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Changelogs
Version 1.0.1
Fixed spell costs/spell requirements. Same bug I had in More Damage, oops
Version 1.0.0
Initial version
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While I do my best to respond to as many comments as possible, I might miss some. If you think your comment requires a reply and I haven't replied in ~24 hours, feel free to bump it by replying to your own comment yourself with "bump". === Ever since the release of Oblivion Remastered I've tried enjoying the combat of the game. I tried the different configurations of More Damage I've created, but not one hit just right.
Since then I wanted to finally, after about 4 days of straight modding instead of enjoying this game during my vacation, create a "definitive" rebalancing on which I'll complete the game. Using this rebalancing the combat will feel deadly, but fair. I highly recommend using the recommended mods a bit further down for the best experience.
While I do intend on providing support as I have for More Damage, I need you to know that from now on I'll have less time due to my vacation being over. Anyways, I welcome balancing suggestions, but I will only be rebalancing those things I agree with.
And - an important question - is this mode save game safe? Yes! You can install and uninstall this mod, and the modules from More Damage, as often as you want. Nothing permanent will stain your save file.
=== If you find my recommended difficulty too hard, don't be afraid to turn it down by either giving yourself more health (or just not using the Less Player Health mod), or by simply turning down the game from Master to Expert or Adept. I myself am a Permadeath Requiem Enjoyer which is why my recommended difficulty might very well be unfun for others. === There is a fix to the bug of blocking draining too much fatigue. See the "Known Bugs" sections. ===
Testing the balance... I've decided to test the early-mid game with 3 different characters:
A pure mage
An assassin/lightly armored warrior/archer
A pure melee tank with restoration
At each of the following level points:
Level 1
Level 5-6
Level 11-12
Level 15-16
Important Information! You might play this with my recommended mods and find that you die in one hit to enemies on level one. That is, depending on your build, intended. I highly recommend investing into Endurance - at least up to 50 - and using a high-level shield-spell if you do not wear any armor.
Since this mod makes combat truly deadly, you will need to play to your classes strengths:
While warriors will be able to tank quite a bit still, they will need health potions, restoration spells, or maybe even a bow for some easy kiting.
Rogues will actually need to be using stealth to kill enemies - but, if you manage to sneak up to one with your dagger, you'll be able to deal massive damage.
Mages really shouldn't get hit. Invisibility, Summons, Paralysis, Frenzy, and Calm exist. And most importantly - the mighty Shield-spell! Or even bound armor! Destruction is not the only school of magic!
Rebalancing I've come to the conclusion that the following modifiers for the different ways of dealing damage seem the most balanced - I will explain my reasoning a bit further down.
Bows: 1.75x
Ammunition: 1.5x
Hand-to-Hand: 2.0x
One-Handed weapons: 2.0x
Two-Handed weapons: 2.5x as well as an increase of 0.1 for reach
Magic: 1.5x
Creatures (Trolls, Mudcrabs, ...): 2.0x as well as an increase of 1.25x for health
Enchantments: 1.5x
Poisons & poisonous ingredients: 2.0x
I've changed the minimum and maximum values of reduced spell effectiveness through armor from 5%-30% to 15%-75%. (This is easily revertable by using this mod by PushTheWinButton and loading it at the very end of your plugins.txt file.
I've increased the health of low-level enemies, as I've found them to be far too weak.
Finally, I've changed the way your armor rating is calculated: Now you always get at minimum 70% of the base armor of the items you're wearing, no matter how skilled you are in the corresponding skill. This will scale up to the vanilla 100% as you get close to a skill of 100.
Why? The following is an explanation about why/how I've landed on the rebalanced modifiers.
Spell effectiveness I wanted to give pure mages a bit of an edge over lightly armored/heavily armored warriors. This change plays well with the increased base armor change, making mages into glass cannons if they do not invest into a shield spell.
Base armor I hated the way my dwarven armor felt like some wet toilet paper when a mudcrab attacked me. And, likely more importantly, enemies also benefit from this change - this means that low-level bandits with low-level HA/LA-skills are now also tankier.
Increased low-level enemy health On my very first character I blasted through the tutorial, as well as the first bandit camp in front of the sewers on Expert without any problems. I then went into the imperial city, helped out a poor shopkeeper involved with grave-robbing, and got my ass handed to me without really being able to fight back in a tomb by two burly nord men.
