Brain dump - split this up

[Lknechtli]

I'm going to continue trying to re-balance signs towards utility rather than straight up magical domination.

The way I think of it, Sword combat should be the default way to handle monsters. There are three ways that a Witcher should be able to take on monsters with superhuman strength: A) Improve his skill with the sword. Pretty much the brute force method, but very satisfying. The sword tree should focus on physical strength, endurance, and adrenaline granted by the trial of the grasses. B) Use signs to change the rules of the fight. Basically bring monsters back down to your level - if they're a fast monster, slow them down with yrden. If they're a tough monster, use fire to weaken their defence. If they do a ton of damage but are slow, use quen to reduce the damage. If there're fast, light, and attack in groups, aard to knock them back-down. If they are highly reactive, use axii to confuse them and give you an opening. The signs should NOT be the primary method of attack, they should allow the witcher to essentially take away what makes the monster deadly and provide utility. C) Alchemy is a blend of the two, focusing on knowledge in chemicals and his physiology to improve his endurance and bombs to make the enemy vulnerable. It depends on preparation first, because without his bombs and potions, he is much weaker. With proper preparation and planning, though, he should be able to get close to matching either the sword or sign methods with the primary advantage of being highly versatile.

It's probably going to take me a while to reach this ideal. Sword: I think that the physical branch is about where we want it, but there's plenty of room for tweaks there and making things more interesting than just +damage/health.

Signs:

Quen will be finished once we figure out the right way to balancing the healing. I like the balance around where it is for the normal cast - there's an obvious benefit to using it, even as a non sign build, but you can't rely on it as your only defense because you still take damage. No thoughtless sword spam please.

Yrden was nerfed a bit too aggressively by the patch in terms of scaling, we need to look at ways to improve its utility without making it OP. A reasonable scaling limit might be around 60-70%, but I want to experiment with the circle causing other status effects as well when you specialize in it.

Igni needs some work. The burn effect in general is too powerful as CC, even after we nerfed the damage. Ideally, it's length would be random, with a maximum length based on spellpower, with damage scaled on spellpower and resistances rather than a % life tick. I don't want to make the damage too high, but utilitywise it should be a hard counter to armor and resistances to other spells while on fire. I want to avoid it being a DPS spell or aoe axii.

Axii. Not sure where I want to go with this right now. Against one monster, it is frequently too powerful, but I'm not sure how I can change its effect in 1v1 battles without making it completely useless against groups. Alt axii: not sure what I want to do with this either. Might be fun to essentially make enemies run away. It's a bit much to make it convert an enemy entirely and hulk him out in the process.

Aard. Oh aard... Not too useful unless you have enough spellpower to guarantee knockdowns, at which point you can dominate any of the smaller enemies in the game without a thought. ESGO removes damage immunity from the knockdown kill so you can't use it willy-nilly, but I'd like to reduce the knockdown effect length so you have to make a quick decision. It should be really useful against large groups of enemies, giving you some extra breathing room. Ideally it should have a fairly small knockdown change: maybe 15-25% when maxed out, so if you use it on a group you're likely to knock someone down, but it should also be able to cause longer staggers - right now, you either completely knock them out, or just stop their current attack. That's a bit too binary for me. Alt aard should be great at staggering everyone around you, giving some needed space to go ham for a second or two, but really shouldn't be knocking anyone down.

Alchemy: At this point we're mostly just removing the effects which make it clearly overpowered (see extreme health buffs from decoctions, effectively infinite potion effects and god mode, etc etc ) . Any tweaks we make will be aimed at making alchemy require more preparation and planning for the situation you're walking into, and less in-the-moment potion chugging. I really like the idea suggested idea of causing stagger when drinking potions. Also looking at the preparation mod for inspiration: http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/750, because that seems like a pretty cool idea. In the future I might make a significant effort in making BCE compatible with his, or simply implementing some of the changes I like.

Aaaaand that's about it. It'll take a while to do all this, and I don't have a timeline or even a guarantee that any of this will happen - it's just a brain dump of where I think we are right now and what would be cool to see in the future.

[Lknechtli]

Comments from BardBlue:

Agree with most of the vision. Axii definitely is hard to balance. Enemies gain damage resistance (25-50%?) while under primary axii? Maybe even lasts a bit after axii? So you don't just axii an enemy and hit them right there -- there's a cost if you try and do that. As for alternate axii, I've always thought the enemy should take a damage penalty while influenced, not a damage bonus. The problem is they can often one or two-shot all their allies (and they also get one or two-shotted). Maybe alternate axii can give damage resist too? This would make alt axii better crowd control because the influenced enemy wouldn't get killed so fast, but he wouldn't be killing all his allies so fast with his damage penalty either. The biggest problem with the damage resist is it's just kind of weird, but I don't think it's too nonsensical if it helps with balance.

