Yo, lately I decided to come back to this game after some years. I am one of those who got the retail DVD Gold Edition. The thing is I am trying out for the first time the Soulvizier mod, and I am playing on 1.10, and so recently I did a brief research on the game's internal state and mechanics, silly bugs and things that don't work. It seems like the 1.17a community patch would solve most of that mess (to be clear, I was using that patch back in the day). So i started wondering if it is worth the try. Therefore I performed a simple yet painful test (due to lack of debug options) on my retail 1.10 Soulvizied version.

    That simple test consisted in checking the +10% Poison Damage completion bonus of Diseased Plumage Charm. Maybe this was wrong but the way i inflicted poison damage was by a RETALIATION effect (it should get boosted too imo). And yeah, the +10% was not working (tried on monsters with the same level) which is unfortunate for me.

    So I was about to reinstall and rebuild the whole thing including the 1.17a patch but nonetheless there are some strange notes everywhere over the place, so I wanted to ask for clarity here, thus docummenting the procedure of how to make things work.

    Right so the first, last and lazy thing I attempted was to just run the 1.17a installer; it couldn't identify the database.arz file. That means Soulvizier prolly replaces directly some stuff in there (this is important).

    Then, according to your guide, you should install Soulvizier 0.90, then 0.96, and lastly 0.98i. But I got mine from moddb and I only installed the 0.98i and it works. So what's the matter with including previous versions? Also, there's a topic posted at this Forum asking for something related to the version 0.98g? But I cannot find anything like that. Can someone explain?

    Regarding 1.17a, I can't be 100% sure but I remember how people were disccussing back in the day a strat that made you have 100% CDR and -X% Energy Cost in the original IT, and the 1.17a was changing  some skills and masteries stuff, changing the formula of that strat or something (go easy on me, I am not an expert of this game). Not like it bothers me, but if Soulvizier reworks masteries (and maybe if it sets some global constants like MAX_CDR=100 that may differ from the patch's), aren't these changes totally replaced? Anyway the thing that really worries me is that while this patch fixes the poison bonus in Charms for instance, Soulvizier rebalances some Charms (like Mechanical Parts), meaning there is a possibility that some fixes included in 1.17a will get overlapped by Soulvizier implementation which has not been developed with community patches in mind (I guess). There is no word anywhere about wheter you can use or not the community patch. I have no clue how modding works so yeah dont r4pe me please.


So yeah, my final question would be : Given patch 1.17a and Soulvizier 0.90-0.98i releases, and installing the environment in the order TQ -> IT -> 1.17a -> S0.90 -> S0.96 -> S0.98i, will my game get the bugs fixed and also get all the mod features added correctly? And if not, is there a way to do so with my retail copy of the game? Thanks in advance.