INTRODUCTION

Hey, I was an expert gameplay designer working on Cyberpunk 2077 and its expansion pack. This mod was waiting on my drive for over half a year, until now, when I finally found the time and felt like submitting it to nexus.

There is a certain power fantasy in Cyberpunk setting involving mercs, corpos and gangs. When you start down at the bottom and climb to hit the big leagues to go out in a blaze of glory, you need stable references to measure yourself against to know how powerful you've become. A borged arasaka agent should wipe the floor with a scav ganger in sweatpants. This is not, however how the game often works.


TLDR, changes:
Main file

• fixed the rarity of all characters in the game
• removed quest rarity overrides where applicable
• removed some of the artificial stat buffs or nerfs (e.g. Jackie's lowered accuracy)
• removed arbitrary mega buffs from MaxTac - they are now at the level of bosses
• disabled rarity scaling with level and difficulty
• disabled downward damage scaling for WEAK and TRASH rarity
• adjusted archetype abilities to reflect tier scaling of subdermal armor and sandevistan qualities
• enemies with sandevistan can now keep up and compete with player's sandevistan depending on quality difference between them
• further lowered scripted car chase enemy damage (e.g. quest chases in nomad origin and Rescue quest at the beginning of the game)
• fixes to character record issues, like missing AI archetype data, use of deprecated OFFICER rarity, etc.
• adjusted corpo factions' weapon pools to ensure they use guns of their own production if such exist in given weapon category
  

Optional
HP tweaks
Adds HP multipliers to rarities. Meant to be used with Gunsensical mod and (optional) Weapon Damage Scaling Rebalance
1. STEEP scaling

• TRASH: x0.42 - was 80HP @lvl1, is 34 - allows for a headshot kill with Unity with and without Gunsensical
• WEAK: x0.46 - was 110HP @lvl1, is 50 - allows for a headshot kill with Unity with and without having both Gunsensical and Weapon Damage Scaling mods
• NORMAL: x0.9 - was 130HP @lvl1, is 117 - simulates player HP at level 1 - allows for point blank shotgun kill, especially with mods
• RARE: x2 - was 195HP @lvl1 , is 390 - turns RARE into ELITE
• ELITE: x3 - was 390HP @lvl1, is 1170 - turns ELITE into BOSS
• BOSS: x2 - was 1170HP @lvl1, is 2340
  

2. MILD scaling

• TRASH: x0.42 - was 80HP @lvl1, is 34 - allows for a headshot kill with Unity with and without Gunsensical
• WEAK: x0.46 - was 110HP @lvl1, is 50 - allows for a headshot kill with Unity with and without having both Gunsensical and Weapon Damage Scaling mods
• NORMAL: x0.9 - was 130HP @lvl1, is 117 - simulates player HP at level 1 -allows for point blank shotgun kill, especially with mods
• RARE: x2 - was 195HP @lvl1 , is 390 - turns RARE into ELITE
• ELITE: x1.6667 - was 390HP @lvl1, is 650 - between old ELITE and BOSS, around max HP endgame V can achieve
• BOSS: x1 - remains 1170HP @lvl1
  

So in general it makes lower rarities have competitive shooter (COD, CS, Battlefield, etc.) time to kill values, which are also what you'd expect from shooting at a regular human - headshots kill instantly, few body shots needed, point blank shot from shotgun kills. It also puts more emphasis on cyberpunk cyborg fantasy with higher rarities severely outclassing regular humans.

Keep in mind that since patch 2.0, visible helmets, body armor and implants reduce incoming damage. You can overcome damage reduction with armor piercing on weapons and whether you succeed is indicated by blood splatters instead of sparks on hit and color of floating damage numbers.

What does the mod do?
The way enemies are constructed in the game, among other things they have:

• an AI archetype data containing stat modifiers and abilities enabling AI behaviors
• equipment with weapons
• an appearance
• rarity
  

Each of the above-mentioned elements are meant to go hand in hand to achieve a clear consistent picture of a character.
AI Archetypes are divided into specialization and tier, e.g. "generic melee T1" (tier 1) or "fast ranged T3". Fast and strong are meant to be specialists that could be measured a tier above respective generic archetypes, so a "generic ranged T3" could be considered a tier weaker than "fast ranged T3".

NPC "rarity" is an indication of its rank or tier for the purpose of health and damage calculations. By default, you could map the rarity to an enemy archetype pretty consistently, where usually the only exceptions are cyberpsychos or special named characters. Such map would look like this:

• ARCHETYPE : RARITY
• Generic Melee/Ranged T1 : WEAK
• Generic Melee/Ranged T2 : NORMAL
• Generic Melee/Ranged T3 : RARE
• Fast Melee/Ranged T2 : RARE
• Fast Melee/Ranged T3 : ELITE
• Heavy Melee/Ranged T2 : RARE
• Heavy Melee/Ranged T3 : ELITE
• Shotgunner T2 : NORMAL
• Shotgunner T3 : RARE
• Fast Shotgunner T2 : RARE
• Fast Shotgunner T3 : ELITE
• Sniper T2 : NORMAL
• Fast Sniper T3 : RARE
• Netrunner T1 : WEAK
• Netrunner T2 : NORMAL
• Netrunner T3 : RARE (Netrunner shouldn't be a tank - it's cyberpunk spellcaster. Rarity doesn't affect it's offensive potential)
  

The ARCHETYPE : RARITY pair is intended to be always accompanied by appropriate character appearance. There's a clear gradation of appearances within each faction prepared for each archetype and tier. When everything is set correctly you can be sure that when you see a borged arasaka agent (Fast Ranged T3 : ELITE) it will destroy a scavenger grunt (Generic Ranged T2 : NORMAL), but quite often you'll find RARE or even ELITE scavengers in sweatsuits, especially on hard and very hard diffculty and NORMAL corporate cyborgs. Obviously it doesn't support the power fantasy and help the player feel powerful when scavs are as powerful or more than corpo agents because then everything just scaled to the player.
This mod fixes every single instance of such misalignment in the game and disables automatic rarity scaling with player level and difficulty level - meaning that a sweatsuit hobo will remain WEAK forever, while corpo agent will forever be ELITE.

What this mod doesn't do?
This mod will affect game's difficulty with some places becoming more difficult, other easier. This mod's purpose, however, is not about difficulty and it's not pushing for any kind of hardcore experience. It focuses on consistency, immersion and power fantasy.

Compatibility
Anything that changes tweak records of NPC has the chance or overriding this mod. To my knowledge there are not many such mods however. Changes in files are marked with comments

//

This mod contains plenty of tweak records with no changes in them. There are currently two methods known to me of implementing such mod - one with direct .tweak file edits, another with .yaml inserts to tweaks. The scale of this mods with hundreds of changes made tweak implementation much easier. Files with no changes made to them have to be included in the mod, otherwise .tweak edits won't be propagated to character records that need to inherit them from their parent records. This doesn't negatively affect compatibility with other mods - .tweak files from other mods will have changes from Enemy Rarity Fixes propagated to them as long as character records that need them are present in the files.

Mods that go well along this one

• Enemy Aggro Improvements
• Gunsensical
• corrected Weapon Damage Scaling Rebalance
• Futuristic Silencers Overhaul (with Ashura and Chao add-on)
  Regarding the missing required mod: there's only a single reference to required mod in the only yaml file present in Futuristic Silencers Overhaul. It's at the top of the file and mentions a perk. You can safely remove it. The mod will work with and without it. There are issues with item descriptions but stat-wise, as far as I know it works fine.