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#595710 19/11/16 02:13 PM
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Hey all!

New player here. Is it possible to edit the damage of spells and abilities (Hail Storm, Daggers Drawn, Lacerate, etc) using Skilldata.txt?

I'm already aware that we can modify the AP cost, cool down, and requirements to learn any given ability. I was wondering if this extended to the damage parameter as well. I realize that some abilities scale with weapon damage, but even they each have a percentage of weapon damage which must be stored somewhere in the game files.

Q2 (related): Would modding skills in this way affect the enemy version as well?

Q3) Is it possible to increase the base damage of weapons? How?

Q4) Does modifying weapons cause enemies' weapons to change as well?

Last edited by AlphaMagnum; 19/11/16 02:50 PM.
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Basically yes.

If you don't know how to modify stats you should read this primer:
http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=582571#Post582571

Also in there you can find templates for these files.

The guide is more for characters than skills but it's really the only guide around for this and the process is basically the same for other things like skills. So if you are starting at 0 knowledge it's as good as any place to start.


For #1
SkillData.txt (or .xlsm if you prefer to use the excel files which are easier to work in) is the file you need to work in.

In one of my mods I lowered the damage on Burning Touch
Code
new entry "Target_BurningTouch"
type "SkillData"
data "SkillType" "Target"
data "Ability" "Offensive"
data "Element" "Fire"
data "Tier" "Novice"
data "ActionPoints" "3"
data "Cooldown" "4"
data "CooldownReduction" "50"
data "ChargeDuration" "0"
data "Damage" "3"
data "Damage Multiplier" "100"
data "Damage Range" "20"
data "DamageType" "Fire"
data "SkillProperties" "Burning,100,2"
data "TargetRadius" "3"
data "AddWeaponRange" "No"
data "DeathType" "DoT"
data "CanTargetCharacters" "Yes"
data "CanTargetItems" "Yes"
data "CanTargetTerrain" "No"
data "Magic Cost" "0"


Simply change the "data "Damage" "3" to "2" (It only goes 1-10). You can also adjust the "Damage Range" or Multiplier instead. There are formulas to figure out exactly what changing each will do, I don't bother learning it exactly though just get a feel for it by playing around with the numbers a few times.

#2 Enemy skills are usually seperate already for balance reasons.

See here is the "enemy" version of burning touch:
Code
new entry "Target_EnemyBurningTouch"
type "SkillData"
data "SkillType" "Target"
data "Ability" "None"
data "Element" "None"
data "ActionPoints" "3"
data "Cooldown" "4"
data "CooldownReduction" "0"
data "ChargeDuration" "0"
data "Damage" "3"
data "Damage Multiplier" "100"
data "Damage Range" "10"
data "DamageType" "Fire"


Note that it has a range of 10 instead of 20 like the player version so it does less damage than the player version.


#3.

Pretty much the same ways as skills, open up weapon.xlsm/weapon.txt and modify the "damage" or "damage range". Also weapons have a "Damage Boost" section, which I'd probably leave alone until you get a feel for how the numbers work.


#4 is also basically the same as skills in that there are enemy versions of each. To figure out which weapon an enemy uses, open up the file equipment.txt (or equipment.xlsm) and see what stats entries are assigned to that character. Also you might want the editor for this so you can click enemies on the map and see what equipment entry they have.

The short version is
1. Figure out the equipment assigned to the character.
2. Open up the equipment file and find the corresponding entry (usually it's something like "Shadows_Ghoul_A"
3. On the "Shadows_Ghoul_A" list find the weapon , in this case it's called "_Shadows_Ghoul_A".

4. Open the weapon file and find "_Shadows_Ghoul_A" and change the numbers.

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EDIT: Nvm.

On an unrelated note, how would you recommend I complete my first (and likely only one for a long while) playthrough of the game? Should I use a mod like Scales or XC_Bags which alters the gameplay experience, balance, and adds recipes?

If you had to play the game just once, would you do it vanilla?

Last edited by AlphaMagnum; 20/11/16 08:03 PM.
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I'm generally a Vanilla player which is my most of my modding work is focused on stand alone modules.

