Hotfix Mod / Aranna Legacy Mod

I am having the SAME problem but am using Legends not Hotfix/Legacy

Keeping the sword seems to cause problems even in unmodded DS2 but I've never had the proper method fail for me yet, though admittedly I haven't tried it with the latest version of Legends or Hotfix/Legacy mods. All I can recommend is not to use any of those mods when playing that part of DS2 until it's been tested properly with those particular mods.

Well, I always do the procedure I described and I always use the same mods, but this is the first time I get this problem, so something changed in either Legacy or Legends.

As I said, I even tried to complete the first quest and start the second one BEFORE reaching the demon crypt.

Anyway, if this bug is caused by a complex and bugged flick, maybe Hotfix/Legacy could revise it a bit?

Thanks for all your comments and inputs about the Family Heirloom quest.

Based on the posts I already have a vague idea what the reason could be. Nonetheless it's a tricky quest (2 actually) and should not be underestimated.
Nonetheless I hope I will be able to find a fix for the next release.

I've got a few bugs to report for the regular DS2 map

In these locations, the creatures don't jump down to ambush you for some reason. It's only affected by Aranna Legacy, I think it might be the same for the Hotfix mod but I'm not sure.

As soon as the movie sequence starts after you finish up the tutorial on the beach, the game crashes and I have to pull up the task manager to close it down. This only happens when the recipe_transfer and save_town_portal is set to true in the configuration file. Just thought I'd let you know about that.

But why some monsters jump, and some don't, is unknown to me. It's probably addon-related!? I hardly can remember any monster intended to jump that doesn't do in v2.2.

EDIT: I'm getting a 404 Error for some reason when trying to download the Hotfix mod.

Hello, I'm using Aranna Legacy and Adepts with compatibility patches and all, but I cannot speak at all with any trader making me a packmule all time since I can't sell nor buy new stuff

I'm at the first Dryad town in Dungeon Siege 2, have both the base game and the expansion installed perfectly, but as I said, I can't trade with any NPC at all, I can only talk with the innkeeper, the enchanter, but not the potion, weapon and armor and reagent sellers. It was right from the beginning, since this is the first time playing this game, I thought it was normal, but I burned the 4 towers and I just began the curse quest, still can't talk to them to sell/buy, they move at my position as if they were about to speak to me, but nothing happens

Note that I used no other mods, even the Legendary Mod was disabled for the purpose of testing the compatibility of these two mods working together. Other than the DS2 files, the only files in my DS2 resources folder were:
Mod-BrokenWorld-ArannaLegacy-Alpha3r,ds2res
DS2BW_Adepts_Aranna_Legacy_Beta1.ds2res
DS2BW_Adepts_Resources_Beta_1h.ds2res

Let us know if you have any other mods installed as the problem will most likely be one of those. The procedure for testing incompatibilities between mods is to start with one or two and just add one at a time until the mod causing the issue is identified.

I have Amulet of the Dead, Petshop and Supershop, just deleted them to try it out

The only item that conflicts on the patching is Dwarven Mithril ring of sight. I only have Legacy + Adepts installed now, here is a picture of the resources folder, maybe you could have a better insight of the problem with it. For some reason I can't upload the image, it just sends me to a white screen, so here is a link for IMGUR of the image http://i.imgur.com/DuPBYuv.png

So therefore I believe the problem stems from having Mod-BrokenWorld-ArannaLegacy-Alpha3r.ds2res in the custom folder and not the DS2 resources folder (you should never have mods in the Broken World resources folder). Try that and see if it works. If not try moving 3 all mods to the DS2 resources folder.

In any case the problem has nothing to do with Aranna Legacy so please report any further issues in the Adepts thread http://siegetheday.org/?q=node/2538 . Thank you and have a Merry XMas.

Long time no see:)

As I am doing _yet another_ DS2 playthrough, I spotted several bugs and issues throughout the game.

