[Mod] A Witcher's Woe-A game play rebalance

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[Mod] A Witcher's Woe-A game play rebalance

Hello fellow modders/mod enthusiasts. I have been working on this mod for some time now and would like to get the community's feedback on it before I publish it elsewhere. I created this mod in the hopes of rebalancing the combat as well as focusing on preparation and readiness without slowing down the game play too much. I have made many small tweaks over the months and now I finally have the game play where I want it. I apologize if my change log is not extremely specific, as I have done many changes over several versions of the game it has been hard to keep track of everything I've done. Also bear in mind this is NOT compatible with NG+. And I personally have not completed Hearts of Stone yet but I have had no issues with it so far using this mod. I know that this mod is compatible with texture/graphic mods and Random Enemy Encounters, but I would be hesitant to use it with any other gameplay changing mod. This mod is compatible with a saved game however many of the skill changes will not take effect, primarily unlocking all of the alternate signs and sword abilities. To get the skill changes to take effect you will need to use the "cleardevelop" command using the console command. I changed it so it won't clear your inventory. You will need to reset your level using "SetLevel(*enter your level here*)". And then account for extra skill points from places of power and the acorn by using "AddSkillPoints(*amount of places of power/acorn*)". Before doing the cleardevelop command at all I recommend using a Potion of Clearance so you can see your total skill points so you know how many you should have once you've done all the above.

The biggest thing I've done, and probably the one in need of most explanation is I introduced a level scaling concept to enemies. In the vanilla game, the developers assigned a specific level to each enemy around the game world. This did a great job of keeping players out of areas where they shouldn't go yet, but it made late game very boring since everything died in nearly one hit. My level scaling mod works in different ways based on the types of enemies. If you are familiar with the game's xml files you will probably know that enemies are divided into two major categories, group and solo. Group enemies include drowners, nekkers, etc etc. Solo enemies include hags, werewolves, fiends, etc etc. With my level scale mod all group enemies will always spawn within +/- 2 levels of the player level. After level 30 group enemies will no longer gain essence (health) but will continue to gain attack power per level. This was done to avoid extremely spongey drowners in the late game.

I handled solo enemies differently. If a monster's vanilla/unmodded level is higher than Geralt's level by 6 or more, it will automatically be set to 10 levels above the player level. This was done to restrict players from high level areas without making fights extremely impossible for no reason. If the player outlevels an enemy or the enemy is 5 or less levels higher than the player the enemy will spawn at a level that is between being equal to or 5 levels higher than the player. Keep in mind, if an enemy's vanilla level is 20, it will always appear 10 levels higher than the player until the player reaches level 15 (less than 6 below the enemy's base level).

With that out of the way, here's the rest of the change log.

Geralt Stat Changes
-Base health set to 4500. No longer gain health per level.
-Added a base attack power of 50 to Geralt. This helps more at the beginning but becomes negligible later on.
-Every level until level 25 Geralt gains 5 attack power. This is help with the damage curve with the level scaling.
-Set base encumbrance to 80. This helps make early looting a little less tedious.
-Applied stamina costs/delay to all of Geralt's actions in combat. Keep in mind, counters cost less than parrying. This is to encourage well timed counters rather than turtling up in combat.
-Removed Geralt's base poison and bleeding resistance.
-Lowered base critical damage.
-Stamina regeneration while guarding has been further reduced

Skill Changes
-Added all alternate signs, whirl, rend, arrow deflection, and delusion as default abilities.
-Removed stamina regen and potion duration bonuses from sign and alchemy skills.
-Unlocked all skills from the beginning of the game, allowing more variety across the skill trees.

Sword Skills
-Increased the cost of sustaining whirl. This ability is very easy to abuse and is capable of stunlocking many enemies. This was the best way to prevent abuse
-Reduced the percentage bonus from 5% to 4% per level of Muscle Memory and Strength Training (light attack and strong attack damage skills).
-Set arrow deflection to have only one level. It seems somewhat lore breaking to have Geralt reflecting arrows back at people.
-Reduced the critical damage of Precise blows to 4% per level (from 15%). Increased critical chance to 4% (from 2%)
-Reduced the critical chance to 1% per level for Crushing blows, reduced damage to 2%. Strong attacks should be for raw power, while fast attacks should be more aimed at critical hits. Critical strong attacks were too powerful late game in vanilla.