The three main D:OS mods for the main campaign:

Scales - The main benefit of scales is most(all?) of the changes don't require a new saved game so if you were already playing a game you could install it and try it. But you probably can't remove it cleanly after it's been installed. So if you wanted to try it out you could say get up to level 3 and make 2 saves, one clean and one with scales. See how it goes and if you cahnge your mind, uninstall (probably backup the entire game directory since Scales is not a mod proper but actually modifies the main campaign files) you could go back to your old save and keep going vanilla. Scales is explicitly intended to add more challenge on tactician mode where as I don't think the other two are.

XC_Bags - I'm not as familiar with this mod, FrauBlake is around and I'm sure he can chime in. Generally it's a mod that has automated inventory handling and a lot of crafting changes. Some other stuff too like some old skills are added back, a few new ones. bug fixes. The rather massive changelist is in the thread here.


The other one you didn't mention is Better Logistics
http://www.nexusmods.com/divinityoriginalsin/mods/92
Which has a lighter touch than both of the other two but features similar inventory management helpers to XC and crafting changes without some of the extra non-vanilla stuff. But it's also compatible with Scales so you could pick your flavor that way.


That probably wasn't much help :P. Just gonna have to figure out which features you want. Personally the inventory management features, while impressive script wise never did much for me in-game because I simply just ignore inventory management. There's not much reason to mind it anyway since your weight limit is insane. I also don't like crafting much. If you care about crafting a lot using a mod probably makes sense.

Last edited by SniperHF; 21/11/16 11:12 PM.
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XC_Bags is mostly about convenience and not rebalancing. And I tried to remove a couple of inconsitencies. (For example making poison stuff do a percentage of damage instead of fixed damage seemed natural to me because they are the healing equivalent of healing potions for zombies, and regular healing potions also heal percentages. Stuff like cleaning up trader's inventories is convenience and nothing else. Cleaning up some treasure tables came from my paranoia about out-of-handles crashes, I had 2 unfixable crashes in my first 2 attempts to play EE unmodded ;-)

Since there has been no negative written feedback lately, the mod seems kinda stable now after many bugfixes. (Some minor 'bugs' are still there but are hard or impossible to fix in existing games and are not game breaking and my 'Divinity motivation' is currently somewhere below the basement.)

Personally I would not recommend a mod for a first playthrough. Maybe you decide to give the game a second try after a first unmodded playthrough. And then choose one of the mods that seems most interesting to you. Better Logistics seems to have the least changes to the unmodded game, but I haven't personally tested it. Same with Scales, I only downloaded that recently myself, because it required registration with Nexus which I tried to avoid for a long time. So I only know as much about it that you know, that is the info in the Readme.

If you are interested in modding yourself, which your initial post suggests, you can look into all of them yourself and find out how things are done.

I have posted a data sheet a while ago which also has damage values. I found out that spell damage uses a very similar formula to weapon damage. I would not manipuilate spell damage too much because it seems pretty much in line with weapon damages. If anything I'd play around with cooldowns and AP cost.
You can take a look at the file Public\Stats\Generated\Structure\Modifiers.txt in the section 'modifier type "SkillData"' to find out what can be modified with spells. Not everything affects every spell type ("Shout", "Target", "Projectile", etc.)

Here is the data sheet, it's LibreOffice format:
A data collection for stats


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Thank you for the feedback and information!

I was hoping to play a Scoundrel-type character with Daggers, and found myself disappointed that as a build it was inferior to 2h Man-at-Arms and dual wielding Strength-based Man-at-Arms characters.

My plan was to buff dagger builds, with some buff to the base weapon damage (which is significantly inferior to other 1h weapon types) and some increases to specific skill damage multipliers to make things like Lacerate and Daggers Drawn legitimately better than autoattacks.

When I began looking into making these changes, I discovered the mods available here and thought that simple convenience changes like bags or additional crafting recipes would make the game more fun/interesting without altering the core gameplay. Do you think the extra recipes or crafting changes aren't worth using during a first playthrough? Why not?

Finally, FrauBlake -- to what degree did your change to weapon damage buffs in XC-Bags affect the damage of crafted weapons? Are all weapons weaker? Did characters' damage potential decrease overall due to the change?

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Daggers are not inferiour in every case, they are 'balanced' around the assumption that a user has the Backstab talent.

Yes, damages are weaker. But it's probably not noticeable. I took single-handed swords as a base and tried to balance everything else against it so that raw damages are within 1% of each other. That made axes take a very hard hit because they were too high in damage.
I buffed daggers a bit but not too much.