1. The ".tmp" bug which corrupts the save is related indeed to the corruption of NPCs in the tavern, HOWEVER in rare cases it may occur without any NPCs in tavern at all (it's hard for me to track any reasons for this). In order to fix this, I take the NPC, finish the NPC-related quest, then start a new game with NPC in the tavern (moved there in the game lobby) and release it ASAP. I do it that way because I found the chance for the NPC getting corrupted upon transfer to tavern is directly related to game runtime. For a game that has run for like an hour or so, the chance is very high, but right after game starts, it nearly never happens. (this suggests memory leaks).

My suggestion is to allow direct release (like with pets) as an option in addition to "send to tavern" when you dismiss an NPC - this would simply get rid of the need to start a new game.

2. Talon bug is still out there. (The dragon is active without the "ballista" part starting). IDK - it's ALWAYS there for me. It requires me to start a new game because the ballista is inactive by default. When starting anew after the Talon part activates, the ballista gets re-activated.

perhaps a work-around would be to activate the ballista no matter whether the quest is active or not, allowing you to rotate and shoot it even without the quest active.
Not game breaking, but annoying as hell.

3. Some powers still need some love. I really like your change to Chain Lightning, it finally is worth memorizing - but there are many powers that could also use tweaks. For example, Waves of Force - the power is more or less a joke - very short range, very narrow effect, and quite low damage. A ranged character can do more damage with a thunderous/ravaging shot that ALSO stuns AND has infinite range AND has a wider effect. Waves of Force needs either a BIG damage buff (2-3 times) or some effect - perhaps applying some sort of debuff? maybe -physical damage resistance?. Getting the AoE wider would also be a thing.

Thunderus shots and Elemental Rage REALLY need attention too because they suck. The problem here is that they REPLACE the physical damage with their respective damage and that SUCKS because later in the game, critical hits and rapid attacks can do more damage by themselves than those two powers, so you actually HURT yourself by activating them... I'd change it so that the extra damage is ADDED to physical damage rather than REPLACING it. Flurry doesn't need this buff, it's one of the strongest powers in the game anyway.

4. There is a certain issue with melee characters that - rather than attacking - prefer to move several steps against the enemy to attack it from different angle. Why? Could you write a workaround that would make a character that has already engaged in melee combat to STAY IN POSITION unless ordered otherwise (or unless the target moved out of range)? The characters lose a LOT of damage when they simply whack once, run few steps to the side, attack again, reposition... and melee is already the weakest class for damage dealing in this game, it needs some attention.

5. The part of the quest with Skath and cpt. Suzor or whatever her name is is ALWAYS marked by a red cross and assumed "completed by another player" for me in every of my playthroughs. Seems a bug to me.

6. Is there a way to rotate the boss spawning (ie. every game the monsters get re-rolled, so you can meet a vulk boss in the jungle, but a rhino boss on a different game in the same place?) Right now they are fixed - you'll always meet the same boss there (and same monsters in general).

7. The Cinbri city is... depressing. There aren't many fights there. A lot of the time you're strolling through empty streets. Kinda anti-climatic for the final game location... Zaramoth's horns was PACKED with monsters and it made the place exciting. This feels so empty...

My suggestion: add a LOT more monsters there. And I mean a LOT. +50-100% more bosses, +100-200% regular monsters. If it raises the difficulty, that's GOOD. Because the place is just so damn easy compared to Zaramoth's horns... also, less empty rooms, fill those with monsters please. it's the final location of the game. It SHOULD be hard and challenging.. it's not.

8. The expansion monsters are too low level. I never EVER finished DS2 vanilla on Mercenary without level 42 characters at least (and that's without any repetition of game areas - just a plain "do everything" walkthorugh). The monsters are IIRC quite a few levels lower, making the blasted valley/blighted hills area silly (too easy, not much exp). I recommend giving those monsters at least 3 levels more!

