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About this mod
Removes vanilla cheat mechanics of excess health, magicka and stamina from ALL npc to bring them in line with the player. No more damage sponges! Only race, class and level contribute. Done via xEdit patching so it's compatible with everything.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
Ever noticed how your enemies have excess amount of health that your mighty Dragonborn couldn't match? Even if you'd commit all your attributes into health a bandit would still have more? Well this game is pretty well known for this... and now it will end for good. This mod is inspired by what tiny lampe did with this mod. But manual editing out values on npc is out the question with big load orders. So being lazy as I am I've created a patcher to do this for me. Really like the results of this so I'm sharing the patch for others to use if they want. With combat/difficulty enhancing mods this feels great.
The philosophy of Bethesda with vanilla player vs npc combat:
So in Skyrim every creature has starting attributes defined by their race. For playable races it is 50/50/50. Some creatures like the mighty dragons have 500 health at startup. Then we have chickens and hares with like 5 health or something. Now everyone gets 10 more attribute points at each level that can be distributed between health/magicka/stamina. As a player you know this when you level up. For npcs it is decided by their class which tells the game what ratio between these 3 attributes should an npc have. Sound pretty fair till now right? Wrong. It so happens that npcs also use a value called Health/Stamina/Magicka Offset that is used to give them all sort of free attribute boost. If that is not enough every npc also gets bonus 5 health points per level on top of that. A bonus that your character again doesn't have. A 20 level npc has 95 bonus health from that alone. That means over 9 level ups needed for the player to get the same amount. So you see that at higher levels it is virtually impossible to match enemy hit points alone.
After the patch:
Does 3 things:
1. Remove Health, Stamina, Magicka Offset values from all npcs.
2. Set npc bonus health value from 5 -> 0.
3. Recalculate health, stamina and magicka based on race, class and level and set the Health, Stamina, Magicka entries accordingly. (I'm not sure if this last step is even needed on npcs that have Auto-Cals stats flag checked).
The gameplay after patching means no more spongy enemies, everything will die more quickly, but so will you as the player has bonus +50 stats at the beginning! Some npc that are meant to be easily killed like Grelod or that horse thief in the intro will actually have more health now since they had 1 in vanilla. Some npcs had thousands of hit points for some reason like some children. This will change too. Also bosses will now benefit mostly only from better equipment or higher level. The patcher does not discriminate and affects everyone equally (including the player). Overall these changes to stats did not cause problems for my playthrough. If you want something tougher you can always manually delete the npc entry from the patched file.
Installation:
You will need xEdit. Copy script file into 'Edit Scripts' folder of xEdit. Done.
Usage:
1. Launch xEdit. Load your full load order.
2. Select all plugins with Ctrl+A.
3. Right click on them and select 'Apply patch...'.
4. Select 'Remove Bonus Health Magicka Stamina from NPCs'.
5. Click 'OK'.
6. The process takes several minutes.
7. Exit xEdit. Save the generated file on exit.
8. Enable 'Equalizer.esp' in your plugins list.
Load order:
Logically this should load after all the esp files it edits i.e. all files contatining npcs. That means late in load order. I place it somewhere after(below) Bashed Patch and before(above) DyndoLOD.
Compatibility:
As an xEdit patcher this is compatible with all mods. You can use it alongside other npc patchers like NPC Proc Patch for example. Just run one then run another with the previous patch enabled and load them in the same order you used them.
Happy hunting
The philosophy of Bethesda with vanilla player vs npc combat:
So in Skyrim every creature has starting attributes defined by their race. For playable races it is 50/50/50. Some creatures like the mighty dragons have 500 health at startup. Then we have chickens and hares with like 5 health or something. Now everyone gets 10 more attribute points at each level that can be distributed between health/magicka/stamina. As a player you know this when you level up. For npcs it is decided by their class which tells the game what ratio between these 3 attributes should an npc have. Sound pretty fair till now right? Wrong. It so happens that npcs also use a value called Health/Stamina/Magicka Offset that is used to give them all sort of free attribute boost. If that is not enough every npc also gets bonus 5 health points per level on top of that. A bonus that your character again doesn't have. A 20 level npc has 95 bonus health from that alone. That means over 9 level ups needed for the player to get the same amount. So you see that at higher levels it is virtually impossible to match enemy hit points alone.
After the patch:
Does 3 things:
1. Remove Health, Stamina, Magicka Offset values from all npcs.
2. Set npc bonus health value from 5 -> 0.
3. Recalculate health, stamina and magicka based on race, class and level and set the Health, Stamina, Magicka entries accordingly. (I'm not sure if this last step is even needed on npcs that have Auto-Cals stats flag checked).
The gameplay after patching means no more spongy enemies, everything will die more quickly, but so will you as the player has bonus +50 stats at the beginning! Some npc that are meant to be easily killed like Grelod or that horse thief in the intro will actually have more health now since they had 1 in vanilla. Some npcs had thousands of hit points for some reason like some children. This will change too. Also bosses will now benefit mostly only from better equipment or higher level. The patcher does not discriminate and affects everyone equally (including the player). Overall these changes to stats did not cause problems for my playthrough. If you want something tougher you can always manually delete the npc entry from the patched file.
Installation:
You will need xEdit. Copy script file into 'Edit Scripts' folder of xEdit. Done.
Usage:
1. Launch xEdit. Load your full load order.
2. Select all plugins with Ctrl+A.
3. Right click on them and select 'Apply patch...'.
4. Select 'Remove Bonus Health Magicka Stamina from NPCs'.
5. Click 'OK'.
6. The process takes several minutes.
7. Exit xEdit. Save the generated file on exit.
8. Enable 'Equalizer.esp' in your plugins list.
Load order:
Logically this should load after all the esp files it edits i.e. all files contatining npcs. That means late in load order. I place it somewhere after(below) Bashed Patch and before(above) DyndoLOD.
Compatibility:
As an xEdit patcher this is compatible with all mods. You can use it alongside other npc patchers like NPC Proc Patch for example. Just run one then run another with the previous patch enabled and load them in the same order you used them.
Happy hunting