INTRODUCTION
Hey, I'm a senior gameplay designer and I worked on The Witcher3 and both expansion packs. This mod used to be a personal set of tweaks and fixes meant to spice up my first The Witcher 3 playthrough after releasing the game. Being in creation for more than half a year and enjoyed during >300h playthrough I thought that I might share it with witcher community. Mod doesn't aim for any deep and intrusive changes, instead it is meant to maintain original feeling of the game, sometimes going closer to original intention behind the designs. It focuses mainly on fixing immersion breakers, buffing underperforming skills and items, cosmetic changes and bugfixing. It also fixes few instances of items and abilities that made Geralt (nearly) immortal and removed all the challenge from the game.
CHANGELOG
Immersion
Bunch of features that added to ‘wow’ factor and changes for things that bothered me.
• Metamorphosis mutation effect "Witcher Senses now increase visibility in dark places without the use of potions works" works without the mutation. In combat it works automatically, while outside of combat it can be activated in focus mode. Witchers see in the dark. All of them, no potions needed. It’s in lore.
• Added reaction to stealing for commoners. There are two severities of reactions and two results for each of them depending on npc AI. Commoners will react depending on the priority of tasks they are undergoing at the moment. The effect is that some of the npcs will ignore you stealing stuff, others will call you out on it, some will just stare. There will be also rare cases when someone will be become intimidated, cover in fear or possibly run away. The effect is especially visible in Novigrad, less in Skellige and least in Toussaint, where even guards ignore player stealing.
• Increased minimal height from which fall damage starts to be applied.
• Made Ciri immune to damage while she's performing special 'teleport' charged attack. Could be considered as a bugfix.
• Allied NPCs (followers) deal full damage to enemies (used to deal minimal damage).
• Buffed sorceress and witcher followers damage. These are the most powerful characters in the setting, you should feel that now.
• Reduced level bonus of guards from player level plus random 11-13 to player level plus random 0-5. A random guard shouldn't pose a threat to legendary witcher.
• Sped up animations of flying monsters falling down after being shot from the sky.
• Added fall damage on ground contact for monsters that were shot from the sky. Damage depends on the height from which they fall.
• Allowed to bounce majority of the physical projectiles with Aard hit.
• Signs buffed by Flood of Anger skill cause enemy explosive dismemberment on kill.
• Sorceresses now dismember enemies on kill.
• Fixed majority of rare cases where Geralt jumped after hitting ground while playing death animation.
• Fixed some of the cases for sorceresses where spell visual effect remained on hand after combat. Still not sure if all instances were fixed but should be better.
Character development
Multiple changes that aim at bringing back the original intended feeling to character development and alchemy builds. Initially skills were designed as a single point investments. The excess of skillpoints player was given was meant to encourage swapping skills depending on the enemies and situations. To bring back that feeling max levels of skills were reduced giving more bang for the buck instead of small percent increases. Additionally there are few changes bringing high toxicity Euphoria build down to be on par with other builds and buffs for mutations that didn’t feel strong or unique enough.
• Decreased skills max levels (most had 5, now 3) and adjusted stats to retain the same balance. Utility skills like slowdown on aiming now have only 1 level.
• Nerfed Acquired Tolerance skill to grant 0.5 Toxicity point per level to prevent safe activation of more than 3 decoctions at the same time in end game.
• Quen doesn't remove damage over time effects on cast, instead it protects player while DoTs consume the shield. Resistances on armors should matter more now.
• Reduced healing from damage on alternate Quen from 100% of received damage to 0.1 * damage * Spell Power. This mechanic was clearly overpowered and made player nearly immortal.
• Decreased toxicity overdose damage threshold from 75 to 50. That was the initial original idea for toxicity handling encouraging player to take risk and correctly time potion use.
• Equalized out of combat and combat toxicity drop rate (used to be twice as fast).
