POST LIMIT REACHED ON THIS THREAD. NEXT THREAD: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1355683-relz-deadly-combat-2/

Deadly Combat mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Download link: http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5485
Forum thread: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1330014-relz-deadly-combat/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcZQrqMK44g&feature=player_embedded

Version 3.01
23 February 2012
Borgut1337

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Requirements
-------------------------------------------------------------------
- A working version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Recommended
-------------------------------------------------------------------
dDefinder1s Enhanced Blood Textures mod, to make combat look more
deadly! Download: http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=60

Dual Wield Parrying, to make dual wielders and spellswords more viable
in this mod. Download: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=9247

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Mod Description
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The mod makes the combat in Skyrim faster-paced, more responsive and
realistic and more rewarding to skilled players. A list of features
follows.
First is a list of ''game setting features'', which are changes
to numerical game settings. As described in the next section, you can pick
which of these you would like to use by picking individual .esp files.

GAME SETTING FEATURES

(a) Reducing the effectiveness of all armor, for both player and NPCs.
In unmodded Skyrim, it is possible to reach the maximum damage reduction
(which is 80%) with mere Orcish Armor if you have 100 Heavy Armor skill
and 100 Smithing skill, pretty much making upgrades useless.
This mod changes settings so you need at least Daedric armor to reach
the cap (which is lowered to 75%), still requiring 100 Heavy Armor and
Smithing skill and all perks.
Clarification: This does not mean that armor which is not improved by
Smithing is useless. All armor (improved and unimproved) is reduced
in effectiveness by the same amount.
All the mentioned values are WITHOUT shields! Shield users will be able
to reach the armor cap slightly (but not much) faster.

( b ) Blocking is more effective. This makes it more important to block
attacks if you want to survive, and attacking targets who are blocking
will be less effective.

( c ) Increasing damage for both player and NPCs.

(d) To make combat more risky, the range of all melee attacks and bashes
has been reduced to a more realistic level.
To win combat, you'll have to get up close and time your attacks and blocks well.

(e) Blocking attacks now costs stamina, and power attacking costs more
stamina. To compensate for this, stamina regeneration during combat
has been increased.

Now follows a list of ''gameplay'' features. These are all included in
the main ''DeadlyCombat.esp'', and all of it's features can be toggled
using an in-game menu, which can be launched through a magical scroll
which is automatically added to your inventory when the game loads the
mod.

GAMEPLAY FEATURES

(f) The player's normal attacks make enemies stagger, showing a realistic
reaction to getting hit. There are a few conditions for this to happen though:
The enemy may not be blocking, may not have a Ward spell active and may not be
a ghost.
NOTE: Whether this feature can be ''spammed'' or not can be changed through an
in-game menu.

(g) The enemy's normal attacks also make their targets stagger or recoil, if they
did not succesfully block the attack. Hits by arrows and magic have a reduced chance
for a ''full stagger'' (where wearing heavy armor further reduces this chance
further). Instead they often make the player stagger ''lightly'', which means
he still visibly reacts and the camera shakes, but the player will remain capable
of performing actions.

(h) Timed blocking: if the player has only been blocking for a short time
(approximately half a second) at the time when he blocks an opponent's
attack, the block will cost no stamina and he'll take the attacker off guard,
staggering or recoiling him. This rewards skillful play. This timed blocking
cannot be executed when blocking with your hands (which is possible if you
use my Dual Wield Parrying mod).
On the other hand, if the player is ''turtling'' (=blocking for a long time)
and in the end he does block an attack (or if he blocks multiple attacks in a
row) each block will cost extra stamina based on the amount of time the player
has been blocking (up to a certain maximum stamina cost).
If the player blocks an attack whilst at a very low Stamina level, the block
takes too much energy and the attack will stagger the player, even though it was
blocked.

(i) The player's and NPC's normal attacks now cost a small amount of stamina. Receiving
hits also takes a small amount of stamina.

