Lithium Flower
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Messages
- 1,832
Dedicated to PorkyThePaladin
DISCLAIMER AND CREDITS
***This is a compilation of other people's mods with my own tweaks and compatibility patches that allow them to be used together with the latest version of the game. I do not claim authorship of any of the below mods. If any modder whose work is a part of this pack wants me to take this pack down, please shoot me a PM on this forum and I will do so as soon as I am able.***
Minus my own changes, this pack consists of the following:
-Atmospheric Nights by olegkuz1997 (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1305)
-Better Combat Evolved 3.0 by ETI & etisvoloch (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1686)
-Witcher Book Collection by KasparsBITELV (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1265/)
-Boostrap by rmemr (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2109/)
-Crossbow Damage Boost and Balance by Fnts (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1126/)
-Custom Localization Fix by uacvax (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/897/)
-Enemy Scaling & Gameplay Overhaul by nolenthar (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1185)
-No GPS by leethx (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1562/)
-No Instant Kill on Knockdown by Siniath (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1451)
-Primer by SkylineR390 (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1318)
-Random Encounters by erxv (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/785/)
-All NPC Scabbards by eguitar01 (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1569/)
-SharedImports by rmemr (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2110/)
-Nitpicker's Patch by chuckcash (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2117)
These guys deserve all the credit, I'm just the stupid monkey who put all this shit together and smoothened some rough edges to ensure different changes don't conflict with one another.
I go over the major, foundational changes in the manual, but for a full breakdown of what each mod does feel free to check out their respective nexus pages.
INTRODUCTION
Do you wish Witcher 3 had more (or any) meaningful systems? Do you mourn the progressive destruction of Witcher 1's excellent alchemy system throughout the series? Do you have autism? Well boy do I have a mod pack for you. I call it the "Last Wish Edition" because the last wish I am going to make before slitting my fucking wrists would be to never have made this pack in the first place.
Jokes aside, I think I've put together a combination of mods, held together by my own tweaks and compatibility patches, that substantially improves the game. My philosophy was for every change to either fix existing issues (including some major bugs that have, for whatever reason, survived to the latest version of the game thanks to CDPR not being very good at things) or introduce changes that would introduce meaning and depth to systems: combat now requires some tactics as opposed to merely decent timing, alchemy is restored to its former glory, nights are no longer just reskinned days, etc. At the same time I avoided changes that introduced entirely new systems to the game, as the more radical the change, the more likely said change is to be a bad one.
The pack comes with a fairly comprehensive manual noting installation instructions (please follow them carefully), going over modded features, and so on. Please read the manual. I had originally made this pack for myself and a few friends and decided to upload it here on a whim, so the documentation of the new features isn't terribly extensive (again, refer to individual mod pages if the summary of what this mod does is not sufficient), however the documentation of various considerations and instructions is.
Many parts of the modpack are customizable, but you don't have to figure out the most optimal settings but yourself. I have provided the suggested settings to use in the manual.
Finally, I recommend playing using the regular New Game start and the Deathwish Difficulty. This mod should work on an existing save, as long as you drink a clearing potion in game to reset Geralt's abilities and reinitialize all of the mods, however this is sub-optimal and I am not going to be held responsible if your saves get corrupted or something.
INSTALLATION
Please refer to the manual for installation instructions. The process is relatively painless and only slightly more complicated than dragging and dropping the modded files into the game's directory. Afterwards you will have to edit/add a few lines in the game's input.settings ini file. Finally, after starting a new game, you will have to configure the mod options using the recommended settings I provided which should take a few more minutes.
FEATURES:
Again, rather than list every single change I am going to go over the major, foundational areas of the game and explain how they have been overhauled.
Tacticool Combat
All you need to win in vanilla Witcher 3 is a light attack, the step-dodge, and a functional spinal cord. That is because you can chain attacks forever, and dodges cancel your animations allowing you to evade attacks at absolutely any time, even mid-swing. All you need your stamina bar for is the ocassional sign use, which will be Quen in 80% of the cases or Yrden/Axii for wraiths/alghouls respectively or Igni if you are going for the brainless sign builds. The game's "challenge" comes from tackling monsters 5+ levels above you, who get bonuses which massively bloat their HP and damage output beyond what their higher level actually gives them, and is more of a pain-in-the-ass war of attrition than a genuine challenge.
