First of all, thank you for making such an interesting mod!
I feel that Axe of Splendor doesn't have the Fast Hitter of Special, is this correct behavior? I'm playing with game version 1.0.0.8 and mod version 1.08.
The 1.0.0.9 update changed the structure around a bit with the introduction of Enhanced mode. Replace the files in the Classic folder and see if that works.
I tried that a while ago and did it again just to be sure, replacing the files in both classic and enhanced but still the same happens. while the text is in line with the mod, the actual cost of spells isn't.
so uh, do i put it in classic or enhaced folder in data example: in monster folder theres no monster.zox, just a folder called classic and enhaced that have monster.zox both
I think you can use any of the two folders, meaning if you put in on classic, the mod will be playable on the classic mode and so Of course if all your chars are on classic mode and you want to play the mod with those, then use classic mode
There shouldn't be any issues using this mod with 1.0.0.9. Let me know if you have any problems though; I'm in regular contact with the programmer contracted to do the updates, so it could help with bug hunting.
This mod clearly has a lot of thought and effort put into it, miles better than vanilla, however it may not be for everyone.
There are several things that, in my opinion, negatively affect the sense of exploring and remove the excitement of gaining new items: 1. Armor upgrade is pointless and individual pieces are often identical stat-wise, despite a huge difference in price. On the other hand, some armor pieces are very powerful with additional abilities, possibly even making them over-powered. 2. Shields are all pretty much identical. 3. You will fast roll or nearly fast roll in most scenarios. 4. Weapon weights are inconsistent with the way those weapons look, which further breaks immersion.
If you want to breeze through the game and not spend too much time grinding, while having fast paced combat with forgiving builds, this is a great overhaul mod for you.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll respond to each point in detail to explain my reasoning behind the changes I made.
"Armor upgrade is pointless and individual pieces are often identical stat-wise, despite a huge difference in price."
Armor upgrades are built in. The strongest armor is about on par with the strongest fully upgraded armor in vanilla. Because you only see a benefit from higher Endurance as you switch out your armor for heavier pieces, the original system forces you to constantly grind to keep your latest armor up to par. There is a reason later installments in the Souls series did away with armor upgrades even though earlier games had it.
Boosting the base protection values of armor and removing the need to upgrade it is an anti-grinding measure so you don't have to upgrade your armor all over again every time you raise your Endurance enough to equip something better, with a side effect of making armor a lot more effective early in the game than it otherwise would have been if it were reliant upon upgrades that weren't available yet. The difference this makes in the viability of early game heavy armor is huge; in vanilla, a Knight starts with an equip load in the upper 90s and has about 34% damage reduction against physical attacks. Compared to just fast rolling in rags that gave you 19% physical reduction, starting with the Knight set was utter garbage. In my mod, a Knight has about 37% damage reduction to start with, but also gets a stamina regeneration boost and a +10% attack bonus, and he can just barely mid-roll if he two hands his sword instead of using a shield.
I didn't mess with armor prices. Armor weights broadly reflect the tier of the armor as well as the price of it, but it's not a perfect correlation so there are some random armor sets out there with wonky prices that are all leftover from vanilla.
"On the other hand, some armor pieces are very powerful with additional abilities, possibly even making them over-powered."
Any armor piece with a special ability has weaker defense than you would otherwise get from another piece of armor with the same weight. A +3 stat boost comes with a penalty of 12 less protection (or a combination of less protection and less balance, for heavy armors) than armor that doesn't, and armor that offers a special ability like you'd see from most rings has 24 less protection than armor that doesn't. This makes a bigger difference with lower weight armor, where something like the Rogue leg armor offers only half the protection that it would if it didn't have a +3 Dexterity bonus on it. Or, you could compare the Patched set to the Assassin's set; they have the same protection, but the Assassin set gives you stamina regen, reduced wounds, fast roll, and +10% attack, while the patched set weighs half as much and gives no abilities. Armor bonuses don't stack with rings, so if you've got the rings to give yourself the abilities you want, you're better off going with the patched set instead.
The way that protection scales with weight actually lines up with Endurance boosting armor's bonuses to make it so that it's about as easy to fast roll in Endurance boosting armor as it is to just wear similarly protective (and therefore lighter) armor that doesn't boost Endurance in the first place, but if you're mid rolling (or worse) the Endurance boosting armor offers huge gains over other sets. If you want to clank around in the really heavy stuff and think that rolling is for babies who can't take a hit like real men, look for +Endurance armor or beeline for Heavy Armor 5 and wear the Titan set, which is basically made for this. Otherwise it's pretty much a wash.
