Luck

[whathuh]

Honestly, does anyone know how this spell works? It states it gives you a 5% bonus on practiaclly everything, but it never seems to work. The painting in irenicus dungeon takes a lockpick skill of 41 to have any chance of breaking. With luck on and lockpicks 40, I get nothing. The way percentages work, I would think that I could get a 45% lockpick skill with it on, but even if it only worked on your lockpick skill itself, INT(40 * .05 +40) = 41 should let me pick that lock.

Is luck good for ANYTHING? (I haven't tried it with the gamblers in the crooked crane yet from UB mod)

The bonus is too small to be of worth.

[whathuh]

that doesn't change the fact that i should get that extra 1 lockpick point.

[Sir Goulum]

Well, I don't think that 1 lockpick point will make much of a difference.

[White Lancer]

I was under the impresion that luck simply added +1 to all yur rolls?

[EDIT] Just checked spell description in-game, it states +5%. Possibly it rolls your chance to pick the lock based on your score +5%, but if you dont have the base level required it wont work?

[ 03-23-2005, 02:10 AM: Message edited by: White Lancer ]

[Zink Whistlefly]

Luck is exactly the inverse of fatigue.

When fatigued, the higher the characters exhaustion, the more significant the penalty they get. A severly tired character might get -5 to his attack and weapon damage rolls. This would mean that they essentially critical miss on rolls of 1-5 on the D20 instead of 1, and that a D8 long sword scores just a single point of damage on rolls of 1-5.

Luck reverses this system, providing bonus to attack rolls and damage, but only until the weapon has reached its max damage. As an example, a character wielding a D8 long sword whilst under the benefits of a luck spell would score 8 points of damage on a roll of 7, but will not score higher than 8 points of damage (even when rolling an 8) since this is the max of the weapon.

I remember finding a cool ring in Icewind Dale that granted a +3 bonus to luck which was nice [img]smile.gif[/img] . Subtle bonuses to attack rolls, damage rolls, and saving throws for my warrior was fan-diddily-tastic.

[whathuh]

This would mean that they essentially critical miss on rolls of 1-5 on the D20 instead of 1

essentially a critical miss or just that you subtract that number from the roll. With the show dice rolls enabled, I usually get something like:
13+5=17 hit

Now if this were severly fatigued, I would get something like:

4-5=-1 hit

Imagine that my thac0 is around like -15, the opponent's ac is 10, so I need a -25 or better total roll to hit. That does not necessarily confer a critical miss does it?

I also noticed that while I played BG1 and went to balduran's island, I came back and was severely fatigued (bug in the game bc I had patch which took 7 days to go between the islands). During that time, I didn't rest, so I got -3452 on all my rolls. But I dont remember if I got consistent damages on my critical hits.

Essentially, what you are saying is that luck does absolutely NOTHING for my thief skills, and very very little for my attack.

[Rataxes]

Originally posted by whathuh: Essentially, what you are saying is that luck does absolutely NOTHING for my thief skills, and very very little for my attack.

For picking locks? No. For other thieving skills such as stealth, pickpocketing and trapsetting it matters more, unless you got so many points in those skills that you automatically make every roll.

But as for your attack power, increased luck has a considerable effect. Every +1 bonus to your Luck is in effect a +1 THAC0 and a +0.5 average damage bonus (capped at a Kai-like effect where you automatically do maximum damage with each hit). Luck as a spell still sucks though, but it can be useful to know just how greatly your attack power is reduced by fatigue, especially when stacked.

[Zink Whistlefly]

Originally posted by Rataxes: ...capped at a Kai-like effect where you automatically do maximum damage with each hit

Ah, that's a good description!