One-Handed & Hand-To-Hand After much testing I've decided 2x to be the sweet spot. 1.5x felt too little, while 3x felt far too much. With 2x both you and the enemy actually die if hit more than a few times.
Two-Handed Many people have been complaining about 2H-Weapons having been nerfed. While I didn't agree with them at the start, I started agreeing as soon as I saw a one-handed mace and a two-handed battle axe dealing nearly the same amount of damage per hit. With the damage increase 2H-Weapons are now truly deadly - bulky, slow, and deadly. I've also increased the reach of 2H-Weapons by a flat 0.1. At the start this was mainly to "help out" enemy combatants who seemed to really struggle to connect their hits on me, but after playtesting it I realized how good it felt.
Bows & Ammunition "Why not at 2x, like the other weapons?", I hear you ask. That is because, using bows, you are able to maintain distance from the enemy. The more distance you have, the less likely the enemies are able to kill you. Kiting in this game using bows is quite bonkers, after all. Also - I did test it. I did play through a level 15 dungeon once with a shortsword/light armor and once with a bow/light armor, and found the bow to be easier, still.
Magic "Just 1.5x for mages? Discrimination!" - Yes, but actually no. A mage is still able to tear through enemies since magic isn't affected by the increased armor ratings of various combatants. Furthermore - as a mage you have access to "weakness to X" spells, which increase your damage output considerably. And - don't forget other spell schools other than destruction. As a mage you still have access to Paralysis, Charm, Frenzy, and so on, which now actually have at least a bit of a use case in comparison to spamming destruction. Only the following effects have been changed: Fire Damage, Frost Damage, Shock Damage, Absorb Health, Drain Health, Damage Health.
Finally, summons - I didn't really rebalance them, mainly because I was unable to. They are still quite OP, just as in vanilla, since they benefit from all the prior buffs - so you can live your power fantasy through them. Keep in mind that they might die quicker, so do summon them a bit further away from the enemies.
Enchantments See "Magic".
Potions & Ingredients I'm going to be real with you here - I didn't test this. Never have I ever had a fun time doing Alchemy in any Elder Scrolls game, never in my far-too-many hours of gameplay. I decided to leave it at 2.0x for now, since I'd rather it be a bit too strong than too weak. If you have recommendations for a better modifier do tell me.
Creatures Creatures sadly don't benefit from my buffs to weapons/armor. That is why I simply increased their attack damage by 2.0x, and their health by 1.25x.
Recommended Mods You'll find my recommended load order a bit further below.
Difficulty Slider Fixed- highly, highly recommended!! recommend the x2 version, and then playing on Master. This rebalance was tested on exactly that difficulty.
Lower Player Health - I play permadeath, and still use this. Am I stupid? I've uploaded an alternative main.lua file for this mod which decreases health gained per level too. Replace the existing one in the following folder: Oblivion Remastered\OblivionRemastered\Binaries\Win64\Mods\Lower Health\Scripts. Keep in mind that ever since I installed UE4SS for this mod I've been experiencing crashes with an about 50% probability whenever I reload a game. On another note, I'm relatively sure that you can use this mod to increase your health too - simply make the numbers in the main.lua file bigger, instead of smaller. That could be a preferable way to make yourself stronger without changing the difficulty slider.
Ascension - another rebalancing mod. I've got a patch for this one. I also recommend the recommended mods of this mod author (Balanced NPC Level Cap, Balanced Unleveled Rewards, Complete Clutter and Crop Ownership). If you do decide to use PushTheWinButtons recommended mods, don't forget to take his created patches. Finally, I also recommend his Slower Leveling plugin, found here. I've got a patch for Balanced Unleveled Item Rewards. The other mods just listed do not need a patch.
Alchemy Overhaul - potions now restore over time, instead of immediately. Use the Alchemy Overhaul - Ascension patch if you also use Ascension.
Configurable Item Degradation OBSE - ASI - I recommend a value of 0.333 | Keep in mind that I've experienced some crash-on-startup shenanigans with OBSE. Restarting Steam, or starting the game without OBSE and then with it, fixed those whenever they happened.