Other stat boosts are basically just a way to convert Endurance into another stat, and the Endurance required to pay the tax for stat boosting armor is about the same as what you get out of the boosts, if you're fast rolling. If you're not, there are some minor gains to be had that get bigger the heavier you're willing to go, but I'm fine with that because losing a decent roll is a pretty serious drawback.
"Shields are all pretty much identical."
Higher tier shields start with better stagger reduction than lower tier shields, but other than that, this is true. In vanilla, there is never any reason to use a shield that offers less than 100% damage absorption, which makes every shield that doesn't offer this irrelevant. The Teuthis Shield, for example, is available at Shields 1 and offers 100% absorption against all physical attacks, has reasonable stability, and it's quite light for a shield. Vanilla offered a choice between a handful of good shields (usually situational, but is it really a choice to take the Phoenix Rondache into the Kraekan Wyrm fight when it's the one obvious correct option?) and a large number of bad shields, and the game's mechanics don't really have a good way to differentiate them that doesn't just go away once you've hit NG+ and weight stops mattering. Because a bad option might as well not exist (and this is a huge part of my design philosophy, so while you can have short term progression in things like weapon damage between tiers, in the long run weapon upgrades restore parity for NG+ so everything is viable rather than one or two weapons of each class), the best we can do with shields is to just not punish players for going with their cosmetic preference.
"You will fast roll or nearly fast roll in most scenarios."
Armor sets are weighted so that with 50 Endurance, you can just barely fast roll in the heaviest Light Armor sets and mid roll in the heaviest Heavy Armor sets. Even with this dramatic reduction in weight, the defensive increase per point is still inferior to the offensive increase per point that you'd see from investing in an offensive stat. This is further complicated by a bunch of built in behind the scenes vanilla boosts to player defenses as they level or from items like Goldenwine, but to summarize, even with the huge boost to the return on investment in Endurance, it's still not as good as boosting offense. It's just less bad than it used to be, comparatively. For the amount of points that could make you do three times the damage, you could instead make yourself twice as hard to kill.
"Weapon weights are inconsistent with the way those weapons look, which further breaks immersion."
Having Endurance tied to your offensive output in any capacity is all sorts of bad for making a system that is balanced both in the short run of NG, where Endurance is a limiting factor, and in the long run of NG+, where it is not. Any weapon that offers superior performance at the expense of weight ends up making everything else inferior in NG+ once weight stops mattering. Or, in the case of vanilla's big two handed weapons, makes everything even more inferior than it already was. Ideally, the starting carrying capacity would be lowered and weapons wouldn't count against your weight at all, but that's not part of the framework I have to deal with.
I recently played through this mod and found it was much more fun than the vanilla game. I appreciate the quality of life changes and for the most part I wouldn't change them. But I was wondering if you would mind if I took a second pass at the weapon overhaul? I know other mods have done this such as resalted, but I thought it'd be more polite to ask. And because that, I think that I would keep the core of the changes, but only making modifications to the weapon overhaul to give a better sense of progression. When people have feedback on this mod, I frequently see that they feel the game lacks the feeling of progression and that itemization feels boring.
Having recently played through the game with this mod, I did feel that defeating bosses felt a bit empty in terms of item progression. I didn't really care about boss drops because my tier 0 weapon could be upgraded to tackle any content I was doing, and bosses that dropped relevant class 2-5 upgrades were so rare that they felt divorced from itemization. I have three major changes I would make to alleviate the previously mentioned concerns.
1) A major complaint that many people seem to have is that the mod feels over-normalized. That is, when every weapon is the same, it feels like weapons are just cosmetic. And while I realize that higher class weapons scale better in the early to mid-game, I think people want game choices to be more than a cosmetic stat stick. To alleviate this concern, I would overhaul weapon enhancements. Tier 0 weapons would have no enhancements. Tier 1-3 weapons would have one enhancement, and tier 4-5 weapons would have two enhancements. Example: Bulwark would now only have one enhancement (extra blunt). Scharfrichter would have two (fast hitter and lightweight, weighing 30% less than similar greatswords), and Envy Blade would have slow hitter and extra sharp (deals 30% bonus damage) This would allow each weapon to have specific niches that would make them viable for different character builds, rather than every weapon feeling cosmetic, but keeping the damage normalization so that every weapon feels viable. I believe this change would be positive for the game, as people would be able to customize their builds while also having late game boss crafts feel rewarding.
