Insane Difficulty: Undead and loving it - Insane Difficulty

Hi! First let me express my appreciation for this mod - you took my favorite game and have insured I'll be playing it for the rest of my life.

Of all the tweaks and improvements, the change to the Relic Ring is one of my favs. I use the Ghost Ring a lot, and in doing so I've noticed some things that have raised a few questions about how some of the mechanics work.

1: Poison - how does it work? Being hit with a poison-elemental attack while undead serves as a direct heal, but I've noticed that sometimes my characters will block what has now become a beneficial action. It also seems like my character's magic defense stat works against it, lessening the end result of the healing. Likewise, holy spells are never blocked. Is this intentional, and, if so, would making changes that put poison spells on the same level as holy spells when characters are undead.

2: While undead, are characters completely immune to the Poison status? I had thought that it would work like Regen and cancel out Sap and/or offensive casts of Regen, but it doesn't appear to.

3: Is there a difference between "death" and "instant death" abilities when undead are concerned?


That's all for now!

Combining the undead property with the poison status was an exploit in the original game since the damage ticks from poison would ramp up over time; we nixed this by making the undead immune to the poison status. Using equipment that absorbs elemental damage does still suffer from the problem of respecting magical defense, and thus it working against you... but such attacks were never meant to be used as a primary means of healing except in very odd/niche cases (Merton, namely).

For holy spells, are you asking why there is no equipment that nullifies or defends against holy damage?

The terms "death" and "instant death" are used interchangeably in the mod. When referring to the printme, "cleave" is used in cases of instant death attacks that are effective versus the undead versus those that aren't (X-Zone may be an outlier here, come to think about it).

Thank you for the quick response! You cleared up a lot regarding the Poison status and why things are the way they are.

Following up regarding Holy - I should have used the word "evasion" since that's what I meant. It always irked me when I'd see my characters whip out their shields to block friendly zaps of poison but they welcome flesh-burning holy spells with open arms.

On death vs instant death, I primarily noticed this when I fought Charadanook with a party of characters wearing Ghost Rings and the female's counter "Death Kiss" would kill them. The Death Ward blocks this though, I think.

The Holy spell is unblockable, yes.

Enemy "special" attacks like Death Kiss used to bypass death immunity entirely, which is why vanilla used them so sparsely (it's almost like the devs knew about the Vanish/Doom bug), but we've since added in a hack to make them respect it. The enemy "special" command is not flagged to heal undead enemies, however, so it behaves more like cleave in that respect.

BTB, on 13 March 2017 - 12:49 PM, said:

Considering this, and the fact that there are already so few ways to heal the undead, have you considered removing the Holy flag from Regen and allowing it to work with undead? It would finally give undead an answer to Sap. Also, aren't there already some undead enemies that perma-regen?

There's actually quite a few ways to heal the undead. Everything that doesn't reverse on the undead is as follows:

• All items except for Phoenix Down/Tear
• Life & Life 2
• Defibrillator & Mana Battery
• Mantra & Chakra
• Empowerer
• Go Fish
• Specter
• Harvester
• Paintbrushes (and the Healing Shiv)

So life heals the Undead, but does not resurrect them if they've fallen, right? If so, is there any way to resurrect an undead character?

Sounds like the Defib is actually a viable option.