Blade and Blunt is a complete overhaul of Skyrim’s combat designed to increase the game’s difficulty and encourage active resource management. Unlike other combat overhauls, it does not seek to import mechanics from other games into Skyrim. Instead, it enhances the existing mechanics of Skyrim’s combat and focuses on tightening the gameplay to allow for more player skill and RPG-like character development. 

Requirements 

Blade and Blunt requires Address Library for SKSE Plugins to be installed. Blade & Blunt is compatible with both pre-AE (1.5.97) and post-AE (1.6+) versions of Skyrim. The same DLL is used for both versions. Blade and Blunt is not currently compatible w/ VR versions of Skyrim. (If you're a VR user and you've enjoyed the mod in the past, I've left the last pre-DLL version available in the files tab.) The source for the DLL can be found here. 

Blade and Blunt also requires Spell Perk Item Distributor and Scrambled Bugs. These two mods allow Blade & Blunt to distribute perks to every NPC in the game, and to maintain patchless compatibility with mods such as Ordinator or Adamant. A list of “recommended settings” for Scrambled Bugs is included at the bottom of this mod page. Note that some of these settings are required for Blade & Blunt to be compatible with perk mods.
 
Resource Management 

Managing your resources is an important part of combat in Blade and Blunt. Both the base regeneration rates and the combat regeneration penalty have been adjusted.

Spoiler:  

Show

Regeneration Rates:

- Base Health Regeneration: 1% 
- Base Magicka Regeneration: 3% 
- Base Stamina Regeneration: 5%

- Combat Health Regeneration: 0.5%
- Combat Magicka Regeneration: 1.5% 
- Combat Stamina Regeneration: 2.5%

The combat penalty for Magicka and Stamina Regeneration has been nerfed from 66% to 50%, meaning that Magicka and Stamina will regenerate slightly faster in combat. Base Health Regeneration has been increased from 0.7% to 1%; however, Health Regeneration in combat will be almost identical to Vanilla (.5% compared to 0.49%). 

You will no longer regenerate Stamina while attacking or blocking, and drawing a bow will slowly drain your Stamina. Aiming a crossbow will halt Stamina regeneration (similar to blocking), and firing the crossbow will drain Stamina. In addition, the Stamina cost of various actions such as power attacking, bashing, and blocking an attack has been adjusted.

Spoiler:  

Show

Power Attack Costs:

- Unarmed: 40 Stamina 
- Dagger: 40 Stamina 
- One-handed: 60 Stamina
- Two-handed: 80 Stamina
- Dual Wield: 120 Stamina 

Note: Wielding a One-handed weapon with an empty offhand reduces the cost of your power attacks by 25%. 

Other Stamina Costs:

- Bow Drawn: 5 Stamina per second
- Crossbow Fired: 15 Stamina 
- Bash: 40 Stamina 
- Power Bash: 60 Stamina

When your Stamina is exhausted, your character will move and attack 25% slower, deal 25% less damage with weapons, and be 50% less effective at blocking. This debuff will also apply to NPCs. 

Blade and Blunt also applies a Stamina drain on sneaking. Sneaking will drain 5 points of Stamina per second. When your Stamina is exhausted, your character will be 50% less effective at sneaking and deal 50% less damage with sneak attacks. The Stamina drain can be disabled by setting bEnableSneakStaminaCost in the ini to false.

Attacks of Opportunity 

Blade and Blunt rewards the player for seizing the advantage against their opponents and striking them while they are most vulnerable. When you attack an enemy who is power attacking, drawing a bow, or casting a spell, you will deal 50% extra damage and deliver a powerful stagger. Attacking an enemy who is staggered also counts as an Attack of Opportunity and deals 50% increased damage. 

Attacks of Opportunity dramatically increase the lethality of combat. As a player, you will need to carefully consider when you can afford to open yourself to enemy Attacks of Opportunity. Power attacking, drawing a bow, or casting a spell at the wrong moment will likely be fatal against dangerous enemies.