Edit: Also, I realize that you can only have one flag and one special property for weapons, but we can work around this by changing weight/damage values to give custom properties.
2) The second major complaint that I have in particular is that the wisdom balance of this mod feels a bit tacked on. Since all wisdom weapons are frontloaded at the creed shop, if you are running a wisdom-based cleric, there are ZERO boss items worth crafting, making it feel like there is no boss progression at all. I would overhaul weapon types so that each class (particularly cleric) has several weapon types appropriate for them.
Strength: Swords, greatswords, greathammers, greataxes, spears (the emphasis being that strength-based builds should use large weapons, but basic swords being an option for sword-and-shield playstyle) Dexterity: Whips, bows, crossbows, axes, daggers (with crossbows being changed to have 80% blunt damage to differentiate their role from bows) Wisdom: Hammers, reapers, and pistols Magic: Staves, wands, and magic swords
3) I would normalize progression so that only bosses unlock new weapons and devotion levels. I would replace all creed shops with tier 0 weapons and remove the higher tier weapons, and require boss kills to unlock new tiers of items. I would make it so that you could turn in boss drops to creed leaders to unlock the ability to buy boss drops from the alchemist. Basically, I would update boss drops to have multiple crafting recipes with different weapon types. So you could combine the sodden knight's ashes with not only a greatsword, but also a whip, bow, hammer, reaper, etc. So rather than turning in 3 locks of hair to unlock the devotion level 1, you would turn in the sodden knight's ashes. Upgrade costs for weapons would remain the same (locks of hair, etc.) If a boss isn't on the progression list, you could use their dropped item to craft 1-3 black pearls (depending on difficulty) and it would not be available at the alchemist. This would make it so that each boss feel rewarding when you defeat them. Every weapon type would have a craftable tier 1/2/3/4/5 weapon. I would also want to reduce the amount of salt that bosses drop, as non-progression bosses will now give black pearls.
Devotion 2: Sodden Knight, unlock class 1 weapons, locks of hair Devotion 3: Mad Alchemist, unlock class 2 weapons Devotion 4: Kraekan wyrm, unlock class 3 weapons, soldier's poem Devotion 5: Disemboweled Husk, unlock alternative class 3 weapons Devotion 6: Third Lamb, unlock class 4 weapons, lord's orders Devotion 7: The Coveted, unlock class 5 weapons, king's orders
The above is an example of what that might look like, with many of the bosses on the progression list being frontloaded towards the earlier parts of the game to keep progression fresh, but slowing down towards the end. The final boss notably is not on the progression list, because it feels rather pointless to unlock items after you defeat him. Rather his boss item could be used to craft 10 black pearls, thus allowing a substantial stat increase for NG+ progression.
Any thoughts on this? I thought I might mod these changes just for my own game, but I wanted to run them by you and see if you thought any of this was interesting or viable. I realize you've probably moved on from the game since you haven't made any changes in a long time, but I'd still like to improve the game which was obviously very poorly balanced in vanilla.
"But I was wondering if you would mind if I took a second pass at the weapon overhaul? I know other mods have done this such as resalted, but I thought it'd be more polite to ask."
Feel free. I'd appreciate it if you mention my mod as the starting point and post a link. Resalted's author didn't even do that much despite apparently working directly with files from an earlier version of my mod. If you're going to be that derivative and not even give credit, that's a dick move, seriously.
"I didn't really care about boss drops because my tier 0 weapon could be upgraded to tackle any content I was doing"
A tier 2-3 weapon does twice the base damage of a tier 0-1 weapon, and a tier 4-5 weapon does three times the base damage. The gap shrinks as the weapons are upgraded and disappears when a weapon is fully upgraded. The progression is there, it just disappears at maximum upgrades (by which point there is basically no more progression anyway).
