Eyeball said:
Thanks. Do you believe Dodd's mod is better than Flamestryke's or Deathstalkers? What I'm looking for is mainly new spells, monsters and tons more items without too much of an incline in difficulty.
Deathstakler´s makes the beginning much more difficult and introduces some large scale battles and powerful loot in the first 1/3 of the game or so and doesn´t touch much the latter parts IIRC. The result is second half of the game becoming way too easy.
Flame´s mod is somewhat more low-key and doesn´t change much in the second half as well. It also introduces some quite powerful spells and items so the latter half becomes a walk in the park with this mod too, but I´d say the mod makes pretty much the whole game easier.
Imo, neither is really worth it simply because changes don´t make much of a difference except for skewing the balance in latter stages of the game.
Of the two, Flame´s mod (1.1) is a better one. Most of changes in Deathstalker´s just don´t make any sense whatsoever.
Dodd´s mod affects the game much more thoroughly, there´s more new loot and monsters, few new areas that are better tackled close to the end of the game, revamps parts of the main quest, adds own second smaller main quest as well as few side ones, hefty amount of combine-able items, including upgradeable gadgets and instruments. Easter-egg dungeons are integrated into the story and there´s one optional dungeon made by Qusari which is a direct throwback to Wizardry 7, both in feel and puzzle-heaviness. Arnika becomes a bit more lively with more wandering characters and vendors, monastery gains more importance and mod utilizes quite well few aspects which were likely scrapped during the development of the original (at one time you´ll need to use a boat, for example).
Without Daegan´s Tweaks the mod surely ramps up the difficulty a lot and even without the need to rest, when Dodd´s mobs start to show up among random encounters in the second half of the game, combat can become tedious quite fast (fixed boss and "mini-boss" encounters are fine imo and add a bit of Gothic-like element to exploration). Daegan´s new spells and tweaks to original ones (you can cast Guardian Angel out of combat, for example), as well as some items such as better ammo for rangers, make second half substantially more fluid. It also removes most of area restrictions from RPCs.
And yes, even with Daegan Tweaks, the game is overall more difficult than the original but that I like since it forces player to make better use of spells and loot (and with all the added item variety there´s a lot to experiment with). There´s also more emphasis on skill development since a lot of new items have skill restrictions (artifact skill becomes quite a bit more important, for example).
With all the added content you´re likely to end up around levels 33 - 35 even with party of eight so you can meet some new vanilla mosters and you can develop hybrids in a more relaxed pace (aka without skill grinding).
As you can guess, I enjoyed playing with this combo a lot, but it´s certainly not without shortcomings - added dialogue isn´t free of typos, added mobs often follow a similar structure of 1-2 spellcasters accompanied by 5-8 melée dudes, and some fixed vanilla encounters are untouched which makes them comparatively too easy. I also didn´t like few textures added to Arnika common houses´ interiors.
Anyway, if you still think the additional difficulty isn´t worth it, you could try Qusari´s Lunastralis. Difficulty stays about the same with this mod since most of the emphasis is put on story and puzzle additions.
The mod adds two main story branches, one alchemy/mystic themed, the other sorta space ranger themed. I think that for a mod, the additions are mostly rather impressive and the whole game becomes much closer to Wizardry 7 which was a nice change for one playthrough. Some original areas are removed (bye bye Rapax Castle), quite a lot of new ones are added (moon base for example, heh), some are substantially restructured (Cosmic Circle).
Main shortcomings of this one are: skewed character balance - ranged weaponry becomes pretty much be-all-end-all for most of the classes, some new monsters animate insufficiently/funny, few references to "earthly" stuff here and there (zen and stuff IRRC).
Definitely the least "lore friendly" of the bunch but might be worth a try.
Personally I enjoyed my playthrough with it, but then again I´m a fan of puzzle elements in cRPGs and, well, I tend to be more tolerant to mods in general and if the mod oozes this much creativity as Lunastralis I can forgive most of the usual mod´s shortcomings packed with it quite easily.
In conclusion, I´d say, if you want few low-key changes here and there, go with Flame´s New Mod 1.1, if you don´t want to have your game becoming more difficult, aren´t lore purist and enjoy puzzles in your cRPGs, give Lunastralis a try, otherwise go with Dodd´s Mod plus Daegan Tweaks - it pretty much adds all you´ve stated you´re looking for, just with an incline in difficulty "drawback".
