Patching the charm spells

Remove all ads!

Is there a simple way to change the charm person spell and the animal empathy to behave similar to how it works in Baldur's Gate? I find it very annoying to charm a character, only to have him stand there doing nothing while the rest of the hostiles go after my party. Worse, when all the other bad guys are dead, I can't kill the charmed guy without setting off all the neutrals in the area. At least, the last part I've only confirmed for the Palisade battle.

Swapping the efffect files using Infinity Explorer or NearInfinity to extract them might work, but I have no idea which ones to extract. Any help would be appreciated.

 

I've never had this happen to me in IWD2 before. And while I like using Charm spells, I can't say that I've ever used one around neutral characters.

My guess is that it might have something to do with the AI script that a charmed creature uses (i.e. 00SSCHRM.BCS), but I'm not particularly good at understanding the content of decompiled BCS scripts.

 

The neutrals only went hostile in the Palisade battle. However, the orcs at Shaegarne ignored their charmed fellows who just stood there deciding to sit the battle out in favor of maintaining their lock on my party members. The same thing happened about 50-60% of the time throughout the hord fortress. Wihe the spell was useful for temporarilly taking enemy archers OOC, it wasn't as useful as it was in Baldur's Gate or even BG2. Now if it made the enemies fight each all the time, then I wouldn't have regretted choosing it. For some reason, occasionaly it WOULD allow me to control the charmed character, which is when they became useful, as I would sic them on the enemy spellcasters.

Oh, the game is unpatched, I tried the patch and it didn't seem to help, so I reverted because I read that the patch nerfed Improved Invisibility and Animate Dead. If there was a way to keep it from nerfing those spells and any others, or unnerf them once the patch is applied... But That's an issue for another thread.

[ April 10, 2006, 05:12: Message edited by: SlickRCBD ]

 

Slick, yes, the patch nerfs ImpInvis and Animate Dead. But ImpInvis is actually broken and needed fixing. Was Animate Dead nerfed? Yes. But it was considered to be overpowered.

It's not a problem to play the game patched. Besides, the patch fixes other bugs, and includes some forgotten armors in some of the later stores in the game.


Regarding Charm... Yes, regular Charm doesn't give you full control over the charmed monster. That's what Dire Charm or Dominate Monster or Mass Domiante are for. I don't know how to determine which monsters will fight for you and which will not. I always use Charm on enemy warriors, not spellcasters, since the tanks and archers will have lower Will saves than the spellcasters. I also prefer to Charm archers well behind enemy front lines, and particular an archer that's very close to aother enemies. That seems to increase the chance that the charmed enemy will fight for you or draw fire from the enemy. And often, if the charmed enemy gets attacked by his own buddies, he seems to start fighting back.

I also don't like Charming enemy tanks that are in melee, cuz I don't want to accidently attack'em a dispel the Charm. Charming behind the lines tends to get more bang for the buck.