• Crippling Strikes skill: Deals regular bleeding effect damage that cannot go below the dmg value specified in skill description. Also effect duration was increased from 5 to 10 seconds to match the duration of regular bleeding. General idea is that effect originating from skill shouldn't be weaker than bleeding from item.
• Adrenaline Rush mutation: When at maximum Vitality, Adrenaline Points drop after 4s delay. Introduced new potential skill combos and play styles instead of another percentage damage buff.
• Deadly Counter mutation: A counterattack immediately triggers a finisher with a chance based on the number of Adrenaline Points. Opponents immune to counterattacks are not affected. Used to work only on opponents below 25% health.
• Toxic Blood mutation: doubled the returned damage value (3% per toxicity point, was 1.5%) to compensate for reducing maximum achievable toxicity.
NPCs
Couple of bugfixes and removing arbitrary stat bonuses.
• Removed huge arbitrary stat buffs on enemies with skull icons. They are already higher level than player, that alone makes them more difficult.
• Allowed to parry and counterattack enemies with skull icons.
• Fixed leshen root damage being a fixed value throughout the whole game. It's taken from his melee attack damage so it scales with enemy level.
• Made bird swarm attacks ignore armor. Leshen bird attacks dealt zero damage starting from mid-game.
• Fixed sprigan's root ground attack dealing no damage.
• Restored monster essence (silver health bar) regeneration (mostly for werewolves). It was temporarily disabled at some point in implementation and never brought back.
• Fixed discrepancies between NG+ and base game xml files, like missing ability definitions, ability tags, etc. These potentially caused minor bugs in enemy stats in NG+.
• Rats are not affected by enemy upscaling option.
General items
Bunch of small changes that put more emphasis on some of the gameplay mechanics that didn’t work as originally intended due to balancing issues.
• Increased random range of item levels rolled for quest rewards. You might end up with an item you cannot use yet, but at least you'll get a guaranteed upgrade on level up.
• Increased stat debuff on damaged items. Value depends on game difficulty level with 50% debuff on highest difficulty. Repairing items matter now.
• Increased amount of gold given in quests where it made sense (Baron should be more generous, etc.). Didn't touch the mini-quests.
• Reduced the amount of healing per second from food but increased healing duration. Overall it's a slight buff for food without Gourmet perk and a significant nerf with it. Swallow and White Raffard potions are intended healing in combat, not chicken sandwiches.
Witcher sets
Changes are focused on fixing near immortality issue coming from high rending (monster) damage reduction combined with Protective Coating skill. Also there are two sets partially focusing on buffing alchemy builds. Mod moves alchemy bonuses to Manticore set making it a dedicated alchemy set and introduces new bonuses and playstyle to Wolven set. I remember reading about the idea of Wolven set built around bleeding damage on Witcher Reddit, so cheers to the Reddit community.
• Scaled down monster damage resistance on witcher armors where applicable. Upgraded witcher sets used in conjunction with Protective Coating oil used to reach 100% rending damage reduction (some damage still passed due to resistance cap). That shouldn't be the case now. For details on numbers check attached images.
• Enabled grandmaster set bonuses on all witcher sets items in New Game+.
• Moved 3 item Wolven set bonus (bombs are thrown without a delay) and merged it with 3 item Manticore set bonus (bombs are affected by critical hit chance and critical hit damage).
• Reduced Manticore set Toxicity bonus from 30 (and more on NG+) to 20, to prevent safe activation of more than 3 decoctions at the same time in end game.
• Moved 6 item Wolven set bonus (3 different oils can be applied to a sword) to Fixative alchemy skill. Should make Fixative skill a more interesting choice in character development.
• New Wolven set 3 item bonus: Each stack of Bleeding effect applied to enemies increases sword damage by 1% for each piece of the set.
• New Wolven set 6 item bonus: Each Adrenaline Point increases number of possible stacks of Bleeding effect that can be applied to single opponent. With new set bonuses Wolven set tries to fulfil the fantasy of specialized Damage over Time build working well in conjunction with buffed Crippling Strikes skill.
