[RELzWIPz] Perks & Skills Advanced - Combat+Perks : V

» Tue Sep 03, 2013 9:40 pm

Welp after all this time, I've finally finished the first version of my mod, Perks & Skill Advanced. It's not ready to go on nexus/etc yet though, so I'm going to do a test release here before I open the floodgates to make sure no obvious bugs are present. I've been testing it for the past week, so I feel like major bugs are gone, but I still need testing feedback! PLEASE SEE THE SECOND POST BELOW THIS ONE FOR DOWNLOAD LINK AND RELEASE-SPECIFIC NOTES

What is Perks & Skills Advanced?

Perks & Skills Advanced aims to redesign the combat skills and skill trees in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, without completely altering the vanilla system (for Heavy Armor, Light Armor, Two-Handed, One-Handed, Archery, Block). I had a few big issues with the new perk tree system in Skyrim, but I loved the idea. In theory - it could have been the deepest and most interesting RPG system used in an Elder Scrolls title to date, but the execution was so poor and some skills were so useless in how they worked compared to other skills, that it was more of a gimmick. Some issues that the vanilla (default) Skyrim perk tree and skill system has that Perks & Skills Advanced (PSA) aims to solve:

Most perk trees were hardly trees at all, such as heavy armor which literally only had about 6-8 perks total, with almost no branching.
Many perks are completely throw-away bonuses that don't do anything relevant or force you to "perk into" useless perks to get to the good perks. Such as, to get Conditioning for Heavy Armor, you first had to pick a completely irrelevant and "useless" perk like Fists of Steel, which made you do more unarmed damage.. even if you weren't fighting without weapons. And why is a perk like that, in Heavy Armor anyways?
Instead of the skill itself having the power, the perks took all the power. A level 100 user of two-handed with no perks deals less damage output than a level 60 user with perks. This is all due to poorly made starter perks like Barbarian, which just boost your damage with two handed by 20%. The game is balanced and expects you to get these perks too, completely removing the "point" of what a skill and perk tree is supposed to do - let you customize and specialize what the skill itself is for.
Some perks totally broke the role of the skill, completely ignoring what makes certain skills unique. Such as Conditioning for Heavy Armor, which made it so armor is weightless and doesn't slow you down when worn. Why would HEAVY armor do that? With that perk, Heavy Armor functions and works exactly like a much better version of Light Armor. Certain skills as such suffer from an identity crisis - they don't feel all that unique from the other skill's opposite.
The new system was made in a way that encouraged players to NOT specialize, and try as many skills as possible, to prevent players from "starting over". However, because in order to be good in a skill you HAD to get perks, you basically needed to specialize in order to survive later levels. At the same time, the perk trees didn't let you specialize very much within the skill you wanted to use, because the perks they used were very simple and tended to just do basic damage increases. When in fact, perk trees could have potentially been incredibly deep, letting users who are good in (for example) two handed to use all two handed weapons rather effectively, but if a player would "perk" into and specialize towards axes, they would have increased ability and bonus to using those weapons. Instead there was no specialization, just simplified perks, that required players to perk them in order to survive later levels. This punishes both players who don't specialize their perks (underpowered) and players who want to specialize (because they really aren't specializing all that much).

PSA aims to address all the above issues. Skills will be tweaked in ways that make the skill more unique to use. The skill level will also be the most important factor in determining how good you are at a skill - perks will only augment, enhance, or add bonuses and abilities, sometimes at a cost, and let players specialize in their "major skill".

Perk trees will encourage sticking to a "class" through the new Major Skill system, and will often feature multiple branches or avenues one can perk into within a skill.

What about Magic PSA or Thief PSA? I plan on doing those, but to ensure that SOMETHING get's released and to keep things modular, I've focused on releasing the combat-skill portion of the mod first. I'm not planning on touching crafting skills though - partially because there is a TON in my opinion that needs done there (to the point of being a separate mod), and partially because there's already some excellent modders out there who are dealing with redoing the craft skills.

What is combat like under PSA?

Combat is completely redesigned, in part because the skill system now ties heavily into how good you are with a skill, and also because the combat flow in Skyrim leaves something to be desired. With my tweaks, hopefully we have something that feels unique to skyrim but takes much inspiration from the the brilliant combat design flow of Dark Souls.

