Thank you for replying my (annoying?) posts. :-) I know my English can be quite difficult to understand sometimes.
Your posts are not annoying and your English is quite understandable. It's better than my French, say. I would like to thank you once again for sharing your opinion on the subject. You are convincing me that there is something here that I'm not seeing ... but I can't seem to figure out what it is from your posts.
What were difficulty settings?
Impossible.
The point is that he is useful in almost all combats.
As above, he doesn't do anything against Liches. He seems to have a similar utility to Mordy.
If he webs you and you are held, he can hit you automatically. However, you won't automatically fail your poison save or web save in the future, so he tends not to get the kind of luck that fury gives.
Althernai's calculations show the opposite.
Notably, Althernai's calculations do *not* show that "you will automatically fail your web save in the future" -- he seems to be giving an 80% chance for it. My personal experience (based on watching Imp Kitthix actually try to get a lock down on some spellcasters: cowlies, soercerous aman, rengard, etc.) is that he does not get a "lock" and that they flicker in and out of being held. That's what I observed in experimental trials. It's possible that all of the enemies I tried against were just really lucky, of course.
Most 'humanoids' don't have very good Saves. With GM in,
In my experience, things that don't have very good saves fall easily without Kitthix. Sure, he takes down kobolds real fast. But so do you! He's not unbalancing anything if he helps you with some 4 hit dice shadow thieves.
My impression is that most players (solo druids and sorcs aside) do not walk around with summons *all the time*. Instead, you pull them out for big battles (not for small skirmishes against lowly humanoids). If Kitthix mops the floor with copper coronet guards, it's no big deal -- you would have done that anyway. My major concern is that somehow Kitthix will win all of the big quests for you -- take down Firkraag, kill all the trolls, destroy all golems in the planar sphere, kill all the beholders in the sewers, that kind of thing. If he did that, I would immediatley agree: he is too powerful.
A final interesting note here is that I almost never use Greater Malison. It is also my impression (from bug reports and saved games and screen shots sent to me) that the "average [mod] user" does not use it all the time either. If you are, it represents a "special strategy" on your part -- advanced tactics. Here's another idea: since Kitthix is immune to Webs, coat the whole area with three or four webs and then let him clean house. Similarly, casting GM before casting Chaos is usually a good idea.
These are all "strong" ideas, but coming up with tactics is also one of the points of the game. Saying that Chaos is too strong because the possibility of casting GM exists (and thus making it a save vs. spells at -8) is missing the point somehow. Every spell is stronger because GM exists. They should be judged without it. Similarly, you could already cast Web and then Spider Spawn (rather than Web + Imp Kitthix) and it was a good idea.
But you have to be a smart player to do these things. All of this "figuring out what spells combo together" business is not something you can do on auto-pilot. It's something that takes brains. And the game should reward you for that. I don't want to make something where no posssible good strategies exist -- that would be boring. If IK happens to have one or two good combos and you've found them -- great! But so does everything else in the game.
I'm concerned about people "sleep-walking" through SoA because of Imp Kitthix. I'm not concerned about smart people getting an advantage because they thought things through.
Actually, some of the items are even more powerful.
Combine the Throwing Impaler with a Kensai, Grandmaster in Spears, GWW. :-)
Throwing Impaler doesn't do appreciably more damage than Impaler, so the GWW thing isn't really important. Ages +5 does more damage. In general, I'd rather have Ages than Throwing Impaler -- the ranged attack is a red herring unless you have strong party support. Monsters move too fast and visibility is too limited.
If you think that Throwing Impaler is stronger than the Staff of the Magi, ask Userunfriendly to explain Magi's many uses to you. :-)
Parties right out of the underdark with a few nymphs can take down Mencar. Kitthix fails. Parties with a few fire elementals can take out the troll mound. Kitthix fails.
There is no reason why he shouldn't fail - a SoA summon shouldn't be as powerful as a post Underdark party with Nymphs, right?
Sorry, that was a typo. Parties right out of the *Irenicus Dungeon* with a few nymphs can take down Mencar. I do it routinely before leaving the Promenade.
Take Althernai's example of a Mordy & IK VS. the Oasis.
I don't see how it argues for delaying him until after the Underdark -- the Oasis is *way* after the Underdark. :-) In addition, Althernai's example shows a fine use of tactics.
IK is a great offensive summons, but it must be used with care.
If the conclusion is "smart people can use IK to great advantage", should we really be concerned? I would be concerned with "people can sleep-walk through the game with this" or "smart people can use IK to an even greater advantage than most other things" ... but the same people who can use IK can also use web, GM, wands of monster summoning, wands of cloudkill, pro-undead scrolls, azuredge, daystar, etc.
At some level, isn't the game *about* using your resources intelligently?
[!--EDIT|weimer|Dec 15 2002, 09:19 PM--]