(j) After an NPC has been staggered by a normal attack, arrow or spell, he has various
options to react in an attempt to prevent getting hit over and over again by his opponent.
These options are: sprinting for a short amount of time, dodge moves in 3 directions
(left, right and back), a forwards roll and blocking. If he blocks in such a way, directly
after getting staggered, he can take the opponent who expected to have a clear shot by
surprise, staggering the opponent for a short amount of time (very much like the player's
timed blocking described in feature (h).
NPCs will not always perform one of these moves after getting staggered. Whether or not they
will is a chance which increases if they're higher level than their attack, and decreases if
they're lower level than their attacker.
Which move is executed if any depends on what kind of attack they were staggered by (melee,
arrow or magic), the armor they're wearing (only light armor wearers can perform dodges and
rolls), the distance between them and their target (they won't roll forwards if already standing
next to their target), the weapon type they're using (an archer or mage won't move forwards
because he wants to stay away) and whether they have a shield or not (in melee they will block
even without a shield, but against arrows they won't bother trying to block if they don't have
a shield).

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Modularity
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In a standard installation you would use 1 .esp file:

- DeadlyCombat.esp includes ALL features described above.

If you wish to use exclude one or more of the GAME SETTING FEATURES
described above, you can use one or more of the following .esp files
IN ADDITION to the main .esp (enable the extra file(s) and make sure
they are later in your load order than DeadlyCombat.esp is. You can
use tools like the Nexus Mod Manage, BOSS or Wrye Bash for this)

- DeadlyCombat_NoArmorChanges.esp: Restores the value changes related
to armor (feature (a)) back to vanilla skyrim values.

- DeadlyCombat_NoAttackDistance.esp: Restores the value changes related
to attack distance (feature (d)) back to vanilla skyrim values.

- DeadlyCombat_NoBlockChanges.esp: Restores the value changes related
to blocking (feature ( b )) back to vanilla skyrim values.

- DeadlyCombat_NoDamageChanges.esp: Restores the value changes related
to weapon damage (feature ( c )) back to vanilla skyrim values.

- DeadlyCombat_NoStaminaChanges.esp: Restores the value changes related
to stamina (feature (e)) back to vanilla skyrim values.

If you wish to tweak the GAMEPLAY FEATURES, you can do this using a magical
scroll called ''[DeadlyCombat] Scroll of Customization'' which is automatically
added to your inventory upon loading the mod. This will open a menu. Using this
menu you can:

- Toggle whether actors can be ''stagger spammed'' or not. (Default NOT possible)
- Toggle Timed Blocking on or off. (Default ON)

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Modularity - Deadly Combat combined with other combat mods
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you wish to use this mod combined with some other combat mod, that is
possible. Just make sure that:
- If 2 mods change the same thing, make sure to load the mod which you would
like to take precedence latest.
- If you wish another mod to override some of Deadly Combat's Game Setting changes,
DO NOT use the extra plugins from this mod. Just load DeadlyCombat.esp and the other
mod afterwards.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Optional versions
-------------------------------------------------------------------
- DeadlyCombat_hardcoeDamage.esp increases damage even more than the
main plugin does. Load this after DeadlyCombat.esp if you wish to have
the extra damage.

Seems like dual-wielding would be far more difficult with this. Less protection from armor, emphasis on blocking, more damage dealt overall, and a closer range for weapons.

Makes me think Bethesda should've done this and just given Dual-Wielders some way to parry or block so it could actually be a realistic, tactically sound way to fight rather than the slap-fest it is in the vanilla game.

Made me chuckle.

But this looks interesting, I may give it a go.

I think the armor rating problem is more a problem with the crappy crafting system and the way it is implemented. Instead of increasing the armor rating needed to reach the cap I'd rather fix that system. The way it works in your mod now (if I understand correctly what you did) is that regular armor is completely useless and only people who exploit the silly smithing system will have any meaningful advantage from wearing armor. That means the armor NPCs wear will always be a joke, even enemies wearing a full set of Daedric will hardly have any damage reduction.

The difference smithing (even more so in combination with alchemy and enchanting) makes is absolutely ridiculous - for lower level equipment it can make a difference of a few hundred percent! I'd like to make a mod that gives 5% more effectiveness for weapons and armor per smithing level (+5% for fine, +25% for legendary) and then base the armor rating cap around that (so a full set of legendary Daedric with maxed out heavy armor skill (including perks) gives you 80% damage reduction). No idea how easy that will be though since for some very stupid reason Bethesda implemented smithing enhancements with a total value instead of a percentage (steel armor will benefit much more from smithing than Daedric armor etc).