Here's how combat works under PSA:

Stamina is extremely important, but regenerates fast in order to make stamina balance a tactical part of the flow in a fight. Actions such as drawing a bow, sprinting, power-attacking, blocking hits among other stamina-intensive actions all keep a toll on your stamina while actions like attacking, being attacked prevent your stamina from regenerating. When out of stamina, you take more damage if using heavy armor, you are more likely to lose balance under light armor, you can't keep your bow fully drawn, you can't fully block hits and you'll find it hard to pull off abilities that drain your stamina.
Everything feels more impactful, and intense with added screen effects for various combat states you are in (designed to also make it easy to get a feel for how you are doing without needing to look at your health/stamina bar). Things become more desaturated the lower you are on stamina, hits you take gives you a subtle but noticeable hit feedback, you can feel the weight behind your swings with a big, slow, powerful 2H weapon, etc.
Shields will now always block 100% of the damage, but take a toll on your stamina while holding the shield up and takes a bigger toll when blocking hits. If you get below zero stamina while blocking a hit, your guard is broken! And you become staggered, leaving you open. This applies to enemies as well, and you'll lose out on stamina if you hit an enemy who is blocking. Weapons block like they do in vanilla skyrim, but you can move much faster in them and react quicker.
Because of the shield changes, combat is now much more damaging in general. You won't find yourself getting sniped by a single arrow, but arrows and weapon attacks will hurt a lot more than before, requiring you to properly dodge or block the attack to avoid damage. Its meaty, in-your-face, tactical combat.
Different weapon and armor types feel unique from each other. 2H weapons play out completely different to 1H ones, and within 1H ones some weapons will perform different style roles compared to others. Waraxes are fast and damaging, but they don't have much armor-piercing. Maces are slower but hit hard and can better hit through armor with perks. Swords are a happy middle ground, focused on utility.
The type of weapon/armor you are using has a huge impact. Daedric is very slow but very powerful at all levels, but requiring a high skill to use it well. Lighter materials are more efficient, quicker, and easier to handle at lower levels but you might find yourself with less damage-per-hit. In other words, just because you have all daedric gear doesn't make you better than someone who just want to use all steel gear. You'll have better stats but more downsides compared to steel.
Everything is derived from your character skills, unlike some other mods that focus entirely on combat. A user of 2H weapons at skill 15 will still do an incredible amount of damage, but his weapon swings slow, he'll have less control, use a ton of stamina on power-attacks and have a good chance of staggering himself when landing power attack hits. At skill 100, swings will be much quicker and efficient, have much more control, and much more damaging. You'll also be able to handle "hard to use weapons" like Daedric much better.
Due to the changes above, potions heal over time now instead of instant. This works much better with balance of the mod. (compatible with mods that change this if you load them after)
Also due to the above changes, enemies can no longer kill move. It was a bad mechanic anyways! (comparable with mods that change this if you load them after).

What is the future for PSA?

Future updates are going to focus on further expanding combat before eventually moving onto magic and sneak skills. Some things to come in the short term:

Disable some of the camera effects and staggers if you are in 3rd person or on a horse, for better playability in those camera mods.
A tutorial in-game so you don't have to read a giant manual on how everything is different
Melee attacks (both to enemies and from enemies) causing you to cancel the draw of your bow on hit.
Blocking with 2H weapons to be slower than blocking with 1H weapons
Timing bashes to become important - if you time it right during an attack, you'll heavily stagger them instead of the normal stagger.
Possibly remove the dice-roll chance for you to fumble attacks (dependant on your skills) in favor of making attacks well timed (the better your skill, the more open this window will be).

In the long term, I'd love to get the perk trees actually looking good, and fully expanding on the features of the mod to offer a deeper experience with item types. I.E. instead of basing movement speed on material type, basing it on weight of the item, and just in-general making more tighter adjustments to the foundation I've laid. Then, possibly move on to doing the magic and stealth skills!

Video Walkthroughs

Heavy Armor Perk Tree, and Skill Redesign (old): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1OlbMwykMY

Two-Handed Skill and Perk Tree Redesign (old): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8-8ibpd4Qw

Combat Overview and Flow of a Fight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9sVCwe6dto&feature=youtu.be

Screenshots

Heavy Armor's new and improved Skill Tree: http://i.imgur.com/mytx4.jpg

Two-Handed's new and improved Skill Tree: http://i.imgur.com/IX0NF.jpg

» Wed Sep 04, 2013 11:15 am

Perks & Skills: Advanced RC2 Download Link:

http://sdrv.ms/17lQmrl

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

- Bows and (maybe?) staffs will say a message about your block ability being very poor when equipping them. This means nothing, and is a silly little bug I haven't bothered fixing since it doesn't affect anything considering you can't block with them

- You must have "EnableOriginalPostProcessing" for your ENB's on to see any of the screen effects, which is a decent part of the combat experience. A stupid downside to using ENB is that it prevents stuff like nighteye or any other screen effects from working unless you have that option. Which is why I like skyrealism with RLO, because it means having that option on doesn't make everything look bad.