And for the final reveal, my recommended load order when using exactly these mods:
Mix & Match This mod is theoretically completely compatible with the various Modules from More Damage. That means that if you dislike the fact that magic is only at 1.5x you could:
Download "More Damage - Modules 2x"
Extract MoreDamage_2x_SpellCostReduction.esp, MoreDamage_2x_Spells.esp, and MoreDamage_2x_Spells_Deluxe.esp to your Data folder
Add MoreDamage_2x_SpellCostReduction.esp and MoreDamage_2x_Spells.esp after MoreDamage_CustomCombatOverhaul_Rebalancing.esp, and add MoreDamage_2x_Spells_Deluxe.esp after MoreDamage_CustomCombatOverhaul_Rebalancing_DeluxeAddOn.esp.
Done!
Same goes for every other module. Keep in mind that the following changes are only in the Custom Combat Overhaul, and thus will be overwritten if you take one of the other corresponding files:
2h reach, and different damage values for 1h/2h weapons
1.25x health for creatures
Compatibility & Patches While I might make patches for mods I enjoy, I absolutely recommend following my guide and using my provided scripts to easily(!) create your own patches.
Incompatible with...
This is incompatible with any other mod that touches weapons, ammunition, creatures, damaging enchantments, poisons, damaging ingredients, or damaging spells.
This is incompatible with Oblivion Remastered Decompressed Records, and causes the game to freeze on start-up without an error message (thanks to ZeroRemorse for finding that one!). I am sadly unable to determine the cause of the error.
On weightless mods: If you really want to use one (not recommended) you can grab a weightless patch from here. Take the 1.5x-Version Patch for Ammo, and the 2x-Version Patch for Ingredients and Potions.
Known Bugs
Blocking takes more fatigue than intended - to fix this you can get this mod: Deadlier Combat - Game Settings Loader. Download whatever version you want, it makes no difference, since we will be replacing the contents of the file anyways. Important: You can not use the .ini-file as is. Replace the entirety of the contents with what I have below. The values seem to be alright, but I'm open to suggestions. Thanks to BiteMat for the idea of using this mod!
Heavy Armor (tested), Blade, Blunt (tested - thanks marshkils!), as well as Light Armor, Destruction, ... (untested) will probably level slower since they are hit-based instead of damage-based. This is alright for me, since I am of the opinion that they level far too fast anyways. But: This combined with a skill level speed reduction mod might make the experience a bit too slow for you - I will be starting a playthrough soon, and if I think the leveling speed is too slow I'll change it myself.
Lower Enemy Health, or rather, UE4SS (the tool you hopefully downloaded in tandem with Lower Enemy Health), has about a 50% chance of crashing your game when reloading a save. Thanks to nest3k we might have a fix:
For those experiencing crashing with Lower Player Health as a result of adding UE4SS, disabling the following setting in UE4SS-settings.ini has allowed me to play for a few hours and load several times without crashing. Might be luck, but worth a shot before uninstalling entirely.
bUseUObjectArrayCache = false
FAQ "My game crashes on start-up!" Stop using OBSE. With this comes the loss of the reduced armor degradation. I'll soon look into an equipment-breakage fix that doesn't use that.
"My game has an infinite black screen on start-up!" If you use MO2: (Thanks to v1ld and Silarn for this info):
Heyo. After running into bizarre load issues with this over on the MO2 discord, we discovered there's a specific load order incompatibility that will result in an infinite black screen.
To avoid this please ensure 'DLCFrostcrag.esp' loads before 'DLCHorseArmor.esp'.
"I don't seem to deal increased damage!" Check, once with, and once without the mod the damage values of your weapons and your magic. If they change, you do deal more damage. "It is too hard! Enemies don't die fast enough! I die in far fewer hits!" Turn down the difficulty, or do not use the Less Player Health mod.
--- If you truly think something is wrong with your installation of this mod, and you've checked the recommended load order, try the following: (!this might break some other mods installed through UE4SS or OBSE!)
backup your .esp-files
backup your plugins.txt file
delete your .esp files and your plugins.txt file
run "Verify game files" on steam (google it if you're unsure how to do that - not sure how to do that on gamepass)
Start vanilla oblivion and check weapon/magic damage numbers
re-add the .esp files
open the newly created plugins.txt file and re-add only my mod.
Start oblivion again and re-check the weapon/magic damage numbers. they should have increased
add the rest of the missing plugins.txt file
Check it once more. If something broke now, then there is an incompatibility.
If that still doesn't fix it, then leave a post for me to try and troubleshoot with you!