I'm not too big of a fan of making alchemy too tedious or expensive by requiring lots of individual refills like preparation mod (though admittedly, I haven't tried it. It just doesn't sound that fun to me. Plus I guess it's not compatible right now?) If you do require some preparation, I think potions should gain more uses and/or last a bit longer, and I think potions should only take like 1 base herb of the recipe per potion + 1 alcohol to refill everything. Would make consistently collecting herbs a bit more rewarding, or you'd have to spend more gold. I was kind of sad when you reduced the duration of potions back to vanilla, though they were kind of OP with all the 2+ minute durations (then again, toxicity was broken at that point).

[Lknechtli]

Comments from Obiyer:

I don't mean to be rude but, have actually tested this idea in the game? Like, the entire game? I feel like most people here haven't even played the mod all the way through the game and have done everything and have been in specific situations.

You need to get specific, right? Like in sword combat, you're saying that it needs to be stronger, but that may not be the problem, it maybe Geralt is put into hit-stun forever. Or some weird thing happens where you get stuck on a tree or a rock because of the terrain.

Like there are forced close range fights such as the Vampires, where you are fighting them in close range and you could get nicked and die. There are also parts where you have to fight Devourer's in close range, and of course I have to play the mod specifically, but I feel like with these changes they're going to be annoying if not just frustrating. I mean of course, someone can say, just do x and y in this situation, but that's not really how the game plays is it? You get stuck into certain situations, and you have to deal with it on the spot unless you like saving and reloading every couple of steps.

On the Aard to get rid of multiple enemies, are Ghouls affected by Aard? I don't think they can be knocked down and insta killed. There's that mission in Vellen where you have to protect a group of people against a group of Ghouls, and even if you have aard it's still going to be really frustrating.

And on the potion staggering, that's crazy isn't it? You have potions running out in the middle of battle, especially if it's a long battle. I hope I don't bring it up too often but in BC-Enhanced I had a 20 minute battle with an arch-griffin where without Quen I would be one shot ko'd. So I hope I'm not saying, I want the game to be easy.

Have you guys looked at the fist fights? Such as the one in the masquerade with a group of enemies, or as of now where I am in Enhanced, against Olaf? It's crazy in Enhanced. Of course this is Evolved, but I get the impression that you haven't changed the core idea.

I think I'm just crazy, because I don't see any other people bringing this up. But again, I don't see specific examples. It's just all theory. A few posts above someone said: could you nerf Axii because it's still OP? Without giving an example, or a counter example. I don't see how you guys are making these changes, without thoroughly testing the entire game. I mean this can be a 200+ hour game, right?

Maybe it's because most players use fast travel? So they don't get put into certain situations as I noted above. Where preparing for each fight is just plain tedious and not fun when all you're doing is getting from point x to point y.

Is it because you guys have so much experience in your play throughs? It seems like you guys are just swinging in the dark.

And honestly, it's going to be unfair to people who start with your mod and get like 10-20 hours in and realize somewhere down the line that's it's unbalanced, so they just wasted 10 to 20 hours of a play through. E.g., there's a post by someone if he's unsure if he's going to keep the mod.

Someone brought up the idea of staggering when you take a potion, and that's just nuts to me. Totally crazy, it's going to limit the player if not make the game Witcher 3: Save and Reload. Because sometimes you get stuck in a fight where it's so long your potion runs out, and I suppose you can quen and retake, but even that.

Again, sorry if I seem rude but I don't see specific examples being brought up. I honestly don't think this mod is being played enough to warrant all these changes. Unless to some people Witcher 3 is just a bunch of battles with no context on where the player is going and what the player plans to do.

Sorry for the wall of text.

[Lknechtli]

Obiyer: Lots of stuff here, I'll address it by paragraph

P1: Of course I haven't tested any of this. I haven't coded any of it. This is an informative braindump to give people an idea of where I think I want things to go and end up - implementation of this has not started, and when it is, will probably look very different as we try things out and see how balanced they actually are. Nothing here is set in stone, and as I word it, a good amount of it would probably be very unbalanced. When working on the quen changes, I went through at least 4 completely different ideas for balancing quen - each fully implemented - and discarded all but the last as being unbalanced / unsatisfactory through playtesting. Development is an evolutionary process, I don't just say "I'm going to implement this feature in X way and that's not changing no matter what" for anything but the smallest changes. Many of the small changes that go into this mod arise from conversation between Chicken and me about something not feeling quite right and experimenting a little bit - so some are going to look arbitrary to an outsider just looking at a bunch of small changes made without context.