- Speaking of ini files, make sure you make these changes to your Skyrim.ini if you are using script-heavy mods:

[Papyrus]fUpdateBudgetMS=800fExtraTaskletBudgetMS=800fPostLoadUpdateTimeMS=2000iMinMemoryPageSize=256iMaxMemoryPageSize=512iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=2457600

This makes papyrus run much smoother. Otherwise you'll have a very slow papyrus engine where you might find actions in my mod taking several seconds to activate when they should be instant. I didn't have this problem when I was running just with my mod, but then I ran into this issue with me running mods like frostfall, wet and cold, hunterborn, etc in tandem with my mod due to the heavy script load that causes. The above ini tweaks fixed it.

- SKSE is required. You specifically need version 16.16. Future or older versions of SKSE are not officially supported, because this mod does alter the actor.pex file that SKSE uses. Future versions of SKSE should work fine with PSA as long as they don't alter/overwrite actor.pex/psc. I will try and keep PSA updated to the latest version, but that said if you don't want to wait you can simply merge in the changes I've made yourself to newer versions of the actor.psc file (my changes are easily found at the end, its simple copy+paste job) and then by re-compiling actor.psc in the creation kit.

- Third-person gameplay works, but is not ideal. The mod is designed under the expectation that you fight and/or use your skills in first-person.

- All enemies to the best of my knowledge no longer kill move. Because when the damage values were increased, I found I was getting kill moved almost all the time at 50% health, which is terrible. Enemy kill moves are a bad mechanic anyways.

- The perk trees look like total crap and don't match up with the constellations at all. I'm sorry, if you are skilled in distilling the chaotic alchemical nature of the perk editor to get the perks to look sixy, by all means... let me know and do it :tongue:

- Some things are still missing/basic. For example, Heavy Armor currently doesn't recognize different armor types you are wearing (i.e. Daedric vs Iron) so as such both daedric and iron work the same except with daedric having a higher armor rating. Meanwhile Light Armor, glass works different than leather in that you are less balanced in glass, move slightly slower, at the benefit of a better AR.

- To uninstall (which will be needed to fix bugs you might get or to receive some updates) type

help "77cpo_uninstallquest" 4

into the console to get the quest ID of the uninstallation quest then type

setstage [uninstall quest ID] 10

to uninstall. Let it do its thing, it'll take a minute. You will be refunded all perk points you spent on the perk trees that were made by me.

- You pretty much need to start a new game. Well kind of. The mod works fine on existing saves, the problem is I've totally replaced the skill trees for block, HA, 2H, 1H, Archery (now marksman) and LA. If you want play on an existing character, you'll have to manually remove each and every perk you've put into the above trees, install my mod, then (if you wanted to play fair) add the same amount of perks you had into mine, taking into account the perk bonuses you get every 3/12 levels up to level 36 (when you stop getting them).

- The script to detect how many major skills you have only works outside of menus, at the moment until I can find a work around. This means don't be a dirty cheater by saving up all your perks points and unlocking all the major skills in the menu before my script realizes that you are already over the limit.

- Theoretically, this should be compatible with any mod out there - I've changed (almost) nothing in vanilla skyrim, only added on top, with the exception of kill moves, the combat perk trees, and HoT potions (in this case, just load mods that affect either of those things after mine). Obviously don't run it in tandem with other combat overhaul mods, because you'll be sad at the result. Mods that aren't properly keyworded will also produce odd results (like the issue I had last page!). And, while the mod will work with Dragonborn/dawnguard, I think the material-specific effects I have for skills like 1H and Light Armor won't recognize any dawnguard/dragonborn specific weapons or armors. Unless they use the same keywords that default skyrim uses. Its an easy fix, I just haven't bothered to look at all the keywords and armor types that dawnguard and dragonborn have added.

- I've not balanced for smithing, because smithing is a failed game mechanic anyways so I never play with it. It probably will be super easy to cheese the game if you insist on making everything you own legendary. That said, I encourage you to smith to keep "lower end" gear more competitive late game, especially since several perks boost the benefits of such gear.

