interesting, but don't you think this will completely unbalance the game? (for Wizards)

I think the "spell effect stacking bug" itself is far more game unbalancing. This is far from a perfect solution though, and it might need some tweaking. The best solution would be that Malfador made a patch that fixes the bug .

The effect of this mod on gamebalance shouldn't be to big as it is now. Remember that nearly all the affected skills/spells only cost 5 mana under the old system for a reasonable amount of time. A character could have most of these spells active at all times under the old system with almost no mana drain(if they didn't abuse the stacking bug). It would just be tedious to have to reactivate the spell every half minute. I might tone down the effectiveness of some of the spells though.

It certainly doesn't only affect wizards, most of their spells are of different types that are not influenced by this patch. Fighter "spells" like rage or berserk might be the most unbalanced.

Personally I wouldn't include this 'Spells' mod as part of a bigger mod. It might be best to have this available as a stand-alone option for players to add if they like it.

I must say it is an interesting mod, keep up the good work.

Cheers!

I am going to include it in the mod, since it makes it much easier to make a mod with balanced gameplay, I don't have to worry anymore about players that make themself invincible using the bug.

It will be easy to change the upcoming mod to use the old system, if you prefer that. Just copy the standard spells.txt file over the one in the mod, and everything should be back to normal. (there are no other changes to the spells.txt file at this point)

Thanks for the feedback!

[ October 12, 2003, 11:49: Message edited by: henk brouwer ]

[henk brouwer]

A small warning, I found a bug: scrolls that use the spells that are changed by this mod don't seem to work.

I'll fix it in a next Version, I'll have to make duplicate entries for those spells, give them the old values, and make the scrolls refer to the duplicates.

The problem is that I would have to change the main_itemclasses.txt file (or the classes.txt file depending on approach, but it's just as messy) Both of those files have their own Versions for each module, so the spell/skill mod would lose compatibility with those modules

[ October 22, 2003, 12:16: Message edited by: henk brouwer ]