Richterm's Retreat Nordock

People are gonna be mad at me I wager, but I wanted to point out that death magic, particularly wail of the banshee, seems to be killing elementals and undead (at least the Abiz specific undead). I thought, "huh weird, must be some different server setting than I'm used to" when I saw it happen with the elementals and kinda shrugged it off.

But when I saw it happen again with undead, I knew something was not quite like it is supposed to be.

Just letting you know that something appears to be off in this regard.

Ok, now all you folks that like it this way can complain at me for opening this topic.

We want the server to present some challenge. If wizards or sorcerors can run around killing everything with just one spell, something is broken.

Hmm,

Apparently catapault forgot a few of the undead skin props (50% pierc/slash imm. on skellies is absent as well).

Nwnwiki suggests elementals arent death immune necessarily however.

I suspect though that the undead lacking death immunity all have a challenge rating lower than that of a wailing sorcerer, wouldn't consider it "exploitable" myself, and their ability to kill unprepared players still forms a challenge.
With the proper preparations the undead can be killed much cheaper than showing noobness with wails.
Without the proper preparations the undead can easily kill noobish wailing sorcerers.

I'm not sure about the higher undead spawn in abiz.

If anyone modding has some time it could be added to skins (propably only some generic "abiz undead skin")

Should I check it and export an ERF with the updated skin(s)?

greets,

Xillie

Death Magic vs Undead is different than Negative Energy like Harm spell, it DOES kill them/destroy them.

with so many devs it's easy for someone to miss undead properties on some spawns. That's a separate issue to report on it's own.

The base spell of wail of the banshee is pretty weak on it's own, when it's boosted via skill points/feats a wizard SHOULD be able to nuke everything with just one spell, mages are meant to be the most powerful, they're responsible for all those nice +5 items you have, if you think about it.

oh, and elementals, they can be killed on the material plane by death magic, just as they can be banished.

I went and checked the wiki after I posted and yeah, there is nothing there that says elementals are immune to death magic. I also checked undead on the wiki and is says the game description leaves out death magic, but then adds that they should be immune to it.

I'm not exactly worried about it, just pointing out what seemed really, really odd to me. Maybe I spent too much time on the Diff Nordock Server and they were tweaked there from standard and that's what my old brain is remembering. Thanks for clearing it up.

For the sake of balance, undead should generally be immune to death magic regardless of their pnp description. Death spells like wail of the banshee are indeed level 9 spells for a good reason, but using one spell to obliterate everything is not a balanced approach to gameplay. We try to (or have tried, cat did not know how to use the pre-buffing scripts that qel and I worked out) use external buffs for monsters whenever possible so that stripping this off provides the opportunity to kill them with spells rather then just flat immunity.l

Valikar wrote:For the sake of balance, undead should generally be immune to death magic regardless of their pnp description. Death spells like wail of the banshee are indeed level 9 spells for a good reason, but using one spell to obliterate everything is not a balanced approach to gameplay. We try to (or have tried, cat did not know how to use the pre-buffing scripts that qel and I worked out) use external buffs for monsters whenever possible so that stripping this off provides the opportunity to kill them with spells rather then just flat immunity.l

I have to invalidate this claim. Did you know these prebuffs aren't greater dispellable at all? They have gazillion caster levels on them, something is wrong.