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Decline Yet Another Witcher 3 Mod Pack (deprecated)

Joined
Dec 5, 2010
Messages
1,611
^I'd really go with FCR3 over ghost mode.

As for aard knockdown, it's only broken if the knockdown effect lasts so long you can kill more than one prone enemy with it with all the others also unable to strike back by the time you deliver the coup de grace, or before you can use aard again.

That typically isn't the case with knockdowns from kicks where you're unlikely to deliver the final blow if you don't immediately attack after a kick. Not to mention that you're still vulnerable as you try to approach a kicked down enemy for a final blow since everyone else is standing up. Watching Geralt wildly swing his sword at the air 5 feet above a prone enemy doesn't seem like an ideal solution. Nor does rendering the adrenaline-boosted counter-attack knockdown skills mostly useless.

Why not simply change how often aard triggers knockdowns, how many enemies it can knock down at once, how long they stay down or how often you can even use aard instead?
 
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Nov 29, 2016
Messages
1,832
:littlemissfun:

After ruminating on Blizzard for a while I decided to tweak it. Primer changes the slowdown effect to kick in as soon as you drink the potion (as opposed to vanilla activation which triggers on enemy kill) but while that is more accurate to how the potion functioned in W1 it also makes Blizzard ridiculously OP. Firstly, you can use it against single targets this way, and those already have stupidly slow and easy movesets, so the slowdown just makes them trivial. Secondly, playing the game in slowmotion for 5min+ of Blizzard's duration is annoying. Thirdly, Superior Blizzard, which makes actions no longer consume stamina for the duration of the slowdown, means you can spam whirl/spells endlessly for said duration which is hilariously broken.

So now Blizzard activates on kill, as in the case of vanilla. Kills trigger 6 seconds of slowdown (double of what it was in vanilla) during which, in case of Superior Blizzard, actions do not consume stamina. The duration of the actual potion remains greatly increased compared to vanilla but shorter relative to other potions in the game. The result should hopefully be a compromise between vanilla's pitiful 3-second slowdown on kill and the world's slowest godmode. You still need to chain kills to keep the slowdown going but now its one of the most useful potions to use versus multiple enemies.

This change is integrated into the pack so that new users don't need to worry about it, but for the 0.8 of you who already have this mod installed, download the below file and drop into the Witcher 3 Wild Hunt folder:

https://mega.nz/#!biAHDJZD!WEWL5k9hNtCalVLPylzNKhkxaFd-EpU9AKTYFN2jNZo

Should be 100% compatible with existing games.
 
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Joined
Nov 29, 2016
Messages
1,832
Ok, found a fitting late game save from my heavy armor playthrough and decided to record some footage. Now with enemy statbloat, brought to you by Blood&Wine! Oh, and its still AIDS quality because I can't into video compression so I recommend 720p and large window to even notice the stamina bar.

First video is me clearing the first level of the hanse base without using blizzard, mostly to show off stamina consumption. The second video is clearing out the second level and the group of reinforcements, with blizzard (to showcase the effectiveness of blizzard against rapestacks of enemies, but also because that part is really fucking hard without it)

Speaking of blizzard, I had to rethink its duration yet again after running clearing this base. Long story short, both the core files and the tweak above have been updated.

Long story: I ran through the hanse base around ten times using whirl exclusively (with blizzard) and have succeeded without taking significant damage every single time. By contrast, it took me multiple tries just to produce a not-terribly-sloppy run using whirl situationally as shown below. Not good. Infinite whirl chains seem to not be terribly problematic as being surrounded can still lead to damage, the issue comes with an infinite chain of blizzard slowdown on top of that which renders the attacks of enemies too slow to reliably connect as you whirl. Of course, the slowdown cannot be too short, as otherwise there would be no point using anything but the superior version of the potion - imagine having the misfortune of getting a finisher animation and spending the entire slowdown duration watching Geralt decapitate a dude. After more tests with different slowdown durations, including some mid-game saves (vanilla game is balanced completely differently, with most enemies, especially humanoid ones being fairly easy compared to the bloated monstrosities that the DLCs call bandits), a lengthy correspondence with Joshua Sawyer which culminated in a two-hour skype call, and using my workplace connections to load all the data points I collected into a NASA-grade supercomputer, I now have the most balanced blizzard slowdown duration at 4 seconds. Not 3, not 6, but 4 - that is the number of BALANCE.

This is not ideal, of course. Ideal would entail the game being designed differently, but CDPR gonna CDPR, and there is only so much we can do by changing numbers around. At least now hanse bases cannot be trivialized by holding down the left mouse button and in this small achievement I find a degree of peace.





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.)
 
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Joined
Nov 29, 2016
Messages
1,832
My current light armour playthrough is helping me consider the game from a different perspective. For example in order to balance for the fact that all actions cost stamina, BCE reduced the stamina cost per second of whirl to 15% of what it was in vanilla. This felt a tad bit generous in heavy armour but in light armour it is pretty #problematic. I decided that doubling the cost to 60% is more reasonable and brings whirl in line with signs when it comes to their new stamina consumption.

You can do this without changing any files (although instructions on how to do this will be added to manual going forward.)
Under [Main Menu>Options>Mods>ESGO>Combat>Abilities>Whirl and Rend>Whirl]:
-set Stamina Usage to 2
-set Adrenaline Usage to 2

Also, I changed New Moon armour to light category and made sure every instance of the manticore armour (including NG+ variant) is also light. This is both for narrative reasons (I mean, come on, its boiled leather over shirt/gambeson) and mechanical ones. Their bonuses suit light armour playstyles and there are simply not enough viable light armour sets in the game when one considers that the vanilla game is crazy about medium armours and the DLCs have a decent selection of heavy alternatives. These changes are implemented into the mod going forward, but if you already have it installed (hah! good one) you can get the tweak here:

https://mega.nz/#!7nJgVKyT!-Ls7hNjjTam7Pxq2A0mHVFTAsOzfP6n0dSzhSooQbHY
 

a cut of domestic sheep prime

Guest
So now Blizzard activates on kill, as in the case of vanilla.
Also the case with W3EE. I think it's 25 seconds though. And since spells work off of vigor, not stamina, in w3ee it's not so OP.
 

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