The difference between my approach and a higher-tier-weapons-are-always-better approach is that with my approach you can use whatever you want in the late game or NG+ and not cripple yourself. There are cosmetic differences, but also the combination of abilities on each weapon varies. There just aren't that many axes along which you can differentiate weapons without making a ton of them irrelevant, and if high tier weapons have more damage output or more abilities in the end then as a practical matter your endgame and NG+ weapon selection is going to be extremely limited. I deliberately did away with long-term weapon obsolescence, and use the base damage and upgrade factor differences to allow for NG progression between different tiers of physical weapons. I think it's a pretty elegant solution, but a lot of people don't seem to realize that it's even in there; they see the same damage at full upgrades and think that there isn't any difference before that point. While the gaps diminish as you upgrade more, it's still quite significant; going from a tier 0-1 weapon that's been upgraded four times to a similarly upgraded tier 2-3 weapon is a ~43% damage increase. Even immediately after transmuting, when you go from a four times upgraded low tier weapon to a three times upgraded mid tier weapon, it's still a ~22% damage increase. You can use a lower tier weapon if you want, and eventually it will be as good as higher tier weapons, but for most of the game it's going to be noticeably weaker.
"Also, I realize that you can only have one flag and one special property for weapons, but we can work around this by changing weight/damage values to give custom properties."
You eventually reach a point where weapon weight no longer matters. Once you're into NG+ cycles you can basically ignore weight constraints, so using weight as a tradeoff for power doesn't work in the long run. In v1.06 and earlier version of the mod I had a few weapons that were extra heavy but did more damage, and in NG this works as a way to trade off your mobility for more damage output, but in NG+ the tradeoff evaporates and you just have a weapon that does more damage. I ditched the idea in v1.07. I use altered damage values to compensate for Fast Hitter and Slow Hitter, since those abilities make a huge difference and if you don't nerf damage then Fast Hitter outshines everything. Slow Hitter needed a big damage buff to not be garbage. I went with a 10% damage nerf for Fast Hitter weapons and a 20% damage buff for Slow Hitters.
"I would overhaul weapon types so that each class (particularly cleric) has several weapon types appropriate for them."
The mod already follows this as a general guideline. Most weapon classes are dominated by a single stat type, with scattered exceptions that use another stat. The exceptions to this are swords (five are Dex, three are Strength, two are Magic, one is Wisdom) and poleaxes (three are Dex, one is Strength, one is Magic, two are Wisdom). Everything else has more than half of all the weapons in that class scaling from the same attribute. Wisdom and Magic don't dominate any weapon types, but instead get a random assortment from weapon types that are dominated by one of the physical stats.
The problem with having hard rules against weapon scaling that deviates from the most common stat for that weapon type is that it isn't very much fun to just have to use a certain type of weapon all the time. After playing through the first half of the game five times with Harmen's Mace because Wisdom didn't get anything but a hammer until later, I got sick of it. I wanted to play with the Leviathan instead of waiting until literally the last five minutes of the game to get my hands on it. Boss weapon progression is deliberately sacrificed for the sake of greater weapon variety throughout the game. Weapon power progression was somewhat muted for the same reason. If you're choosing between two weapons that are basically just differentiated from one another by cosmetics and their special abilities, that's not a huge choice, but it's still a more interesting choice than picking between a weapon that sucks and a weapon that doesn't.
At least, that's my preference. If you want to mod things so that your chosen attribute gives you a strictly defined set of weapons for a more curated experience with each class, with a series of weapons that are each stronger than the last and become obsolete as the next tier is reached, there is certainly a case to be made for that kind of design philosophy. A lot of games take that approach, with a stronger feeling of progression and a more sharply defined border between classes to make each class feel more distinct, but it comes at the expense of the player's opportunity to make choices. I simply value the choices and the variety more than the feeling of progression and more distinct classes since only Clerics get to use (for example) hammers.
Re: Boss progression - this introduces a lot of complexity without changing very much in terms of actual progression. Tying creed progression to boss drops introduces the potential for a player to lock themselves out of creed progression if they switch creeds, although being able to buy boss drops from the alchemist is a workaround only if the player remembers to buy extras from the alchemist before switching. The way I've got it set up, creed progression is already tied to game progression at basically the same rate that you've suggested. Tying it explicitly to boss kills is another way to do it, but it seems like it's extra work to get basically the same result. Also, instead of making recipes for boss drops to transmute them into black pearls, you can just adjust boss salt drops if you want to get more levels out of them. That reward is already there for all the bosses except for Mal, who is a cheap-ass alien lookin' bugbitch who don't drop no salt or gold worth nothin' neither. Pfeh!
