MM7Rev4mod A Radical Redone

[Tomsod]

Thief promotion requires taking out strong melee opponents in a small room. Usually I can get that at low level by using invisibility & the gatemaster NPC.
But that npc is not available for hire in this mod (and uses town portal which doesn't work anyway until after the 2nd mage promotion) .

FWIW Town Portal should still teleport to Nighon (and Celeste/Pit if you've progressed the story) even before you "unlock" it (unless DaveHer fixed that). But casting from a scroll will fail with enemies nearby.

In vanilla rescuing the dwarves started a timer which triggered the human/elf war & several tough quest approx 4 months later.
Those quests had a strict time limit.

I don't believe the judge death really blocked anything even in vanilla, IIRC you can still complete human-elf war quests after choosing a new judge. There's one month limit on these quests after taking them, but you don't have to talk to royals right away. In fact I, for one, usually aim to rescue dwarves as soon as possible because there's a mandatory four month wait from there to the second half of the storyline, and I try to spend it productively.

[DaveHer]

Sorry about the strong monsters. They were made stronger by Big Daddy Jim. You are not supposed to go there until you beef up your group.
David

[Lone_Wolf]

For now I'll stick to KTCS (Barbarian Thief Acolyte Mage ) and get to know this mod better as I do like the changes (except the free bows of carnage).

Might even delay promotion quests after completing courier quests (or atleast not turn them in) to see how strong a pre-first-promotion party can become with good gear.
(found heartbreaker & moon strike in B, so have the 2 strongest artifacts already).

[DaveHer]

For now I'll stick to KTCS (Barbarian Thief Acolyte Mage ) and get to know this mod better as I do like the changes (except the free bows of carnage).

Might even delay promotion quests after completing courier quests (or atleast not turn them in) to see how strong a pre-first-promotion party can become with good gear.
(found heartbreaker & moon strike in B, so have the 2 strongest artifacts already).

That is the way to do it. Keep developing your group. Complete all the quests I added to the game. They increase your experience Points.
David

[Lone_Wolf]

Some monsters use Acid Burst .
While that is a water spell, the description of weapons with "of acid" mentions doing body damage .

data/events text/spells.txt list none in the Res column for acid burst, which suggests the damage is physical.

mm7patch readme.txt suggests acid burst was changed to water damage, but also mentions that can be overridden .
That option is not in my mm7.ini, so it should be at default.

How to improve defense against acid burst damage in this mod ?

[Tomsod]

IIRC overriding Acid Burst fix is done through editing spells.txt, not mm7.ini. If the element is "none" it gets changed to water, specifying an actual element leaves it intact.

[Lone_Wolf]

Thank you, Tomsod .

For testing I increased water resistance to 500 for all chars and acid burst does very little now.

Acid burst in this mod (which inlucdes grayface patch) is confirmed to cause Water Damage .

A strong white water resistance potion is looking very attractive now and getting to nighon has moved up the list of things to do.

Party is now at lvl 11 and arena knight battles are doable at level 11 with this gear, but I don't have skill 7 in dagger, leather and alchemy yet .
Would have to train up to lvl 17 or 18 atleast .
Decisions , decisions .

[Tomsod]

Master dagger is useless in vanilla, maybe less so in this mod, but still not great. What it does is triple just the dagger's stated damage, it doesn't affect strength, heroism, armsmaster etc. bonuses. So let's say you have a 3d4+15 dagger, on average it does 22.5 damage: with master 7 there's a 7% chance of doing 45 extra damage, or just 3.15 extra damage on average. Compare this with axe, mace, spear, armsmaster which all grant +7 damage at 7 skill, and much less random too. In this scenario, dagger only gets even with bigger weapons if it can attack more than twice as fast!

Master Leather is also not great, as master 7 only grants +10 AC compared to expert 4, which is not game-changing. Eventually you should get it, but with limited skill points I would advise investing in armsmaster and some magic school for now. (Assuming we're talking about a thief.) Stealing is also underrated, as it allows saving a lot of money, esp. on consumables.

[Lone_Wolf]

I only mentioned the skills that require to get to nighon to become master .