GAMEPLAY THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

- Stamina is very important. Using abilities, sprinting, power attacking, or using your bow will drain it. Blocking hits will drain it (but blocking now blocks all damage+arrows, no matter what for shields). You cannot effectively block while at zero stamina at any level, attacking prevents your stamina from regenerating as does taking a hit. You also can't use a bow very well at zero stamina.

- Potions heal over time to account for the fact combat under my mod would literally be piss easy trivial if you could just insta-win at full health through your magical osmosis ability of becoming perfectly fine in the middle of a quick inventory potion drink.

- The mod was developed on the expectation that you play on Adept difficulty (aka standard), and as such should play out more punishingly but also tactically than default skyrim. You'll take much more damage than before, but also deal much more damage, balanced by the fact that shields now actually block all damage and at higher levels things even out a bit (I hope).

- Every three levels you get an extra perk point. Every 12 levels you three extra perk points. This only lasts till level 36. Have fun.

- All of my perk trees start out with a "Major Skill" perk instead of the typical starter perk. This is for several reasons. One, you'll get naturally better at using your skill the higher level you are so you don't need that stupid perk anyways, and two it encourages you to specialize. You can't have more than 5 major skills active at one time, once you pick your fifth major skill the rest of the trees become forever locked (including vanilla ones). Perk trees I've not worked on yet (aka anything in theif/magic) are worth only half of a major skill. This means that once you've unlocked enough skills to be worth "4.5 major skill points, you'll be locked out of trees you've not perked into yet. I do need to fix this though so its 4.5> instead of 4.5>=

- Magic is mostly unaffected by damage changes, but it also (should? maybe someone should test this?) pretty much ignores much of your AR. Vice versa for enemies.

- Stamina regenerates very fast (think dark souls), but more stuff is keeps it from regenerating. It's more tactical now. Not as fast as darksouls mind you, because bethesda's regen system heals attributes as a default % per second instead of a linear number per second (aka, even if you have 500 stamina you'll regen it just as quick as someone with 100 stamina... this might be a balance issue late game, let me know. I can put in a system to make it so the higher your stamina pool is the slower the rate you regen is, as annoying as that would be to implement).

- Enemies who block you will never take damage, and you lose about 20 stamina trying to attack them. So don't do it, you'll wear yourself out and leave you open. It'll be important to A. Overpower weaker enemies, B. Get an angle on the enemy who is blocking, or C. try to catch them while they attack you.

- Daedric, ebony, artifact weapons in general all damage much much more than they have before, at the downside of speed.

QUICK PRIMER ON HOW EACH SKILL WORKS (because I don't have a tutorial system implemented yet, you might want to read this):

Heavy Armor:

- Naturally gets more AR than light armor

- If you can maintain above 30% stamina, you get a bonus 33% or so damage reduction from physical sources. This combined with the above makes heavy armor users very, very tanky even at low level.

- However if you take a hit while under 30% stamina, you take an extra 30-50% (can't remember) damage than normal and stagger more as you are exhausted and can't defend yourself as well.

- Each hit you take will always chink away 5 stamina no matter your skill..

- Heavy armor users can't get knocked off balance (see below)

- You skill determines: the AR you get from your armor, how fast you move in the armor (more heavy armor pieces means you move slower), how much stamina you burn when you sprint while in heavy armor (read: a lot at low levels).

Light Armor:

- Naturally quicker than heavy armor

- Pretty simple, no-frills. Your ability to resist damage is likely greater than a heavy armor user who is exhausted, but not greater while they aren't exhausted. The only mechanic you have to really worry about in light armor is balance, which you also have to worry about if you wear no armor at all.

- Heavy focus on mobility with the perks with some pretty cool abilities.

- Knocked off-balance: this is determined by your skill level, what type of light armor you are wearing (wearing no light armor gives you a big bonus on balance), and your stamina level (numbers count here, no percentages), against the enemy's level and health they have (if they are a creature) or the health, level, and weapon skill they have (for NPC's). When you are knocked off balance all that happens is you move very slow for about 2-3 seconds and your vission is dazed/staggered. High health/level enemies like dragons are likely to knock you off balance a lot in high end armor (like glass), especially if you aren't a high enough level, for unblocked hits until you whittle their health down or make sure to stay at near-max stamina. Note that this only happens for melee attacks against you, not ranged/magic.