Anyway, you can just add more salt if you want.
"Any thoughts on this? I thought I might mod these changes just for my own game, but I wanted to run them by you and see if you thought any of this was interesting or viable."
While I spent this whole post talking about why I didn't do it the way you suggested and I'd rather have it my way, a lot of this stuff really does just boil down to personal preference. The best thing about modding is making the game into what you personally want to play, Once you've done that, why not share it with others? Good luck with your mod; I hope you share it.
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131 comments
I feel that Axe of Splendor doesn't have the Fast Hitter of Special, is this correct behavior?
I'm playing with game version 1.0.0.8 and mod version 1.08.
example: in monster folder theres no monster.zox, just a folder called classic and enhaced that have monster.zox both
Of course if all your chars are on classic mode and you want to play the mod with those, then use classic mode
I expect it would still work in Enhanced, but the balance might be a little wonky.
Thanks
There are several things that, in my opinion, negatively affect the sense of exploring and remove the excitement of gaining new items:
1. Armor upgrade is pointless and individual pieces are often identical stat-wise, despite a huge difference in price. On the other hand, some armor pieces are very powerful with additional abilities, possibly even making them over-powered.
2. Shields are all pretty much identical.
3. You will fast roll or nearly fast roll in most scenarios.
4. Weapon weights are inconsistent with the way those weapons look, which further breaks immersion.
If you want to breeze through the game and not spend too much time grinding, while having fast paced combat with forgiving builds, this is a great overhaul mod for you.
"Armor upgrade is pointless and individual pieces are often identical stat-wise, despite a huge difference in price."
Armor upgrades are built in. The strongest armor is about on par with the strongest fully upgraded armor in vanilla. Because you only see a benefit from higher Endurance as you switch out your armor for heavier pieces, the original system forces you to constantly grind to keep your latest armor up to par. There is a reason later installments in the Souls series did away with armor upgrades even though earlier games had it.
Boosting the base protection values of armor and removing the need to upgrade it is an anti-grinding measure so you don't have to upgrade your armor all over again every time you raise your Endurance enough to equip something better, with a side effect of making armor a lot more effective early in the game than it otherwise would have been if it were reliant upon upgrades that weren't available yet. The difference this makes in the viability of early game heavy armor is huge; in vanilla, a Knight starts with an equip load in the upper 90s and has about 34% damage reduction against physical attacks. Compared to just fast rolling in rags that gave you 19% physical reduction, starting with the Knight set was utter garbage. In my mod, a Knight has about 37% damage reduction to start with, but also gets a stamina regeneration boost and a +10% attack bonus, and he can just barely mid-roll if he two hands his sword instead of using a shield.
I didn't mess with armor prices. Armor weights broadly reflect the tier of the armor as well as the price of it, but it's not a perfect correlation so there are some random armor sets out there with wonky prices that are all leftover from vanilla.
"On the other hand, some armor pieces are very powerful with additional abilities, possibly even making them over-powered."
Any armor piece with a special ability has weaker defense than you would otherwise get from another piece of armor with the same weight. A +3 stat boost comes with a penalty of 12 less protection (or a combination of less protection and less balance, for heavy armors) than armor that doesn't, and armor that offers a special ability like you'd see from most rings has 24 less protection than armor that doesn't. This makes a bigger difference with lower weight armor, where something like the Rogue leg armor offers only half the protection that it would if it didn't have a +3 Dexterity bonus on it. Or, you could compare the Patched set to the Assassin's set; they have the same protection, but the Assassin set gives you stamina regen, reduced wounds, fast roll, and +10% attack, while the patched set weighs half as much and gives no abilities. Armor bonuses don't stack with rings, so if you've got the rings to give yourself the abilities you want, you're better off going with the patched set instead.
The way that protection scales with weight actually lines up with Endurance boosting armor's bonuses to make it so that it's about as easy to fast roll in Endurance boosting armor as it is to just wear similarly protective (and therefore lighter) armor that doesn't boost Endurance in the first place, but if you're mid rolling (or worse) the Endurance boosting armor offers huge gains over other sets. If you want to clank around in the really heavy stuff and think that rolling is for babies who can't take a hit like real men, look for +Endurance armor or beeline for Heavy Armor 5 and wear the Titan set, which is basically made for this. Otherwise it's pretty much a wash.