The changes in this modpack change this dynamic considerable. First of all, every single action now has an associated stamina cost. Meanwhile signs cost ~66% of the stamina barThis happens to make a world of difference; in the vanilla game, over-extension and positioning are rarely concerns, but with the mod they are one of the many tactical considerations that are on the player's mind most of the time. Since you can't dodge forever, powerful solitary monsters can wear you down and hordes will utterly gangrape you unless you actually use your brain and employ various tactics. Debuff or thin out the enemy with bombs and the crossbow, use signs to create vulnerabilities and chokepoints, always reposition yourself to avoid becoming surrounded, and come prepared with the right potions and oils. Every melee attack now has a role - fast for dodgers, heavy if you have the stamina for it, rend against armored opponents, and whirl against tightly-packed groups - and are available from the start, along with alternate sign modes, so that you have all the basic combat options from the very beginning of the game.
The three armour classes now come with new sets of bonuses and maluses. For example, Heavy Armour dramatically increases vitality and attack power, but decreases stamina regeneration while increasing stamina costs for actions, making you move like a tank while hitting like a truck. Meanwhile, Light Armour turns you into an agile glass cannon. Having tested several builds, I can say that using the armour of different weights actually makes the gameplay wildly different.
A small but crucial change is the removal of the autolock (it can be turned back on if you wish). This means that every attack needs to be manually aimed. This removes the annoying and often lethal occurrence of attacking the wrong target. There is an added element of challenge as you actually must track moving enemies with your mouse/gamepad as the game won't do it for you; however, thanks to greater precision, it is also a possible to benefit from this change by making attacks from angles that do not expose you or even by hitting multiple enemies with a single heavy attack.
Higher-level monsters no longer have bloated stats. They are still benefit from being higher level, but their difficulty is not artificially inflated.
Unfucked Upscaling
Upscaling is necessary to Witcher 3 as it is too easy to overlevel the main quest. However, the vanilla alogrithm is strange and annoying. When upscaled 20+ levels, many enemies would turn into HP sponges. Infamously, Rats and Djinn turn into deathmachines when upscaled. In the Blood and Wine expansion pack, Geralt would often level past 50, which meant that Toussaint enemies would match his level and severely overlevel end-game gear, forcing the player to either be stuck with cool, statistically inadequate shit or switching over to level-scaled generic items which is no fun at all.
So I configured ESGO to produce the following scaling formula: Enemies 5 or less levels below Geralt are scaled to his level. Enemies 6-14 levels below Geralt are scaled to be exactly 5 levels below him. Finally, enemies 15- levels below Geralt are scaled exactly 10 levels below him. This means that enemies lower than Geralt in level are still relatively weaker but still pose a challenge and are, for the most part, not reduced to a one-shot fodder as is the case without upscaling.
You can customize the upscaling formula in whichever way you wish through a convenient in-game interface if you are unsatisfied with my preset.
Real Alchemy for Real People
This mod pack includes the Primer which I consider to be the single greatest mod made for the entire Witcher series. Simply put, it tries to recreate the Witcher 1 alchemy system as faithfully as possible. Alchemical preparations need certain base substances to be created, however each base substance can be derived from 10-20 different ingredients, so its never a matter of grinding for the single correct material. For instance, Rebis is a base substance that can be found in Celandine (a common plant) as well as Drowner Brains and about a dozen other things. What this means is that acquiring ingredients is no longer akin to mindlessly fulfilling a checklist like in the vanilla game or GM but rather the natural result of exploration and combat. While potions are harder and more expensive to make than in vanilla, they also last for the better part of the day with some skill investment, which means that potion use is less of a temporary buff and more of a major mechanic you actually need to approach with some planning and forethought. Witcher 1 alchemy is wonderful because it creates a very engaging and, for the lack of a better term, """immersive""" gameplay loop of exploration and preparation before major combat encounters. For example, after taking on a witcher contract and identifying the monster in question, you may have to actually return to an alchemist/settlement or set up a campfire in the wilderness and take a second to brew the right oils/potions/bombs for the job, which rarely happens in the vanilla game as typically you have all the resources you need at all times.
Instructions for how the new alchemy system are included in the manual.
Meaningful Day/Night cycle
Remember nights from Witcher 1? The quiet rural landscape would transform into one of those horror slavic tales I was read as a kid, full of ghouls and ghosts. That is why, much like the monsters they hunt, Witchers come out at night. Geralt prepared at day and hunted at night, almost like a nocturnal animal.