Most important is that I decreased the extreme potential boost that can occur on drops because I think they were the reason why crafted weapons were so above regular drops. In XC_Bags, crafted weapons still do he highest raw damage average but with a lot of drop luck you might find a weapon with even higher damage. Divinity has a gear boost system like most other games have but it does not have the respawn of Diablo which is required to take advantage of such a system. So in general, I lowered the damage difference between the highest and the lowest damage weapons.

I did not really nerf weapon damage, just made choices other than axes viable for dual wielders, I buffed daggers a little bit and staffs some more. Nothing really that big, it only sounds big.

In numbers, the maximum possible damage boost on a weapon was reduced from almost 70% of base damage to around 30% of base damage. You might never have seen a drop weapon with such extreme boosts but on paper they exist, it's because of the 'thousands of boosts but no respawn' problem why you never saw one. Crafted weapons are now a bit above drops in raw damage because they have limited additional attributes, but they are no longer balanced against insanely high - potential - boosts.
(Crafted weapons were never the ones with the highest damage but they were the ones with the highest reliable damage - which they still are in the mod -, because the weapons with potentially extreme boosts never showed up in the game ... or maybe only for very few persons.)

Crafted weapons are a 'problem' in general, because they have a fixed damage boost for all levels while the boost of drops gets lower with increasing level. This is how Larian implemented some kind of 'damage curve'. So it is impossible to really balance crafted weapons against drops for every single level. Crafted weapons will be weaker than drops on lower levels and stronger on higher levels.
The only way to really fully balance them against drops would be to remove the boost curve for drops and that would require a complete rebalancing of all enemy vitality etc. Which is why I never did that ;-)


I played the game again with my mod and found it too easy on Tactician. So don't worry about weapon damage being too low even with the adjustments. And Wolgraff - with daggers - was my main damage dealer.

Last edited by FrauBlake; 24/11/16 08:53 AM.
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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


If so, how did you change the paradigm? Did you enhance the base damage of weapons to compensate for the decrease in boosts?

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.

Last edited by AlphaMagnum; 24/11/16 02:27 PM.
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Originally Posted by AlphaMagnum
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.

Originally Posted by AlphaMagnum
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.

Originally Posted by AlphaMagnum
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 ;-)

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Thanks again for your detailed feedback! I appreciate that you took the time out to help me out.

I have a couple semi-related questions:

1) How is the damage of skills like Lacerate, Precise Incision, Eye Gouge, and Daggers Drawn calculated? Does it differ between using a Dagger/Shield vs Dagger/Dagger vs Dagger/Axe?

2) How did you alter treasure tables in your mod? Did you use the Lucky Charm tables? Is Lucky Charm even worth using in its current state?

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Originally Posted by AlphaMagnum
Thanks again for your detailed feedback! I appreciate that you took the time out to help me out.

I have a couple semi-related questions:

1) How is the damage of skills like Lacerate, Precise Incision, Eye Gouge, and Daggers Drawn calculated? Does it differ between using a Dagger/Shield vs Dagger/Dagger vs Dagger/Axe?

They are based on weapon damage with a percentage multiplier. Dagger/Shield cannot backstab twice e.g. with Daggers Drawn because it has only one attack, etc.

You can look the skills up in SkillData.txt.

If skills which require a dagger but only in the main hand I consider it a bug, but of course I cannot fix that.

I don't like the Rogue/Burglar/Thief type wearing anything but daggers so I always use daggers with them unless they are totally underpowered, which is not the case in my mod. In standard Divinity, daggers are not underpowered either, but axes are overpowered there.

Originally Posted by AlphaMagnum
2) How did you alter treasure tables in your mod? Did you use the Lucky Charm tables? Is Lucky Charm even worth using in its current state?

In the mod, I only increased the chances for a Lucky Charm drop but did not change what can drop with Lucky Charm.
For the 'is it worth' question, you could probably get 5 different answers from 4 people.
I never put any points into it personally but I make sure to have the party leader with the Pragmatic trait and I wear gear with Lucky Charm ... until something really useful comes along ;-)

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The reason I'm asking is because it's not clear to me that using Dagger/Dagger is actually superior to just going Dagger/empty. If all the Scoundrel weapon damage-based skills don't care what's in my offhand there's no reason to have an offhand at all, since I did notice that the AP cost of skills like Lacerate does increase when you equip an offhand weapon, only going down with investment in Dual Wielding.