Current skills at lvl 11 (leaving out some)

Knight Bow 4E , Sword 7M , Plate 4E, Armsmaster 4E , BB 7E
Thief Bow 4E, Dagger 4E, leather 4E, Armsmaster 4E, BB 7E, disarm 4B , perception 4E
Cleric Bow 4E, mace 4E, Leather 4E, Shield 4E, BB 7E, spirit 4E, Body 4E, mind 1B, merchant 7E
Sorcerer Bow B4, Dagger 4E, leather 4E, BB 7E, fire 4E, AIr 4E, water 1B , earth 1B, ID item 7M, Alchemy 4E

With training up
Knight gets Plate M + Armsmaster M
Thief gets Dagger M, Leather M & Armsmaster M .
Cleric Mace M, meditation M , mind E
Sorcerer Alchemy M, Air M, earth E, Water E, meditation E

Knight & Thief have 5 sk left, cleric + sorcerer 0 . need 54 sk total for thief & sorcerer .
Using 3 horseshoes for sorcerer and 1 for thief would mean 8 levels needed .
I got around 37 horseshoes now (mod adds extra horseshoes) , so could use more and train a bit less.

Not using stealing as I want to roleplay a good party, so no stealing from shopkeeepers.
I also never raid the dwarven treasure and only raid Castle Gryphonheart / Castle Navan if I can pull it off before the dwarf king officially recognizes party as lords of harmondale . (Gryphonheart is tough with masters of the sword, but elven rangers can be worse )

[Tomsod]

I see, roleplay is a valid concern. It's just that I only recently found that Stealing is actually very good early on, but of course it's entirely optional!

Even then, I think the thief would benefit more from a strong fire/ice bolt than the dagger & leather masters, although I recall you don't want to get promoted yet so it makes sense. You could've also pushed ID item master on her (master 10 can ID anything, and there are booster rings), possibly also merchant (by the point you can get GM on cleric money is a non-issue anyway).

Bow experts are because of free carnage bows I suppose? Should've skipped the sorcerer, carnage always hits.

Cleric doesn't need the mace master, the bonus is virtually useless, better to invest in magic skills -- you will later need them at 10 anyway, and both spirit and body benefit from each skill point greatly.

Sorcerer can get master air, I thought this mod version was without Maestro's class tweaks? In vanilla you need a promotion first. Overall she looks starving for horseshoes, so many skills. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you need to complete a quest to get expert fire (and you also got skill level 8 for free)? I guess DaveHer changed that? But if there still is a quest then advancing it manually is kind of a waste.

[Lone_Wolf]

Thief has intellect 7 , so would get very little SP .

I prefer to use rings for things that can't be done easy with skillpoints and often find the limit of items a problem, especailly for magic users..
Also I prefer to have GM rank over Master if possible, even though it's not strictly necessary. Once party gets to higher levels, the 27 sk to get from 7 to 10 is not a big loss .

Money tends to get tight for a while when you need to buy master / grandmaster spells (especailly the light/dark spells) and black potions .
(This is partially due to my habit of wanting all possible spells one could cast to be available) . I very much prefer to have merchant GM by then.

Sorcerer can get master air, I thought this mod version was without Maestro's class tweaks? In vanilla you need a promotion first. Overall she looks starving for horseshoes, so many skills. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you need to complete a quest to get expert fire (and you also got skill level 8 for free)? I guess DaveHer changed that? But if there still is a quest then advancing it manually is kind of a waste.

sorcerer can't get master air without promoting,it will have to be 7E .

The quest that grants 8 Expert in fire requires finding something in the barrows AND returning to emerald .
I have no idea how long that will take and trained up to lvl 7 on Emerald to ensure I didn't need to wait for fire expert too long.
Once I do get there I'll just add the sk points spent on increasing fire magic using a savegame editor.
(in my opinion the reward should do that anyway instead of neglecting already achieved rank).

Sofar I've taken all the skill boost barrels found, but in next playthrough I'll prob skip all of them except the BB 7E one.
(The extra free HP are just too valuable)

Bows :
I dislike weapons that hurt my party and in vanilla only used bows of carnage for one playthrough were I wanted artifacts early and used carnage bows to kill titans in titans stronghold .
Besides the carnage bows are limited by the strength of the bow they're on.
In vanilla they are on elven lomgbow I think, which is about half as strong as the griffin bow.
In this mod its ebony bow - enchanted elven bow with a similar difference.