In vanilla Witcher 3, on the other hand, night is just a reskinned day. So I attempted to recreate the day/night dynamic of the original game using several mods.
First of all, Geralt now starts the game with an ability that grants a bonus to passive health renegeration in daytime and a bonus to stamina regeneration during nighttime. This simple change turns the time of day into a serious consideration. Daytime is more suited for exploring, where long-term health regeneration is a factor, but for long, critical fights one could benefit from the nighttime bonus. In other words, just like in Witcher 1 there is an incentive to explore during the day and hunt during the night.
Of course, the world in W3 is very static and there aren't, to my knowledge, new enemy spawns or behaviors during the night save for a few nocturnal creatures becoming marginally more powerful. So I found a mod which I configured to randomly spawn various nocturnal monsters (wolves if you are lucky, ekkimma if you are not) some distance away from Geralt at random intervals, ONLY at night and in the wilderness. These monsters actually act dynamically by hunting passive creatures but will wander towards Geralt's initial position at the time of their spawn, so that you will have a choice of hunting or evading them.
Finally, nights are now dark. Like, really dark. Cat potions are your friends.
If you hate the idea of dark nights and random encounters, that, too, can be changed or disabled in-game.
Better Economy
Buy prices have been multiplied, sell prices halved. Free loot in civilized areas has been dramatically reduced, as has the availability of valuable and rare shit like alchemy bases or dimeritium ores. Basically, Geralt should now be relatively poor throughout his journey into Velen, as opposed to the vanilla game where poverty ended soon after White Orchard. Of course, your mileage will vary by the amount of looting and side-objectives you do; I am a completionist and grab every single question mark on the map, and managed to afford every late-game moneysink while floating 20-30k by the end of the game, however I was reduced to below 1k gold several times throughout the playthrough, even after level 20.
Better Economy, Reprise
I created an additional, optional mod that is installed over the mod pack.
The purpose of this mod is to take inconsequential stealing opportunities out of the game. Tripping over rare materials in villages while getting crap loot in treasure chests is ridiculous.
What it do:
-Made all generic sacks, crates, and barrels unlootable.
-Revised common chests to contain common and useful gear.
-Human enemies now have more diverse loot tables and a higher chance of
dropping more stuff.
-Doubled all loot in dungeons, caves, and mines.
-Caves contain an inflated chance of containing alchemy ingredients;
-Mines contain an inflated chance of containing metals and ores;
-Dungeons have diverse loot tables.
In theory and in the period of time I spent testing this, there should no longer be free loot in civilized place except for common chests which are rare and/or hidden and no longer contain rare items.
I have NOT TESTED THE ENTIRE GAME using this mod. I have no idea what long-term ramifications for the game's economy these changes will bring. Use at your own risk.
This mod is compatible with existing saves. See bottom of the post for download link.
EDIT: I should mention that Toussaint is unaffected and uses vanilla loot tables. The main reason for this is that the loot categories in the .xml files are rather unintuitive for Blood & Wine so I'd rather not touch anything rather than break everything by accident. I suppose Toussaint is meant to be a land of milk and honey...
THE UGLY
As I had originally planned to assemble this pack for myself and a few people who weren't really concerned with modding the game themselves, I have taken some...shortcuts in implementing my fixes and changes. If you are familiar with the way the scripts are merged for this game, I kinda injected the majority of my changes into the merged files as opposed to creating a new mod and merging that with the rest of the mods. In other words, I did something quick, easy, and absolutely inelegant. Does this affect the actual game? Not really. However, if you plan on modding the game, pretty much anything that alters a script, .ws or .xml file has a pretty good chance of undoing my changes during the script merging process and fucking a bunch of things up. The game might still be playable, but one or more things are going to be broken under its hood. So as a rule of thumb, try not to install any more script altering mods on top of this pack. Graphical mods and everyone's favorite nudity patches should probably be fine, though.
While I am quite serious when I claim that this version of the game has less balance and technical issues than fully patched vanilla game, there are some issues to keep in mind. The vast majority of them are rather minor, like the descriptions of a few abilities being different from their actual effects. There is also a few issues in the early game, for example you have to choose to skip the combat tutorial with Vesemir to progress. These issues and their solutions are all documented in the manual.
To the 1.5 people that actually play this, please let me know if any bugs or issues pop up.
