Have you considered testing out different values (lower) for Giant attack reach in the racial edits? I'm not certain this would work but it might be another way around the problem. Giant have a very high unarmed reach 512 compared to normal races. I imagine the effective distances are all in multiples of 8 or less.

I don't think blocking should completely remove all damage taken, because to me it only makes sense if someone stands there requiring all his time to just block attacks and he receives a large barrage of attacks, he should eventually be overwhelmed.

Normal attack stamina cost can still be tweaked though yeah.

I pretty much like the way timed blocking is right now, the only thing I'm still trying to do there is to allow enemies to also perform timed blocks.


I'm still not sure on this one.. I do think some other people have already done a good job at balancing magic overall, I'm just having kind of a hard time getting a full playthrough on a mage to see if I'm happy with the balance because I simply like playing melee and archer characters so much more

I do think though that I might eventually make a small magic mod which doesn't really rebalance everything (there are other mods that do that well imo already) but maybe just add a couple spells to deal with the new Deadly Combat mechanics. An example would be a kind of shield which prevents stagger reactions for a duration so you have enough time to cast one of those long-cast-time Master spells. (by the way, all Ward spells already prevent staggers so that already works )


About damage, that does kind of surprise me because I refuse to play at any difficulty higher than adept just because of the annoying health multiplier all enemies get (not that I think it's too hard, just that it's boring to have to beat someone up for that long).

About getting staggered, yes it might be hard when fighting multiple opponents and when some of them are archers or mages... but that's the kind of difficulty I want, as opposed to turning the difficulty to Master. When fighting many opponents, you SHOULD make smart use of terrain, think of your positioning, use cover and make smart use of chokepoints, that kind of thing. It only makes sense imo.

About the bug where you couldn't hit enemies... you should try disabling killmove plus and see if that fixes it, because I don't think that can be caused by my mod really.

What about a mod of the Elemental Protection perk so fighters stand a chance against mages without resorting to gameplay devolving gimmicks like magic resistance gear?

During testing I've noticed that the game can actually tell when a spell has been ''blocked'' or not as you'd expect (counts as blocked when it hits the shield), and same counts for arrows, even without the Deflect Arrows and Elemental Protection perks, so in the next version arrows and magic won't stagger you when they're blocked either.

Hmm wondering about an idea I had and would like some feedback about it.

With the incoming changes (enemies will be staggered for a shorter amount of time, and will be able to react mostly defensively in various ways, they can perform some dodge moves and start blocking and perform timed blocks after getting staggered), I was thinking there should be a way to tire an opponent out to prevent them from being able to constantly recover from a long barrage of attacks.

What I was thinking of is to have actors at VERY LOW stamina get knocked down instead of staggered. Will have to test in combat a bit how NPC's stamina levels vary throughout a fight, but seemed like a good idea to be able to eventually defeat an opponent if they fight 100% defensively all the time. What do you guys think?

If you could set up a long stagger than a knock-down that would be preferable, but either way I think it's a good idea. Would you have it happen to the player too?

I would have it happen to player if I were going to make it though, but scratched it again for now I've tested it and enemies are very VERY bad at stamina management, so it's really not a good idea to have stamina influence them TOO much

I'm gonna wrap up my current version, do some final testing and then upload so I'll get a much much larger pool of testers (right now I'm the only one ) to see how everyone feels about the balance

I think the the only weird thing about enemies getting damaged while blocking is that it looks like they're dying from "an exhausted arm". The Knockdown idea isn't a bad fix, but it could be OP too. Maybe if was dependant on very low health as well as low stamina?


On another note, is Deadly Combat compatible with new weapon mods like Jaysus Swords? I know it adjusts damage, and was wondering if that was a global game setting or item specific.

Yes it's compatible, all damage adjustments are game settings. Really the only incompatibilities are other combat mods, and even they work to some extent.. probably don't work too well together seeing how they're trying to change the same thing in different ways, but technically even they should be mostly compatible.

I like this idea. Maybe have it so that if health is below 25%, then you get knocked over at 0 stamina.

Version 3.00 uploaded to skyrimnexus! Changelog:

3.00 (22 February 2012)
- The player will now only ''fully stagger'' (stagger in a way where he is unable to
act) when the mod requires it. This means that staggers from causes outside of this mod
(like shield bashes) will revert to their vanilla behaviour. This will remove the issue
where some people were getting ''stagger locked'' even with the stagger spam prevention
enabled.
- Arrows and spells which hit the shield of a blocking target will no longer stagger.
- Continuous spells like breath shouts and flamethrower spells should be less likely
to stagger lock a target.
- Staggers on NPCs last for a shorter amount of time
- NPCs can utilize various moves after getting staggered in an attempt to prevent future
staggers. These moves are: sprinting, rolling, dodging sideways or backwards, and blocking.
Whether they use one of these moves and which one they use depends on the situation.
- NPCs will now get staggered if they're blocking when at VERY low stamina
(just like the player).