Hmm that's true didn't think about it. But then again, I never dual wield myself exactly because it's impossible to block. If I can find a way to mod this when the creation kit is out, I'll do it, but I'm no good with stuff like animations so I don't think I'll be able to.. sure hoping someone else will find a way to make blocking possible while dual wielding.


Nononono I only talked about fully upgraded armor and stuff like that as an example. I did nothing other than lowering some percentages, so that affects unsmithed armor just as much as it affects smithed armor.

But what percentages did you lower? If fully upgraded armor gives you far less damage reduction, not upgraded armor will give you almost none - the difference between maxed out upgraded armor and regular armor is simply too large. Unless you changed the smithing system, so maybe that is what you mean?

well to fix dual wielding maybe a cc type of perk might help. i.e if possible tying up the +50% damage for dual power attacks with a large percent to do a cc. would be nice if there was a way to single ccs out i.e a perk if you use the left hand power attack while the npc does a power attack it stops their power attack (kind of like the bash perk for shields). but i doubt something like this can be done atm.

What you would need to do to reduce the impact of smithing on damage resistance would be to increase the armor ratings of unimproved armors, bring the armor ratings of different armor types closer together, and reduce the amount that upgrading armor effects armor rating. But I think lowering the armor cap and raising the armor rating needed to reach that cap are both big improvements over the original system. It sounds like the point of this mod isn't so much to rebalance the crafting disciplines as to make combat more challenging in general.

And the crafting systems themselves aren't silly and exploitable, its the values the developers chose for things like enchantment strengths, armor rating to damage resistance calculations, and the ratios of base weapon damage and armor rating to upgraded weapon damage and armor rating. Balance those and the systems become pretty awesome, leaps and bounds above crafting in games like Fallout.

It would be far easier to fix the smithing system than to adjust all the armor/damage ratings. Adjusting all the values would be a huge amount of work and it would be a compatibility nightmare. I also think that the smithing system was an afterthought Bethesda implemented very late. A full set of Daedric armor with shield has an armor rating of 588 if you have heavy armor maxed out with all necessary perks. That's almost exactly the armor rating cap (which is 567). Coincidence? Don't think so. I guess they balanced the armor rating around the values they have and then thought 'hey, a smithing system would be cool, so let's implement something quickly'.

Armor types are already quite close together when you look at it. Iron armor has an armor rating of 25, Daedric armor has 49. So less than 100% difference between the lowest low level armor and the best armor in the whole game.


All you will achieve by raising the armor rating needed to reach the cap is that wearing regular armors will be pointless. Since enemies only wear regular armors you basically remove their armor and make it slightly (but not much seeing how easy it is to get a high smithing skill level and find the necessary materials for higher level armor) harder for the player to reach the cap.



Well, aren't the crafting systems made up of values? Of course crafting could be great if done right, but if the values are silly the whole system is silly.

Values are easily tweaked via the CK, but you can't as easily do things like create mines everywhere with the various ores, forges with their associated models and animations, enchanting stations that let you customize your gear and rename it to whatever you want. At the core, the process of creating gear from appropriate materials, improving it based on your smithing skill, enchanting it with dozens of effects and giving it unique names is all pretty sound. It's just the numbers that are off, something that you need zero modding skill to change (just a really good understanding of gameplay and the benefit of lots of play testing.)