FOOTAGE
720p and youtube's large player recommended as lossless video compression is a secret to me.
Pardon the 5:4 resolution (old monitor) and shitty youtube compression.
This is a very early and fairly challenging Lvl5 fight at a bandit camp situated on an island south of Crow Perch.
I used basic hanged man's venom on the Viper Steel Sword, bottled water (which heals you for a very small amount over a long period of time in this mod pack as opposed to basically being a healing potion), basic Thunderbolt and Maribor's Forest potion to do as much damage as possible in a short period of time. Since I am taking toxicity damage, I keep White Honey in slot 4 which ends up saving me.
I chose to fight during daytime so that the increased passive health regeneration would offset some of the toxicity damage I was taking. I made a few retarded mistakes, like misjudging the range of the initial heavy attack, but I also got lucky with one of the arbalists nailing the halberdier in the back. I figured showing this footage of an imperfect play would be a better representation of the game than a flawless run.
You can compare and contrast with the light armour video or even the parry video by Crunchy on page 2. A more grounded fighting style with emphasis on heavy attacks and parries is more preferable with heavy armour's glacial stamina regen rate, plus you are stacking a lot of bonus damage % which is a must when fighting DLC enemies. At the same time the AI is much more aggressive than in vanilla so you can't right click your way to victory - sorry, Crunch. Still, there are mistakes and/or sloppy parts - I should have popped way more free Quens during blizzard's slow-mo to take advantage of my set bonus, there was a lot of shitty parry timing, etc (in my defense, my main playthrough is a light armour build in which I rarely parry.) Oh well, the aim of these videos is not to demonstrate my skill (or lack thereof).
This build is heavily focused on adrenaline and vitality with euphoria mutation (mutated blood/skin may have synergized better with how tanky this build is).
Besides Blizzard, I used Swallow (unnecessarily increased toxicity for the second round of combat but whatever), Full Moon (maximum vitality, maximum tankiness) and Tawny Owl (with this mod pack heavy armour very hard to use without tawny owl. I would walk around in medium armour until I found an opportunity to pop TO and switch to a heavier set. Think of it like power armour in Codex' favorite RPG, Fallout 4)
You might notice that I sharply turn my mouse when power attacking adjacent enemies to hit several of them. This is possible thanks to the softlock is being disabled. A more advanced version of this is performing a heavy attack that not only damages the enemy but also moves you out of the range of their attack - not sure if I performed any in the above runs but definitely fun to land, though very risky. Something like a Witcher version of a Talhoffer masterstroke.
What is much less risky is the Whirl rapechain. Although I have since changed the Blizzard slowdown duration, so effectiveness of Blizzard-assisted whirl is no longer representantive. There are two ways to maintain a very long/infinite Whirl attack, being an adrenaline-focused build or the use of Superior Blizzard. I had both, of course. The former entails 3+ enemies consistently and the latter killing someone every 6 or less seconds to keep the slowmo going, so you still need to set up the whirl chain by getting a good chokepoint going and preferably softening up enemies with bombs or debuffing them with aard or yrden, and getting rid of shields/polearms/archers first. It is a bit of a double edged-sword, as you need a thick group of enemies to keep the whirl going but that many can typically score free, so changing directions and distributing damage more or less evenly is a must. Quen shield, especially when used with ursine armour, does help a lot in being more aggressive with your whirls. It should be noted that enemies can still hit you when doing a charge attack from behind, so its not an unbeatable strategy although it is still ridiculously effective against massive groups compared to alternatives, as I suppose it should be.
Naturally, this hanse base is particularly well suited to Whirl due to its staircase.
Lastly, I mostly ignored the archers as late game + heavy armour render them more or less an inconvenience, although they still staggered me. When I ended the video there were still a few of them left plus the guy who lit the distress beacon, but at that point my victory was certain.
(Incidentally, I might redo the light armour video given the quantity of sloppiness in it. Maybe even base it in this base to showcase how two different late-game playstyles tackle the same challenge? We'll see.)
