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Zowbaid

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Zowbaid

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About this mod

Improves some of the weaker skills in the game to be more....useful.

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This mod improves some of the more lackluster/weaker skills in the game to be more effective while still retaining balance. Click on the "Spoilers" to see all the changes, or check out the screenshots up above.

Improved skills
*NEW* Version 2.03:
Completely reworked the Dismemberment system. I'm shy to call it an overhaul, but it essentially is. I never even planned to go as far as I did with it, but it just sorta happened that way. 
Spoiler:  
Show
  • Whirl now guarantees a flat global 50% Dismemberment chance on skill activation.
  • Rend now guarantees a 100% Dismemberment chance at Skill level 3.
  • Disabled Finishers from both those skills since the Finisher animation looked weird when performed mid-Whirl or suddenly at the end of Rend. Now these skills ONLY Dismember, not Finish, making their animations feel more natural and fluid.
  • Completely reworked the way dismemberments are triggered when performing critical hits:
  • Any non-melee or non-ranged critical hit will guarantee a dismemberment when killing the enemy, such as with Signs, bombs, etc. (Same logic as vanilla, so this is actually unchanged behavior)
  • Melee and ranged critical hits that kill the enemy will now have a 50% mutiplicative chance to dismember enemies as opposed to a guaranteed dismember. 50% mutiplicative chance is actually not as drastic as it sounds. The game uses a 0 - 100 scale for chances anyway, so 50% mutliplicative chance equals 1.5x. For example, if you have a weapon with a stat of 30% Dismemberment Chance, if you land a critical hit, that mutliplies your 30% chance by 1.5, resulting in a 45% chance to dismember. You see, that's not that extreme at all. (Rant: Yes, I seriously NEVER knew that in the Vanilla game, killing enemies with critical hits FORCED a dismemberment. I completely oppose this philosophy because it defeats the whole purpose of the "Dismemberment" stat. All you would have to do would be to simply pump Crit chance instead, killing two birds with one stone. Now you might be wondering, who gives a crap about Dismemberment chance anyway? Well, if you're like me and use ESGO, it has a function that gives you Adrenaline Points on dismember/finisher kills, making Dismemberment chance an actually useful stat and skill now. So I had to rework this to make it feel more balanced without trivializing or breaking the intended balance of ESGO and the game in general. I realize this goes beyond what Better Skills was designed for, but I might make a standalone Dismemberment mod if there's a demand for it. For now, V2 of this comes with a whole Dismemberment rework as well, so I hope you like it.)
  • Because of the aforementioned changes, I made a slightly controversial decision when creating this system. Essentially, now no two Dismemberment chance sources can exist simultaneously. In other words, you can't stack Dismemberment chance. It will only ever come from one active source at a time. The only time this rule doesn't apply is if you use Additional Perks mod, and you unlock the "Predatory Instinct" Skill. That Skill's Dismemberment Bonus is the ONLY bonus that will stack globally to any and all other sources of Dismemeberment. Now, in case you're wondering, the vanilla game's global chance is 30% for both finishers and dismemberments. If you find a weapon with a bonus of 40% or 50%, it will overwrite that global bonus, not stack on top of it. I did this so that you can't easily stack dismemberment chance by just equipping a single weapon and unlocking a perk and boom, you're now at 100% at all times. It'll be an actual bloodbath 24/7 with this approach. However, I know some people might not like this decision and DO want it to stack, so it's actually very easy to do so. Go into the damageManagerProcessor.ws file, Ctrl + F for "//Better Skills". Towards the bottom of the file, where the Dismemberment chances are located, you should see lines that say "dismemberChance = RoundMath(...........". Simply change all of the the = to +=. DO THIS ONLY IN MY COMMENTED AREAS. Removed in v2.04

========================================================================================

*NEW* Version 2.0: 
In addition to all buffs in Version 1, the following skills have also received buffs.
Spoiler:  
Show

Combat:
- Anatomical Knowledge: Increased critical hit chance from 20% to 25% per level.
- Counterattack: Increased damage bonus from 30% to 33.4% per skill level. Increased duration from 4 seconds to 5 seconds.
- Muscle Memory: Increased Attack Power bonus from 10% to 16.7% per level.
- Strength Training: Increased Attack Power bonus from 10% to 16.7% per level.
- Precise Blows: Increased critical hit chance from 4% to 5% per level.
- Crushing Blows: Increased critical hit chance from 4% to 5% per level.
- Whirl: Added Attack power bonus of 16.7% per level, capping out at 50% attack power bonus at level 3. Added
innate 200 points of armor piercing and a 50% chance to dismember enemies on kill.
- Rend: Increased critical hit chance bonus from 20% to 25% per level. Added dismemberment chance of 33% and instant kill
chance of 1% that go up per skill level, capping out at 100% and 5% respectively. Reworked the Adrenaline Dmg bonus
per point system so that it goes up by skill level, capping out at 100% dmg bonus per point. (This now feels like a
properly epic Special Attack. I always wanted this ability to have the ability to dismember enemies on kill, just like it was
first shown in the E3 gameplay footage.)