In one sentence you complain that raising the armor rating needed to reach the armor cap would make inferior armors obsolete (which I sort of fail to see the problem with, inferior armors should be inferior), then in another sentence you say that you shouldn't change the base armor values to make them closer together. Which do you want? The point is to reduce the change in armor rating and damage achieved through smithing. That's a combination of the change in base armor value/damage from one type to the next (which goes up about 100% as you pointed out) and the change from upgrading (which is roughly another 100%). Subtracting evenly from both would require edits to base armor values. If its impossible to make the upgrade amount a percentage rather than a flat increase, then bringing the base armor values and weapon damages closer together would make that flat increase less unbalanced for the inferior equipment grades. Yes, it would be more work, but most rebalance mods that I'm familiar with heavily edit all equipment stats anyway.

uesp.net says armor in skyrim works like this:

displayed armor rating = (worn armor rating + item quality) * (1 + 0.4 * (skill + skill effect)/100) *						 (1 + Custom Fit or Well Fitted + Matching Set) * (1 + Agile Defender or Juggernaut) +						 (shield armor rating + item quality) * (1 + 0.4 * (skill + skill effect)/100) *						 (1 + Custom Fit or Well Fitted + Matching Set) + armor effectshidden armor rating	= 25 per piece worndamage reduction%	  = (displayed armor rating + hidden armor rating) * 0.12

In the skill part of the formula, the ''1'' is the game setting fArmorRatingPCBase (which I left unchanged) and the ''0.4'' is (fArmorRatingPCMax - fArmorRatingPCBase), where fArmorRatingPCMax = 1.4 in vanilla. That I lowered to 1.32, which basically means every point of armor skill increases your armor by slightly less.

Then the damage reduction is calculated by multiplying your changed (not base) armor by 0.12. That 0.12 = fArmorScalingFactor, which I lowered to 0.11.

And then I lowered fMaxArmorRating from 80 to 75 (so maximum reduction is 75% instead of 80%).

That's all I did. So basically the changes are quite small, but the effect is that where in vanilla skyrim you needed 135 Base Armor (a full set of Orcish Armor without even a shield already gives 140 armor) if you had 100 skill in armor and smithing and all armor perks to get 80% damage reduction, you now need 146 base armor (which is ebony armor without a shield) to get 75% damage reduction.

I know the changes are small at the moment (can always make them bigger if necessary), but combined with the overall increase in damage (similar tweaks to game settings, only now increasing instead of decreasing) the effect does become noticeable.

If I had only changed armor settings by more and had left weapon settings untouched, creatures without armor would become relatively stronger compared to player and humanoid NPCs. Similarly, if I had left armor untouched and only increased weapon damage by more, creatures would become underpowered.

Base armor and weapon values can of course be changed as well, and I suppose the effects of smithing too, but I preferred to stick to game settings for now to reduce compatability issues with other mods. Besides, my aim is not to change combat in a huge way anyway. I do not intend to make everything one-hit kills or something like that. I just want slightly tweaked, noticeable changes, but not an entirely different game.

Edited the OP because there is now a new optional plugin for people who think staggering was overpowered in version 1.00

The visual implementation of the crafting system with mines, crafting stations etc is done well (just like generally Bethesda manages to create great looking worlds), but the system behind it is so flawed it's ridiculous (just like it is the case with most gameplay implemented by Bethesda). And that is all I said. I'm talking about the system, not the visual implementation. And while you may not need huge modding skills to change this it still needs to be done - and to fix it may not be as easy as it sounds, see below.


Like you already mentioned the problem is the difference between regular equipment and upgraded equipment. Not that inferior armors are worse than better ones, something I don't have a problem with and never talked about. A simple example - if you upgrade a steel dagger with the best vanilla smithing equipment (without even exploiting the crafting loop) the damage increase is almost 500% (15>88). If you upgrade a Daedric warhammer with the same equipment the difference is less than 100% (81>154). And an upgraded steel dagger will cause more damage than a regular Daedric Warhammer. That's ridiculous. So what you suggest is to move the damage ratings of the steel dagger and Daedric warhammer closer together to make the difference less noticeable? So that by default a steel dagger already does only a tiny bit less damage than a Daedric warhammer? You can't be serious. That's replacing one evil with another. A percentage based system is the only system that would work and it would solve the problem without even touching the damage or armor values of thousands of entries in the CK.



That change is very small, so it won't have any large impact. But the lower fArmorScalingFactor becomes with the default system, the more obsolete regular armors will become. And in the end only the player will have a decent armor rating, while NPCs will run around naked even when wearing high level armor. Like I said, the problem is smithing (and additionally the alchemy/enchanting loop), not the armor rating per se.