DOWNLOAD THE MOD PACK:
MEGA Link for Modpack:
https://mega.nz/#!L3BiCZ4L!YcPk5jDfSqwxNH-1VSnEHXvr1Jl9OeT8275bhJRkOfg
MEGA Link for Loot Rebalance:
https://mega.nz/#!7ypzwCLA!GsgimWuFC8KKS21XuXaXnCzlVK0zdd67io_wI-4o1w8
DISCLAIMER AND CREDITS
***This is a compilation of other people's mods with my own tweaks and compatibility patches that allow them to be used together with the latest version of the game. I do not claim authorship of any of the below mods. If any modder whose work is a part of this pack wants me to take this pack down, please shoot me a PM on this forum and I will do so as soon as I am able.***
Minus my own changes, this pack consists of the following:
-Atmospheric Nights by olegkuz1997 (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1305)
-Better Combat Evolved 3.0 by ETI & etisvoloch (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1686)
-Witcher Book Collection by KasparsBITELV (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1265/)
-Boostrap by rmemr (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2109/)
-Crossbow Damage Boost and Balance by Fnts (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1126/)
-Custom Localization Fix by uacvax (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/897/)
-Enemy Scaling & Gameplay Overhaul by nolenthar (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1185)
-No GPS by leethx (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1562/)
-No Instant Kill on Knockdown by Siniath (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1451)
-Primer by SkylineR390 (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1318)
-Random Encounters by erxv (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/785/)
-All NPC Scabbards by eguitar01 (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1569/)
-SharedImports by rmemr (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2110/)
-Nitpicker's Patch by chuckcash (https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2117)
These guys deserve all the credit, I'm just the stupid monkey who put all this shit together and smoothened some rough edges to ensure different changes don't conflict with one another.
I go over the major, foundational changes in the manual, but for a full breakdown of what each mod does feel free to check out their respective nexus pages.
INTRODUCTION
Do you wish Witcher 3 had more (or any) meaningful systems? Do you mourn the progressive destruction of Witcher 1's excellent alchemy system throughout the series? Do you have autism? Well boy do I have a mod pack for you. I call it the "Last Wish Edition" because the last wish I am going to make before slitting my fucking wrists would be to never have made this pack in the first place.
Jokes aside, I think I've put together a combination of mods, held together by my own tweaks and compatibility patches, that substantially improves the game. My philosophy was for every change to either fix existing issues (including some major bugs that have, for whatever reason, survived to the latest version of the game thanks to CDPR not being very good at things) or introduce changes that would introduce meaning and depth to systems: combat now requires some tactics as opposed to merely decent timing, alchemy is restored to its former glory, nights are no longer just reskinned days, etc. At the same time I avoided changes that introduced entirely new systems to the game, as the more radical the change, the more likely said change is to be a bad one.
The pack comes with a fairly comprehensive manual noting installation instructions (please follow them carefully), going over modded features, and so on. Please read the manual. I had originally made this pack for myself and a few friends and decided to upload it here on a whim, so the documentation of the new features isn't terribly extensive (again, refer to individual mod pages if the summary of what this mod does is not sufficient), however the documentation of various considerations and instructions is.
Many parts of the modpack are customizable, but you don't have to figure out the most optimal settings but yourself. I have provided the suggested settings to use in the manual.
Finally, I recommend playing using the regular New Game start and the Deathwish Difficulty. This mod should work on an existing save, as long as you drink a clearing potion in game to reset Geralt's abilities and reinitialize all of the mods, however this is sub-optimal and I am not going to be held responsible if your saves get corrupted or something.
INSTALLATION
Please refer to the manual for installation instructions. The process is relatively painless and only slightly more complicated than dragging and dropping the modded files into the game's directory. Afterwards you will have to edit/add a few lines in the game's input.settings ini file. Finally, after starting a new game, you will have to configure the mod options using the recommended settings I provided which should take a few more minutes.
FEATURES:
Again, rather than list every single change I am going to go over the major, foundational areas of the game and explain how they have been overhauled.
Tacticool Combat
All you need to win in vanilla Witcher 3 is a light attack, the step-dodge, and a functional spinal cord. That is because you can chain attacks forever, and dodges cancel your animations allowing you to evade attacks at absolutely any time, even mid-swing. All you need your stamina bar for is the ocassional sign use, which will be Quen in 80% of the cases or Yrden/Axii for wraiths/alghouls respectively or Igni if you are going for the brainless sign builds. The game's "challenge" comes from tackling monsters 5+ levels above you, who get bonuses which massively bloat their HP and damage output beyond what their higher level actually gives them, and is more of a pain-in-the-ass war of attrition than a genuine challenge.