Other stat boosts are basically just a way to convert Endurance into another stat, and the Endurance required to pay the tax for stat boosting armor is about the same as what you get out of the boosts, if you're fast rolling. If you're not, there are some minor gains to be had that get bigger the heavier you're willing to go, but I'm fine with that because losing a decent roll is a pretty serious drawback.
"Shields are all pretty much identical."
Higher tier shields start with better stagger reduction than lower tier shields, but other than that, this is true. In vanilla, there is never any reason to use a shield that offers less than 100% damage absorption, which makes every shield that doesn't offer this irrelevant. The Teuthis Shield, for example, is available at Shields 1 and offers 100% absorption against all physical attacks, has reasonable stability, and it's quite light for a shield. Vanilla offered a choice between a handful of good shields (usually situational, but is it really a choice to take the Phoenix Rondache into the Kraekan Wyrm fight when it's the one obvious correct option?) and a large number of bad shields, and the game's mechanics don't really have a good way to differentiate them that doesn't just go away once you've hit NG+ and weight stops mattering. Because a bad option might as well not exist (and this is a huge part of my design philosophy, so while you can have short term progression in things like weapon damage between tiers, in the long run weapon upgrades restore parity for NG+ so everything is viable rather than one or two weapons of each class), the best we can do with shields is to just not punish players for going with their cosmetic preference.
"You will fast roll or nearly fast roll in most scenarios."
Armor sets are weighted so that with 50 Endurance, you can just barely fast roll in the heaviest Light Armor sets and mid roll in the heaviest Heavy Armor sets. Even with this dramatic reduction in weight, the defensive increase per point is still inferior to the offensive increase per point that you'd see from investing in an offensive stat. This is further complicated by a bunch of built in behind the scenes vanilla boosts to player defenses as they level or from items like Goldenwine, but to summarize, even with the huge boost to the return on investment in Endurance, it's still not as good as boosting offense. It's just less bad than it used to be, comparatively. For the amount of points that could make you do three times the damage, you could instead make yourself twice as hard to kill.
"Weapon weights are inconsistent with the way those weapons look, which further breaks immersion."
Having Endurance tied to your offensive output in any capacity is all sorts of bad for making a system that is balanced both in the short run of NG, where Endurance is a limiting factor, and in the long run of NG+, where it is not. Any weapon that offers superior performance at the expense of weight ends up making everything else inferior in NG+ once weight stops mattering. Or, in the case of vanilla's big two handed weapons, makes everything even more inferior than it already was. Ideally, the starting carrying capacity would be lowered and weapons wouldn't count against your weight at all, but that's not part of the framework I have to deal with.
Having recently played through the game with this mod, I did feel that defeating bosses felt a bit empty in terms of item progression. I didn't really care about boss drops because my tier 0 weapon could be upgraded to tackle any content I was doing, and bosses that dropped relevant class 2-5 upgrades were so rare that they felt divorced from itemization. I have three major changes I would make to alleviate the previously mentioned concerns.
1) A major complaint that many people seem to have is that the mod feels over-normalized. That is, when every weapon is the same, it feels like weapons are just cosmetic. And while I realize that higher class weapons scale better in the early to mid-game, I think people want game choices to be more than a cosmetic stat stick. To alleviate this concern, I would overhaul weapon enhancements. Tier 0 weapons would have no enhancements. Tier 1-3 weapons would have one enhancement, and tier 4-5 weapons would have two enhancements. Example: Bulwark would now only have one enhancement (extra blunt). Scharfrichter would have two (fast hitter and lightweight, weighing 30% less than similar greatswords), and Envy Blade would have slow hitter and extra sharp (deals 30% bonus damage) This would allow each weapon to have specific niches that would make them viable for different character builds, rather than every weapon feeling cosmetic, but keeping the damage normalization so that every weapon feels viable. I believe this change would be positive for the game, as people would be able to customize their builds while also having late game boss crafts feel rewarding.
Edit: Also, I realize that you can only have one flag and one special property for weapons, but we can work around this by changing weight/damage values to give custom properties.
2) The second major complaint that I have in particular is that the wisdom balance of this mod feels a bit tacked on. Since all wisdom weapons are frontloaded at the creed shop, if you are running a wisdom-based cleric, there are ZERO boss items worth crafting, making it feel like there is no boss progression at all. I would overhaul weapon types so that each class (particularly cleric) has several weapon types appropriate for them.
