Trashos
What simple yet logical tweaks would you make to F:NV's itemization, and other easily-editable things like damage values and VATS values and stuff like that? I have nothing to do till mid-Jan when I leave so I want to spend the following weeks doing something absolutely autistic that only myself and MAYBE one or two other people will even bother "using", and it dawned on me: Mod/tweak every single adjustable numerical value possible in FNV, on NPCs, on Factions, on Checks, on Gear/Loot/Items!
I ride the Spectrum like the Silver Surfer rides the cosmic waves, so I will do it.
Aside from the stuff I mentioned previously: reducing by 25% flat substraction any/all shots to the HEAD while in VATS (this is very easy to do, takes less than 2 minutes). Why? Make "go for crits to thead" slightly less powerful (i mean you can 95% enemy heads by like, level 10, jesus christ), and thus...
...opening a viable choice in instead going for arms/legs by making cripple effect 2x or more pronounced: default leg-crippling slows enemy down by 33 %, which as you know is barely noticeable in-game especially when you have a swarm of fuckers on you, and to top it off arm/leg crippling is kind of hard to accomplish because Obsidian gave the appendages a surprisingly high amount of HP:
- reduce arm/leg HP by half
- increase crippled leg debuff to 75%, make those fuckers feel them crippling legs all crippled and shit
- increase the value which controls the chance % of whether or not arm-crippling will make enemy drop their weapons to 100%
- ...but balance that by making VATS shots to arms receive a 50% penalty to accuracy, flat value. Probably give a 25% penalty to VATS-targeting legs then.
Reduced backpedal speed is already in Sawyer mod which I found surprisingly insightly from Sawyer, didn't think he was that smart, so no need for that. Other than that, what else could one tweak? Obvious things like raising explosive damage, I guess, but on that account I think increasing their radius instead is much better, and the clincher that will make Explosives 100% legit is:
- make Explosives have 75% chance to cripple whatever parts of enemy it hits (frankly I wanna make it 100%).
This way the grenade/mine will do the vanilla damage, but its radius will be much bigger (making it more dangerous to the player as well) and whoever it hits they're gonna come out with arms/legs crippled, with the above debuffs.
Any thoughts/ideas?
Oh, I think halving all Companion's Attributes by 50% across the board would also be a good tweak. They are simply too good in default game and since there is no way to fix the main issue companions bring to this game:
- that enemies always/most-of-the time will focus their attentions on your Companion instead of you the player, thus making a lot of FNV's combat somewhat trivial is you take this into account and abuse it.
I don't know how one could possibly change enemy AI enough to
not do that, and since after 6 years of game being out
there still isn't an Enemy AI mod which does this... I think it's safe to say at this point it's for all intents and purposes impossible to change that enemy behavior.
So... the band-aid fix is just nerfing Companions a lot so that they still remain useful (i.e. they're automatic meat shields and even with -50% Attributes/Skills, they will STILL be better than 90% of the game enemies), but they'll be weak enough to (probably) go down fast if tough enemies target them thus eliminating their meat-shield property for tough encounters.
EDIT: Also I would love to find some way to make movement speed remain unaffected by armor types. I'm not a fan of having to go slow as a fucking turtle everywhere just because I want to wear some Desert Ranger gear.
Instead of heavier armors affecting movement speed (which has little-to-no tactical value for purposes of combat because of VATS; it only serves to make the game tedious and annoying because you have to switch to fast-movement gear to move fast to next location and it has no meaningful bearing on what it was supposed to have bearing: the combat)--
--instead, make med/hev. Armors give maluses of some sort. Probably I'll do each one individually, not something across the board. Like, for example, the base game has stuff like the Metal armor that gives a malus to AGILITY.
That is what they should have run with instead of making them affect movement speed and thus make the game tedious; one can extrapolate from that concept. I mean, it's not exactly rocket science.
Anyway, if you want to move in that direction, consider giving medium and heavy armor drawbacks to Agility OR Sneaking, drawing/holstering, and Reloading. Note that with the JSawyer mod there are some really cool medium armors available in stores (eg, at Novac), so be careful that you don't make them a no brainer.
