Arcane spells and Armor

Scripted ALFA systems & related tech discussions (ACR)

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Blindhamsterman
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by Blindhamsterman »

clever, I'd not considered doing it all inside the mage armour code itself. I'll drop it in my test mod and let you know if i find a way to break it.
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by ElCadaver »

Kind of wish I'd never started this thread now. If you nerf mage armor I wanna relevel to cleric instead!

The way I have been playing it with my PC (who has plate and towershield) is put down the shield, cast the spell, pick the shield back up, and wear the roughly 30% spell failure for my armour. It's quite accurate in that I get spells off 2 out of 3 times, which makes combat interesting if the spell fizzles, and keeps me from biting off more that I can chew. If I want to use flare ( my uber spell), I equip my longsword without a shield, and when finished firing off a few at the approacing group, don my shield.

I feel that is a fair way of RPing a staunch fighter getting used to his new found arcane power.

Having plate, tower shield, combat expertise and mage armor gives me AC27. This means I can own boars, but still get smacked around by ogres

It's not THAT big an advantage...
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t-ice
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by t-ice »

First,
10-2(dex)+8(plate)+4(tower)+3(CE)+4(magearmor)=27
So you really have a dex of 6?

Second, what's fair or unfair advantage is always a matter of opinion, but :
1) Mage armor stacking with armor is squarly against the SRD. MA is obviously supposed to be the mage's spell to protect herself _instead of_ armor.
2) Giving +4 armors to people from the get-go would likely be considered unbalanced. That's what MA effectively is. The game is balanced roughly for +N magic things for PCs of level 3N, and this obsidian bug goes in the face of that giving a +4 at lvl1.
3) It would probably be considered unfair by most players if NPC enemies (especially random-generated) would start using this "feature", showing up with +4 to armor thanks to being buffed by some friendly sorcerer or another.

In fact ogres attack at +8
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/ogre.htm
so if you had a dex of 8 instead of 6, you would pretty much own them (then they hit you with a 20 only).

There never is an objective view to what is "THAT big an advantage", but people who enjoy a benefit pretty much never would think theirs is unfair, or rate it fairly. You can always come up with justifications. If there are PC builds based on this "feature", if it were upto me, I would give people the chance to rebuild their char sheets, but of course it's not.

Like Zelknoff pointed out:
"As a general rule, though, the more AC you have, the more valuable it is to get more"

This fix would actually help the AC of pure wizards, as they can enchant their clothing and it stacks with mage armor.

So cheers to Zelknoff for pulling if off. Now how do we get it into the haks?
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by AcadiusLost »

Should be able to add it with next hak update. Not sure when that'll be yet, maybe when the new vault scripts are ready, maybe before. Given the amount of hassle involved in updating central resources simultaneously across all ALFA servers for the autodownloader, it's a large enough operation to justify "saving up" a number of pieces of content to bring in together.
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Blindhamsterman
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by Blindhamsterman »

didn't seem to have any issues with the script myself, once again I say Kudos to Zelfnolf.
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by AcadiusLost »

Actually, thinking about it again, I should be able to make a serverside script version of this which we could drop into WHL Beta for anyone to test. If no one's managed to break it after a week or so of that, we could interim patch it into the Live servers using the same method, until the hak version is ready.
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by Zelknolf »

I'll keep an eye on the thread. Extending the concept to improved mage armor and shield will be a simple matter, but if there are bugs I'd rather fix it once than three times. I can clean up how it looks on the GUI now for any released version; currently, it starts displaying a skill penalty (on Animal Empathy, so it's not actually hurting any usable skills) that is not needed to track the spell's bonus in that version. That's just a matter of rearranging the effect building in the pseudoheartbeat to look like the effect building in main.
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by AcadiusLost »

Zelknolf wrote: currently, it starts displaying a skill penalty (on Animal Empathy, so it's not actually hurting any usable skills) that is not needed to track the spell's bonus in that version.
Gave me a start there, since I hadn't noticed that part... currently the ACR uses the Animal Empathy skill rank (base rank, though) to check/track adaption to the backgrounds/custom skills frameworks. Looks like it's a skill modifier (EffectSkillDecrease) being used, so it shouldn't lead to unanticipated problems like the ACR suddenly deciding a given PC is actually in the middle of an automated rebuild onto the new skills framework (as I check base ranks for that).