The changes in this modpack change this dynamic considerable. First of all, every single action now has an associated stamina cost. Meanwhile signs cost ~66% of the stamina barThis happens to make a world of difference; in the vanilla game, over-extension and positioning are rarely concerns, but with the mod they are one of the many tactical considerations that are on the player's mind most of the time. Since you can't dodge forever, powerful solitary monsters can wear you down and hordes will utterly gangrape you unless you actually use your brain and employ various tactics. Debuff or thin out the enemy with bombs and the crossbow, use signs to create vulnerabilities and chokepoints, always reposition yourself to avoid becoming surrounded, and come prepared with the right potions and oils. Every melee attack now has a role - fast for dodgers, heavy if you have the stamina for it, rend against armored opponents, and whirl against tightly-packed groups - and are available from the start, along with alternate sign modes, so that you have all the basic combat options from the very beginning of the game.
The three armour classes now come with new sets of bonuses and maluses. For example, Heavy Armour dramatically increases vitality and attack power, but decreases stamina regeneration while increasing stamina costs for actions, making you move like a tank while hitting like a truck. Meanwhile, Light Armour turns you into an agile glass cannon. Having tested several builds, I can say that using the armour of different weights actually makes the gameplay wildly different.
A small but crucial change is the removal of the autolock (it can be turned back on if you wish). This means that every attack needs to be manually aimed. This removes the annoying and often lethal occurrence of attacking the wrong target. There is an added element of challenge as you actually must track moving enemies with your mouse/gamepad as the game won't do it for you; however, thanks to greater precision, it is also a possible to benefit from this change by making attacks from angles that do not expose you or even by hitting multiple enemies with a single heavy attack.
Higher-level monsters no longer have bloated stats. They are still benefit from being higher level, but their difficulty is not artificially inflated.
Unfucked Upscaling
Upscaling is necessary to Witcher 3 as it is too easy to overlevel the main quest. However, the vanilla alogrithm is strange and annoying. When upscaled 20+ levels, many enemies would turn into HP sponges. Infamously, Rats and Djinn turn into deathmachines when upscaled. In the Blood and Wine expansion pack, Geralt would often level past 50, which meant that Toussaint enemies would match his level and severely overlevel end-game gear, forcing the player to either be stuck with cool, statistically inadequate shit or switching over to level-scaled generic items which is no fun at all.
So I configured ESGO to produce the following scaling formula: Enemies 5 or less levels below Geralt are scaled to his level. Enemies 6-14 levels below Geralt are scaled to be exactly 5 levels below him. Finally, enemies 15- levels below Geralt are scaled exactly 10 levels below him. This means that enemies lower than Geralt in level are still relatively weaker but still pose a challenge and are, for the most part, not reduced to a one-shot fodder as is the case without upscaling.
You can customize the upscaling formula in whichever way you wish through a convenient in-game interface if you are unsatisfied with my preset.
Real Alchemy for Real People
This mod pack includes the Primer which I consider to be the single greatest mod made for the entire Witcher series. Simply put, it tries to recreate the Witcher 1 alchemy system as faithfully as possible. Alchemical preparations need certain base substances to be created, however each base substance can be derived from 10-20 different ingredients, so its never a matter of grinding for the single correct material. For instance, Rebis is a base substance that can be found in Celandine (a common plant) as well as Drowner Brains and about a dozen other things. What this means is that acquiring ingredients is no longer akin to mindlessly fulfilling a checklist like in the vanilla game or GM but rather the natural result of exploration and combat. While potions are harder and more expensive to make than in vanilla, they also last for the better part of the day with some skill investment, which means that potion use is less of a temporary buff and more of a major mechanic you actually need to approach with some planning and forethought. Witcher 1 alchemy is wonderful because it creates a very engaging and, for the lack of a better term, """immersive""" gameplay loop of exploration and preparation before major combat encounters. For example, after taking on a witcher contract and identifying the monster in question, you may have to actually return to an alchemist/settlement or set up a campfire in the wilderness and take a second to brew the right oils/potions/bombs for the job, which rarely happens in the vanilla game as typically you have all the resources you need at all times.
Instructions for how the new alchemy system are included in the manual.
Meaningful Day/Night cycle
Remember nights from Witcher 1? The quiet rural landscape would transform into one of those horror slavic tales I was read as a kid, full of ghouls and ghosts. That is why, much like the monsters they hunt, Witchers come out at night. Geralt prepared at day and hunted at night, almost like a nocturnal animal.
