Various tweaks that I want in my own setup, and may be useful in yours.
Table of Contents
In an effort to balance out some mega-mod added items (some of the older content) with insane boosts of things like +3 to +5 attacks per round, this component normalizes all +APR items as such:
- 1.5 to 2 APR -> 1 APR, +1 thac0, +1 damage
- 2.5 to 3 APR -> 1 APR, +2 thac0, +1 damage
- 3.5 to 4 APR -> 1 APR, +2 thac0, +2 damage
- 4.5 to 5 APR -> 1 APR, +3 thac0, +2 damage
The bonuses should apply to both the mainhand and offhand weapons.
Reasoning: the old APR, even used in offhand, provided a great benefit to the mainhand, however I feel this also makes +APR items extremely meta-game (using a +2 OH over a +4 or +5 OH, simply due to the extra APR present on it).
Some other mods have a better balancing of +APR items, correlating a small thac0 penalty alongside of it (attacking fast, but more recklessly). I like that idea, but needed a simple compensation for the subtracted APR - another thought might be to keep some of the crazy strength APR items from mods, but give a similar thac0 penalty that is multiplied by the bonus (so a +3 APR item would incur a 6 thac0 penalty, a +5 APR item would incur a 10 thac0 penalty).
I feel my solution smoothes over the gear to keep overall team APR numbers lower (as it's easier to totally overcome thac0 penalties later on in game).
I've felt that it's a bit unfair to backstabbers that a lot of the late game/tougher combat encounters totally nullified a class defining feature for no good gameplay reason (RP wise, sure, it may make sense you can't backstab a dragon - but maybe they have a weak scale/achilles heel on their back?).
For a humanoid barbarian though, one of their class defining features is the backstab immunity (likewise for a few rare items) - so this should remain untouched.
This has always seemed like a terrible game choice to me (although perhaps exciting/surprising the first time it happens in ToB). We aren't in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure though, so this component offers the ability to remove this "immunity" (I would think of timestop as "super speed", not a status ailment, so immunity being removed isn't game breaking to me).
Miscellaneous fixes or adjustments for third party mods (perhaps with a focus on fixes to critical failures).
This component addresses the fact that DH does a hard copy of AR0700 (South Central BG), while EET will re-assign AR0700 to Waukeen's Promenade, and flag South Central BG under BG0700.
The entrance can still be hard to find though, so see the screenshot (I had to draw an arrow, the door cursor disappeared when I took the screenshot):