If the damage of those skills doesn't rise with an offhand, there doesn't seem to be a point in using them. Plus, if they do less damage for the same cost as an autoattack, they likewise don't seem to have a role in a damage-dealing Scoundrel's kit.

Thanks for the heads up about treasure tables and Lucky Charm. I think I might modify it to give a slight chance for some epic/leg/divine loot at high levels of Lucky Charm, to make it worth using and to give crafted gear some real competition.

Last edited by AlphaMagnum; 25/11/16 09:20 PM.
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It's up to you what you like best.

Dual wielding does more damage because most attacks are auto attacks (skill cooldowns).

I can say that if you don't go dual wield you won't do damage. Unless you use a two-hander, but scoundrel is not exactly the ideal ability for two-handers and scoundrel attack skills require daggers and don't work with other weapons.

Leveling Dual Wielding is part of building a damage rogue, unless you want to use axes, swords or clubs, but then Man-at-Arms is the better ability.


You can improve loot tables as much as you want, the big problem in this game is the too many different types of boosts with way too few drops with an RNG choosing the boosts. In diablo, it did not matter, because if you were out of luck in one playthrough, you had the same chance again for better loot in the next playthrough.
Divinity somehow copied Diablo's recipe with drops with lots of different attributes, but this does not work in its world with no respawn and no new game with a previously built party.

I 'improved' boss and miniboss drops a lot in XC_Bags and still there was hardly anything usable which could compare with crafted stuff or vendor items. Vendors are the only source for gear that works okay with the broken boost system because they have regular treasure recreation, a repeated chance for something usable.
People tend to say that vendors are OP but they are not. They only refresh their offer. The whole system is broken by design which makes vendors look OP.
A change to luck tables only somehow imitates the 'vendor behaviour' of having a constant stream of new stuff which of course increases the chances for something useful. Once all containers are opened though, there will be no more Lucky Charm drops.

In a system like Divinity's it would be much better to cut back on gear boosts altogether, or put much more into crafting.
There is a thread with a title 'Loot still is not exciting' (or something similar) in the D:OS2 subforum. It just shows that the system is flawed and will never get better without radical change. But handing out tons of loot with 'impressively colored tooltips' is a recipe for a lot of games to attract people.

Be aware that if you have changes that increase chances for decent drops simply by having a lot more stuff drop, you might run close to the out-of-handles-crash situation.

See what Abraxas wrote here:
How do you mod the EE?


Now, all that stuff is not too important to successfully finish the game and gear is not everything in this game but tactics is more important.
And as said before, in my last playthrough - my XC_Bags test - Wolgraff was my best damage dealer, but I had built the warrior as tank and not DD and I stayed away from the OP master level mage spells and Rain of Arrows.


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Makes sense! I'll have to decide what feels best, I guess...The 2h Man-at-Arms warrior also looks pretty fun, but I'll have to look into how those skills function and whether I can increase the ratio of using abilities to autoattacks for that spec, by reducing cooldowns and actually improving the abilities' AP/damage ratio so they're strictly more useful than basic autoattacks when available. Sitting around autoattacking everything just feels a little boring to me!

I noticed that there doesn't seem to be an "enemy" entry for skills like Flurry, Daggers Drawn, and Whirlwind. Do they use the player version? Or do they not use those skills at all?

As for loot, my thought was not to make Lucky Charm drop excessive amounts of loot, but simply to directly link increasing Lucky Charm to increased amounts of epic/legendary/divine quality loot. Something like:

LC1 - 1% Lucky Charm chance, 10% chance of high-quality (epic+ level loot)
LC2 - 1% Lucky Charm chance, 20% high-quality
LC3 - 2% Lucky Charm chance, 25% high-quality
LC4 - 2% Lucky Charm chance, 35% high-quality
LC5 - 3% Lucky Charm chance, 40% high-quality
LC6 - 3% Lucky Charm chance, 50% high-quality

The numbers would absolutely be subject to change, but it would always be 1 item that drops. The only difference would be that this way you would have a small chance of getting something amazing, and a large chance of getting nothing at all, as opposed to more moderate chances to get junk. In my mind that makes "Lucky Charm" feel a bit better, since whenever it triggers it's actually a meaningful drop, as opposed to most likely junk.

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Auto attacks are something completely different in Divinity than they are in games with real time combat. It's only that those games gave them a really bad name - especially the bigger MMOs. They are an integral and important part in Divinity and completely different from auto attacks in most real time games.
But you can do whatever you like in a mod you make.

