Combat
Combat
I felt that stamina in Req and especially AZtweaks was too dependent on flat stamina restoration such as from Apple Cabbage Soup or Tonic of Endurance. As a result, you now get your natural stamina regeneration while doing stamina-draining actions. However, all actions which drain stamina now drain significantly more stamina, and two-handed weapons also drain more stamina. Daggers now drain less stamina (but still more than before). You also swing slowly when low on stamina. Your speed is a bit more reduced when low on stamina and you suffer a slight regen penalty when below critical stamina, so don’t exhaust yourself.
Factor: 80% Damage Resist at 800 AR, rather than 667 AR.
This is to slightly nerf armor rating stacking (though 3.0 limiting max defense to 80% helps a lot) but it also makes your armor rating easier to read: each 10 armor is 1% damage reduction, before armor pen.
Mass Effect influence on speedmult is now half as strong. Especially with Mortal Enemies the significant movement speed reduction of heavy armor makes in some ways less protective than no armor, and since heavy armor isn’t quite as protective as before (especially compared to 1.9) it doesn’t need to slow you down by such a significant amount. In addition, traveling out of combat is annoying when you’re practically 33% slower but I didn’t want to give the player a conditional speed boost (why do I magically become slow when I step into combat?) 15% slowdown is pretty significant for dodging attacks, but it isn’t so much that you shouldn’t bother trying to get out of the way. I felt like heavy armor’s default speeds made you too much of a walking tank, and now that you really aren’t a walking tank any more due to changes in 3.0+ and 3tweaks, there’s no need to be slowed to a shuffle. Besides, “real” armor is not nearly as encumbering even with minimal training.
Reintroduced the ranged damage falloff mechanic, where you lose multiplicative 10% of your archery damage over long distance if you don’t have 10 archery skill for each segment of distance (so if you don’t have 10 archery skill, all shots over ~1300 units do 10% less damage. If you don’t have 20 archery skill, all shots over ~1800 units do 10% less damage, and so on)
The player is now protected from enemy archers at range in a similar fashion. You’re now less likely to be sniped and oneshot approaching a bandit location like Valtheim or Silent Moons. It’s not a huge boost, though, only around ~10-20% damage reduction in most cases. It’s possible that I may reduce NPC arrow damage regardless of their skill, because it is virtually impossible to tell the archery skill of NPCs by looks alone and that can easily mean they won’t receive any ranged penalties without you even realizing it. Testing to come.
I also wanted to nerf player damage at long range because I felt the ability to oneshot bandits
with a crossbow with no risk from huge distances away was too good. Even when you didn't kill a bandit in one hit, you often triggered them to true-yield, putting them out of the fight. Crossbows are still vital for warriors and mages early game, but they are less amazing now.
Similar to AZtweaks, blocking with a shield now protects against arrowfire, even if the arrow gets past your shield (since you’re defending your most vital parts, the arrow can’t “crit” you)
Weapons/shields now block virtually all melee poisons.
Shields also protect actors from spells while blocking, by an amount that scales with blocking perks (40% with no perks) Blocking will now also protect you from many common knockdown effects. You can now safely engage giant frostbite spiders in melee without having to spam bashes, though “safe” might be a bit of an exaggeration as they still hit like trucks in melee.
Mixed beneficial potions are conditioned so that they can’t be “blocked” when drunk.
Diseases can be blocked and no longer cause instantaneous convulsive double vision.
Poisons now will largely fail to affect actors with 90% poison resistance. Note that while >75% resistance on the player will now have no effect (NPC resists still work “normally” because they are calculated differently in the game engine) you can physically possess more than 75 resistance which doesn’t matter except as a condition to prevent certain poison effects from affecting you. This way poison immunity still matters, since it is the one damage type that I feel is fine to have immunity towards.
Magical resistance caps lowered to 75%. Many effects which give resistance in AZ tweaks are nerfed to hell, because stacking resistances is stupidly broken in Skyrim’s resistance system. However, if you actually reduce the caps, you can have impactful effects that matter while also preventing runaway OPness and forcing the player to dance around “balanced” and “invincible”. 75% is a good place to stop, where you aren’t too immune quite yet but enough so that you are tanky.
Magic cost is now cap to 75%. Whatever means you use to get higher cost reduction, in the end it will be cap to 75% in order to avoid free cast.
Similar to AZtweaks, invisibility now grants 15% extra damage (but not to sneak attacks), 15% physical damage resistance, and 20% arrow resistance (stacks with physical). This is to simulate your opponent not knowing where to aim or where to defend against your attacks, giving in-combat invisibility a bit of usefulness.
It’s especially helpful for charging archers in light armor/clothes. The 15% boons are ignored when the opponent is already blind or is a vampire, and blind opponents suffer no arrow damage penalty against invisible actors (since if you’re blind, your foe being invisible doesn’t really matter-- and vampires can sense you by your blood in melee).
Only protect against 50% of magicka impact, instead of 100%. Further, all magicka impacts are higher. Only Nords are immune to impact pain in this manner.
Magicka regenerates comparatively faster in combat, but has had its overall regeneration speed reduced to compensate. NPC mages have more limitations on their abilities to prevent them from bombarding you with dozens of adept spells.
The True Yield system affects actors who are below level 20 so that bosses won’t become cowards
as they near death, which ruins the gravitas of the fight. Ultimately, it’s still probably best to disable this feature because it makes many enemies much easier to kill in a rather silly way.