Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Technical Problems steadily losing resistances (steam)

Either I corrupted a save badly, or I have encountered a bug in the dragon armor (or a skill bonus applied to it). Before I got the dragon armor, my base resistances were 15 - which is what they should be since I had 3 levels of magic barrier. Loading an old save, I see that right after getting the dragon armor (with magic barrier +1) my base resistance is -10. Additionally, the armor has a wisdom +1, which, along with my 2 helm bonuses, do not appear to be active once I reload... so I just got in the habit of re-applying my armor not noticing my resistance...

About 4 game-play hours later, my base resistances are now at -65! Has anyone else had this problem or heard of this happening? I only suspect a corrupt save because I rerolled a lot to get that armor (and I'd hate to do it over...)

I'm running the steam version on Win7 Ultimate, SP1 - no patches or fixes, save the Imp fix as per George's murder, but that was after the problem had already started.

Thanks!

The game may have messed up the resistances upon removing your dragon armour with the Magic Barrier bonus (though if that happens it is more often when the skill was not otherwise known), which could grow progressively worse whenever you remove your equipment (visiting the dwarven king, etc) or otherwise do something to get the game to update your resistances. There could also potentially be a problem if the sum of the levels that you learned yourself and the equipment bonus (usually) add up to 5 or more (at least one person said they only had an issue if the total was over 5, another said it happened to them at 5, as well). Since you started with level 3, either the problem is triggered even at a total of level 4, or you have more than one Magic Barrier equipment bonus... or the sum of the skill levels wasn't what trigger the problem.

There are a couple ways you can fix your resistances. The values can be edited directly (see the topic Some more hex offsets..., and possibly Teleporting Anywhere, via hex editor as a reference).
Alternately, if you learn Magic Barrier (if you have the level and skill points to do so), save, use iZakaroN's SaveEditor to unlearn the skill, reload the save, learn the skill and save again, and repeat using the save editor to unlearn the skill, you can keep doing that to restore up to 25 resistance each time.

To keep this from happening again you can use DAD's Item Editor (link below) to re-create your dragon armour by editing another breastplate in your inventory to have the same stats (you can add resistance bonuses rather than the skill bonus, and give yourself a skill point to learn Wisdom). You only need to wear the complete dragon armour set once to finish that quest, and have Bless cast on you (temporary effect); there are no set bonuses.
Alternately, make sure you end up with at least 1 but less than 3(?) levels in the passive Magic Barrier skill. Or since it triggered when you already knew the skill, you could try unlearning it completely.

There is a similar issue with the sight range skills (please help with my blind hero).


EDIT: Here is a mirror link for version 1.4 of DAD's Item Editor.
If you do not already have the Visual Basic 6 redistributable installed, and get missing file/component errors, use the full installer for v1.1, then replace the executable in the install folder with the latest version.

Wow. That's a bit of info! Thank you very much, Raze. I love these older games - people know quite a bit about them by this point. It's also good to see a dev surviving this long.

I had read about the one-time set bonus and had no problems getting that.

I'm not sure if I want to get into hex editing. I've never messed with that so I'm looking at tweaking my skills. More later.

While I do that, I'm also (obviously) interested in not having this happen again. I had significant resistances that contributed greatly to keeping me alive - particularly necessary while trying to fight these higher level creatures. Does this breastplate have to be clear of any resistances, bonuses and/or unnamed? ie, can I edit the Larian armor to take it's place?

It is just the Magic Barrier skill bonus that you need to be wary of, so you can edit the Larian Armour (or another breastplate) to take its place. DAD's Item Editor can also change the name of items, if you want the replacement to look more like it matches the rest of the set.

It is better to edit equipment with a bonus or two, actually. In the editor you may have 2 or 3 items with the same name, and if they have the same durability and armour/damage value, the bonuses would be the only way to tell which entry is the one in your inventory.

Okay, got it. So you're saying Magic Barrier (passive) is bugged, right?

I'm thinking I will modify a few sets of armor.. don't these items have level thresholds? Only a certain number of bonuses, even at level 5? Like, can an uber item crash the game?

Magic Barrier itself isn't bugged, but the way it and the sight bonus skills on equipment are handled can rarely lead to errors recalculating the values when removing that equipment.

A reasonable number of bonuses (or even slightly excessive) shouldn't cause any problems. If the list of bonuses becomes large enough that the mouse over description goes off the screen, it can cause the game to crash. For individual bonuses, you can also cause problems with extreme values. A +200 boost to stats should be fine, for example; checking something with sight range I equipped one ring with a +1000 sight bonus ok (cleared much of the fog of war in the wastelands), but trying a second such ring crashed the game.

Okay! I finally had a chance to get back to this.

I downloaded those item and save editors and had a lot of fun with them. I incrementally fixed my resistances, as you recommended, and it worked like a charm. It seems to me that the game has difficulty remembering more than one skill bonus on any item, no matter the bonus. I also learned that I cannot remove any type of magic bonus from items, only add certain effects to them, so I just tweaked items with any ONE of the skill bonuses I wanted and had no issues.

I've since finished the game and have started Beyond Divinity. Thanks for your help and Happy New Year!