Spellswords & Sorcerers

Ryoko Honda · May 13, 2016, 02:42 AM

Hello CD,

After few conversations with admins. I have decerned that Sorcerer and Spellswords aren't work. That only a Rebuild at lvl 18 would get around the inability to select new spells as you level.

So here's my goals. I want to play sword welding sorcerer. Though doing 18 Sorcerer, 2 fighter leaves me with gimped AB. (Offsetable by Tester's Transformation sure).

The other alternative is Do more Fighter, and only 12 levels of Sorcerer that way the AB pain wouldn't be so bad. But I suffer on Caster Levesl. (Classic Fighter/ Spellcaster Delima).

My question is, What do you recommend? Also has taking Sorcerer , and Spellsword every other level been considered as work around from having a gimped AB? Still the benfits of Spellsword every other level? Will Spellsword still count as caster levels? Has anyone tried this before?

Hand_of_Banath · May 13, 2016, 04:06 AM

sorcerers and bards share that problem, because no PRC with arcane spellcasting progression will also grant new spells. Usually why such PRC's are favored by those who mix wizard. Because though they still don't learn spells through levellup with those PRC's, they can still learn from scrolls.

You should get increased caster level though, (only at 1/2 rate I believe, as I was told the current progression of 1:1 CL:level ratio was wrong, if you want 1:1 CL to level, take Eldritch Knight.)

tbh, the more even level split might be the way to go, even if its not ideal.

Ryoko Honda · May 13, 2016, 04:43 AM

So, Eldrich Knight will work with Sorcerer? To achieve my progress of AB and CL? Then later maybe rebuild for sorcerer?

ladybug · May 13, 2016, 05:57 AM

Spont caster classes do not work with PrCs at this time.

trylobyte · May 13, 2016, 08:40 AM

Sorcerers and prestige classes, sadly, do not mix. The devil is in the hard coding of the spell acquisition system. Bypassing it (which another server I play on does thanks to a modified PRC) is a huge amount of work and requires using a dialog-based alternate spellbook that's kind of a pain in the butt. I can totally understand why Vince hasn't gone that route. Unfortunately, this effectively cuts sorcerers off from taking the proper prestige classes.

On the topic of melee sorcerers, 18/2 Sorc/Fighter is not actually that bad as a spellsword substitute. It's a build that takes a long time to come into its own, yes, and you won't be as amazing as a Sorc/Blackguard (those saves!) or a spellsword (which is supposed to do this sort of thing) but it still works. I played Mista that way for a while before she lost a couple levels and the folks I traveled with could tell you she was respectably dangerous. Your AB isn't the greatest, true, and you don't have a lot of health, but the flip side is that you're still more or less a full spellcaster, so your spells are harder to dispel, you have a lot more of them, and you can generally do all the annoying things casters do while hitting people with a sword. It really gets fun at epic levels too, where epic spells come into the mix.

I could give you some advice on how best to make it work sometime, if you like.

Edge · May 13, 2016, 11:28 AM

Furthermore, when we were able to bypass the restrictions with an ingame dialog, it crashed the whole server unless the character was over level 18 - basically, whenever a sorcerer or vard had access to higher level spells than their base class level would allow, the whole server crashed. (So for example a single Sorc 10/Ek 2 having even only one 6th level spell in their spellbook would bring the whole server down.)

From what I've been told, there are ways to fix this issue... but they all require running the server on a Linux machine, and CD is on Windows.

Fire Wraith · May 13, 2016, 12:42 PM

And I have a Linux machine on order now to move us to. But don't hold your breath, that's a project that will take a bit of work on my part before it's ready, let alone any sorcerer/bard re-implementation.

Ryoko Honda · May 13, 2016, 05:22 PM

Alright. I'll have to consider vinilia way of building. Thank you <3

Kymus · May 15, 2016, 10:08 AM

May 13, 2016 12:42:07 GMT -5 Fire Wraith said:

And I have a Linux machine on order now to move us to. But don't hold your breath, that's a project that will take a bit of work on my part before it's ready, let alone any sorcerer/bard re-implementation.

I'm a native Linux user, but I have no experience with running servers. I assume that it's the server aspect of it that makes it such a pain to work with?

I'm also very curious as to why the OS makes a difference with the scripting in game and what other possibilities would this open up for the server (likely with even more work and time spent, I assume)?

Welcome to the dark side! We have cookies, but you'll have to compile them yourselves; the recipe and ingredients are over there but the good news is that if you're lucky, someone else already turned it into a make-and-bake recipe and you can just shove it in the oven

Fire Wraith · May 16, 2016, 07:27 AM

Because the Linux side of NWNX has seen more active development, or at least, fixing of bugs, for certain NWNX plugins. Thus, the Windows version of the plugin we would need to use in order to be able to add known spells to the character has a crash bug that occurs when running in a 64 bit environment, meaning that we would have to run in 32 bit (limiting us in our active memory), or not using that function.

The server aspect itself is pretty simple, for the most part, though I'll have to take a look at databasing. I think I'd rather move away from MySQL and to something more movement/copying tolerant, but we'll see.

Kymus · May 16, 2016, 09:19 AM

Ah, I see! I didn't realize that these scripts are OS-dependent. Though from what I've read from you and Vincent, NWNX is a whole different monstrosity.

Fire Wraith · May 16, 2016, 05:30 PM

They are and they aren't. NWServer for Linux is a different program from NWServer for Windows (obviously), and NWNX exists separately for both. Everything within NWN itself is the same (with the exception perhaps of scripts implemented that interface with those), so I can take the CD module and servervault and plop it onto a Linux server, and that core NWN works just fine.

The devil lies in the external details - NWNX, and the external database stuff. It's all entirely feasible though, it's just a matter of free time on my part to set things up and finding good solutions, such as making sure Bella has a good version of LETO (I don't know if there's a Linux one?) etc.

Kymus · May 17, 2016, 06:33 AM

Huh, very interesting. Thanks for the explanation!

Fire Wraith · May 17, 2016, 06:14 PM

I also intend/hope to actually set up a different and better solution database-wise that doesn't use MySQL. I had to sort of reverse-engineer the setup that was done by Aeternus some time back. I managed it once, for the first server move, and then apparently something with either Windows 10 or MySQL 5.7 decided it doesn't want to play nice anymore, so we're having issues where NWNX won't read/write properly.

And if I'm going to nuke the setup from orbit and rebuild, I want to do it on Linux for the various other reasons, etc.

shotgunbunny · May 22, 2016, 06:43 PM

Hey folks! My main character is a melee sorcerer suffering from this issue. I just stumbled across this thread. I would really love to see this fixed, but it sounds like a very complicated issue. I'm guessing a fix for this won't be coming soon? I've been spoiled by NWN2, where this stuff is actually supported out of the box!

To Ryoko: My char has 1 fighter level, with the rest all in sorcerer. With Still Spell, you can run around in full plate, tanking and casting stuff. My char can still sorta hit things, so it's not all bad. Still, it could be amazing if we had access to the proper PRC's!