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About this mod
Fixes the damage dealing critical effects of most vanilla weapons so that they cannot cause you to miss "killcounts" and other proc effects such as crime responsibility. Includes some personal tweaks so this mod is IMPURE... if at this point you still think the vanilla "balance" from FNV is sacrosanct, you're worse off than me.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
Critical & Effects - Fixes & Tweaks
RECOMMENDED:
Ammo Script Fixes to take care of damaging effects from ammo. Here I took care of weapons.
Mostly Unarmed Tweaks to take care of the fatigue-causing weapons.
In the game, many weapons cause additional effects in the event of a critical hit. The most straightforward example is the laser and plasma disintegrations, but there are a few others. You're probably familiar with them.
What's not so familiar is the way the game applies these effects. As far as the game is concerned, they are not caused by you, the attacker, to be applied on your target. They are caused by the target onto itself, which as dumb as it sounds is for the most part harmless, as long as the critical effect itself doesn't cause HP damage. Disintegrations happen only when the target is already dead and there's a killer to blame, knockdowns are a bit iffy but for the most part they do the same no matter who's really "responsible" for them, etc. This also applies to special VATS effects from melee weapons that have them.
But there are a few critical effects from weapons which do actually cause HP damage, and in the event they end up being the cause for the target's demise, you won't be recognized as the party responsible of their death. Which is not much of a big deal as you can imagine, but it's still not ideal.
This is what I've set out to fix in this mod. Amazingly enough, the functions to get a hit's parameters in an attack can also work from these critical effect's scripts, so that way I can correctly gather who's really responsible for causing them, and redirect them to use some custom damaging effects that will trigger crime and killcounts if they end up killing the target.
Some effects I've buffed from their vanilla versions because frankly they are quite underwhelming. Purists beware of the TWEAKED notices where I've (definitely) deviated from the vanilla parameters. Here are the changes:
Super Heated Cosmic Knife, Super Heated Saturnite Fist, Sterilizer Glove, Sonic Emitter - Tarantula
All caused 2pts Fire Damage over 5 seconds in a critical hit, and in the knife's case, some random script crap that didn't matter at all. Which is kinda underwhelming, so I've TWEAKED it to a stronger 7pts instant + 7pts x 2sec effect, so that their critical hits can cause a more noticeable HP loss.
Corrosive Glove
Caused 2pts "acid" damage (no resistance to it) over 10 seconds, plus those incredibly annoying (or rather poorly made) cazador stinger sounds that blast at full volume no matter how far you are from the afflicted target. It is TWEAKED to a stronger 4pts instant + 4pts x 9sec effect, and will now display a shader effect on the target instead of playing any sounds.
Nuka Breaker
While this one's effect was fixed by YUP so that it caused damage from the effect instead of hardcoded from its script (+25 EMP vs. robots, +13 EMP vs. OWB robots, +10 EMP vs. Power Armor, +25 Electric vs. all, jeez); here I've opted to have it TWEAKED it with another vanilla effect in a simpler fashion (besides it's a friggin' neon post, it's not supposed to release EMPs!). It will now simply cause 20 electric damage x 2sec on all targets it critically hits.
Cleansing Flame
This one is a bit out there in this mod, but the thing was that it's supposed to have a fire damage effect that scales with the player's skill. There are a pair of issues: it measures the player skill no matter who's wielding it, and it uses Energy Weapons no matter what skill Cleansing Flame has associated.
Cleansing Flame's effect now adjusts its fire damage to the actual skill of whoever is using it. By default it is capped between 2 and 13 pts of Fire Damage x 6sec, but you can change these in the configuration file. In order for this to work, the mod uses handlers that updates the fire effect's damage with the skill values of whoever holds it. This mod should be compatible with other mods that change the Cleansing Flame weapon proper, but not so much with those that change its fire effect.
It also displays a TWEAKED shader with a blue flame on burning targets, so it better matches the flame coming out of the weapon.
Robo-Scorpion and Spore Carrier death bursts
The explosion that these two creatures can trigger when they die or kill themselves is now linked to an explosive weapon form, such that your perks like Hit the Deck, or resistances to electricity and poison respectively, can protect you from their damage.
Robo-Scorpions will now also try to actively self-destruct near their target if their HP fall below 1/2 of their max, using a stronger electrical explosion. They also cannot explode when killed if they are disintegrated by an energy weapon's critical.
Sonic Emitter - Opera Singer
The critical effect of this weapon simply causes those killed by it to get gibbed into bloody bits. Fun, but useless from a combat efficiency perspective. I've TWEAKED it to also affect living targets, such that it will instantly cripple the limb that was hit, or break and drop their currently held weapon if it gets hit.
Sonic Emitter - Robo-Scorpion
Caused an explosion in ANY critical hit, with all the problems that entails... The explosion placing script will now adjust the explosion's blast area to make sure it can't harm you, your allies or innocent bystanders, and the damage it causes benefits from your Explosives skill and perks. It will also use a TWEAKED electrical explosion like that of the Robo-Scorpions' own dying burst, instead of a gunpowder explosion like that of the 40mm Grenade.