Enemies can use skills that are in their scripts. I don't think they use any player spells/skills but I did not check every single character script to find out. They don't need to. Enemies have spells that players don't have, so they don't need to have every spell players have.


You can do whatever you like with Lucky Charm drop tables. I can't give you advice there because the numbers you posted are far beyond my personal taste.
Any numbers you choose won't change the principal problem: very limited amount of drops in a system designed for an unlimited number (like Diablo's).

It's also a matter of personal taste. I did not care about gear from lucky charm but was pretty happy and content with the additional special arrows and ingredients it gave me.
And don't forget that Lucky Charm is not only about drops but also about offense rating.
(Same problem as with Loremaster, which is also not only about identifying items.)

The most important person you make a mod for is you, so do what you personally like most. Others might like it or not, but that is less important. If you publish a mod, you will get feedback, stuff like drop tables are changeable even for existing games. The things that cannot be changed afterwards are story scripts, placed objects and existing drops. Even character scripts are changeable for existing save games, unless they work with either pre-placed objects or work together with story scripts. (But not because the character scripts cannot be changed but because story scripts cannot be changed.)


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Your point is very well taken!

I've dug into the files and looked at gameplay but found something odd -- certain skills benefit from Strength/primary attributes but others do not! For example, comparing Battering Ram (50% weapon damage), Whirlwind (90% weapon damage), Crippling Blow (130% weapon damage), and Flurry (70% weapon damage), the numbers in game are quite different.

Crippling Blow seems to deal much more damage than expected, which could be explained if it received a 50% boost from high Strength, causing it to deal (1.3 * 1.5) = 195% weapon damage. Likewise, Flurry does more than the expected 70% weapon damage per strike, explainable only if it was dealing (0.7 * 1.5) = 105% weapon damage per strike. This can be seen when you compare the tooltip damage to your sheet damage as seen on the character sheet. I don't notice this issue with Battering Ram of Whirlwind, however.

The phenomenon I'm describing can be seen in this Man at Arms Bully Test video, where the tooltip and actual damage dealt by Crippling Blow and Flurry vastly outstrips what it should be. For example, Flurry shouldn't be doing more damage per strike than Whirlwind, which you can see highlighted in the tooltips in question.

Do you have any ideas?


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Some skills have 'data "UseCharacterStats" "Yes"' which means they can profit from character stats, can crit but can also miss.

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As far as I know, Whirlwind has UseCharacterStats "Yes" but does not feature increased damage. On the other hand, Crippling Blow has UseCharacterStats "No" but it shows increased damage. I'm not sure how to reconcile these details with what you describe in your post.

I would have to double check to see whether spells like Death Punch or Shocking Touch have this in their code, since their damage does scale with increased Int I believe.

EDIT: Looking at Lacerate/Precise Incision and Eye Gouge, they too seem to benefit from Primary Attributes up to a point of 50% multiplicative bonus damage, despite all of them having UseCharacterStats "No."

Last edited by AlphaMagnum; 29/11/16 04:42 AM.
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The thing that differentiates the spells and determines the governing primary attribute is probably the field 'data "Ability" "Warrior"' etc.

What could influence damage and the effect attributes have is stuff like "Damage" of course, the spell type ("Shout", "Target", etc.) and others. I have no information about all that stuff or the influence of primary attributes on spell damage. If you want formulas and exact mechanics, you have to ask Larian. I did not even manage to find formulas for the data I collected.

Or maybe another modder has dug deeply into that field and would share this info.

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stranger
A
Joined: Nov 2016
How can I ask Larian? Is there some mechanism to get in touch with them for non serious issues?

I'm guessing there's some parameter in the code like you say which influences whether each skill gets boosted by primary attributes. One theory is that AoE skills do not receive the bonus since the two we found were Battering Ram and Whirlwind. I'd have to look at others to form a more thorough opinion, but to some degree it doesn't really matter!

Thank you for all your patience. It's not often that people are willing to offer real criticism as you did (that may be unnecessary, those skills aren't actually underpowered, etc) and I appreciate that you spoke up. I'm modifying things a bit like Scales did -- I've dug into those Skilldata files and am reducing the damage of several Master-level skills and I've slightly buffed enemy HP and movement/initiative to enhance the challenge!

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