Ward spells protect the user from Attacks of Opportunity, for both the player and for all NPCs.

Stagger and Interrupts

Blade and Blunt makes several improvements to the game’s stagger mechanics. Stagger comes in four different magnitudes. The magnitude of the stagger controls the animation that plays when a humanoid actor is staggered; higher magnitudes result in a longer animation, which translates to a longer window of vulnerability to Attacks of Opportunity.

Spoiler:  

Show

Stagger Categories: 

25% Stagger - Power attacks with daggers and fists*  
50% Stagger - Power attacks with swords, axes, and maces; weapon bashes
75% Stagger - Power attacks with greatswords, battleaxes, and warhammers; bashes with shields 
100% Stagger - Attacks of Opportunity, Power Bashes with shields

*Note: Hand to Hand power attacks can only stagger if the invisible “unarmed weapon” is equipped. Ordinator, Vokrii, and Adamant all equip the “unarmed weapon” to your character in the background when you have two free hands.

Attacks of Opportunity double the magnitude of associated stagger, both for the player and all for NPCs, meaning that staggering an enemy who is power attacking, drawing a bow, or casting a spell will result in a 100% stagger with most weapons.

Blade & Blunt makes several changes to ensure that incoming stagger is dangerous to the player. Normally, the player is immune from the "full body staggers" which NPCs experience; however, when you are staggered while at zero Stamina, you will be temporarily locked in place. This will allow enemies to exploit the stagger to deal significant damage to your character.

Blade and Blunt prevents stunlocking enemies by enforcing a 5 second cooldown on stagger. This cooldown is applied on a per-target basis and is shared among all sources of stagger. If Adamant is installed, perks such as Impact and Power Shot will also share this cooldown.

Note that interrupting a power attacking enemy with a bash does not respect the stagger cooldown. You will always be able to interrupt power attacking enemies with a bash, and you will only trigger the stagger cooldown from interrupting enemies if you also stagger them. Since interrupting an enemy with a bash triggers an Attack of Opportunity, staggering them during an interrupt will typically result in a 100% stagger.

Adamant also includes two perks (Power Shot, and Impact) which provide stagger effects to bows, and spells, respectively. Each of these staggers is a 50% stagger with a five second cooldown. 

In addition to protecting the target from taking Attack of Opportunity damage, ward spells also reduce all incoming stagger by 50%.

To ensure that its stagger cooldown is always respected, the Blade & Blunt DLL dynamically reduces the stagger value of all weapons to 0. This feature can be disabled by setting bZeroAllWeaponStagger in the ini to false.

Blocking and Parrying

Blade and Blunt prevents you from regenerating Stamina while blocking with either a weapon or a shield. It also increases the Stamina cost of blocking. To compensate for these changes, it increases the power of blocking in various ways.

The base power of blocking with a shield has been set to 40%. When you block with a shield, you have a 25% chance to stagger an enemy (for a 50% stagger). The base power of blocking with a weapon has been set to 20%. However, weapons also benefit from a “weapon parry” mechanic.Blocking with a weapon doubles your block effectiveness for one second, making it equal to a shield’s blocking effectiveness. Targets who attack you during this window suffer a light (25%) stagger with a five second cooldown per target. (The increased blocking effectiveness does not have a cooldown.)In addition, wielding a one-handed weapon with an empty offhand increases your blocking potency by 25% (from 20% to 25%, or from 40% to 50% during a weapon parry). 

In addition to these changes, Blocking is no longer controlled by the Magic Resistance cap. Blocking now caps at 90%. You can adjust this value with the Game Setting fBlockMax.In Adamant, you gain 50% block effectiveness from your Block skill, and an additional 50% from mastery perks. This means that block characters will reach the block cap (40% → 60% → 90%) with Block perks alone.

Blocking a power attack is 50% less effective than blocking a normal attack. However, you can continue to improve your block effectiveness through Standing Stones, enchantments, and potions to reach the 90% block cap for power attacks.