9. BOUND TERRAKS ARRRRGH! Idk what the devs where thinking. They are bugged beyond oblivion - first, they are impervious to damage even WITHOUT their shield activated when they reach 10% (or so) HP. Next, activating their shield sometimes takes 10 seconds or more - with them still being invulnerable during that period. Finally, their shield sometimes gets visual bugs and shows the "purple orb" animation somewhere else than ON the monster ie. right next to it. The damage reflection works randomly - sometimes it reflect damage done by drown, sometimes it doesn't.

Solution: remove that stupid shield. No really, it's just a pain in the @ss. If you intend to keep it, at least make those things killable BEFORE they activate the shield. As if, if the monster couldn't activate the shield, it should be killable (stun, or just damage high enough to kill it right away) instead of running around immortal with 10% hp with you waiting 15 seconds for the damn thing to activate and pass so you can FINALLY kill the Terrak. Also, certain things (like "wasting" rending aura) should ignore the effect and slay them anyway. Kinda like Axe in Dota ignores invulnerability with his "Culling blade" ultimate that slays the target under certain amount of HP no matter what.

10. I appreciate that the devs tried to make the Aman'lu arena in the expansion harder, but giving the magic mobs (dryads and bound elves) an attack with 10 meters of AoE is just ... too much. It's hard to escape from that even if you're alone. In party? your back row will never make it. The damage is so big that on Veteran/Elite it actually instantly KILLS you (not makes you unconscious - just downright kills you instantly). Which is stupidly frustrating. You can't even silence/steal magic them properly because they are too far apart from each other.

Solution: cut the damage of that attack at least by half.

Cheers!

I was continuing (since yesterday succeeding in installing on the laptop, w/o the hotfix) my full mage party play. Now I can say that Talon was a piece of cake. Ballista activated, my girls positively went through everything, moving around to dodge melee enemies and the fireballs was a piece of cake (none of the "my front/mid/backline decided to move through a wall of dragon fire crap"), Talon in the reliquary was a matter of patience, Durvlas couldn't make me dehydrated thanks to spirit embrace, and steal magic+spirit embrace enhanced resists is already close to 70% damage reduction from every other magic user.

Oh yeah: with 4 summons up (2 nature 2 combat), steal magic, and spirit embrace, the Mimic I met couldn't even scratch me.

Now I'm wondering: does this finally change in veteran/elite? I'm buffing the vault of eternity out of my curses and embraces, so I expect to be able to handle most resistances/immunities, but I'm curious on how bad the situation really is there. (I think it was veteran/azunite desert that the first "healed by X" mobs showed up, but it was ~10 years ago)

A note on magic: Though chain lighting may be crap, and Arcing may do more damage than ignite, Ignite can be triggered by any (i think) fireshot of the firespray, ember of the embers you fire, and may ignite multiple enemies, and note that these spells are quick to cast...

And one summon per character is enough. really. Having 4 of them on my mage party is overpowered as is, I don't need more buffs. (opinion may change during veteran difficulty)

The boss spawning rotations, (a.k.a. rebuild tuning paths on each new game) I'd love to see.

edit: is this the right thread for that?

We have no other threads I guess

If you expect things on veteran / elite to get tougher... well, not really. Except for some minor aspects (like mostly unavoidable powers) veteran is much easier than mercenary. Elite is still kinda easy. Mercenary is the hardest one (duh).

Let's put it this way: I clocked my party's time of killing Mimic on Veteran difficulty and it was 4-5 seconds, not more. (the one at the morden city). So... yeah, the game gets progressively easier. Act bosses absolutely can't handle stacking war cry, decay armor and rune of sacrifice + rapid attack flurry to the face. It melts them in seconds.

Then again, not many people power game like I do. I always try to make the strongest, most broken party ever and in DS2 Legacy of Aranna I did create what I consider "perfect" party.

@czacki: Thanks for your extended feedback.

>> 1.)
(Broken) party members may be one reason for *.tmp save-files, but there may be other reasons too.
Since addon release (mainly due to several v2.2=>addon char export matters) the 'Release to Wilderness' button works for non-pets as well. Additionally the Necromancer (at Eirulan) can release party member direct out of your party.