- Your skill determines: How fast you move in light armor, your AR, knocked-off-balance chance

Marksman:

- Very high damage compared to before. At least, at mid/early levels? Haven't really had the chance to see what its like at level 50.

- Keeping your bow drawn drains stamina. Having better skill and/or a higher stamina pool negates this. At zero stamina, you will always fire your bow.

- Daedric bows draw really slowly, but are super high damage shots. Glass bows do less damage than dwarven, but shoot off much faster (you'll need to be a good skill to take advantage of high draw speed though... see below). Hunting/long bows are the fastest bows no matter what, perfect for low levels.

- Your skill determines: Your aim when drawing the arrow (low skill users will shake a lot trying to stabilize the aim of the bow when they draw), the speed at which you draw, the damage you do, the amount of stamina you drain each second with a drawn bow.

One-handed:

- Quick, efficent. Not as damaging as 2H, but still pretty good.

- One-handed users have a natural weakness against heavy armor. They get around a 30% damage penalty against a heavy-armor wearing target for normal attacks. Don't want this penality? Powerattack! The power attack for one-handers isn't nearly as strong as a 2H power attack, but uses far less stamina and ignores the damage penalty I just mentioned.

- You have a chance of fumbling your attack, dependant on skill. A fumble means nothing more than your vision getting pretty badly staggered, which can disorient you.

- Better weapons will almost always swing slower due to their weight and/or form.

- Dual weilding gives you a small speed reduction without the right perks compared to standard wielding.

- Your skill determines: damage you do, the speed you swing your weapons, your attack control (fumble chance), and your effectiveness at doing power-attacks (low level, your power attacks are only slightly better than normal attacks).

Two-handed:

- Slow, powerful. Very high damage, not very fast.

- Each swing you jerks your vision due to the size/weight of your weapon. Having a better skill reduces this "staggering"

- Powerattacks with 2H weapons not only take longer (due to slower weapon speeds in general) but also use a CRAP ton more stamina. The upside? CRUSH. DEAD.

- However, power-attacks also have a chance of fumbling like one handed, but unlike one handed it can only happen when you connect a powerattack (versus all attacks) and when it does happen its a full-body stagger. Get better skill to overcome this.

- Your skill determines: damage you do, your attack control (the jerkyness when you swing), stamina usage on powerattacks, speed of the weapon, your chance you fumble your powerattacks.

Block:

- Works very different from vanilla

- All shields always block arrows from the start.

- You will never take damage from blocked hits with a shield. Damage works like normal when blocking with a weapon.

- Instead, you will take stamina damage, in the form of "stability". Higher stability shields lose less stamina per hit they take than low stability shields (weapons have the worst stability, and lose a ton of stamina per hit they block).

- There is also "burden". High burden shields will drain your stamina faster as you hold your block up than low burden shields. Weapons have no burden, so you'll always regenerate stamina at the max rate when blocking with them. Burden also affects how fast you move with a shield.

- Heavy shields: generally, high stability and high burden. You'll lose much less stamina blocking with a heavy shield, but drain much more while holding your block. High level shields will have better stability but worse burden, so you'll generally move slower in high level shields than lower ones while blocking.

- Light shields: generally low stability but low burden. You'll take much more stamina damage per hit, but at low levels you'll only slightly lose stamina while holding a block and high levels you'll even regen stamina while holding a block. Burden rules apply the same to light shields as they do heavy shields.

- Weapon shields: Very low stability, very low burden. You'll always move quick when blocking with a weapon, and you'll always regen at the max stamina rate. Downside: each hit you take seriously kills your stamina, you take damage like you normally do in skyrim with blocking (and like skyrim, the higher your skill the better).

- If you take a hit while blocking that takes you lower than 0 stamina, you guard is broken and you are full-body staggered, unable to move or do anything for about 1-2 seconds. Bad, obviously. Also, when your guard is broken some damage breaks through.

- Your skill affects: Your speed while moving with a shield raised, the amount of stamina damage you take on hits, the amount of burden stamina damage you take while the shield is raised, damage blocked when blocking with a weapon

So that is that. Please let me know of any big bugs, ideally by posting here (so I can address you) or by PM (either way I'll save the posts into my bug report links). Also let me know of any balance concerns, especially late game. I worry that late game might not be as balanced in your favor due to me getting rid of those awful "You do 100% more damage at skill level 100!!!" perks you have in default skyrim. Also, some perk combinations might not work well - i.e. some of the perks in 2H mixed with the block perks like quick reflexes. If so, just let me know and I'll try and figure out a fix.