Sorcerer with bow : My most-used party is goblin knight, goblin thief, human cleric, elf sorcerer.
All have 30 in the attrib they can get to 30 so the sorcerer starts with 30 int & 30 accuracy.
This makes the sorcerer the best bow user of the party on Emerald, despite not being able to become bow expert.
The +3 to hit from Increasing bow skill to 4 helps a lot with early fights.

ADDED : I'm thinking this mod may be too different for me (atleast for now) and mm7 redoneultimate might be a better fit.

[Tomsod]

Thief has intellect 7 , so would get very little SP .

Sure, but fire bolt is just 2 sp and even one blue potion will last for a while. The thing is, spells are very sensitive to skill levels, so you can get very strong attacks if you invest in them...

Bows :
I dislike weapons that hurt my party and in vanilla only used bows of carnage for one playthrough were I wanted artifacts early and used carnage bows to kill titans in titans stronghold .
Besides the carnage bows are limited by the strength of the bow they're on.
In vanilla they are on elven lomgbow I think, which is about half as strong as the griffin bow.
In this mod its ebony bow - enchanted elven bow with a similar difference.

Sorcerer with bow : My most-used party is goblin knight, goblin thief, human cleric, elf sorcerer.
All have 30 in the attrib they can get to 30 so the sorcerer starts with 30 int & 30 accuracy.
This makes the sorcerer the best bow user of the party on Emerald, despite not being able to become bow expert.
The +3 to hit from Increasing bow skill to 4 helps a lot with early fights.

...Especially compared to ordinary bows -- consider that most attack spells always hit, so they have functionally infinite to-hit bonus. So a sorcerer would be better served putting skill points in magic, and for others, the best way to increase accuracy is to invest in cleric's spirit magic, as Expert Bless affects the entire party (and other spells like Heroism are also boosted "for free"), so it's very skill-point-effective.

And if you're not using carnage bows (I also didn't like them, BTW), then consider that expert bow only gives less than 10% DPS increase (the lower recovery the better; if your base bow recovery is 45 which is difficult but not impossible to achieve, then you'll shoot 9.75% faster with Expert 4), while level 4 in [any spell school] gives +300% damage with its attack spells, and possibly lower recovery on Expert. Investing in bow is only really worth it if you can get to master, sadly unlike MM6 it's very restricted.

I prefer to use rings for things that can't be done easy with skillpoints and often find the limit of items a problem, especailly for magic users..
Also I prefer to have GM rank over Master if possible, even though it's not strictly necessary. Once party gets to higher levels, the 27 sk to get from 7 to 10 is not a big loss .

When you have plenty of skill points, buying all the skill ranks you can is par for the course; my unsolicited advice began when you said you don't have enough skill points for now, so I'm discussing the optimized early-game approach.

ID item rings should ideally be swapped on for just when you need to identify something, so they don't have to occupy a slot.

Money tends to get tight for a while when you need to buy master / grandmaster spells (especailly the light/dark spells) and black potions .
(This is partially due to my habit of wanting all possible spells one could cast to be available) . I very much prefer to have merchant GM by then.

That's interesting, somehow I'm always swimming in money by that point! Well, it's good that the GM is useful to someone.

The quest that grants 8 Expert in fire requires finding something in the barrows AND returning to emerald .
I have no idea how long that will take and trained up to lvl 7 on Emerald to ensure I didn't need to wait for fire expert too long.
Once I do get there I'll just add the sk points spent on increasing fire magic using a savegame editor.
(in my opinion the reward should do that anyway instead of neglecting already achieved rank).

It would be possible to add +7 to skill using game scripts, but then the more skill you already had, the greater the reward (in terms of skill points) would be, so maybe BDJ though it'd be too cheesy. But as it stands it discourages putting ANY points in fire, which is also bad.

Another interesting thing about that quest reward is it gives thieves Expert 8 if they already have fire skill, so ideally you'd have to promote your thief first as well.