P2: I don't see how game bugs like getting stuck in terrain play into balance. I don't look at a single comment saying "X is OP" or "Y is too weak" then nerf or buff accordingly unless it matches what I've experienced or makes a lot of sense.

P3: You mention fights in closed spaces. Just because you get stuck in a closed space doesn't mean that things aren't working the way they should. If you make Geralt fight with a hand tied behind his back and he can't hit as hard, or stick a ball and chain on his leg so he can't roll around as much, that doesn't mean that he's underpowered in that situation. That just means it's a shitty situation that you need to work around and find a solution to. Some parts of the game ARE hard, and I fully expect that people will have issues with some of them. One of them I noticed was the werewolf contract - since igni wouldn't catch him on fire and he kept regenerating, I had to reload the game several times to find a strategy that worked (use tawny owl, trap him in yrden and dodge around him to cast alt igni and stop his regeneration). This mod is supposed to make things more difficult and require more thought by A: weakening the tools which are too powerful and B: giving you more varied tools to make up for it.

Vampires and Devourers in closed spaces may very well require more several tries, but that's alright, because you're essentially fighting them on their home turf where they are most effective. You have to figure out how to nullify that advantage, something that is definitely very possible. Devourers one hit you if you are next to them when they explode? Don't stand next to them. Stun them with axii, roll away, and finish them with a crossbow bolt or alt igni (which still does a good amount of ranged damage). If you're not willing to modify your tactics and just complain that it's "Too hard", then a mod that's developed by people who want to have to think more about the combat for similar people probably isn't for you.

P4: Gouls and Agouls are definitely affected by aard. Early on, aard doesn't have a very high knockdown change though, which makes it more useful for giving yourself space than as an offensive move. I really don't like the idea of 1hk0 on any mob though - it's just an IWIN button, and that's not what I'm looking for in more tactical combat. The mission is perfectly possible though - just think outside the box. On a combat build with no points in spells, I was able to use a combination of alt axii, yrden, and yes, aard to defend the peasants. Even in vanilla it's a pretty tough quest because the peasants can't take hits for s***, but I think it took me fewer tries, not more, in this mod than in vanilla due to my increased options for attacking them and keeping them at bay.

P5: See previous post on potion staggering. I want to eventually change the way that potions are used. With the way that potions work right now, yes, staggering would be an annoying pain the ass that doesn't add much.

P6: I understand you haven't read every single comment on this mod. We're aware that fist fights are too difficult, and are working on toning them down a bit.

P7-10: Axii is a skill that is generally accepted to be overpowered by the witcher community as a whole, and it's a comment that I agree with. It doesn't really need context for me to agree with it because I've played through about 90% of the game and agree that in vanilla, Axii is incredibly OP, especially alt-axii. I've played about 150 hours of this game and spent another 40 hours digging around in its code, and after that much time, I'd like to think that I can recognize which things need work in my experience. Obviously I can be wrong (I'm human, damnnit), but I think that gives me a fairly good foundation on which to work.

Testing the whole game? Are you nuts? We're two people. Just because we can't test every possible situation when applying what we think is a more enjoyable game balance for us doesn't mean we can't release it for other people. Making this mod isn't a day job, it's a hobby project that we're sharing with other people because we think it's awesome and get tons of really great feedback for doing. You can't expect a mod creator to apply the same sort of rigor to the mods and CDProjekt applies to the game at large - and you're suggesting that releasing the mod without doing so is negligent. That's both false, and plain unfair. People who download this mod should have the expectation that it is very much a WORK IN PROGRESS, and that not everything will work perfectly. We are not selling this mod as a product, and give no guarantees about it at all.

You seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't make these modifications because we don't know for sure that they will work. Well fine. Don't use the mod if you don't like it. That's the beauty of game modding - people can modify the game HOWEVER THEY WANT. If you don't like a change and you have the time to do it better, I invite you to fork the github repository and do it yourself. Who knows, maybe we'll like your modification better and integrate it in a pull request!

Specific example aren't necessary - you seem to have a lot invested in that idea. Balance changes are applied across the board, not fight by fight, and likewise, most responses to them are equally broad - we don't need to have a list of monsters that skill X is too good against or skill Y is weak against unless it's a special case. Honestly, my bar for "good enough" on this mod is pretty low - as long as I like it better than the vanilla version. There's always room for improvement.