Sign Skills
-Reduced cost of Aard to 45, with a regeneration delay of 5 seconds
-Reduced cost of Igni to 50 with a regeneration delay of 5 seconds. Removed the burning chance from the base Igni.
-Reduced the cost of Yrden to 55, with a delay of 7.5 seconds. Increased the slow down hard cap that was put in place by the developers
-Reduced the cost of Quen to 55, with a delay of 8 seconds.
-Reduced the cost of Axii to 65, with a delay of 5 seconds.
-Increased the base and burning damage of Firestream
-Drastically reduced the healing factor of Quen alternate (note: This was a script change, not an XML change)
-Reduced the shock damage of Yrden alternate
-Removed the bonus damage from enemies controlled by Axii

Alchemy Skills
-Reduced the defensive buff from Protective Coating from 5% to 3% per level
-Drastically lowered the toxicity degeneration from Fast Metabolism
-Lowered the bonus from Synergy

Perk Changes
-Lowered the critical chance per piece of armor to 4% and fast attack power to 2.5% for Cat School Techniques
-Lowered the stamina regeneration per piece of armor from 5% to 1% for Griffin School Techniques
-Lowered strong attack power per piece of armor from 5% to 3% for Bear School Techniques


Enemy Changes
-Enemy Level Scaling (see above)
-Monsters now gain resistance bonuses per level, such as bleeding resistance, poison resistance, etc etc.
-Stamina costs for Monster actions have been removed. This makes monsters appropriately aggressive as well as more reactive to your actions (ie, more counter attacks and dodges).
-Enemies will no longer get High and Deadly bonuses if they out level the player.
-Armor has been added to many solo type enemies to reduce the effectiveness of light attack spam. Players must now make more carefully timed heavy attacks to inflict serious wounds.
-Human stamina cost of parrying has been increased by 50%. This is to reduce parry spam by even the lowliest bandit.

Alchemy Changes
-Alcohest and White Gull are now the only alcohols that will refill your consumables. Their recipes have been altered to balance this out.

Potion Changes
-All potions (except for Cat, Blizzard, and White Rafford's Decoction) now last 10 minutes long. There is no way to increase this time.
-Increased toxicity for all potions
-Thunderbolt attack power bonus has been lowered to account for the longer duration
-Petri's Philter has been buffed to make it a more viable potion. It was rather weak in vanilla.
-Maribor Forest now becomes more effective per level. In vanilla it only gained duration per level but the adrenaline gain remained the same.
-Superior Cat has been shortened. It lasted unnecessarily long and it was annoying to be forced to run around in blinding grey scale after only being underground for a minute or two.
-White Rafford's Decoction heals less per item level now. At superior level it only heals 80% of max health.
-Swallow now heals at a slower rate in combat. This is to make it more like Witcher 2 where mistakes in combat were more severely punished.
-Tawny Owl stamina regeneration has been reduced. For some reason Tawny owl negates the stamina regeneration delay of all the abilities so I slowed down the overall regeneration to keep it from being too powerful.

Oil Changes
-Increased the attack power bonus of base level oils to 15% (from 10%).
-Decreased Enhanced oil attack power to 20% (from 25%). Decreased charged to 35 (from 40)
-Decreased Superior oil attack power to 25% (from 50%). Decreased charges to 50 (from 60)

Bomb Changes
-Grapeshot now inflicts more silver damage at all levels. Monsters have much higher health than humans so the silver damage was buffed to account for this.

Ability Mutagen Changes
-Base value of all Red, Green and Blue mutagens has been increased
-When a mutagen is linked to a skill it only gains a 50% bonus rather than 100% bonus. Example; A red mutagen, which grants 10% attack power, will give 15% if linked to one red skill, as opposed to 20% in vanilla. This was done to prevent stacking red mutagen bonuses and dealing insane damage.
-All mutagens require 5 of their previous level to craft. Example: 5 Lesser Green mutagens are needed to craft a Green Mutagen. 5 Green mutagens are needed to craft a Greater Green.

Decoction Changes
-Arch Griffin decoction duration has been reduced to 1 minute. It is now meant to be used as a regular potion in vanilla. It was excessively powerful in vanilla and it was annoying to be stuck with 100% stamina draining strong attacks for an hour. The skill to increase the duration of decoctions will increase this time
-Ekhidna decoction has been debuffed to disallow sign spamming to heal.

Food and Drink Changes
-All food and drink now heals at a slower rate but more a longer time. Food and drink no longer heal in combat.

General Changes
-All health bonuses for each difficulty level have been reduced. At the vanilla values, enemies would have had too high of health late game thanks to the level scaling. Conversely, all enemies do much more damage per level of difficulty. Enemies also gain resistance bonuses on Blood and Broken Bones and Death March.
-Selling prices have been reduced. Relics and high level items will still get a good price but low level, low quality goods will be much less profitable.
-The Potion of Clearance's price has been reduced. This is to allow much more freedom in assigning skills.
-Damage over time (burning, bleeding, poison) has been reworked. Instead of dealing a percentage of the enemy's max health every second, it now deals a percentage of the enemy's current health every second. This means that every second the damage becomes less and less. This is to prevent easily killing high level enemies by proccing poison or burning effects on them.
-Sharpening stones and armor benches now provide a 15% bonus (down from 20%) but last a full hour.