The Adamant perk Determination increases both your chance to stagger enemies while blocking (from 25% to 50%) and the magnitude of the stagger you deal (from 50% to 75%).

Injuries and Rest 

Blade and Blunt adds an injury system to Skyrim. When you fall below 50% Health, incoming attacks will have a 10% chance to injure you. When you fall below 25% Health, this chance will increase to 25%. 

The first time you are injured, you receive a Minor Injury, and your maximum Health is reduced by 25. When you receive a Minor Injury, there is a three minute cooldown before you can be injured again. If you are injured a second time, your Minor Injury will become a Major Injury, and your maximum Health will be reduced by a total of 50 points. When you receive a Major Injury, there is a five minute cooldown before you can be injured again. If you are injured a third time, your Major Injury will progress to a Critical Injury, and your maximum Health will be reduced by a total of 100 points. Once you receive a critical injury, you cannot be injured again. 

To heal from your injuries, you must rest in a bed or a bedroll. Resting for four hours will heal a Minor Injury. It will also downgrade a Major Injury to a Minor Injury, or a Critical Injury to a Major Injury. Resting for eight hours will heal a Minor or Major Injury. It will also downgrade a Critical Injury to a Minor Injury. Resting for twelve hours will cure all injuries. For the purposes of healing an injury, Rested vs. Well Rested does not matter, and even a bedroll in a dungeon will do.

If you do not rest and recover from your injuries within twenty-four in-game hours, you will contract an infection. A Minor Infection reduces your Base Health Regeneration by 25%. If you do not cure your Minor Infection within twenty-four in-game hours, it will progress to a Major Infection, which reduces your Base Health Regeneration by 50%. If you do not cure your Major Infection within twenty-four in-game hours, it will progress to a Critical Infection, which reduces your Base Health Regeneration by 100%, preventing you from regenerating Health under most circumstances. Mechanical speaking, Minor, Major, and Critical Infections are diseases. They respect Disease Resistance and will be cured by any Cure Disease effect.

Blade & Blunt’s injury system serves as an attrition-based “push mechanic,” designed to encourage the player to return to an inn or a nearby campsite and rest before continuing on in their adventures. This mechanic is reminiscent of Survival Mode and other similar systems, and is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible. However, if you wish to disable the injury system, you may do so by bEnableInjuries in the ini to false.

Armor Rating and Resistance 

Magic Resistance, Fire Resistance, Frost Resistance, Shock Resistance and Poison Resistance all cap out at 75%. In addition, Spell Absorption now caps out at 75%. 

Each point of Armor Rating reduces incoming damage by 0.15%, up to 75% damage reduction at 500 Armor Rating. This represents the “soft cap” for Armor Rating. Increasing your Armor Rating beyond 500 reduces incoming damage by 0.03% per point, up to a total reduction of 90% damage reduction at 1000 Armor Rating. This represents the “hard cap” for Armor Rating. 

While the jump from 0.15% to 0.03% might seem extreme at first, the additive nature of Armor Rating means that the first 500 points provides you with 75% “real mitigation,” while the next 500 points provide you with 60% extra “real mitigation.” This change allows Heavy Armor builds to benefit from very high levels of Armor Rating while maintaining the balance of the existing armor system for light armor and robes users. However, you may disable the “soft/hard cap” feature by setting bArmorRatingScalingEnabled in the ini to false.

In addition, Blade and Blunt eliminates the “hidden” Armor Rating granted when equipping light or heavy armor, and ensures that Armor Rating reduces the damage from perks such as Hack and Slash and Rip and Tear in Adamant for both the player and NPCs.

Speed, Reach, and Attack Commitment  

The player will now move in a slower, more realistic fashion, especially when their weapon is drawn. They will also move slower while attacking, power attacking, drawing a bow, or casting a spell. In addition, weapon reach has been reduced to be more in line with in-game models. Both attack commitment and the reach changes apply to all humanoid NPCs. I recommend combining this mod with Mortal Enemies to apply attack commitment to animals. I do not recommend combining this mod with other mods that reduce weapon reach.