The change is bigger than it looks though. At the highest levels, you will have between 600 and 700 armor probably (between 500 and 600 is shown, and if wearing 4 armor pieces you also get a hidden armor value of 25*4=100), which means that from 0.12 to 0.11 is already a 6-7% nerf to damage reduction at highest levels. And on top of that, the game setting related to skill was also changed.

About the difference between player with upgraded armor and NPCs having regular armor, it's a problem too yeah but not as big as you think. The 0.4 I talked about in previous post (which I changed to 0.32) is actually 1.5 for NPCs vanilla (and 1.357 in my mod). Though I think enemies are also lacking our perks, so it most likely indeed isn't enough to make up for the difference.

The crafting visuals are good, but the process is also fine. If not, what in your opinion is wrong with it? How would you go about crafting weapons if not from appropriate ores? Do you not like having the ability to enchant and rename gear? I agree with you that the numbers are off, but there's more to it than just numbers and visuals. The framework is fine.

For the percent improvement from upgrading, one thing to keep in mind is that if your smithing skill is 100, you're going to be improving daedric daggers, not iron ones. In the smithing skill range where you're going to be using iron weapons, lets say around 20, you can improve things by +3, or 75% of an iron dagger's base damage of 4. Once your up at 100 level smithing, there's no reason for you to use an iron dagger, you're going to be using an ebony or daedric one (or glass). The +10 damage from upgrading is about 90% of a daedric dagger's base damage of 11. So you're actually able to make a larger % improvement once you're able to craft daedric quality gear.

If you did want to even out the max percent improvement, what I was suggesting would be more along the lines of, for daggers, raising iron daggers from, say, 4 to 8 base damage, and daedric daggers from 11 to 15. Then decrease the max improvement at level 100 smithing from 10 to 5. That means an iron dagger would see a potential improvement of about 62%, while the daedric would see an improvement of 33%. This is compared to the vanilla values of 250% and 90%, a much bigger discrepancy. As you decrease the relative spread of base weapon damages, and decrease max improvement, the percentages get closer and closer.

From one weapon category to the next though, you're right, the fixed improvement magnitude makes smithing a lot more profitable for light weapons. I haven't looked at any of the perks yet in an editor, but I'm wondering if some perks could be created that are similar to the existing smithing perks that double your max improvement for a given category of gear. Could you create a perk that increases the max improvement for greatswords, battle axes and warhammers, and give it to the player at the start? A similar one, with smaller magnitude, for swords, war axes and maces? That'd fix it, if its possible.

When I read this question I was thinking by myself ''probably not without creation kit, gonna be hard'' but checked the perks in SkyEdit quickly, and actually I think it could be easily done. That is, making a perk which does this could be easily done, I don't think you can add perks to the perk trees yet in SkyEdit though, only replace or add to existing perks.

Anyway, looking at for example the perk DragonArmor, it does the following:

Armor Smithing * 2 with the conditions:

- Item HasKeyWord ArmorMaterialDragonplate == 1 OR
- Item HasKeyWord ArmorMaterialDragonscale == 1

Change those conditions to

- Item HasKeyWord WeapTypeBattleaxe == 1 OR
- Item HasKeyWord WeapTypeGreatsword == 1 OR
- Item HasKeyWord WeapTypeWarhammer == 1

and then you've got the perk u suggested

Apart from the very basic 'craft your own stuff with appropriate materials' principle, which isn't even worth mentioning since it's the most obvious approach to handle it, almost everything else is a mess. No matter whether it's the way smithing levels (spamming iron daggers), the materials you need (you can have enough materials for a full set of ebony, dragon plate/scale or even Daedric by the time you reach level 5) or the way the upgrading system works. That's like saying a combat system is fine because when I hit someone with a sword he takes damage, even when everything else is a mess.


