For the love of the gods - Summon overhaul

[Rad-Icarus]

First off, I love that there are some interesting scripts and changes to the vanilla summoning spells and abilities on BG, that being said:

It is no secret that the summons need some serious tweaking in several places.

I reached a level of frustration when I picked the Fiendish Legacy feat, only to learn it casts the spell at level 1...meaning if disappears in about 30 seconds and renders the feat essentially useless - even for roleplay and aesthetics.

Also, can we tweak the scale of some of these summons?

A summon creature 2 bat should not be the size of a wyvern...and many of these are massive, cumbersome, and unruly causing more of a pathing problem than anything else.

I would be happy to work with anyone who can either point me in the right direction on with files need to be modified on the re-sizing and any appearance changes needed. I know from working with NWN1 that each summon for each spell exists as a creature file that can be edited in the toolset - which I would certainly be willing to help with.

Do you think we could possibly fix the fiendish heritage summon as well. or change it to summon something more appropriate?
Would an imp-like lesser planar binding type familiar be more in keeping with the fiendish theme?
Or is there a lore-based reason why they summon dire badgers and such?

[Wildsheep]

Someone please tint the Asura's wings orange instead of red while you're at it, they look like fiends atm

[Wandering_Woodsman]

I don't know enough about summons to say for certain one way or the other on the need for an overhaul.

I WILL say this however:

If I begin work on my magi again, and it turns out that at low levels an undead summon lasts A LOT LONGER then anything else I can conjure, then by god I'm goin' to use it. RP be damned. I don't mean to be rude here, or insensitive to others, but daggonit, if I'm gonna go into a fight, I'd like to actually have a summon that takes the beating that's meant for my squishy magi. If the only thing that works due to game mechanics and/or server setup is an undead, then that's what I'm conjuring.

[Mursey]

I find Giant Scorpions take a huge beating and keep on ticking.

[Rad-Icarus]

I find Giant Scorpions take a huge beating and keep on ticking.

All of the summons have the same base statistics per summon level with some changes depending on whether fiendish or dire or celestial.

I don't want to change the fundamental stats of the giant scorpion, but scale it down a bit so it isn't a massive obstacle that makes it difficult for other players to fit through corridors or target enemies it's fighting. Same goes with a few of the other creature models.

[Ravial]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/summonMonsterV.htm

The table is what Fiendish legacy can summon in PnP-- fiensish things only.

As for the hit boxes, I'll see what I can do. I've been increasingly irritated by overly large hit boxes of things like dragon shapes, which's texture models are too small for them in the first place.

[Moridin]

The bebilith's hitbox needs to be shrunk down forsure.

[izzul]

some monsters have too long attack range my cleave wasn't able to reach them

[Mursey]

I actually like the size of some of the summons. Yes they block corridors and make it difficult for other creatures to reach you or attack past them. But when you're a squishy wizard, that's sort of the point. It's why I like scorpions so much. The models are nice, big roadblocks.

I don't think of their size as a bug or a problem. I see it as a feature. A positive feature.

[Ravial]

It's not supposed to be a feature if the hitbox is literally x1.5 - x2 bigger than they actually are. Either they're scaled up or the hitbox gets scaled down.

[Rad-Icarus]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/summonMonsterV.htm

The table is what Fiendish legacy can summon in PnP-- fiensish things only.

As for the hit boxes, I'll see what I can do. I've been increasingly irritated by overly large hit boxes of things like dragon shapes, which's texture models are too small for them in the first place.

Couple things here:

1) The fiendish legacy feat is BROKEN - it casts at level 1 a standard summon creature V - this needs to be fixed as it only lasts a single turn
(I am willing to put in the work to help mod this if I can)

2) the only creatures on that list you CAN summon are a fiendish dire boar or scorpion

- Most of the creatures you summon are not on the list, and most on that list cannot be summoned...so it's not very lore-correct now at all

3) I would be happy to edit the summon sizes and hitboxes (I'm on the dev team as area builder, and I can work with blueprints as each creature is drawn from a blueprint)

4) we can always leave one or two summoned creatures very large, like the dire bear for people that want to exploit them and use them as a wall of flesh to clog corridors. Right now if you don't want to have a corridor clogging impediment, you are limited to ONLY the lion or wolf (badger and ant slightly less so)

On a related note: can we tame down the vastly overpowered hellfire warlock summon? Or make it level up so that people aren't dragging around a permanent epic level summon early on? Seems ridiculously overpowered.

[Ravial]

1) Take it easy. No need to get super passionate about it.

2) Yes, well. I did say the table is PnP and I've never said what we have right now is lore accurate.

And as I've said- I'll see what I can do about it.

[Balthomer]

some monsters have too long attack range my cleave wasn't able to reach them

This is very aggravating and has made this feat useless for me 90% of the time.

[Wandering_Woodsman]

Well, I'm glad I decided to change my feats at my last levelup...