>> 2.)
As far as I remember there shouldn't be any problems anymore!(?), and whether you play it in one session or across multiple sessions shouldn't matter.
Should you have enforced a larger sight/fog range, try to avoid to it - the Snowbrook Castle is a more vulnerable place for this type of hack.

>> 3.)
I'm sure, 'Gravity Stone' is the power you like most... !?
However it's funny that you mention 'Thounderous Shot' and 'Waves of Forces' - these powers actually cause ~1/3 less damage in the addon as they did without it. Time perhaps to take an average...

>> 4.)
Your sadly right on this observation. Key problem here is that the attack/hit command includes approaching (you can't split it into two tasks), and that with ai always tries to find 'ideal' attack distance.
I already tried out some things, but it's quite tricky to calcualte and overwrite this distance - if the path-finding doesn't like it the situation becomes even worse...

>> 5.)
Never seen a red quest cross there, but I can recheck my savegames.

>> 6.)
The existing monster placement is not that flexible (not without reworking it basically).

>> 7.)
Cinbri city... perhaps really a bit desperate...

>> 8.)
That's a relative matter, it also could be 'fixed' be reducing the exp from monsters by 20-30% - however quite unpopular probably.
However it's too painful to change levels for each monster in the addon (and as consequence, for veteran/elite mode too on the original map), but the Level Adjustment mod can help perhaps.

>> 9.) / 10.)
Sorry, had to revisit them/it first to say more about it

Then (I've seen it often enough in DS1, and guess DS2 is the same), on any sort of a slope melee opponents shift so they are fighting exactly across the slope, with neither the least bit up- or down-slope of the other.

The monster AI in this mod however is some smarter, but still far away from being clever - it's easier to show a 2 year old child how/where to directly/detour-lessly intercept a toy-train on circular path than to teach something similar to a monster in DS2. :o

Most probably there is a (big) grain of truth in both perspectives.
The mod tries to make summoning more interesting and versatile, allowing you multiple summons if you are willed to invested the required amount of skill points.
The carefull summoner may have an advantage because of this, the careless one may not be prepared or being rushed by angry monsters who hate too many of these summoned creatures...

However it's interesting to see that the addon features some new summoning related bonuses.
In this context, a remaining balancing problem in the (unmodded) game is that the amount of monsters (nor their behaviour) does respect or scale up with the number of party members (incl. summons or any allied/nearby NPCs).
With 6 party members for example a monster may have ~2x more life points than it had when facing a 1-man-party, but it remain 1 monster who finally can be happy to get the chance to attack/hit once or twice.
 

Yep, and there is more than meets the eye when it comes to number of players and difficulty.

For instance, if you compare the amount of time it takes to recharge a single power for 6-man party to the same for a single character, you will notice that the powers recharge - duh - 6 times faster. However, monster HP does not increase 6 times, so in the end, you're using (in a 6-man party) your powers around three times less often (assuming you use them every time they are available - as an example, really, since nobody really does that except with lategame flurry).

On the other hand, bigger parties do inflict a lot more "rightclick" damage because the HP grows slower than damage output.

So, the bigger your party is, the more it is linked to "regular" attacks, and less to frequent use of powers.

BUT

Since powers (some of them, at least) make such huge impact on clear speeds, the "killing speed" of your party actually LOWERS with more party members rather than going up.

Which is kinda hilarious for unexperienced DS2 players. They usually expect 6-man party to be a total stomp, and reality is quite different.

My optimal party is 2-3 members, not more, because more usually means less speed and less fun. Also, the "back row" (positions for 5th and 6th party member) are a burden, it's really really hard to avoid strong AoE attacks (such as the Aman'lu Arena AoE blasts in the expansion, or Dark Wizards' AoE attacks for vanilla) and you'll naturally see characters actually dying way more often, meaning frustration.