In addition to these changes, Two-handed weapons will swing 10% faster, and the player’s height no longer affects their movement speed.

Game Settings, Combat Styles, and Kill Moves

Many changes have been made to game settings and combat styles that provide subtleimprovements to the combat experience. These changes largely focus on combat mechanics such as blocking, bashing, and combat regeneration. Enemies will be more aggressive, and more intelligent, with Blade and Blunt installed. You may wish to ensure that Blade and Blunt loads lower than any other mod that changes these game settings or combat styles.

With Blade and Blunt installed, the player will be immune to kill moves. While cinematic executions are fun when used on NPCs, allowing them to affect the PC often prevents players from surviving difficult encounters through skill and good play. Additionally, kill moves will only trigger on enemies who are below 50% Health, to account for a bug where enemy armor is not taken into account when the game decides to trigger a kill move. Note that this does not apply to sneak kill moves.

Difficulty Settings 

Blade and Blunt adjusts the game’s difficulty settings to provide increased lethality while still giving players control over their own experience. Please be sure to select the difficulty you find most enjoyable in play, rather than the difficulty that you are used to playing with. The difficulty modifiers are:

Spoiler:  

Show

Novice: 1.25x Damage Dealt / 0.75x Damage Received
Apprentice: 1.00x Damage Dealt / 1.00x Damage Received 
Adept: 1.00x Damage Dealt / 1.50x Damage Received 
Expert: 0.80x Damage Dealt / 2.00x Damage Received 
Master: 0.60x Damage Dealt / 3.00x Damage Received
Legendary: 0.40x Damage Dealt / 4.00x Damage Received

Note: These difficulty modifiers are more aggressive than Vanilla modifiers, and assume that players wish for their combat to be more lethal by default. If that does not describe your experience, or if you are a mod list author who wishes for their list to be less difficult and more accessible, please download the Blade and Blunt - Vanilla Difficulty Modifiers addon, which reverts these numbers back to Vanilla. 

 
In addition to these difficulty settings, Blade & Blunt also adds an optional Level Based Difficulty Scaling option. This option is disabled by default, and can be enabled by setting bLevelBasedDifficulty in the ini to true. Level Based Difficulty Scaling makes incremental changes to your game’s difficulty in the background when you reach levels 10, 20, 30, and 40, to simulate increasing the difficulty of your game by one tier (Adept to Expert; Expert to Master, etc) over the course of your game. Level Based Difficulty Scaling only supports Apprentice, Adept, Expert, and Master difficulties; Novice and Legendary difficulties are unaffected. You can view the specific breakpoints below. 


Blade and Blunt - Harsher Health Regen Addon

This addon reduces your character's "natural" Health Regeneration by 100%.* When you fall below 50% Health, your Health Regeneration is increased by 100%. When you fall below 25% Health, your Health regeneration is increased by an additional 100%. If you use the wait function to rest for an hour, you will only "naturally" back to 50%. However, sleeping in bed will restore your Health to full. 

All effects that grant Health Regeneration (perks, shrines, stones, potions, enchantments, food, etc) will continue to work as normal, as will all effects that grant "base" Health Regeneration (although you will need to have acquired a source of Health Regeneration before you will see the effects of increased Base Health Regeneration while above 50% Health).

Many survival-oriented mods reduce the player’s natural Health Regeneration in order to simulate a harsher and more difficult world; however, this change has a disproportionate effect on characters who attempt to play without magic, who often rely on Health Regeneration to survive. In addition, Simonrim fully supports Health Regeneration as a viable stat, and I felt it was unfair to them to simply remove natural Health Regeneration. This plugin attempts to introduce the positive gameplay aspects of restricting natural Health Regeneration, without punishing non-magic or Health Regeneration focused characters in Simonrim. 