Strength: Swords, greatswords, greathammers, greataxes, spears (the emphasis being that strength-based builds should use large weapons, but basic swords being an option for sword-and-shield playstyle)
Dexterity: Whips, bows, crossbows, axes, daggers (with crossbows being changed to have 80% blunt damage to differentiate their role from bows)
Wisdom: Hammers, reapers, and pistols
Magic: Staves, wands, and magic swords
3) I would normalize progression so that only bosses unlock new weapons and devotion levels. I would replace all creed shops with tier 0 weapons and remove the higher tier weapons, and require boss kills to unlock new tiers of items. I would make it so that you could turn in boss drops to creed leaders to unlock the ability to buy boss drops from the alchemist. Basically, I would update boss drops to have multiple crafting recipes with different weapon types. So you could combine the sodden knight's ashes with not only a greatsword, but also a whip, bow, hammer, reaper, etc. So rather than turning in 3 locks of hair to unlock the devotion level 1, you would turn in the sodden knight's ashes. Upgrade costs for weapons would remain the same (locks of hair, etc.) If a boss isn't on the progression list, you could use their dropped item to craft 1-3 black pearls (depending on difficulty) and it would not be available at the alchemist. This would make it so that each boss feel rewarding when you defeat them. Every weapon type would have a craftable tier 1/2/3/4/5 weapon. I would also want to reduce the amount of salt that bosses drop, as non-progression bosses will now give black pearls.
Devotion 2: Sodden Knight, unlock class 1 weapons, locks of hair
Devotion 3: Mad Alchemist, unlock class 2 weapons
Devotion 4: Kraekan wyrm, unlock class 3 weapons, soldier's poem
Devotion 5: Disemboweled Husk, unlock alternative class 3 weapons
Devotion 6: Third Lamb, unlock class 4 weapons, lord's orders
Devotion 7: The Coveted, unlock class 5 weapons, king's orders
The above is an example of what that might look like, with many of the bosses on the progression list being frontloaded towards the earlier parts of the game to keep progression fresh, but slowing down towards the end. The final boss notably is not on the progression list, because it feels rather pointless to unlock items after you defeat him. Rather his boss item could be used to craft 10 black pearls, thus allowing a substantial stat increase for NG+ progression.
Any thoughts on this? I thought I might mod these changes just for my own game, but I wanted to run them by you and see if you thought any of this was interesting or viable. I realize you've probably moved on from the game since you haven't made any changes in a long time, but I'd still like to improve the game which was obviously very poorly balanced in vanilla.
"But I was wondering if you would mind if I took a second pass at the weapon overhaul? I know other mods have done this such as resalted, but I thought it'd be more polite to ask."
Feel free. I'd appreciate it if you mention my mod as the starting point and post a link. Resalted's author didn't even do that much despite apparently working directly with files from an earlier version of my mod. If you're going to be that derivative and not even give credit, that's a dick move, seriously.
"I didn't really care about boss drops because my tier 0 weapon could be upgraded to tackle any content I was doing"
A tier 2-3 weapon does twice the base damage of a tier 0-1 weapon, and a tier 4-5 weapon does three times the base damage. The gap shrinks as the weapons are upgraded and disappears when a weapon is fully upgraded. The progression is there, it just disappears at maximum upgrades (by which point there is basically no more progression anyway).
The difference between my approach and a higher-tier-weapons-are-always-better approach is that with my approach you can use whatever you want in the late game or NG+ and not cripple yourself. There are cosmetic differences, but also the combination of abilities on each weapon varies. There just aren't that many axes along which you can differentiate weapons without making a ton of them irrelevant, and if high tier weapons have more damage output or more abilities in the end then as a practical matter your endgame and NG+ weapon selection is going to be extremely limited. I deliberately did away with long-term weapon obsolescence, and use the base damage and upgrade factor differences to allow for NG progression between different tiers of physical weapons. I think it's a pretty elegant solution, but a lot of people don't seem to realize that it's even in there; they see the same damage at full upgrades and think that there isn't any difference before that point. While the gaps diminish as you upgrade more, it's still quite significant; going from a tier 0-1 weapon that's been upgraded four times to a similarly upgraded tier 2-3 weapon is a ~43% damage increase. Even immediately after transmuting, when you go from a four times upgraded low tier weapon to a three times upgraded mid tier weapon, it's still a ~22% damage increase. You can use a lower tier weapon if you want, and eventually it will be as good as higher tier weapons, but for most of the game it's going to be noticeably weaker.
