I've released v0.70 which has another significant number of changes, albeit not as large as 0.60.  I've now finished balancing all Bloodmoon and Tribunal gear, as well as any remaining unique weapons and armour. Previous releases focused on the main game, whereas now almost every weapon and armour in the game has been tweaked (those that haven't changed, either by luck or design were already ~perfect).

I've also started correcting the more obvious errors with enchant potential, made sure every enchanted & silver weapon is correctly flagged as such (catching a number of omissions in the process), and made some further tweaks to spears and weapon and item weights.  Full changelist below:


Spears:


  • Huntsman spear shortened and attacks faster, and is now closer to a beefed up chitin spear, in line with its weapon model.
  • Increased attack speeds.  All spears are now 0.1x faster (speed 1.1 vs 1.0 previously), bringing their DPS a bit closer to other weapon classes.  Halberds now attack at speed 1 (same as battleaxes) instead of 0.9.  Realistically I don't see why a halberd would be much slower than a battleaxe, and from a DPS perspective this is fairer the previous setting.  They may need another slight damage boost, but this should close some of the DPS gap between Spears and other weapon classes.
 
Daggers:

  • Shortened the nord dagger and shortsword, made them lighter in line with their models.
  • Tweaked stahlrim dagger stats and reach, has same reach as a tanto befitting its length

Long blades:
  • Adjusted Huntsman longsword and Nordic Silver longsword/claymore in line with the vanilla sword changes.  Generally Nordic Silver will be better than Dwemer and worse than Ebony.
  • Ice longsword renamed to Stalhrim and range and speed tweaked
 
Maces:

  • Made Nordic silver mace lighter and rebalanced stats and reach
  • Ice mace renamed to Stalhrim and rebalanced stats 
 
Axes:

  • Huntsman axe and war axe made lighter and faster, like a beefed up chitin axe.
  • Ice war axe renamed to Stalhrim war axe and given shorter reach in line with other axes
  • Nordic silver battleaxes length, speed and weight reweighted inline with other battleaxes.
  • Fixed damage of some unique axes that had weirdly low stats
  • Stahlrim pick gained damage and faster attack

Bolts:
  • Huntsman bolts are now cheaper than bonemold befitting their lower damage

Armour:

  • Rebalanced the Nordic mail (which is now called Nordic Honor Guard mail) to be heavier, as previously it was the same weight as Steel.  It is now about 20% heavier than steel but lighter than Dwemer. It will still fill the midweight role quite nicely – much lighter than ebony – but without being basically medium armour. Buffed its armour rating slightly from 46 to 48 to compensate.  The armour rating may be slightly too low or the weight still a bit too high so this needs player feedback.
  • Minor tweaks to nordic iron and trollbone, dragonscale, and a handful of other armours to be more sensible.  
 
Other:

  • All Ice weapons and armour are now called Stalhrim instead. Generally they will be slightly better than ebony and worse than daedric, while also being lighter
  • Rebalanced some item weights for stalhrim and ebony. Often the longsword was the heaviest of the items despite having the fastest speed and lowest DPS.  Now weight typically goes longsword -> axe -> mace from lightest to heaviest, and also fastest to slowest and lowest to highest damage per hit. 
  • Increased stalhrim longsword enchant value.  Reweighted and rebalanced all stalhrim items,  generally they should be around ebony weight, more damaging than ebony but less damage and lighter than daedric.
  • Modified the fryse hag to not have winterwound dagger at level 8, which is a devastating weapon at that level and will probably 1-2hit kill most players. The level 20 Hag had an iron sparksword, while level 8 had the winterwound; I think these are supposed to be reversed so that’s what I did.  Also slightly upped their medium and light armour skill so now they’ll actually wear the bear & wolf armour in their inventory.
  • Gave the Riekling Lance slightly longer reach and made the Riekling blade a little lighter.  They don’t really make sense (why is the lance a short blade despite being longer than the actual blade?) but as with the goblin clubs I’m reluctant to touch these further since so much of their value is contextual, i.e. as the main weapon for a mounted opponent that attacks in groups. Realistically the lance should be a long blade with longer reach, and the blade a short blade with short reach and faster attack, but I’ve left it mostly unchanged so as not to affect the balance of these enemies or hinder their ability to strike from their mounts.
  • “special” weapons (unique non-legendary) such as Magebane, Temreki, Cloudcleaver, Uvenim silver spear, Sarano ebony helm, and so on now often have improved stats or some other way to differentiate them from the base item.
  • Went through all silver and all enchanted weapons and fixed any weapons that were missing their enchanted or silver weapon flags.  
  • Added enchanted flag to all the darts used by the gangs in Mournhold. These will now behave as magic items and can damage ghosts and will ignore normal damage resistance. None of these were flagged as enchanted previously – I’m not sure why this is, possibly an oversight or a thematic decision to represent them as poisoned darts rather than magic darts.  In any event, they now count as enchanted items.  Given >95% of their damage is done by enchantments, it shouldn’t affect their damage output by more than 1-2 DPS.
  • Tweaked Dwarven armour weight as it was slightly out of line with where it was supposed to be.  Increased dwarven armour item value to compensate for the weight that was added in previous updates. 
  • Started work rebalancing some enchant values for higher end gear:  
    • Generally axes and maces got a boost to enchant capacity to bring them more in line with long blades.
    • Boosted adamantium armour enchant values and slightly nerfed royal guard – adamantium is now more enchantable than royal guard, befitting its “special” nature and also compensating for its slightly lower armour rating relative to RG.  
    •  Slightly boosted some Her Hand, Indoril, and Stalhrim item enchantability as these were too low. 
    • Tweaked daedric weapon weights.  It was weird that the mace was so light (45 weight) and the waraxe and longsword so heavy (72, 60).  These are now much more sensible.

Optional QoL changes:
- A reminder: the optional QoL file makes escort characters tougher and reduces cliff racer spawns.  I've added a few more characters to the list of escorts that get buffed.
Upcoming changes:
  • Further tweaks to item enchant value and comparisons between & within item types (Glass, Ebony, Daedric, Stalhrim, Adamantium, Indoril).  I think the lower tier items like Dwarven, Orcish, Steel etc don't really matter all that much and thus are "mostly fair" given the player would hardly spend 50k enchanting them.  However at the higher tiers there are some clear imbalances between weapon and armour types and materials, which need to be revisited given the drastic changes to damage (especially for maces).  
  • Pending feedback, potentially revisit spears, short blades, and adamantium/royal guard/nordic honour guard armour. 

Final note:  This is likely to be the last update for a while so I hope you enjoy it.  Thanks to all have provided feedback so far. 

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