>>527741387
Improved Anvil is a difficulty mod. It replaces certain encounters with far more challenging ones. It primarily achieves this by giving enemies coded immunities which they don't have in the base game, as well as modifying their scripts so that they can use abilities which aren't typically found in their kits. Many enemies now have the ability to cast spells from both the arcane and divine tables which they wouldn't typically have access to.

It's explicitly not meant to be "fair" but purely challenging. Many CC abilities are far less useful, for example, because enemies are completely immune to them. For this reason, it's very important when playing Improved Anvil to bring a roster of highly capable martials in order to deal physical damage very quickly during the periods where enemies are vulnerable.

Further, certain spells and abilities which were considered overpowered by the mod author have been nerfed, restricted, our outright removed. This includes spells like Skull Trap, Chain Contingency and Time Stop.

Most experienced veterans of Improved Anvil claim that they best edition was IA v5, with IA v6 being a significant step down in quality, and IA v7 (actually a fork of IA v6 updated by a different mod author) being a marginal improvement over IA v6. If the player does certain things or hits certain experience threshholds in IA v6, the game will activate hidden scripts which essentially punish the player with substantially nastier fights, or removes/relocates the rewards from certain fights.

It's obviously a highly controversial mod.

Also, the mod author is insane. He's a lot of fun to piss off on SP though.