Best NPC in whole of BG Saga?

[Dirty Meg]

I'm not playing with any mods (except the official ToB patch). Cernd has the best AC in the game without any mods. Who cares what his stats are when he's not a greater werewolf? He can be a greater werewolf all the time if he so desires. When he's casting spells he doesn't need to be near the enemy and so doesn't need any good stats other than wisdom. He can be a weapon platform with insect plagues and elemental summons, or he can be a tank - he just can't do both at the same time.

[krunchyfrogg]

Ok, I'll bite. How do you get Cernd to be powerful?

[JrKASperov]

It's quite easy, he already has a superlow AC when you shapeshift. The AC bonus isn't there for just the weimer version.

[LennonCook]

Originally posted by SixOfSpades: I understand that Gibberlings Three or PocketPlane has released a mod that tweaks some of the NPCs a bit, including changing Cernd into a Totemic Druid with halfway-decent stats.

The G3 NPC Kit Pack doesn't touch Cernd, none of the Pocket Plane mods do anything similar. My NPC-Tweak mod changes Cernd into a Totemic druid, but doesn't modify his stats (yet), and I also haven't quite gotten around to changing that cutscene with Faldorn... Cirerrik's site has an override only mod (it might be WeiDU, but it still just copies new files into override destructively last I checked), which does do exactly what you say. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[SixOfSpades]

Originally posted by Dirty Meg: Cernd has the best AC in the game without any mods. Who cares what his stats are when he's not a greater werewolf? He can be a weapon platform with insect plagues and elemental summons, or he can be a tank - he just can't do both at the same time.

True, perhaps, but Jaheira can--and her AC right now is -17, for me. From what I can see, the only thing that Cernd can do appreciably better than Jaheira is defeat Improved Faldorn due to Weimer's lame-assed "bugfix."

Originally posted by LennonCook: The G3 NPC Kit Pack doesn't touch Cernd, none of the Pocket Plane mods do anything similar. My NPC-Tweak mod changes Cernd into a Totemic druid, but doesn't modify his stats (yet).

Sorry, my apologies. Getting my mods mixed up. Speaking of tweaking NPCs, you might consider offering a "Yoshimo as Monk" option, a lot of people seemed to like that idea.

[Dirty Meg]

Jaheira is a much worse druid than Cernd. At 3 million exp, Jaheira has only has one lvl 7 spell, and won't be getting any more until she has 6 million exp. Cernd has six lvl 7 spells at 3 million exp.

I'd be curious to hear how you got Jaheira's AC to -17 without using spells or potions. (You could be using the woodland staff, but it Barkskins the wearer, and you can't cast two barkskins at once. Also, apart from the shambling mound summon and the barkskin, it is a fairly poor weapon).

[SixOfSpades]

Originally posted by Dirty Meg: Jaheira is a much worse druid than Cernd. At 3 million exp, Jaheira has only has one lvl 7 spell, and won't be getting any more until she has 6 million exp. Cernd has six lvl 7 spells at 3 million exp.

Given the general freakiness of the Druid EXP table, the comparison can be made to swing any way you want it, just by determining what amount of EXP you want to look at.
For example, a pure Druid spends the majority of the game at Level 14: 1.5 million EXP. Now, Jaheira at 1.5 mil would be Levels 11/13, a single Druid level behind Cernd. At these levels, and accounting for their WIS,
Jaheira's daily spells are: 8 6 6 4 2 2, and
Cernd's daily spells are: 8 8 7 6 3 2 1. Okay, so he can cast the best Lich-killing spell in the game before you're halfway through SoA, which is nothing to sniff at, but can that really outweigh Jaheira's THAC0 and ApR, to say nothing of weapons like Gnasher and Blackblood, and her (very likely) permanent 19 or 100) Strength? Considering that Cernd can only shift to Greater Wolfwere once a day, that puts a serious damper on using him as a spellcaster at all.

I'd be curious to hear how you got Jaheira's AC to -17 without using spells or potions.

Full Plate = 1
17 DEX = -2
Helm of Balduran = -3
Ring of Preservation+2 = -5
Cloak of Balduran = -6
Sentinel Shield +4 = -11
Girdle of Glory = -14
That's odd. I've got 3 points of AC I can't account for. I know she's not wearing the Ring of Earth Control or Amulet of Ilmater.....I'll check her gear by tomorrow.

[Klorox]

Originally posted by Xen: Klorox? Why in the nine hells did you ressurect this thread? It's three years old! Ressurecting threads is against the rules here.

Well, that is a pretty stupid rule if you ask me.

If there is a thread that shouldn't be bumped to the top, then that thread should be archived.

This thread is a good discussion, and there have been good responses after my bumping, relative to the thread subject and not my bumping of it. The only two posts in this thread that don't have anything to do with the subject are your response and Illuminas after that. If anything, these kinds of posts should be "against the rules" not mine.

[SixOfSpades]

Sorry, brain fart on my part. Jaheira's AC right now is only -14, not -17.

Klorox, the rules against thread necromancy exist primarily because resurrecting dead threads wastes time and space:

Suppose there was a thread entitled "Can't clear WK Level 2." Now, I would read that thread and try to understand the person's problem: Was it because they don't understand the order in which the rooms must be cleared, or because they can't find the Slime Key, or because they're getting nailed by the Traps because they're temporarily without a Thief, or because they can't kill the Fire Giant and/or Fire Elementals, or because of some bug that makes the Chromatic Demon literally unkillable? And, after reading the guy's post, sorting through the 2 dozen people who give advice on how to beat the level (1/3rd of which is wrong), and finally figuring out what the heck is wrong with this guy's game so that I can tell him how to fix it, it's a genuine pain in the ass to see that I've already answered his questions, way back in 2002, his game is fine now, and the thread was only raised from the ashes because of some bozo who did a search on how to kill the Chromatic Demon and then posted because he wanted to boast of killing it on the first try. Yeah. Extremely irritating waste of time.

As for wasting space, suppose somebody is searching the forum for "NPC quests," and reads a topic where somebody complains about Minsc and Valygar not having any quests. This person happily supplies the answer that yes they do have quests, they're part of Unfinished Business--but they neglect to notice that the date of the post is May 2000, looooong before Unfinished Business was even begun, and of course the original poster hasn't been to Ironworks in years. This new post, which does nobody any good, is now dragged up to the #1 slot in the forum, thus bumping some other thread--which may vary well still be active--off the front page, thus making it less likely to be seen and therefore more likely to die.

[Rataxes]

I don't see the issue with bumping poll threads such as this one. Better to recycle an existing one than to make 200 different threads all titled something like "What's your favourite/most hated NPC/monster/item?".

[ 10-14-2004, 04:26 PM: Message edited by: Rataxes ]