Two-Step Goodbye
Here it is. This one causes a large explosion on a critical death, which makes it quite the source of frustration. Now, this explosion will show a grenade hazard on screen while the timer ticks down, will adjust its blast area to prevent harming innocents too close to the corpse like the above, and once it triggers it can gib the corpse for that extra dose of gorey fun. Damage will again benefit from any Explosives skill and perks you have.
I've also provided an optional TWEAK enabling this critical effect to work on live targets as well, like TTW does by default. It's cheesy as hell, but can be quite fun. If you're lucky and fast enough (Slayer) you can even chain several concurrent explosions on the same live target. Check the configuration file if you're interested.
Flame weapons critical death TWEAKED
For Flamers and Incinerators, a critical death causes a flashy corpse bursting, and this burst is problematic due to causing additional damage and burning effects to anyone nearby, which again cannot be linked to any actor responsible for it. This damage was so low however that I've opted to nullify it, to avoid problems with it altogether.
But while I was at it, I implemented some new visuals in this effect so that it goes beyond just leaving a severed bloody torso and some smoke puffs. When a human target dies in a burst of flame, they can now leave behind a charred skeleton (still containing all their items of course). This feature can be controlled in the configuration file.
No criticals on yourself/your companions
Scoring a critical hit on yourself is difficult, but not impossible. Most if not all explosive weapons have a critical multiplier and/or damage of 0, so while technically the collateral can trigger a critical on you, it will usually do nothing (if the weapon has no critical effect defined). But one example could be the Anti-Materiel Rifle loaded with explosive .50MG, these can also damage you with the rifle's own critical damage if you get caught in the blast.
There's also nothing preventing you from scoring a critical hit with any weapon on your active companions. Overall, these sound to me like the opposite of the "luck" that controls the critical hits feature, so an option in the configuration makes both you and your companions unable to score a critical hit with any weapon on yourselves or each other.
Automatic melee weapons criticals fix
Automatic melee weapons (erm... AMW from now on) are somewhat bizarre in how they cause damage, in that roughly they hit their target on each frame to deliver a frame fraction of their damage each time, regardless of their defined fire rate. However, their fire rate does come into effect to determine the frequency of critical hits, since all automatic weapons have your character's base critical chance divided by their fire rate.
In practice this means that AMW should be using a fire rate of 60 or so to make their critical chance behave sensibly, but obviously none are set like that. Instead, their critical damage is very low compared to their regular damage, but not low enough if they are going to score this damage several times per second. And this also falls apart when attacking with them in VATS or used by NPCs. In these cases they are swung as if they were non-automatic, causing their displayed damage all at once, and with only one chance to cause a critical hit whose damage will be sorely lacking.
The fix in this mod goes through all AMW in your game, forces their fire rate to be 1.0 and their critical damage to be the same as their regular one, and gives the player a perk that makes this critical damage 1/60 when not in VATS mode. If some weapon mod happened to increase their fire rate (which is weird but with WMX you never know), that mod's effect is changed to give them an equivalent % damage increase instead. In effect, this makes AMW gain a DPS percentage increase equal to your critical chance, and makes any critical hits with them for NPCs and in VATS double their damage as they should.
Explosive ammo critical damage fix
Incidentally, the reason explosive weapons have a critical damage of 0 is quite likely because of the way the explosion interacts with this critical damage. If a explosion causes a critical hit, it applies this critical damage in full without adjusting it by distance like it does for regular damage. Another reason is that this critical damage, and other damage modifiers like sneak attack or limb damage multipliers, get lost or scrambled in a direct weapon hit proper from VATS mode, just by virtue of the impact projectile having an explosion defined. This can be seen in action in the Gauss Rifle in vanilla, for which I'd direct you to this other mod.
In most other circumstances, such explosive weapons are correctly set to not have critical damage, and their explosion is so strong compared to their direct hit damage that they are clearly not intended to be used for "precision shots". Think weapons like the Missile Launcher or Fat Man, they may not gain much from a headshot due to this feature, but they are not really meant for that anyways.
But the one particular vanilla weapon really affected by this is the Anti-Materiel Rifle when using explosive rounds from GRA. Attacks with this ammo can be cheesed to cause the weapon's huge critical damage on targets caught in the blast, while the weapon can lose quite a bit of performance when used in a precise fashion with it due to losing the headshot multiplier.
The fix in this mod will check all playable weapons, focusing only in those which cause critical damage and which have different ammo options. Of these ammos, it will check those that cause an explosion in their projectile override, and apply this explosion through a handler instead. The explosion will be restored to the ammo while the pipboy inventory view is open, so that the tooltip can display the full impact+explosion damage. It might cause some conflict if a mod relies on viewing that ammo's explosion at all times, though I don't know of any such cases. Yet.
Content Pending
if you happen to know any other weapons that cause either damage from critical effects, OR damage from a script using "DamageAV Health" or the like, be sure to let me know, since it's possible I don't have all of them under control.
The ones I know to be missing from here are the Fatigue causing weapons: Boxing Tape and Gloves, and the Cattle Prod. Those are handled in this other mod.
Enjoy