Item upgrades
Buffed every runeword and glyphword about which I thought “I’d never use that when I have that other, better choice”. Beside buffing, Possession runeword had its effect changed because there used to be 2 glyphwords buffing Axii in different ways and 3rd being a sum of previous two, so it just wasn’t interesting enough.
• Rejuvenation runeword: Fatal blows restore 100% stamina (was 25%).
• Dumplings runeword: changed duration bonus to 5x increase in healing speed. With this buff food brought back to the same healing speed as in vanilla game while also having significantly increased effect duration.
• Elation runeword: Fatal blows give 1 Adrenaline point (was 0.1 to 0.25).
• Prolongation runeword: Unblocked blows increases potion duration by 1s (was 0.5s)
• Ignition glyphword: Enemies set alight with Igni have a 100% chance to ignite other enemies within a 2 yard radius. (was 25% chance)
• Rotation glyphword: Igni strikes in a 360 radius (removed "but doesn't induce Burning" tradeoff). When I read 360 radius I thought “cool!”, then I read “but doesn’t induce Burning” and I thought “aww, but that tradeoff makes it useless”.
• Possession glyphword, new effect: When effect of Axii ends, opponent receives damage dependent on effect duration and Sign intensity. Spent long time balancing the damage potential. It’s a nice bonus when you don’t invest in Sign intensity and a killer when you do. It’s very effective at the cost of waiting - you could finish off enemies faster by other means. As a bonus eye candy, enemies that die to Possession effect explode.
• Retribution glyphword: 100% chance for half damage returned (was 30% chance for ⅔ damage returned). A small damage nerf in exchange for consistency and reliability. When you allow yourself to be hit to deal damage, you want it to be reliable, not bet on random chance.
• Eruption glyphword: explosion deals the same damage as rotfiend's explosion added to original damage. Used to be only 50 dmg multiplied by Sign intensity.
• Depletion glyphword: casting Aard depletes enemy’s stamina (was 50% stamina damage). The idea behind the glyphword was to allow player to overcome enemy defence even if he didn’t manage to knock him down (stamina is used for offensive and defensive actions). With just 50% stamina damage enemies could still parry after casting Aard, so it didn’t feel like it made any difference.
Bombs
Bombs deal a decent amount of damage up to the middle of main game and then they fall behind Signs and sword damage becoming useless as damage dealers in end game, both expansions and NG+. These changes aim to make bombs a perfectly viable build if player chooses to invest enough skill points in alchemy build.
• Beside increasing potion duration each active alchemy skill also increases damage of bombs by 5% per skill level.
• Added DoT value scaling with enemy max health on top of existing damage value to Devil's Puffball bomb. This is how majority of other DoTs work in the game.
• Heavy Artillery damage bonus acts as a final damage multiplier calculated after bonus from alchemy skills.
• Doubled damage values of bombs and Pyromancy skill in NG+.
• Moon Dust bombs block abilities of cursed monsters and shapeshifters. These monsters are especially vulnerable to silver.
• Northern Wind bombs block rotfiend enemy types explosive deaths.
Crossbow
Beside the cosmetic improvements the main intention is to make crossbow damage useful but not competing with swords, Signs and bombs unless you invest in crossbow related skills and use high quality bolts.
• Crossbow bolt's damage scales with player level. Damage is dependent on bolt quality.
• Slowed down crossbow bolts when shot underwater.
• Increased crossbow bolts range from 25m to 50m when not underwater.
Potions
Didn’t like the way Blizzard potion was triggered. It was useless in 1v1 monster hunts and boss fights. I wanted to remedy that.
• Blizzard potion now activates slow motion when Geralt is in danger, no need to kill an enemy anymore. To compensate, effect's strength and duration was slightly decreased. Blizzard should be more consistent and easy to use now but also not that overpowered.
• Cat potion grants 5% crit chance bonus. A little bonus that should make Cat potion a bit more useful.
And I'm constantly getting new enemies thrown at me too.