This addon is fully recommended, and designed to pair with Blade & Blunt’s injury system; the only reason I didn’t add it to the main plugin is that I thought too many players would yell at me in the comments section if I did.

*Actually, it reduces it by 99.9%, because a HealRateMult value of 0.1 is enough to force the Health bar to stay on your screen. I find that if I get my HP stuck at 60%, and my Health bar disappears, I tend to forget that I needed to heal, so I prefer for the Health bar to stay on my screen any time I'm at less than 100% Health.

Note: This plugin will "double up" with Survival Mode, which reduces the player's "natural" Health Regeneration by 100%. However, Survival Mode Improved - SKSE Edition will automatically detect the presence of this plugin and disable its own Health Regen malus.

Blade and Blunt - Vanilla Difficulty Modifiers

For players who wish to benefit from Blade and Blunt’s expanded combat mechanics, but who find combat too difficult for their liking, I have provided an optional addon that reverts these numbers to their Vanilla values. The Level Scaling Difficulty option does not support the Blade & Blunt - Vanilla Difficulty Modifiers addon.

Blade and Blunt - Stamina Patch 

The way that Blade and Blunt adjusts Stamina costs for individual power attacks and bashes doesn't play nicely with the "flat" Stamina cost reduction perks in Vokrii and Ordinator. This patch reverts those changes to Stamina cost for easy compatibility with Enairim or any other mod that uses "flat" cost reduction perks. The effect on balance is minimal. 

Scrambled Bugs Settings

Scrambled Bugs comes with a number of optional settings. Users sometimes find themselves unsure of which options to enable for their load order. I recommend activating the following settings in Scrambled Bugs. Note that while I am only including settings that directly relate to my mods, I am assuming that you’re using all of Simonrim for these suggestions.

• Quick Shot - The default setting is 2.0, and should work fine with Adamant.
• Accumulating Magnitude - This setting makes wards scale like other spells.

• Improve Multiple Enchantment Effects - Fixes the Chaos enchantment.
• Leveled Characters - Makes Very Hard enemies in Arena less annoying.
• Perk Entry Points: Apply Multiple Spells - Makes perk entry points such as Apply Combat Hit Spell more compatible and more versatile. Required for some features of Blade and Blunt to function with perk mods (including Adamant).
• Poison Resistance - Allows for new functionality in Apothecary 1.3.
• Power Attack Stamina - Prevents the player and NPCs from power attacking without the required Stamina. Makes Frost magic and other Stamina-damaging effects much more useful. Highly recommended.
• Reflect Damage - Allows Reflect Damage to scale above 100%, which is necessary since it’s a weak effect.
• Scroll Experience - Get magic school XP when using scrolls! 
• Staff Experience - Get magic school XP when using staves!

Compatibility 

Blade and Blunt is designed to be a total combat package. However, some users will likely wish to combine Blade and Blunt with other mods. In general, whatever mod is loaded last will “win” conflicts. Load Blade and Blunt after Mortal Enemies if you choose to keep Mortal Enemies in your load order, as it will affect non-humanoid NPCs which are not touched by Blade and Blunt.

The Simonrim Team 

Simon Magus (Nexus / Patreon) 
DeltaRider (Nexus / Patreon)
Oreo (Nexus / Patreon)
Colinswrath (Nexus / Ko-fi)

The Simonrim Suite

Aetherius - A Race Overhaul
Mundus - A Standing Stone Overhaul
Mysticism - A Magic Overhaul
Adamant - A Perk Overhaul
Hand to Hand - An Adamant Overhaul
Blade and Blunt - A Combat Overhaul
Arena - An Encounter Zone Overhaul
Scion - A Vampire Overhaul
Manbeast - A Werewolf Overhaul
Stormcrown - A Shout Overhaul
Pilgrim - A Religion Overhaul 
Apothecary - An Alchemy Overhaul
Thaumaturgy - An Enchanting Overhaul
Journeyman - A Fast Travel Overhaul