For those of you who are mod savvy you may notice that I have many, many scripts in my scripts folder. I did not edit all of these. Keep in mind this is essentially the beta version of my mod. I have those in there so I can easily make edits if need be.
The scripts that I have edited are;
-scripts/game/player/playerWitcher.ws (slight adjustment made to player dodging calculation and removing the clear inventory portion of the cleardevelop console command)
-scripts/game/npc/npc.ws (level scaling)
-scripts/game/gameplay/items/spells/quenentity.ws (Quen alt. debuff)
-scripts/game/behavior_tree/tasks/combat/taskperformparry.ws (Adjusted to increase chance of enemy counter attacks)
-scripts/game/gameplay/effects/effects/dotEffect.ws (Used to change how damage over time is handled)
-scripts/game/gameparams.ws (Used to remove high/deadly enemy bonuses)
-scripts/game/gui/menus/characterMenu.ws (used to change how Mutagen bonuses are calculated)

I have made the file available via Google Drive, if anyone has any issues just let me know and hopefully we can get it fixed. As I said before, there may be some small changes I forgot to mention. If there is anything major just let me know and I can put it in the change log. I would love to hear your feedback on the mod.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8D335lyJiT7UGZqQ04wXzdnQTA/view?usp=sharing (v1.0)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8D335lyJiT7bFRJY0gtNW9iUHM/view?usp=sharing (v.101, see changelog in post #4)
 
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Perfect timing since I've just started a new game, so I will start over with this... It looks really good!
 
I hope the mod is working for anyone who has tried it. It came to my attention today that I nerfed fast attacks/Feline builds a bit too much. I'm currently re working some of the numbers associated with fast attack skills in order to make Feline based builds a bit more viable, especially late in the game.

I'm going to buff Full Moon and Tissue Transmutation (vitality for drinking decoctions). I realized that the small boosts between each level was negligible due to the high enemy damage. Hopefully after I rework the numbers these items/skills will give a noticeable boost to survivability without being too powerful.

Additionally I'm going to raise the selling prices as I'm finding it nearly impossible to fund the rune smith in Hearts of Stone.

Here's the updated version (v1.01)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8D335lyJiT7bFRJY0gtNW9iUHM/view?usp=sharing

The changelog for this one is

-Cat School Technique bonus raised to 8% Attack power per piece of armor and fast attack critical damage raised to 12.5% per piece of armor (Note: There is a typo in the xml file, it denotes this ability as granting critical hit chance per piece, but in game it boosts critical hit damage per piece).

-Griffin School Technique now yields 2% stamina regeneration per piece of medium armor. (Note: Each percentage point directly translates to 1 more stamina per second. So a full set of medium armor will increase stamina regen by 8 points per second).

-All Feline chest armors have had their rending resistances buffed somewhat. Now at the mastercrafted level a full set will yield 40% rending resistance (up from 30%)

-Superior and Mastercrafted Bear armor now give slightly bigger penalties to stamina regeneration. All levels of Bear chest armors have had their rending resistances reduced slightly. A full mastercrafted set now yields 60% rending resistance (from 70%).

-Muscle Memory has been restored to 5% attack power per level

-Full Moon has been buffed, it now yields 500/750/1000 health at each level.

-Protective Coating now gives 5% protection per level, but only has 3 levels. (This still yields a 15% damage reduction but the scripts were handling the other value strangely).

-Tissue Transmutation now gives 200 health per level with a maximum of 3 levels. This will yield 600 health per decoction.

-Armorer and Blacksmith selling prices have been increased to account for the high cost of Hearts of Stone items
 
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No offense meant, but reading the change logs, it looks like something that has been done several times already. BCEv, Ghost Mode, Original BCE, and I probably forget some.

How is this overhaul mod any different than BCE or Ghost Mode for instance ?
 
No offense meant, but reading the change logs, it looks like something that has been done several times already. BCEv, Ghost Mode, Original BCE, and I probably forget some.

How is this overhaul mod any different than BCE or Ghost Mode for instance ?

True, there is only so much you can change in this game, and there are several overhaul mods already out there. But I consider mine different primarily on the way the level scaling works. While the stat changes and the level scaling can be separated into their own mods, they work best together as I modded the the leveling stats to balance out with the level scaling.
 
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