Signs:
- Puppet: Increased puppet damage from 20% to 100% per level. (It was virtually useless before).

Alchemy:
- Heightened Tolerance: Increased Toxic Threshold boost from 10% to 11.67% per skill level, capping out at 85%.
- Pyrotechnics: Bomb damage increased from 50 to 100 points per skill level.
- Tissue Transmutation: Increased Vitality bonus from 300 to 500 points per skill level.
- Frenzy: Increased slowdown from 12% to 15% per skill level.

General:
- Sun and Stars: Increased Stamina Regen bonus at night from 1% to 5%. (1 freaking percent, are you kidding me, CDPR?)
- Predatory Instinct: Increased Dismember chance from 10% to 25% and changed Burn chance to Armor Piercing
of 250 points. (This perk is only available in the Restored Content - Additional Perks mod).
- Cat School Techniques: Changed Fast Attack critical hit chance to general critical hit chance by 5% per piece equipped.
- Griffin School Techniques: Increased Sign damage from 5% to 12.5% per piece equipped.
- Bear School Techniques: Changed Vitality bonus to critical hit damage bonus of 25% per piece equipped.
- Survival Instinct: Increased Vitality boost to 25%. Made it a multiplicative percentage boost instead of a flat additive buff.
(Was probably one of the most useless skills before).
- Battle Frenzy: In version 2, added Stamina regen of 3.3% per Adrenaline point, on top of it's Attack damage and critical hit
chance bonuses from version 1. (It just makes sense that as you get more Adrenaline in your system, your stamina
regen would go up as well.)
- Attack is the Best Defense: Reduced cooldown from 5 seconds to 3 seconds.
- Gourmet: Increased duration from 20 minutes to 1 hour.

========================================================================================

Version 1.0: 
These buffs only apply to this version. For the extra buffs, check Version 2, which contains these ones as well as SEVERAL new changes.
Spoiler:  
Show

Signs:
- Firestream:
- Fire damage boost from 30 to 50
- Channeling damage boost from 70 to 100
- Channeling stamina cost reduced from 50 to 35. (You can now cast it slightly longer than before)

- Yrden: Yrden slowdown has been buffed from 20% (min) - 45% (max) to 25% (min) - 75% (max) slowdown.

- All Sign intensity skills have been boosted from 10% per point to 25%, now capping at 75% Sign intensity

Alchemy:
- Acquired Tolerance: Increased maximum Toxicity from 0.5 to 1 point per alchemy formula.

General:
- Survival Instinct: Changed it from flat 500 HP Increase to percentage-based 15% HP Increase
- Steady Shot: Buffed crossbow damage from 25% to 100%
- Metabolic Control: Buffed Toxicity increase from 30 to 50
- Strong Back: Buffed inventory weight increase from 60 to 100
- Battle Frenzy: Changed it so that instead of replacing Battle Trance's original effect of increasing Attack Power for Crit Chance,
it now increases both by 10% per adrenaline point. Also changed the text to indicate the new change. (Stupid perk. Glad
to change this crap.)


Installation
- Simply extract, then drag/drop the mod into your "mods" folder in your The Witcher 3 directory. If a "mods" folder does not exist, create one.

Recommended Mods
The following mods are highly recommended to use with this and work great together.
- Akatoshka's Skills
- Path of the Tough
- Restored Content - Additional Perks
- ESGO

Compatibilities
- If people want to translate for me, go ahead and send me the .csv file translated and I'll upload the updated strings.
- NG+ compatible.

- Version 2 contains new script files. Will require merging in Script Merger with other mods.

- If you have any mods modifying the following bundled .xml files, you will need to merge them as well:
- gameplay/abilities/geralt_skills.xml
- gameplay/abilities_plus/geralt_skills.xml
- gameplay/abilities/effects.xml
- gameplay/abilities_plus/effects.xml

- dlc/ep1/data/gameplay/abilities/geralt_skills_ep1.xml
- dlc/ep1/data/gameplay/abilities_plus/geralt_skills_ep1.xml

- dlc/bob/data/gameplay/abilities/effects_ep2.xml
- dlc/bob/data/gameplay/abilities_plus/effects_ep2.xml
- dlc/bob/data/gameplay/abilities/geralt_skills_ep2.xml
- dlc/bob/data/gameplay/abilities_plus/geralt_skills_ep2.xml

My Other Mods: