2 items
About this mod
Adds an Ash of War that allows any infusable weapon to act as a catalyst. Also includes new infusions.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
Does what it says on the box.
Here's a basic showcase.
You can purchase the Ash from Kale for 500 runes. Can be applied to any melee weapon (but not shields).
Sounds simple enough, but weapons were very much not intended to be used as catalysts by Fromsoft. In the most basic terms, spells will only look at a catalyst's scaling, and not the base damage. They're also balanced around very high scaling. These two facts present an issue if you were to try and cast a spell using a weapon: most weapons have much higher base damage than catalysts, while having much lower scaling. Thus any spell you cast would be very weak.
This is why the Carian Sorcery Sword has such high scaling (though still not that high compared to the majority of catalysts (which is why it sucks lol)).
As a result of this issue, I've rebalanced the Flame Art, Sacred, and Magic infusions, and I've added several new infusions that correspond to alternate stat spreads/builds. All will now confer much lower base damage (when fully upgraded), no base physical damage (where applicable), and much higher scaling. Damage should be approximately the same or a bit higher, but it's difficult to compare due to the way damage calculations are handled.
The new infusions are as follows:
The original scaling of each weapon remains somewhat intact through the absolute washing machine of changes I put it through to get all these infusions (arguably) balanced. As a result, spell damage will vary based on the weapon. Weapons with higher scaling will get more, weapons with lower scaling will get less. I've clamped and squished it a bit so the variation won't be massive. At max upgrade, you can expect the equivalent spell scaling to be in the range of 280-320 at the first major stat breakpoint (60 for single skills, 38/38 for dual). Generally scaling is inverse to size: smaller stuff is higher, bigger stuff is lower.
A few things more to note:
- Every infusion except standard allow for casting both incantations and sorceries. This will have no effect if not using the new Ash of War apart from not greying out spells in your HUD.
- You could probably guess but in case anyone doesn't: the jar shard talismans do NOT work on this, but all the spell-boosting ones do.
- All Ashes of War should be usable with all affinities now. Yes I was lazy.
- Some spells will look a bit weird due to them expecting you to be holding a staff/seal and not a weapon (e.g. Rock Blaster, Shatter Earth). Nothing I can (easily) do about that unfortunately, but it shouldn't be an issue for most spells.
- Any infusion that isn't Flame Art, Magic, Sacred, or one of the new ones will behave strangely with its spell damage. This is because I didn't want to mess with the attack element correction parameters, which are what tell a weapon what each damage type should scale with. For most weapons, it'll be Physical: STR + DEX, Fire: FTH, Lightning: DEX, Magic: INT, Holy: FTH. Thus, casting Beast Claw with a heavy-infused weapon will deal decent damage, but casting Catch Flame will not. Catalysts get around this by making every damage type scale with the same stat(s), which is exactly what I did for Flame Art, Magic, Sacred, and the new infusions.
There is ONE major caveat to this mod: combo'ing spells will be slower or outright impossible. This is due to the game interpreting the input as an Ash of War before interpreting it as a spell, thus using the "do Ash of War" input window of that spell which begins a few frames later than the "do combo spell" input window. In certain cases, the difference in frames is large enough to go completely past the spell input window, so you can't combo at all (Black Blade is the only one I know of like this).
Initial casts are completely unaffected, so you will not notice this most of the time. Think of it as a balancing factor I guess.
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v1.0.1 changes:
- Disabled the use of this Ash on shields. Does not work properly, would require extensive edits to c0000.hks to work with left-handed weapons. Frankly it'd be easier just to implement a second nearly-identical Ash specifically for shields, but I'm not interested in doing that at the moment.
- New infusions will no longer be enabled with whetblades, and will instead be enabled by default. As much as I'd like them to unlock this way, the whetblade event ids were a mess and this is a much cleaner solution.
- The new dual-type infusions (Gravity and Communion) now have higher base damage at +0 (+25 is unchanged). Hadn't actually tested that before and realized it was doing doodoo damage at the start of the game. Should be in-line with other infusions now.
- Removed the redundant param folder. Smithbox seems to just make that whenever you save, it doesn't contain any mod changes as far as I can tell.
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Installation:
Use ModEngine2. Put the files (everything at the level that has regulation.bin) in the ModEngine2 mod folder.
Requires Script-Data-Exposer-FS for swapping spells to be updated properly. Just place the dll in the ModEngine2 folder (or wherever you like) and include it in the "external_dlls" entry of config_eldenring. e.g. external_dlls = ["Scripts-Data-Exposer-FS.dll"] if you have it in the ModEngine2 folder.
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Notes for anyone who wants to use this for modding:
I've uploaded a pared-down version in the optional files that does not include any of the infusion additions or changes.
Since there's no infusion changes, I also left out the "enable incantations/sorceries" checkboxes on all the weapons. You can enable this yourself as needed.
I did leave the shop entry for Kale for testing purposes, but you can remove that easily if need be.
The way this works should be pretty straightforward, I'm just spoofing an Ash of War the same way the Carian Sorcery Sword is spoofing a special heavy attack. My ID of choice was 700, well out of range of typical Ashes of War. I labelled all my changes in c0000.hks with "Added/modified by Anisol" so if you need to root around in there you can just search my name and it should come up with all the stuff I added.
Item name changes and such should be under Item DLC 02 stuff, Ashes of War and Skills (might be under DLC 01 in some spots, it's weird like that).
I've exported and uploaded the .csvs and .jsons for merging, available under the miscellaneous files. The download includes both the files for the gameplay version and the no infusions version, separated into their own folders. May be a slight hassle to merge the gameplay version with anything due to the amount of changes. For merging c0000.hks and common.emevd.dcx... just do a file comparison I guess. Not really a clean solution with those.
Honestly, this Ash is more suitable for individual custom weapons than what I did. I just felt like implementing it as a general-purpose Ash you could put on anything.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Credits:
Vawser for Smithbox
AinTunez for DarkScript
Meowmaritus for DSAS (Ended up not needing it but it was still helpful)
ividyon/Exelot for the decompiled c0000.hks
ElaDiDu for Script-Data-Exposer-FS/NewHksInfo.lua
The ?ServerName? discord for various questions I never actually asked but searched for a lot.
Veebelnades in the discord actually had the idea for the spoof implementation about a month and a half ago, just wanted to mention that since I noticed while scouring for clues.
This description is subject to change, I'm probably forgetting things. If there's any major issues (that aren't any quirks mentioned here), then leave a bug report and I should see it eventually. I'll do my best to keep this mod updated.
Here's a basic showcase.
You can purchase the Ash from Kale for 500 runes. Can be applied to any melee weapon (but not shields).
Sounds simple enough, but weapons were very much not intended to be used as catalysts by Fromsoft. In the most basic terms, spells will only look at a catalyst's scaling, and not the base damage. They're also balanced around very high scaling. These two facts present an issue if you were to try and cast a spell using a weapon: most weapons have much higher base damage than catalysts, while having much lower scaling. Thus any spell you cast would be very weak.
This is why the Carian Sorcery Sword has such high scaling (though still not that high compared to the majority of catalysts (which is why it sucks lol)).
As a result of this issue, I've rebalanced the Flame Art, Sacred, and Magic infusions, and I've added several new infusions that correspond to alternate stat spreads/builds. All will now confer much lower base damage (when fully upgraded), no base physical damage (where applicable), and much higher scaling. Damage should be approximately the same or a bit higher, but it's difficult to compare due to the way damage calculations are handled.
The new infusions are as follows:
- Magma - INT, fire damage
- Thorn - FTH, magic damage
- Cultist - FTH, lightning damage
- Faithful - FTH, physical damage
- Gravity - STR/INT, physical/magic damage
- Communion - FTH/ARC, fire/lightning damage
- Bloodflame - FTH/ARC, fire damage
- Finger - INT/ARC, magic damage
- Ghostflame - INT/FTH, magic damage
- Golden - INT/FTH, holy damage
The original scaling of each weapon remains somewhat intact through the absolute washing machine of changes I put it through to get all these infusions (arguably) balanced. As a result, spell damage will vary based on the weapon. Weapons with higher scaling will get more, weapons with lower scaling will get less. I've clamped and squished it a bit so the variation won't be massive. At max upgrade, you can expect the equivalent spell scaling to be in the range of 280-320 at the first major stat breakpoint (60 for single skills, 38/38 for dual). Generally scaling is inverse to size: smaller stuff is higher, bigger stuff is lower.
A few things more to note:
- Every infusion except standard allow for casting both incantations and sorceries. This will have no effect if not using the new Ash of War apart from not greying out spells in your HUD.
- You could probably guess but in case anyone doesn't: the jar shard talismans do NOT work on this, but all the spell-boosting ones do.
- All Ashes of War should be usable with all affinities now. Yes I was lazy.
- Some spells will look a bit weird due to them expecting you to be holding a staff/seal and not a weapon (e.g. Rock Blaster, Shatter Earth). Nothing I can (easily) do about that unfortunately, but it shouldn't be an issue for most spells.
- Any infusion that isn't Flame Art, Magic, Sacred, or one of the new ones will behave strangely with its spell damage. This is because I didn't want to mess with the attack element correction parameters, which are what tell a weapon what each damage type should scale with. For most weapons, it'll be Physical: STR + DEX, Fire: FTH, Lightning: DEX, Magic: INT, Holy: FTH. Thus, casting Beast Claw with a heavy-infused weapon will deal decent damage, but casting Catch Flame will not. Catalysts get around this by making every damage type scale with the same stat(s), which is exactly what I did for Flame Art, Magic, Sacred, and the new infusions.
There is ONE major caveat to this mod: combo'ing spells will be slower or outright impossible. This is due to the game interpreting the input as an Ash of War before interpreting it as a spell, thus using the "do Ash of War" input window of that spell which begins a few frames later than the "do combo spell" input window. In certain cases, the difference in frames is large enough to go completely past the spell input window, so you can't combo at all (Black Blade is the only one I know of like this).
Initial casts are completely unaffected, so you will not notice this most of the time. Think of it as a balancing factor I guess.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
v1.0.1 changes:
- Disabled the use of this Ash on shields. Does not work properly, would require extensive edits to c0000.hks to work with left-handed weapons. Frankly it'd be easier just to implement a second nearly-identical Ash specifically for shields, but I'm not interested in doing that at the moment.
- New infusions will no longer be enabled with whetblades, and will instead be enabled by default. As much as I'd like them to unlock this way, the whetblade event ids were a mess and this is a much cleaner solution.
- The new dual-type infusions (Gravity and Communion) now have higher base damage at +0 (+25 is unchanged). Hadn't actually tested that before and realized it was doing doodoo damage at the start of the game. Should be in-line with other infusions now.
- Removed the redundant param folder. Smithbox seems to just make that whenever you save, it doesn't contain any mod changes as far as I can tell.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Installation:
Use ModEngine2. Put the files (everything at the level that has regulation.bin) in the ModEngine2 mod folder.
Requires Script-Data-Exposer-FS for swapping spells to be updated properly. Just place the dll in the ModEngine2 folder (or wherever you like) and include it in the "external_dlls" entry of config_eldenring. e.g. external_dlls = ["Scripts-Data-Exposer-FS.dll"] if you have it in the ModEngine2 folder.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes for anyone who wants to use this for modding:
I've uploaded a pared-down version in the optional files that does not include any of the infusion additions or changes.
Since there's no infusion changes, I also left out the "enable incantations/sorceries" checkboxes on all the weapons. You can enable this yourself as needed.
I did leave the shop entry for Kale for testing purposes, but you can remove that easily if need be.
The way this works should be pretty straightforward, I'm just spoofing an Ash of War the same way the Carian Sorcery Sword is spoofing a special heavy attack. My ID of choice was 700, well out of range of typical Ashes of War. I labelled all my changes in c0000.hks with "Added/modified by Anisol" so if you need to root around in there you can just search my name and it should come up with all the stuff I added.
Item name changes and such should be under Item DLC 02 stuff, Ashes of War and Skills (might be under DLC 01 in some spots, it's weird like that).
I've exported and uploaded the .csvs and .jsons for merging, available under the miscellaneous files. The download includes both the files for the gameplay version and the no infusions version, separated into their own folders. May be a slight hassle to merge the gameplay version with anything due to the amount of changes. For merging c0000.hks and common.emevd.dcx... just do a file comparison I guess. Not really a clean solution with those.
Honestly, this Ash is more suitable for individual custom weapons than what I did. I just felt like implementing it as a general-purpose Ash you could put on anything.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Credits:
Vawser for Smithbox
AinTunez for DarkScript
Meowmaritus for DSAS (Ended up not needing it but it was still helpful)
ividyon/Exelot for the decompiled c0000.hks
ElaDiDu for Script-Data-Exposer-FS/NewHksInfo.lua
The ?ServerName? discord for various questions I never actually asked but searched for a lot.
Veebelnades in the discord actually had the idea for the spoof implementation about a month and a half ago, just wanted to mention that since I noticed while scouring for clues.
This description is subject to change, I'm probably forgetting things. If there's any major issues (that aren't any quirks mentioned here), then leave a bug report and I should see it eventually. I'll do my best to keep this mod updated.