And who says that your smithing skill is around 20 when you use iron weapons and 100 when you use Daedric weapons? You can level your skills whenever you want and as much as you want. The only reason why it could be that way is that you can find enough materials for any type of equipment without problems. So as soon as your smithing level reaches the next perk cap you craft your nice new set of armor and weapons. That's yet another problem, but certainly not a fix. You could easily have a full set of Daedric armor and weapons before you hit level 20. Which is supposedly extremely rare and you never see someone in full Daedric, but the cool player who spent a few minutes at the forge spamming iron daggers can easily craft his own set without a problem. Yep, makes sense. I always laugh when I craft stuff at the regular Whiterun forge and the woman working there tells me about the 'legendary' steel the guy at the Skyforge crafts. He probably dedicated his whole life to smithing, yet my own gear is 1000x better than his crappy steel.


Still don't see how this approach, which is extremely cumbersome, a compatibility nightmare and only slightly reduces, but doesn't get rid of the problem is better than a simple percentage based approach.


I assume that's possible.

Cool. I wasn't thinking of them as actual perks in the skill trees, just sort of a hack to get around the fixed magnitude of smithing improvements, so you wouldn't list them anywhere and you'd add them all to the player automatically at the start of the game (can't remember if you have to add them via script, or if you can designate a perk as being something the player starts with by default.)

Awesome, DL'd.

What about the mace perks? Any chance you could up the stagger to account for the armour debuff, and hence mace debuff?

Don't think that's easy to do right at this moment, but will be very easy with a simple invisible quest script once the creation kit is out.


Could always buff it if maces turn out to underpowered, don't know myself (using battleaxes on my current character ) but I don't think it will be necessary. Maces have most damage of all weapons, and the increases in damage this mod gives is based on percentages, which means maces have already been improved more than other weapons

@Phitt -
I agree with everything you have stated in this thread by 1000000% x10!
I too found it [censored] how you could pretty much make iron armor equivalent to ebony.

Just out of curiosity, have you found a mod that fixes the armor balance?
Better yet, are you making a mod that balances armor?

Edit: Apparently ret@rd3d is a bad word.

Those all sound like things that can be fixed via the tools beth provides, so its not a broken system, just a poorly balanced one. There's already a mod that drastically increases the amount of raw materials needed to craft weapons and armor (makes their weight slightly greater than the weight of the gear it produces.) And I wouldn't rule out the possibility of Bethesda addressing some of this in an upcoming patch. The only major change I'd make that might not easily be possible with the CK would be to add equipment degradation back in, so that repairing your equipment trained your smithing skill. I'm ok with being able to raise my smithing skill by crafting stuff out of the random materials I find, like iron ingots and animal pelts, making stuff like that trivial would make leveling smithing a lot less natural in my opinion. Higher level gear should raise your skill by a higher amount, but that'd just make it even easier to power level (and I wouldn't really want to introduce more grinding by drastically reducing the value gained from petty materials like iron and leather, that's just no fun.)


Not using high quality weapons when you have the means to produce them seems like an odd choice to make, so I can see why the game wouldn't be designed with that in mind. And inferior gear is still going to be less damaging/protecting than better gear at a given level of improvement, so I fail to see where the problem is (aside from what my perk suggestion would fix.)


Cumbersome, but I have mods like Crafting 300 in mind, he's going to end up tweaking every single weapon in the game, and adding considerably more, so this effect would be something to keep in mind.

The http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1328616-ideawip-paladins-smithing-overhaul/page__p__19994733 I'm working on will do this. Basically, I attempt to overhaul the broken system and have improvements change other stats besides the damage for weapons, like weight or speed (a master smith would be able to make a slightly lighter and more balanced weapon) as well as drastically reduced damage from the vanilla increases. Same with Armor enhancements, where improved armor will reduce weight, movement penalties and stamina drain while sprinting. I also intend to make upgraded weapons available from smiths and on enemies, because it is entirely game breaking imo that the player is the only smith in the world (even at the lowest levels) who can upgrade weapons and armor.

Edited the OP for new version

- Power attacks cost more stamina now
- Blocking attacks costs some stamina
- Stamina regeneration increased in combat
- Modularity (now you can pick which features you want and which features you don't want)

balancing dual wielding isnt that hard - if every hit causes some staggering, then dual wielder with its fast attacks is practically immune to enemy counteraction, isnt he?

if the enemies don't block, yes

Anyway, the overall increase in damage of course also further amplifies their offensive capabilities

And edited the OP for a new version.