Ah, I see. Was it not possible for crafted weapons to roll those high damage boosts? Or was it the fact that you could reroll and re-create crafting weapons infinitely to allow you to get those boots that was the problem?
Was it something like this?
- Crafted: fixed damage boost and weapon scales to level, possible to roll an additional fixed moderate damage boost (which doesn't stack with whetstone)
- Vs drops: roll random damage boost with a wide range of possible results, need to roll high to beat crafted
All possible boosts are fixed, both on crafted weapons and on drops. Crafted weapons can only have one additional crafted boost, the whetstone boost. Drops can also get the same damage boost. But they can also get a damage boost as part of their drop attributes. You would never see a damage boost on a weapon explicitely, it's already calculated into the weapon damage. On top, weapons, both crafted and drops, can have elemental damage crafted on them with essences or poison potions. Again, drops can have an additional elemental damage as part of their attributes.
There is an internal attribute 'Damage Boost' for weapons in Weapon.txt, and Larian used this parameter to simulate some kind of declining damage with increasing level. For example, a sword level 1 has a damage boost of 0% while one on level 20 has one of -30%, with intermediate values in between. The stat of a crafted weapon can also have a 'Damage Boost', but this boost is constant for every weapon you create. Since crafted weapons scale to the crafter's level, it is clear that they can never be really well balanced against drops, because if they have -10%, they will have -10% on level 1 and -10% on level 20. A low level crafted weapon would have a lower base damage than a drop while a high level crafted weapon has a higher one.
So this is what I mean by 'impossible to balance'. It *could* be balanced by flattening out the curve for drops and remove the damage decline with level but then the whole game has to be rebalanced, e.g. enemy hp.
There is also the problem of against what you balance crafted weapons, even if drops had a flat 'Damage Boost'. Would you balance crafted weapons against drops which have no damage boost but other attributes or would you balance them against the highest potential damage boost on drops ?
This is the reason why I decreased all potential damage boosts and elemental damage boosts, because it decreases the difference between weapons without any boosts and the ones with all boosts.
I said this in one D:OS2 thread already, the game can never have enough drops to make up for a bad RNG. I only made the consequences of bad RNG rolls less important in the mod, at least for weapon damage.
If so, how did you change the paradigm? Did you enhance the base damage of weapons to compensate for the decrease in boosts?
The only thing I did was to reduce the potential boosts, I did not increase base weapon damage. In addition, I flattened out some of the bigger jumps in 'Damage Boost', for example there's a big jump from -20% to -25% for swords on some level, I made the steps smaller. It's really not very noticable.
And no, it was not necessary to 'compensate' anything when the game is already too easy once you know what you're doing.
As far as I remember I took two-handed swords as the very base and tried to balance all other weapons against that with the exception of daggers, wands and staves, because it is impossible to calculate how many times you can really back-stab with a dagger. I increased dagger damage a little bit, in the end I think the 'Damage Boost' for a level 20 dagger ended up at -47 instead of the standard -50, which is really very little. 1H swords ended up at -32 instead of -30, also very little change. Only 1H axes got nerfed a lot because they were far ahead, in my mod they are as equal as possible with swords. Clubs are a bit behind, some 5%, because there are so many enemies with weakness to crushing damage. And spears are tiny bit behind other two-handers because of their extreme range, again only some 5%.
And crossbows got boosted because nobody wants to use them. Same with staves.
Too easy on Tactician? I was thinking of making my first playthrough on Tactician mode with XC_Bags! Scales sounds a bit too scary for a starting player but I've seen quite a few posts complaining of the difficulty of Tactician mode.
I've seen some Let's Plays of the game and I know that things can be hard. But once you learn the right tactics, it becomes too easy. The game is still hard in early levels but it becomes easier the higher you level.
I might have made Tactician somewhat easier in the mod by introducing some other features like the ability to remove Fear with the Man-at-Arms skill 'Encourage', or remove Charm with the *forgotten name* spell. It's also a lot easier to craft certain stuff like grenades with the mod.
The game could have some better balancing, which I did not really want to do in the mod. As said, it was mostly about convenience. Currently, I have no motivation to do any further work. That would also require scripting skills beyond my current abilities and more a thing for the scripter pros in this forum like Sniper himself or Abraxas and some others, but Sniper is not very interested in main module modding ...
The fact that there are all kinds of opinions from 'too easy' to 'too hard' shows that Larian did a decent balancing job for the majority of players.
I don't think, my motivation will come back so soon as I am currently preparing for the Yule Festival ;-)
