Better Build Diversity – Armor & Attribute Overhaul

Have you ever been frustrated with the limitations on build possibilities imposed by the vanilla experience? Perhaps you feel there is too much focus on chaining turn-skipping effects on your enemies? Are you tired of "all physical" parties? Maybe you wanted to play a spell-blade, a healer a tank or a witty assassin and realized that options for doing so are scarce?

Well – this mod aims to solve these issues and improve synergies within builds.

This mod changes the armor system, certain attributes as well as a series of status effects, mechanics and talents. These changes are made to increase the number of viable builds and shift the gameplay towards more diverse combat with less focus on turn-skipping crowd control, while staying true to the vanilla experience.

• Armor – the usual damage types will now deal damage to both physical and magical armor.
• Attributes – damage scaling has been tuned down and new bonuses added for several attributes.
• Status effects – the number of turn-skipping crowd control effects has been reduced, and certain statuses altered.
• Talents – certain underwhelming talents have been changed to accommodate new playstyles.
• Mechanics – steps have been taken to improve the viability of "crit builds" and to enforce synergies.

Some of the changes included in this mod have already been addressed in similar ways by other mods. This is particularly the case regarding the armor change, which is very much reminiscent of the Dual Armor Damage mod by Kalavinka. Whereas this mod is not the first to incorporate this kind of changes, it does have its own flair, and attempts to unify a series of changes into a single mod.

To avoid penalising split-damage parties and characters, damage dealt affects both armor types. In particular, dealing physical damage will also damage magical armor and vice versa. Damage to vitality will only be applied once the appropriate armor type is removed and status effects are resisted as usual. To alleviate the generally faster removal of armor, armor values have been increased by 20%.

Attribute damage scaling has been decreased to 2% and attributes have been given new effects. This way, damage scaling is more so dependent on combat ability investments, allowing for a larger number of viable combinations. This also means, that weapon abilities should be more important.

Attributes now also have the following additional bonus:

• Intelligence – Grants additional combat ability points distributed among abilities already invested in. Priority is given to higher level abilities.
• Finesse – Grants an additional 1% accuracy per point (see changes to Hit Chance for more detail).
• Strength – Grants an additional 1.5% physical resistance per point.
• Wits – Grants an additional 0.5% dodging and 1% backstab damage per point.

These changes are made to reduce the number of turn skipping effects and imrpoving the viability of air and especially fire damage towards later stages of the game where magical resistances often are large.

• Knocked Down – No longer skips turns. Affected characters will get up on their turn, losing 2 AP.
• Stunned – Same as Knocked Down, but air resistance is decreased by 25% (from 15%).
• Burning – Additional functionality: reduces fire resistance by 5% every turn up to 15% extra reduction in fire resistance.
• Suffocating – Additional functionality: reduces all magical resistances by 10%.
• Acid – Additional functionality: reduces physical resistance by 10%.

These changes are made to simply improve on the state of certain talents.

• Demon – Additional functionality: grants immunity to burning.
• Ice King – Additional functionality: grants immunity to chilled and frozen.
• What a Rush – Activation threshold increased to 60% vitality (from 50%).
• Hothead – Accuracy bonus reduced to 5% (from 10%).

These changes concern the viability of "crit builds", that should now be more accessible.

• Hit Chance – Hit chance in excess of 100% will grant bonus critical chance. 1% extra critical chance for every 1% excess hit chance, calculated by the formula: Hit chance [%] = (100 – dodge [%]) * Accuracy [%]
• Critical Chance – All characters start with a base Critical Chance of 5%.
• One Handed – Accuracy bonus reduced to 3% (from 5%).

Disclaimer: this mod has not yet been play tested extensively and will probably be updated to fix balance issues and possible bugs. If you have any issues with the mod, please leave some feedback.

I hope you enjoy this mod – if you do, perhaps consider giving it a thumbs up!