Geralt Level Scales

Made with FCR3 in mind (which is now included in the nextgen version of the game).

What it does

At the beginning of a combat encounter Geralt's levelup stats (base max vitality, base damage bonus, base sign intensity bonus -not his actual level-)  and gear (melee weapons, armor  & crossbows) are scaled to the recommended level for that encounter, so that you get the intended challenge/balance for every fight. All those scaling buffs/nerfs are removed when combat ends.

Effectively removes enemy levels from the equation so that with this mod a rat remains a rat and a golem remains a golem without needing to make any arbitrary changes to enemy stats.

This means, for instance, that it's possible to go to Skellige first and try its higher level quests, and conversely you can also visit Velen later and you still won't feel overpowered when doing its lower level quests.

Does not make permanent changes to the game/your saves.

Works for both NewGame and NewGamePlus*.

Why this mod?

TW3's world suffers from levelitis. You have lv5 draconids and lv 40 boars walking around, and the high level pig would eat the dragon. This makes not only the open gameworld feel incoherent and the content/quests artificially level-gated or bloated (among a myriad other issues), it also means that once you outlevel a combat encounter/quest/area (e.g. by following the main story) all that lower level content will be a cakewalk, unchallenging and unrewarding.

To solve that last problem, a year after the game released, patch 1. 2 introduced an option for upscaling enemies to the player's level. The problem is that the enemy-upscaling mechanics don't really preserve any sort of balance. In White Orchard the low level drowner might have felt like a drowner and the low level griffin might have felt like a griffin to a low level Geralt, but the same drowner generically upscaled to a level 40 Geralt feels like something else entirely, in fact it pretty much feels the same as that low level griffin when it's also upscaled to lv40 as the upscaling formula renders base enemy differences/definitions almost meaningless. With each upscaled enemy being as strong as the next you ended up with a pack of upscaled rats as the most fearsome enemy in TW3 (strength in numbers).

Some mods tried to better tune the enemy upscaling mechanics so that the most egregious examples don't happen or use their own arbitrary scaling formulas to come up with different results for what stats a lv4 drowner facing off against a level 50 Geralt should have.

Other mods instead set a single fixed level for Geralt and arbitrarily change the stats of all the higher or lower level enemies as well as Geralt's stats at that level in order to get their own chosen balance against the arbitrary stats Geralt has at that single, fixed level.