[v1.3.0+] Escort Rescheduling

[Zizzo]

So, in one of my addon test runs, I ran into two early zones in a row that had an escort on the very last level, right on top of the zone boss. I'm sure you can guess how well that went.? In the interest of never having to go through that again, I whipped up my new Escort Rescheduling addon, which slightly rearranges the candidate list of zone/level combinations where escorts can appear.

Specifically, the zones in which escorts can appear on the last level are Trollmire, Scintillating Caves, Norgos' Lair and Old Forest. For the first three of these zones, I shifted the allowed levels from 2 and 3 up to 1 and 2, or just level 2 if it's the first tier-1 zone you've visited; for Old Forest, I just removed level 4 as an allowed level, leaving 1 thru 3. As an unavoidable side effect, this does slightly increase the likelihood of having more escorts appear in Dreadfell; We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

--
? On a tangentially related note, the "Restart the same character" option in the death dialog apparently reuses the random escort locations chosen for the character that just died. You can imagine my annoyance under the circumstances...

[ibanix]

Nice. Thanks for this.

[sajberhippien]

Hi, I know this is an old addon, but it's still a staple for me. There's one thing I'd love to see with it though, and it's a prevention of an escort dropping when you first teleport to the west with the Lady Zoisla right on top of you. I don't know if that's even possible, but would love it was, has happened several times now and it's always a doomed prospect from the start.

[Zizzo]

Hi, I know this is an old addon, but it's still a staple for me. There's one thing I'd love to see with it though, and it's a prevention of an escort dropping when you first teleport to the west with the Lady Zoisla right on top of you. I don't know if that's even possible, but would love it was, has happened several times now and it's always a doomed prospect from the start.

…? [sound F/X: source diving] Oh, the Celestial special start zone. Hmm, if I'm reading the code correctly, since Slazish Fens can't have escorts, whichever T1 zone you get dumped into from there will be treated as the "first" one for escort purposes ("tier1.1", in the internal parlance). Currently, the addon only allows escorts on level 2 of that zone (level 3 is the boss level, and level 1 is usually where you enter); I suppose I could check for a Celestial class and change to only allowing an escort on level 1 (since you'll be entering on level 2). Give me a little time to fiddle with that.

[sajberhippien]

Cool, thanks a lot!

[Zizzo]

Well, testing so far is getting the desired results (I even broke my "no Sun Paladins" rule for testing purposes ), so that's going out as v1a. As noted above, don't forget to go upstairs to level 1, because you can get an escort there now.

[Zizzo]

v1b is a compatibility update for the 1.6 release; we copy some internal changes that I believe are used to allow escorts to appear in the Infinite Dungeon.

[Zizzo]

The 1.7 game module makes a small change to its escort placement to allow a world descriptor to specify its own number of escorts to place. We reproduce that change in v1c; there shouldn't be any visible change, since AFAICT no descriptor uses this (maybe in upcoming DLC?).

[Zizzo]

It was recently pointed out to me that since Doomelves get teleported to level 2 of their first tier-1 zone by their starting quest, they should also get the same handling that Celestials get, with escorts only allowed on level 1 of that zone. Interestingly, I then noticed in testing that (for instance) Ogre Celestials shouldn't get this treatment, since their race overrides the Celestial starting quest.

v1c.1, just pushed out, is an attempt to sort all this out. We now key our special handling off the player's starting quest — Serpentine Invaders for Celestials, Ashes in the Wind for Doomelves and AoU's added Defiler classes. That also gives us a convenient inroad if some new race or class has a starting quest that does something similar.