Been playing some myself. Found lots of decent mods to make it better this time around.
High res Textures
High Res Characters
Makes textures better. Obviously.
Full Combat Rebalance
Very well done rebalance. Because frankly the hardest difficulty in vanilla is still consoletard easy, you can win with no alchemy other than the swallow (first potion you get lol) and/or just spamming igni/quen/aard/etc.
There are two separate rebalances included in this. Flash mod just makes the game harder through giving enemies bonuses and you penalties, so I'm not to fond of it even though you might want to use it for your first time threw since its the most faithful to the original game. FCR completely overhauls things so that instead of a battle of attrition everything dies in about 5s of fighting, you included if you let them flank you. Pretty much everything is different from the base game, but it works. Only downside is that in the early game its easy to get raped if enemies ambush you before you can even draw your sword.
Also included are a number of mini-mods that you can select to install even without either rebalance mod, so you might want to check it out even if you want the vanilla game balance. Make sure to deselect the main menu music replacer because its shit.
One further note: there are 2 files you need to delete from the texture mod if you use this, otherwise health bars don't display correctly. Check the readme.
Stuff to make Geralt's life easier
Lets you meditate/access storage/use nighteye whenever you want. Little bit of a cheat, mostly just a huge time saver.
Increasing movement speeds
Guide on how to make Geralt not slow. Note that contrary to the information, you need to change only the line "Default" in moverates.2da. I recommend changing only the run speed since thats all Geralt needs. It will make everyone else run faster, but it doesn't look too bad so long as you don't push the speed too high. I use a speed of 4.5 myself.
Saxon1974 said:
Is there any point to strategizing over the talents when developing your character?
It seems like you need all 3 attributes and all 3 major skill areas. For combat you need strong, fast and group style so only investing in 1 or 2 seems dumb.
Is ther only decision really whether to go more alchemy heavy or sign heavy?
In Vanilla you will probably end the game with 95% of your bronze talents maxed and 1/2-2/3rds of the Gold/Silvers. You really get enough talents to do everything, especially if you ignore obviously useless talents and Yrden/Axii (which are plenty powerful, but takes 10x as much effort and time to use as simply spamming the others).
All 4 base attributes are really useful, its almost always best to pump them first. Group sword attacks are pretty uninspiring, hordes of low level enemies are fodder for Igni and/or Aard, and both of those signs can also rape high level enemies if you develop them enough. Half the bosses in the game can be downed instantly if Aard stuns them, and level 5 Igni kills pretty much anything in 2/3 casts, even most bosses if you prep with +intensity effects. Since you get a shitton of Bronze talents you will easily max all important swordsmanship skills at the lower levels, higher level silver/gold skills aren't as important since they only apply to the later hits in the attack chain, by which point the enemy could have already died anyway.
FCR will completely change all of this if you use it, mostly for the better