In vanilla Witcher 3, on the other hand, night is just a reskinned day. So I attempted to recreate the day/night dynamic of the original game using several mods.
First of all, Geralt now starts the game with an ability that grants a bonus to passive health renegeration in daytime and a bonus to stamina regeneration during nighttime. This simple change turns the time of day into a serious consideration. Daytime is more suited for exploring, where long-term health regeneration is a factor, but for long, critical fights one could benefit from the nighttime bonus. In other words, just like in Witcher 1 there is an incentive to explore during the day and hunt during the night.
Of course, the world in W3 is very static and there aren't, to my knowledge, new enemy spawns or behaviors during the night save for a few nocturnal creatures becoming marginally more powerful. So I found a mod which I configured to randomly spawn various nocturnal monsters (wolves if you are lucky, ekkimma if you are not) some distance away from Geralt at random intervals, ONLY at night and in the wilderness. These monsters actually act dynamically by hunting passive creatures but will wander towards Geralt's initial position at the time of their spawn, so that you will have a choice of hunting or evading them.
Finally, nights are now dark. Like, really dark. Cat potions are your friends.
If you hate the idea of dark nights and random encounters, that, too, can be changed or disabled in-game.
Better Economy
Buy prices have been multiplied, sell prices halved. Free loot in civilized areas has been dramatically reduced, as has the availability of valuable and rare shit like alchemy bases or dimeritium ores. Basically, Geralt should now be relatively poor throughout his journey into Velen, as opposed to the vanilla game where poverty ended soon after White Orchard. Of course, your mileage will vary by the amount of looting and side-objectives you do; I am a completionist and grab every single question mark on the map, and managed to afford every late-game moneysink while floating 20-30k by the end of the game, however I was reduced to below 1k gold several times throughout the playthrough, even after level 20.
Better Economy, Reprise
I created an additional, optional mod that is installed over the mod pack.
The purpose of this mod is to take inconsequential stealing opportunities out of the game. Tripping over rare materials in villages while getting crap loot in treasure chests is ridiculous.
What it do:
-Made all generic sacks, crates, and barrels unlootable.
-Revised common chests to contain common and useful gear.
-Human enemies now have more diverse loot tables and a higher chance of
dropping more stuff.
-Doubled all loot in dungeons, caves, and mines.
-Caves contain an inflated chance of containing alchemy ingredients;
-Mines contain an inflated chance of containing metals and ores;
-Dungeons have diverse loot tables.
In theory and in the period of time I spent testing this, there should no longer be free loot in civilized place except for common chests which are rare and/or hidden and no longer contain rare items.
I have NOT TESTED THE ENTIRE GAME using this mod. I have no idea what long-term ramifications for the game's economy these changes will bring. Use at your own risk.
This mod is compatible with existing saves. See bottom of the post for download link.
EDIT: I should mention that Toussaint is unaffected and uses vanilla loot tables. The main reason for this is that the loot categories in the .xml files are rather unintuitive for Blood & Wine so I'd rather not touch anything rather than break everything by accident. I suppose Toussaint is meant to be a land of milk and honey...
THE UGLY
As I had originally planned to assemble this pack for myself and a few people who weren't really concerned with modding the game themselves, I have taken some...shortcuts in implementing my fixes and changes. If you are familiar with the way the scripts are merged for this game, I kinda injected the majority of my changes into the merged files as opposed to creating a new mod and merging that with the rest of the mods. In other words, I did something quick, easy, and absolutely inelegant. Does this affect the actual game? Not really. However, if you plan on modding the game, pretty much anything that alters a script, .ws or .xml file has a pretty good chance of undoing my changes during the script merging process and fucking a bunch of things up. The game might still be playable, but one or more things are going to be broken under its hood. So as a rule of thumb, try not to install any more script altering mods on top of this pack. Graphical mods and everyone's favorite nudity patches should probably be fine, though.
While I am quite serious when I claim that this version of the game has less balance and technical issues than fully patched vanilla game, there are some issues to keep in mind. The vast majority of them are rather minor, like the descriptions of a few abilities being different from their actual effects. There is also a few issues in the early game, for example you have to choose to skip the combat tutorial with Vesemir to progress. These issues and their solutions are all documented in the manual.
To the 1.5 people that actually play this, please let me know if any bugs or issues pop up.
FOOTAGE
720p and youtube's large player recommended as lossless video compression is a secret to me.