Am I reading this correctly, though, that this skill modifier is not needed in the present version of the Mage Armor fix?
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by oldgrayrogue »

t-ice wrote:In fact ogres attack at +8
Going from memory here but I remember Ogres and other mobs attacking at more like +12. Could be wrong, just saying. I am all for these fixes to bring things into proper order, but we should ensure they are applied on the other side of the equation where needed as well.
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by Blindhamsterman »

Ogre Berzerkers (not uncommon on TSM, or at least they never used to be) are +13 iirc.
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by Zelknolf »

Baaaaack on topic.

AcadiusLost wrote:Am I reading this correctly, though, that this skill modifier is not needed in the present version of the Mage Armor fix?
That is correct. The version posted is actually using a blank VFX of an absurdly-high number (so as to not conflict with any potential VFX additions in the future) to keep track of mage-armor-ish effects, as effects lose their spell ID if applied from the delay queue. I changed it in my main function, but not in my heartbeat function. Bad testing on my part, I suppose.
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by ElCadaver »

Zelknolf wrote:Baaaaack on topic.
Actually, the topic is using spells as an arcane warriorish acolyte, not opening up a forum to nerf my chr.. luckily I have found a new survivability tool, only logging on every six months or so when I have time.
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by Ithildur »

Kudos zelk; I've played gishes/ftr/mage types forever and have for a long time keenly felt that this fix was needed (along with imp/greater mage armor and Shield spells) for ALFA.

Yes, I know it makes my character theoretically more vulnerable (I've never used the mage armor/physical armor combo in ALFA as far as I can recall anyway), but I'm willing to happily live with it because it's a fix/correction of the ruleset which affects everyone. People running around at low lvls with +3/+4 full plate armor is extremely broken.
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Regas
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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by Regas »

Could someone please explain in plain terms what the 'fix' is for mage armor and shield then? This seems to have come up as part of the Blade slinger PrC class. I certainly understand wanting to bring the spell into PnP terms, and I don't want to see it abused by plate mail wearing uber fighter mages... but I am very concerned these changes will make mages that much more difficult to play in alfa, in the NWN2 game engine. There appears to be some agreement that this should be a concern (game balance) when we begin tweaking abilities, feats and skills. Could we please pause a moment and reflect on this?

For what it's worth, I play a rogue/ mage now so you can accuse me of bias on this one but I believe, blades slinger PrC not withstanding, the current mechanics of Armor and shield are not only justified in the game environment but necessary, especially for low and moderate level pcs.

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Re: Arcane spells and Armor

Post by AcadiusLost »

The fix is returning Mage Armor to it's intended PnP format.

Basically, it should work like a no-armor-check-penalty AC4 armor (equiv. to chain shirt).

If one is already wearing, say, leather armor (boosts AC by 2), it would up armor class by 2 more to the same AC4 type level (so an equal dex wizard+mage armor = wiz/rogue in leather + mage armor = rogue + chain shirt). Casting mage armor while in chain shirt or better has no effect (unless one takes off the armor).

The spell was never intended to add +4 to whatever armor is being worn... closest equivalent to that is Magic Vestment, a 3rd level cleric spell (vs. 1st level wiz/sorc spell)- and MV doesn't get up to +4 until the caster is 16th level... so yeah, it's definitely a bug that a 1st level mage spell has this effect.

(haven't had time to get the Mage Armor fix applied to WHL for testing yet, hoping to get that in tonight though)
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