NOTICE

This mod is for the Steam version of S&S only!
This mod does not use the Desalinated Framework!

Overview


Salt and Sanctuary Overhaul aims to freshen up your Salt and Sanctuary gameplay experience by rebalancing all of the game's equipment and modifying frustrating or underwhelming mechanics to be useful and satisfying. This fixes the game's notoriously overpowered great weapons, underpowered daggers, and useless items such as the Kismet Stone. The mod also makes heavy armor worthwhile by increasing the effects of defense and balance, as well as giving significantly more balance to heavy armor sets.

Equipment Rebalance

The equipment rebalance is designed around these four principles:

1. Consistent, Meaningful Upgrade Values

It was always a little frustrating not knowing just how much of an impact upgrades will make on your equipment's effectiveness. Some weapons gained as much as 12% extra damage per upgrade, while others gained as little as 4%. Shields were barely worth upgrading at all unless their defenses were already near 100%.

Weapons: All weapons now exactly double in base damage when fully upgraded. This means their damage goes up by slightly more than 10% per upgrade.

Shields: Instead of having shields' defenses increase by a percentage, shields now progress such that once you fully upgrade, you take only half as much chip damage when blocking as you otherwise would. For example, if a shield's base fire defense is 40 (60% chip damage), its fully upgraded fire defense will be 70 (30% chip damage). If the base defense was 80, the upgraded defense will be 90, etc.

Armor: Armor pieces now gain flat increases to their defense, granting 210 additional points of defense across a complete armor set.

2. Payoff for Weight

Given how important mobility is, heavy equipment should provide significant benefits to reward the player's investment in the endurance to use it. For weapons, this takes the form of increased damage scaling or special properties like leeching HP on hit. For armor, this means more defense (and balance, if a heavy armor). For shields, this means more defense and stability, as well as bonuses like HP regen.

3. Meaningful Equipment Choices

Weapons, shields, and armor have been balanced against each other such that all (or at least most) of them have something to offer in the long run. While lower class weapons do not stand quite as strong as high class ones, they are still adequate sidearms for characters to switch to in a pinch.

4. Interesting Variety

Within a given equipment class, some items stand out and serve special purposes. This could be scaling with a different stat, providing a special bonus, or dealing a different damage type. These are largely distributed according to these rules about weapon classes:

• Class 0 and 1 weapons are entry-level weapons that practically anyone can use with minimal investment. They remain usable throughout the game if upgraded, but they will be outshined by higher class weapons.
• Class 2 and 3 weapons are quirky weapons. As far as sheer damage goes, they remain respectable even in the late game but are slightly edged out by higher class weapons. The primary reason to use these weapons is their special traits — elemental damage, HP/MP absorption, or flexible scaling. This makes them good dedicated weapons for casters OR switch weapons for physical builds that normally have a hard time doing a certain damage type.
• Class 4 and 5 weapons are top-tier picks for dedicated users of the given weapon type. They are no-nonsense damage dealers that cannot be beaten in sheer DPS. While they may still have special bonuses, they never have non-standard damage types for their class.
  

Application

To ensure balance between weapons and weapon categories, weapons follow these rules:

• Each weapon category has a standard base damage and weight.
• A weapon's base damage is 90% of the standard for its category if it is a fast hitter, 120% if it is a slow hitter, and 100% otherwise.
• Each non-elemental weapon starts with a base of 200% scaling and gets +20% per class level (up to 300% at class 5).
• A weapon gets +5% scaling for each unit of weight above the standard for its category, and gets -10% scaling for each beneficial trait (HP Leech, MP Leech, or Poise).
• If a weapon has split damage, it gets 1.5 times scaling in both stats. These weapons can do great damage if you invest in both stats but will generally do less than a pure damage weapon if you invest in only one.
• Additionally, dual-scaling weapons with pure physical damage receive +60% overall scaling (equivalent to three class levels) with at least 1/4 of the total scaling coming from the disfavored stat. Like elemental weapons, they will underperform if you invest in only one of their scaling stats but will do very high damage if you invest in both.
  

Rules for shields:

• All shields have 100% strike and slash defense.
• Each shield is assigned a score based on its weight, class, type (buckler, heater, kite, or tower), and special effect.
• The higher the score, the closer the geometric average of the shield's stagger reduction and elemental defenses gets to 100.
• No shield has 100% stagger reduction, nor 100% defense against any element (though some come close).
  

Rules for armor:

• Weight and defense are distributed across an armor set as follows:
• Torso: 40%
• Legs: 30%
• Head: 20%
• Arms: 10%
• A piece of light armor gets 42 points of defense per unit weight, to be distributed across all damage types.
• A piece of heavy armor gets 35 points of defense and 5 points of balance per unit weight.
  

The following items have also received buffs to make them more useful:

• Stat boost gear (rings and armors): Grants 5 extra stat points instead of 3.
• Defense rings: Grant 200 defense instead of 50.
• Kismet Stone: Grants 60 item discovery instead of 3.
  

Mechanical and Miscellaneous Changes

Salt and Sanctuary Overhaul also includes changes to the game's code that improve quality of life, enable long-term character progression through new game cycles, and reinforce the equipment rebalance. Major changes include:

• All shields now have the ability to both parry and bash. Smaller shields excel at parrying, while larger shields excel at bashing.
• Parry windows have been tweaked. Smaller shield types have relatively wide parry windows, while larger shields have narrower ones. Parrying without a shield is still possible but has very tight timing.
• Blocking with a weapon has been nerfed to align with the overall decrease in the effectiveness of shields.
• There is now a timed block system. Timing a block just before an attack lands provides considerable defensive benefits.
• On-hit effects like HP Leech now scale with the damage dealt.
• Charged attacks do significantly more damage, and much more poise damage.
• Daggers have a 5x critical hit multiplier.
• The softcaps for all stats now increase by 25 with each new game cycle, maxing at 250 in NG+8. To compensate, the health and attack bonuses enemies receive in NG+ have been increased.
• Class 6 Swordfighter, Pikeman, and Heavy Macefighter nodes have been added to the skill tree, allowing class 5 weapons of the respective types to be one-handed.
• Enemies no longer drop weapons or shields. These items must be transmuted by an alchemist using the enemy's remains.
• Various enemies drop high level upgrade materials that were previously too rare or obtainable only once per playthrough.
• Various enemies drop gray pearls.
• The Mountainsmith blacksmith now sells a warhammer at devotion 3, allowing multiple to be obtained per playthrough.
• The formulas for stamina and drop rate have been changed.
• The formula for max equip load has been changed to emphasize the importance of endurance — characters have less maximum load when starting off but more at high endurance.
  

For a full look at the changes introduced by Salt and Sanctuary Overhaul, check out the links below:

Mechanics Changes

Equipment Changes

Enemy Changes

Shop Changes

Credits and Thanks

Salt and Sanctuary Overhaul was made entirely by me, Xaxaiue.

I'd like to give a special thanks to the following:
Pax Empyrean, whose balance overhaul opened my eyes to this game's modding potential.
Illamasqua, creator of Salt and Sanctuary Resalted, whose mod gave me several good ideas for S&S Overhaul.
Zephyr Greene, creator of the Desalinated Framework, for numerous pointers and design discussions.

You can find their mods below:

Pax Empyrean's Balance Overhaul

Salt and Sanctuary Resalted

Desalinated Framework