What kinda gets to me is that the scaling is apparently managed by just a few stats and is easily editable, as has been done in
a number of mods.
So since everything seems to depend on this, it means that Larian actually tested the scaling and built everything in the game around being easily scaleable - by just tweaking these numbers, everything else scales to match.
This means that they consciously settled on this grotesque bloat that we're seeing, where a unique weapon on one level is completely trashed by another, run-of-the-mill weapon on the next, and where the numbers just get huge by the endgame, for no apparent reason.
Or did they just enjoy seeing the high numbers (which is apparently something people often appreciate as part of some imagined power-trip) without any regard for how this would affect the itemization scaling and so on?
While I can see some people not really caring about the bloat, while others react negatively to it, I have a hard time seeing any real reason as to why it would be good, or why Larian would settle on it in the interest of making the best possible game.
Is it intended to somehow force us to go hunt for gear every single level or something, or to inspire in us to adopt the attitude of disposability? I just think it's
weird.
No. The goal of this mod was to keep the ratio of damage to hp the same at each level, but make the difference in numbers between levels not as great.
Using your numbers.
Before Mod:
Lvl 1 weapon against Lvl 30 health: 6,858 attacks to kill.
After Mod:
Lvl 1 weapon against Lvl 30 health: 146 attacks to kill.
I think this visualizes the point of the mod very well. I think that the base version of the mod might overdo it just a little bit (I'm currently trying the "moderate" instead, but I haven't played enough to comment), but having a much tighter range is wonderful. It doesn't feel like everything I do is completely invalidated in the next level, and actually finding something good feels.. good.
Before, it really felt like
"Eh, whatever, it's not going to last long", but now when I find equipment with the bonuses I want, I may end up using that for a lot longer than I previously would've, simply because while it's generally worse in scaled stats, it still gives me things I
want in addition to things I
need (like armor).
The only potential "downside" to this is that since I'm not practically required to change my gear as often, build reliability is higher (which devs could consider negative, I guess, since it allows me to rely on certain bonuses from items whereas they might
want me to deal with completely random bonuses out of necessity) and the gold economy is a bit more lax (since I don't have to spend so much gold anymore to keep ahead of the curve).
But overall, I think those are very reasonable trade-offs. Gold is relatively plentiful in the game anyway if you want it to be (it's a thief's life for me), and "too much gold" is a very small issue when standing next to the issue of constant re-itemization and numbers bloat.