But I kinda like it, honestly, that pretty much every party size is playable in this game. I personally don't like big parties because it turns the whole thing into a crazy lightshow, with millions of numbers and spells flying around, quite confusing and annoying.

By the way, Rending auras and their speed of scaling is insane. I literally put 10 points into all correspoding skills (such as: Embrace, wrath, Soul of Protection, Improved Weapon Enchancements, etc.) and use amulet of kings and similar items to boost my skill levels when casting the rending spell. The effect is hilarious:

- Wasting instantly kills everything below 10000 HP. At the point of the game, regular mobs have up to 12000HP and big ones, like Varth Barbarians, have like 20-25k. Pretty funny to oneshot Kurgans with a simple blow. And it also gives a nice +59% health steal!
- Dragoon (if I used it) would give me 111% dodge chance. Too bad you can no longer have "100% dodge" :P
- Magician gives me +180% Magical damage. Holy F! Mages hit like a truck end game.
- Sharpshooter is +80% Crit chance and the far shot allows a thrower to hit stuff 40 meters away. That's almost the "fog range" of an unmodded game!

don't get me wrong, I love that those effects go up high because they are fun and unique. Especially wasting makes melee character in the lategame more useful than just being a War Cry casting bot with no purpose at all. If KG nerfed Wasting, I'd literally use another Mage instead of a Melee figher and skill him those useless Smite skills to cast War Cry instead.

(if you wonder why War cry is so good: regular mobs have 2000 armor on elite. After a warcry, you can notice how much more damage you do to them - it's like twice-thrice more).

But it does seems weird how lame ranged characters become later on in the game. Their rending auras have significant flaws (such as lower attack speed) that doesn't quite allow them to match mages. Throwers doing flurryspam are great, but they need constant Flurry activation which is annoying. Also, ranged characters don't benefit from chant of stone like mages do, so they are the least armored class. I try to offset that by using rending aura sentinel (the one that gives me dex and int - with all bonuses on level 82 it's around +250 dex +180 int, which is a massive damage and health boost).

Either way, some tuning of those effects could be probably a good idea, even though I'm opposed to nerfing them (i'd rather bring stuff like the original "rending auras" like mark of harvest up to par and scaling).

@czacki: Yes, a bigger party doesn't automatically make a player's life easier. The 6th member is relatively 'expensive' in several ways. Or to express it in a more optimisic way, the balancing between a party of 5 or 6 members is quite ok.

I going to check the Rending Auras, it's intended that they provide similar bonuses/benefits as the native Weapon Enchantment spells in the addon.
So perhaps there is a bug in a formula (quite extreme ones, often ~800 characters long with dozens of subterms and brackets).
In v2.2 however I can't state something really anormal/unintended, of course you can always find some space for optimizations or balance tunings.

 
@RSimpkinuk57: It's rather a low-level vs. high-level matter. Many assumptions and gameplay/design decisions GPG made may fit to the mercenary mode resp. character levels below 40, but often they are not really appropriate anymore for high-levelled characters.

The biggest party size depending issue in the game most probably is that the 6 party members still face the same monster amount as a 1-man-party does - that the monster's life points may vary by a factor of ~2 is almost ignorable then.

This is actually quite simple. The more characters you have, the slower it gets.

It's roughly six times faster to recharge a power for a single char when it's the only char in the party compared to a single char in a 6-man party.

Of course, all powers recharge simulatanously, but since monsters have roughly twice HP, you can assume your powers work at 50% of their potential compared to 1-man party. At least the damage dealing ones.

So, they take longer, and they (individually) do less. At the same time, a 6-man party deals roughly three times more "regular" damage than a single character, so the balance shifts from powerspam to right click "regular" DPM when you compare smaller parties to bigger ones.

But since powers are so decisive, you will actually kill things slower in a 6-man party than in a, say, 3-man party which I think has the best balance between powers and regular damage.