"Also, I realize that you can only have one flag and one special property for weapons, but we can work around this by changing weight/damage values to give custom properties."
You eventually reach a point where weapon weight no longer matters. Once you're into NG+ cycles you can basically ignore weight constraints, so using weight as a tradeoff for power doesn't work in the long run. In v1.06 and earlier version of the mod I had a few weapons that were extra heavy but did more damage, and in NG this works as a way to trade off your mobility for more damage output, but in NG+ the tradeoff evaporates and you just have a weapon that does more damage. I ditched the idea in v1.07. I use altered damage values to compensate for Fast Hitter and Slow Hitter, since those abilities make a huge difference and if you don't nerf damage then Fast Hitter outshines everything. Slow Hitter needed a big damage buff to not be garbage. I went with a 10% damage nerf for Fast Hitter weapons and a 20% damage buff for Slow Hitters.
"I would overhaul weapon types so that each class (particularly cleric) has several weapon types appropriate for them."
The mod already follows this as a general guideline. Most weapon classes are dominated by a single stat type, with scattered exceptions that use another stat. The exceptions to this are swords (five are Dex, three are Strength, two are Magic, one is Wisdom) and poleaxes (three are Dex, one is Strength, one is Magic, two are Wisdom). Everything else has more than half of all the weapons in that class scaling from the same attribute. Wisdom and Magic don't dominate any weapon types, but instead get a random assortment from weapon types that are dominated by one of the physical stats.
The problem with having hard rules against weapon scaling that deviates from the most common stat for that weapon type is that it isn't very much fun to just have to use a certain type of weapon all the time. After playing through the first half of the game five times with Harmen's Mace because Wisdom didn't get anything but a hammer until later, I got sick of it. I wanted to play with the Leviathan instead of waiting until literally the last five minutes of the game to get my hands on it. Boss weapon progression is deliberately sacrificed for the sake of greater weapon variety throughout the game. Weapon power progression was somewhat muted for the same reason. If you're choosing between two weapons that are basically just differentiated from one another by cosmetics and their special abilities, that's not a huge choice, but it's still a more interesting choice than picking between a weapon that sucks and a weapon that doesn't.
At least, that's my preference. If you want to mod things so that your chosen attribute gives you a strictly defined set of weapons for a more curated experience with each class, with a series of weapons that are each stronger than the last and become obsolete as the next tier is reached, there is certainly a case to be made for that kind of design philosophy. A lot of games take that approach, with a stronger feeling of progression and a more sharply defined border between classes to make each class feel more distinct, but it comes at the expense of the player's opportunity to make choices. I simply value the choices and the variety more than the feeling of progression and more distinct classes since only Clerics get to use (for example) hammers.
Re: Boss progression - this introduces a lot of complexity without changing very much in terms of actual progression. Tying creed progression to boss drops introduces the potential for a player to lock themselves out of creed progression if they switch creeds, although being able to buy boss drops from the alchemist is a workaround only if the player remembers to buy extras from the alchemist before switching. The way I've got it set up, creed progression is already tied to game progression at basically the same rate that you've suggested. Tying it explicitly to boss kills is another way to do it, but it seems like it's extra work to get basically the same result. Also, instead of making recipes for boss drops to transmute them into black pearls, you can just adjust boss salt drops if you want to get more levels out of them. That reward is already there for all the bosses except for Mal, who is a cheap-ass alien lookin' bugbitch who don't drop no salt or gold worth nothin' neither. Pfeh!
Anyway, you can just add more salt if you want.
"Any thoughts on this? I thought I might mod these changes just for my own game, but I wanted to run them by you and see if you thought any of this was interesting or viable."
While I spent this whole post talking about why I didn't do it the way you suggested and I'd rather have it my way, a lot of this stuff really does just boil down to personal preference. The best thing about modding is making the game into what you personally want to play, Once you've done that, why not share it with others? Good luck with your mod; I hope you share it.
Edit: Nvrmnd, i
realizednoticed the version buttons had more text.