I edited all of the melee weapons in the game. Including NPC melee attacks and robot melee weapons. The goal was to make melee opponents more of a threat and to make a player melee build more satisfying outside of stealth/Blitz.Melee Weapons
Melee damage was increased about 80% on average. While a few weapons had their damage raised or lowered to balance them against the rest.
I classified melee weapons into 3 main categories based on the weapon's "melee speed" in the Creation Kit:
- Fast: small, one handed weapons. The combat knife is a good average stat fast speed weapon. Light weight, lower damage, less AP cost to use in VATS.
- Medium: longer one handed weapons. Swords are the average stat medium speed weapon. A solid ideal weapon for most melee situations. Good damage. easy to use.
- Slow: large, heavy, 2 handed weapons like the sledgehammer. Typically do high damage and cost more AP to use in VATS.
I changed the value of some weapons to reflect their utility. Some smaller weapons, like the switchblade and brass knuckles received a higher increase of value in the idea that everyone in the commonwealth would want a backup weapon so that type would be pretty popular. It also made for nice loot, since they are relatively high value to weight ratio items.Perks
Blacksmith got an extra rank and I spread out weapon upgrades to help melee damage scale further into late game. A few extra weapon upgrades were added where I could fit them and felt they were needed. Some weapons have intentionally bad stats until they are modified. The board and commie whacker are good examples here.
Blitz was completely broken and so I redesigned the perk. It is now "Duck and Weave" and gives a player to essentially auto evade damage while a melee weapon is equipped. This moves the perk into an 'outside of VATS' perk and encourages to actually play the game with melee rather than teleport and kill. The one downside to this is that the only way I could get it to work was to add all melee weapons to a "mrMeleeList" formlist. So any mod added melee weapons will need to be added to that list (creating the risk for compatibility issues).
Ninja was changed to affect unarmed sneak attacks as well as 1 and 2 handed melee weapons.
Unarmed Melee
I did a lot of playtesting and found unarmed kind of a lackluster combat class. The damage isn't great and the selection of weapons aren't very diverse. However, after some time I came to realize that Power Armor is the king of unarmed weapons. Paired with perks like Pain Train and a suit of Power Armor with arm upgrades (plus a jetpack) and the player pretty much becomes the Hulk. Unfortunately this isn't easy to communicate to players in game.
NPC unarmed attacks were all buffed as well. But damage was adjusted in part by the size of the opponent and what level it appears. I also had to adjust damage more case-by case as a straight damage percent increase would lead to some creatures killing the player with a single swipe. I added a bonus to feral ghoul melee attacks that increase the amount of limb damage they do, which helps them pose a little more of a threat without them being too strong. Sometimes a damaged limb is scarier than low health.
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