@KG

Yeah, I like the rending auras, they give that personal "twist" to the character and make it possible to develop characters even at Elite since at high levels they seem to react to points from extra skills the most. The only thing that should be "fixed" is the vanilla game ones, they are just very weak in comparison. I mean, 10000 damage wasting may seem OP, but it's fun to have such an option and not just another weak effect, those things feel "build defining" and that's good.

For example, a Dryad Sentinel at max potential gives so much DEX that it completely overshadows the "Mark of Rending" from vanilla game which gives damage. But it doesn't add "just" damage, it also adds a ton of HP (through increasing main stats) and boost to skills that use DEX or INT in the equation. The disproportion is huge! I'd simply buff the old Marks, multi classing is the way to play this game anyway.

Except numeric buffs, some of the old spells could use some interesting tweaks. For instance, "Earth Blast" enchantment for fist of stone should also come with passive boosts to Tremor (radius and damage) and should be multiplied by skills that affect the Aranna Legacy rending auras (like Wrath, Embrace). That would open up potential "builds" that nobody would ever use otherwise. More options = good!

Hello everyone,

it has been a long while since my last visit.

Yesterday I reinstalled Dungeon Siege II Deluxe (v2.2 only, no Broken World, I do not like it at all). I also applied the Hotfix mod (beta 5f).

I was surprised to see the game work on my Win7 x64. The only complaint I have is that it can not detect the VRAM amount of my gfx card, and though I have 4GB it says that I need at least 32MB...

I have no graphic glitch either, except -maybe- one minor thing to report:

In Eirulan there is that scripted 4-piece Set of Dryad gear that you find in chests.
The Body Armor piece of this set is in a cave slightly off the beaten path. The entrance of the cave is behind a waterfall, and inside the cave there are a Ghost and a Chant lectern. Do you recall the place?
Well, the body of water _outside_ of this cave is messed up.
The falling water is there and looks fine, and if I observe hard enough at the ground where the water ought to be, I can spot something translucent and slowly moving. But it is not the light-blue animated water texture you can see everywhere else.
I have reloaded many times and that particular body of water is consistently "missing" -- for lack of a better word.

I tried different graphic options on/off and every compatibility flag, but nothing seems to fix the glitch. Oh well...

-----

I conclude this post with a question for good KillerGremal.
I very much like your Hotfix mod, but I wish you had not touched the blue map dots that used to reveal the position of the secret buttons and other interactove objects. I miss them

Is this a feature I can disable? I mean, is there a way to make those dots show up again? Please

Be well!

The look of water is not affected by this mod (not intended at least).
Did this matter appear suddenly? And is it only at that place?
What about the look of the iver between this 'waterfall lake' and the Northern Greylin Teleporter?
If you didn't try it already, also try out once different shader types in the option menu.

Doors, signs and big levers don't have any blue dot anymore - as evident they are!(?)
Similar so other RPGs a (green) dot may reappear for smaller levers/things depending on your magic-find rate (check you once the shops, there is a high chance now of +8%MF bonuses already at the beginning of the game).

Up till now those are the only waters I have noticed that glitch like that. I can not exclude that I may find more as I progress through the game.

I have to report another glitch: the Dark Orthrac monster is completely invisible. It sounds, it moves, it attacks and can be attacked, but there is no body shown on screen.
Spell effects and projectiles will correctly stick to its body, at least.
On Greylin Isle I have killed 5 of these already -- all 5 were invisible.

I have taken two screenshots to support my claims. See the .rar attachment.
[edit]
I upload the attachment but it does not show up. How do I post images??
[/edit]

Both glitches are verified to occur:
-- with and without your mod
-- with and without use of shaders
-- with and without any NVIDIA control panel override

what could be causing them?
The only thing I have not tried is to edit the system_detail.gas -- I do not know what to write in it

If I run the DeviceID.exe program it says:

Please help.

In particular take care on the (new) 'advanced shadering' option in that form.
Even if you selected 'none'/'no  shaders' in the option menu, some features of the advanced shadering may be still active - unless you disable it the form. So try to disable it, hopefully the water will look fine again and the will become monsters visible again then.