Pardon the 5:4 resolution (old monitor) and shitty youtube compression.
This is a very early and fairly challenging Lvl5 fight at a bandit camp situated on an island south of Crow Perch.
I used basic hanged man's venom on the Viper Steel Sword, bottled water (which heals you for a very small amount over a long period of time in this mod pack as opposed to basically being a healing potion), basic Thunderbolt and Maribor's Forest potion to do as much damage as possible in a short period of time. Since I am taking toxicity damage, I keep White Honey in slot 4 which ends up saving me.
I chose to fight during daytime so that the increased passive health regeneration would offset some of the toxicity damage I was taking. I made a few retarded mistakes, like misjudging the range of the initial heavy attack, but I also got lucky with one of the arbalists nailing the halberdier in the back. I figured showing this footage of an imperfect play would be a better representation of the game than a flawless run.
You can compare and contrast with the light armour video or even the parry video by Crunchy on page 2. A more grounded fighting style with emphasis on heavy attacks and parries is more preferable with heavy armour's glacial stamina regen rate, plus you are stacking a lot of bonus damage % which is a must when fighting DLC enemies. At the same time the AI is much more aggressive than in vanilla so you can't right click your way to victory - sorry, Crunch. Still, there are mistakes and/or sloppy parts - I should have popped way more free Quens during blizzard's slow-mo to take advantage of my set bonus, there was a lot of shitty parry timing, etc (in my defense, my main playthrough is a light armour build in which I rarely parry.) Oh well, the aim of these videos is not to demonstrate my skill (or lack thereof).
This build is heavily focused on adrenaline and vitality with euphoria mutation (mutated blood/skin may have synergized better with how tanky this build is).
Besides Blizzard, I used Swallow (unnecessarily increased toxicity for the second round of combat but whatever), Full Moon (maximum vitality, maximum tankiness) and Tawny Owl (with this mod pack heavy armour very hard to use without tawny owl. I would walk around in medium armour until I found an opportunity to pop TO and switch to a heavier set. Think of it like power armour in Codex' favorite RPG, Fallout 4)
You might notice that I sharply turn my mouse when power attacking adjacent enemies to hit several of them. This is possible thanks to the softlock is being disabled. A more advanced version of this is performing a heavy attack that not only damages the enemy but also moves you out of the range of their attack - not sure if I performed any in the above runs but definitely fun to land, though very risky. Something like a Witcher version of a Talhoffer masterstroke.
What is much less risky is the Whirl rapechain. Although I have since changed the Blizzard slowdown duration, so effectiveness of Blizzard-assisted whirl is no longer representantive. There are two ways to maintain a very long/infinite Whirl attack, being an adrenaline-focused build or the use of Superior Blizzard. I had both, of course. The former entails 3+ enemies consistently and the latter killing someone every 6 or less seconds to keep the slowmo going, so you still need to set up the whirl chain by getting a good chokepoint going and preferably softening up enemies with bombs or debuffing them with aard or yrden, and getting rid of shields/polearms/archers first. It is a bit of a double edged-sword, as you need a thick group of enemies to keep the whirl going but that many can typically score free, so changing directions and distributing damage more or less evenly is a must. Quen shield, especially when used with ursine armour, does help a lot in being more aggressive with your whirls. It should be noted that enemies can still hit you when doing a charge attack from behind, so its not an unbeatable strategy although it is still ridiculously effective against massive groups compared to alternatives, as I suppose it should be.
Naturally, this hanse base is particularly well suited to Whirl due to its staircase.
Lastly, I mostly ignored the archers as late game + heavy armour render them more or less an inconvenience, although they still staggered me. When I ended the video there were still a few of them left plus the guy who lit the distress beacon, but at that point my victory was certain.
(Incidentally, I might redo the light armour video given the quantity of sloppiness in it. Maybe even base it in this base to showcase how two different late-game playstyles tackle the same challenge? We'll see.)
DOWNLOAD THE MOD PACK:
MEGA Link for Modpack:
https://mega.nz/#!L3BiCZ4L!YcPk5jDfSqwxNH-1VSnEHXvr1Jl9OeT8275bhJRkOfg
MEGA Link for Loot Rebalance:
https://mega.nz/#!7ypzwCLA!GsgimWuFC8KKS21XuXaXnCzlVK0zdd67io_wI-4o1w8
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