SCBA - Smart Combat Balance Adjustment

SCBA - Smart Combat Balance Adjustment

Update 2/17/2018: Added an optional version - 1. 3 Enhanced Difficulty. I agree with those who felt the minimum damage in the first upload was too low. I'm keeping the original up for people who were fine with that level of damage, but if you want a higher difficulty switch to version 1. 3

Overview

This mod enforces minimum and maximum damage thresholds for enemy attacks. These thresholds are calculated as percents of your maximum health. Each attack type has different minimum and maximum damage values: light attack, heavy attack, super attack, and ranged attack. Enemies are divided into 6 main groups:

Weakest (examples: nekkers, wolves, and dogs)

Weak (examples: sirens, harpies, drowners, peasant and thug bandits)

Average (examples: wraiths, ghouls, rotfiends, foglets, soldiers, deserters)

Strong (examples: alps and bruxas, spiders, bears, werewolves, vampies, trolls, wyverns, alghouls, officers and two-handed weapons)

Elite (examples: leshens, gargoyles, arachas, larger vampires and trolls, golems, fiends, cyclops, nightwraiths and noonwraiths, basilisks, grave hags, boss bandits, witchers)

Boss (examples: the cloud giant, the big bad wolf, the spotted wight, the toad prince, iris, armored arachas, the ice giant, chorts, archgriffins, ancient leshens)

The main goal of the mod is to enforce damage minimums, so that late-game combat does not become trivial when the player has extremely high resistance to damage. The different minimums and maximums between different enemies creates a distinction between weaker and stronger enemies.

The mod does not actually change the base damage calculations. Instead, it enforces these minimums and maximums after all of the other damage adjustments have taken place, just before the damage is either applied to the player or hits the Quen shield.

A small amount of randomization is applied to the threshold values each time they are calculated, so you won't see a static damage value when hitting the minimum or maximum thresholds.

This is not intended to be a "hardcore" difficulty mode, but it will make the game harder. You will be unable to reduce damage below a certain minimum value no matter how much health and damage resistance you have. Increasing your health and damage resistance is still valuable because it makes it more likely that you will receive the minimum damage from enemies. However, that minimum is usually a lot higher than what is possible in the original game.

A side-effect of this mod is that "