I now made enemies stagger when they're blocking at very low health (this was already implemented for the player in an earlier version, now also works for NPCs).

I totally forgot about the Shield Wall perk we talked about earlier, so it's not in this version, but will be in version 3.10.

Can't wait to get home and try this out! I wish I didn't have to choose between yours and Duke Patrick's. I tried playing with both loaded last night and it sort of worked but led to some strange if still somewhat realistic AI behaviors. I already can tell though that the more advanced your mods get, the more incompatible they'll become. Wish I could have two installations of the game!

Question. Does not staggered by arrows and magic mean reduced damage too? Or is it simply not staggered? That kind of makes sense that magic would still cause some damage because a basic shield isn't necessarily a good insulator, but arrows either hit the shield or they don't. Right? Is they're anyway to make the ranged attacks (or even all blocked attacks for that matter) slow movement while blocking without staggering? I mean, more than the usual reduced blocking movement (without tactics).

Reducing movement might work, reducing damage... not so much I think. That's exactly what Duke Patrick wanted to do in his mod, and what he couldn't really get working yet because skyrim's AddPerk functions aren't working properly.

But my main priority right now is to optimise my scripts... on my PC there is a small delay between hits and staggers, and this delay seems to be greatly dependent on amount of mods, CPU power, FPS, that kind of thing, because topeira (might remember him from skyrimnexus comments section? ) is having large delays now. Papyrus (skyrim's scripting language) is pretty slow by itself, so I might not be able to entirely remove the delay, but hoping to make it as small as possible through optimizations now.

Have you looked at the scripts for the shield http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Spellbreaker_(Skyrim) ? Maybe there's a clue in there somewhere.

Skyrim Nexus is not letting me download v3, which is weird because I can download other mods from Nexus just fine

Yay works now!

It's working for me now.

Haven't had a chance to play yet.

I am going to quote myself and contradict myself all in one post. Yeah, let me go on record as saying adding a non-togglable Ward Script permanently attached to a blocking perk would be a terrible idea. Not because it doesn't work well, It works great with Deadly Combat actually. BUT, having the visuals distorted and the sound effects every time you block would get seriously annoying. The screen acreage is pretty limited while blocking as it is... But as I said previously, using a ward associated with a shield via the actual Spellbreaker shield works very well with Deadly Combat 2.55. Because of Deadly Combat's stamina drain on block, it will proabably cost you a full stamina bar to block the full duration of a short range cone spell. With no stamina, you can still block however because the ward prevents staggering. But I think it is balanced by the weakness to follow up melee attacks. So I guess a solution for a more interactive magic defense is to get the Spellbreaker shield? And use Deadly Combat! I know it's pretty ugly, and hardly the best solution for what is essentially a failed Vanilla mechanic (because it defaults to passive stats and only partially to active perks), but at least there are mods that let you change the mesh it too whatever graphic you want and it works in fun and challenging way. I have mine set to the Blades Shield. Looks pretty slick actually.

Looking at Spellbreaker still might not be a bad idea, becaues I could maybe just make a copy of the Ward magic effect without sounds and visuals. But that's still behind the optimization of scripts on my priority list

If that's possible it would be great. I understand why the optomization is so important. In any case, the normal lag built into the Ward script would make it impossible to use effectively until the standard mod is lag free. I delved into the CK for the first time tonight looking for anything I could find on the spellbreaker script. It was alot of fun! I can see how you could easily get addicted to modding. Especially if you're a good programmer.

Version 3.01 is now up on skyrimnexus, with much more optimized scripts hopefully resulting in faster reactions, and another small bugfix.

Hi Borgut,

There is a feature that I'd love to see in your mod if you're up to it: hits that land on the opponent's back deal extra damage.
This feature would offer a reward to the player who, with skilfull footwork, manages to circle his opponents and reach their backs. It would be a useful tactic to use against NPCs armed with shields for example, and it would also be an effective way to deal with slow bosses such as centurions and high level draugr (who tend to have plenty of health).

As for how to implement it, I remember reading that there was a command called "isfacingup" that checked wether an actor was facing you or not. Perhaps you could use this command because, in the end, if an actor is not facing you and you are fighting him, then it must mean that you managed to reach his back or a close to it.

What do you think? Interested? Feasible?

I'm on the fence with this mod, do this and Duke Patrick's mod both do the same thing? Which would you guys recommend at this point? They both sound great

Duke Patrick for realism

Deadly Combat for pure gameplay


They are both awesome and you really can't go wrong.

This. And IMHO, gameplay trumps realism 9 times out of 10, since you're playing a game, not life.

Ziljan sums it up very well. Deadly Combat favors game-y fun mechanics such as timed blocking. Even though I'm a gameplay guy, I'm still keeping an eye on Duke Patrick's since the mod has very large goals for the future.