Thanks, I will work on that soon, thinking of making a small pack first to rebalance Racial Skills first since there are no good mods doing that right now imo. If anyone has a fun suggestion for those, be sure to let me know here in in DMs. :)

Actually yes, that would be great.

Asking in advance, since I haven't played this game in ages. Would anyone like a DE update on this mod (with a possible complete overhaul on the physical skills like warfare, scoundrel and huntsman as well)? Let me know in this comment section if you do, thinking about completing what I started and finally balance this game the proper way.

I'm on it, saw the balance changes and as expected they were very lackluster. Will be rebalancing this as well since Torturer changing is a big deal to the pyro and geo tree. On it!

Indeed. Also, can't wait for your physical skills rebalance.

Yea, would love that too!

Will you be updating this for the definitive edition? The changes you've made seem pretty interesting.

I'm not a fan of one save mode on a game so heavily focused on dialogs and with fix content. I'm fine when it's randomized or whatever but not in this case, and I have no problem at all with loading hundreds of time the same save to find the right tactic to win. I don't call that save scumming personally.

As for talents I'm not sure they'll change the modding tool sadly. I mean they could but at the same time I don't see any reason why it would change the slightest. I really hope it does as it needs some serious love (it's so clunky, slow, buggy and some huge limitations like talents or creating new schools of skills).

Honestly, the one thing I really hope they release is a solid way to adjust Talents. So far the modding tool can't do it directly and you have to write your own script to make it work. It'd be a wonderful tool to have for the modding community and I'm sure I'll use it as well if they decide it comes out.

Tactician's wonderful, you should try it! The best way to play in my opinion so far is Honour mode though, since you can't save-scum your way out of situations so you have to live with every mistake you make. It's very challenging and very fun, I urge you to give it a try!

There has been some significant balance changes for talents already so I guess we can expect the rest. Well I suppose technically we could already see those changes on the PS4 early access version of the edition.

As for my potential big mod I'd make in the future, I'll first wait to do a complete playthrough of the Definitive Edition in Tactician mode (never took the time to play an entire playthrough in Tactician). Compile many notes about balance and then see from there. But I'd love to add new spells to balance the game as well. Like add 1-5 spells in each school and maybe some hybrid spells (like fire-water) with balance and build diversity in mind.

There's been some wind of balance changes if I recall correctly, but I don't expect any major overhauls or big changes. If they are though, I'm all the more excited to check it out so it doesn't mean anything for my motivation of finishing this line of mods. :)

Did they say they are going to change balance in the definitive edition? I thought they only changed storylines and UI and stuff. I've never heard anything about balance changes, I might be uninformed though.

@Sombrero Hit me up when you do, balancing is always done better with a group, I've noticed. I'm going to finish the next mod before Definitive Edition comes out mostly because I'm curious how close I'll be to the changes they make and to have something fun to do. Would appreciate it if you try it out as well next week, the more feedback the better!

The thing is that most of the main concerns players have with this version will most likely be tweaked on the Definitive Edition by default so it's hard to make balance changes right after big ones are made. But again I respect your project I would have loved doing the same and maybe one day I'll try to.

@Schnoz I like your ideas! They match mine for Polymorph at least, to make sure more classes will be able to use those. Look forward to some nerfs in that tree though; there are a few skills way too strong and I think nerfing those would make a ton of builds more viable. Scoundrel I'm probably going to have the most trouble with as I want to keep it interesting but I don't want it to outshine every other physical tree. I'd like to rework some skilltrees in the long run, but I want the game fixed to make more things viable first. After the next mod is done, I'll start on working out some ideas for attributes and combat skills, then maybe reworks. :)

@Tidepride I'm glad you like it! I have a job interview tomorrow so I won't be working on it for 2 days, after that I'm going to continue. I already have most of my ideas for the other trees in check, so all in all, it should be done in about a week after tomorrow. The new mod will be uploaded then and I'll make sure the descriptions have a link towards one another.

Call me a stickler but I've never been able to really get into the game because how the skills esentially forced certain builds when the system was designed to be open to whatever. Things like warfare being essentially mandatory to any physical damage builds or all damaging polymorph skills scaling with strength when it's advertised as flexible enough to be used on anything. Mods like these are things that could finally open up the game for and allow my whacky ideas like scoundrel mixed with fire for sabotage and traps with some poison mixed in to life.

Really nice changes, I agree with almost all of them. Just a question here- how long did it take to rebalance all of this and when do you think you will be finished rebalancing every skill? An estimate would be great.

@profi I'm going to tackle that next, my goal is to give them utility and mobility but taking away the ridiculous boss oneshots. I'm doing the same to Polymorph, changing Apotheosis and nerfing Skin Graft. Stay tuned!

I mean to be honest, if you're a min-maxer, you just play Rogue and 1shot every boss/enemy in the game, using the same combo. It killed all the fun in the game for me when I realised how incredibly broken Rogue was and I couldn't ever do another playthrough because of it, so when you get around to balancing Scoundrel/Warfare, you're going to make me a very happy gamer.

You're right about Blinding Radiance being easy to use, but stunning can be done at range too and usually isn't an issue at all, since you'd stun character from halfway across the map, making the electrified water a big plus. Blind is still a soft CC and it's a single turn. I might increase the AP cost to 3 if it's really that overpowered, to keep it a defensive option that's not relied on in a damage rotation. The reason I like it as it is, is because it actually gets used now. The skill always felt weak to me with the insanely short range, and I only increased it by 3. What do you think of this? Also, if you have any suggestions regarding Favourable Winds, I'm all ears.

Honestly, I never felt like anyone ever used Favourable Winds for the effect it had. To me it was always a much worse haste effect, with an aura effect. The aura effect meaning you can't use it to buff and forget either, I always felt it needed a little extra. I thought about giving it extra range, since it's make sense lore-wise, but there's a ranger source skill that does that and I don't want to thread on other classes too much. I'm still thinking of what to do with the skill, since it's not great in vanilla and not great as I made it, but at least I know the experiment I did on it failed. I thought about it adding some kind of dodge to ranged attacks, but there's in in-game mechanic that uses that as far as I know. I thought of making it have an additional effect of increasing High Ground properties, but that doesn't quite feel right either, especially with ranger being ridiculously strong already.

Blinding radiance is also extremly safe to use. While stunning can go wrong very fast especially with big pools of water.

As for favourable wind I understand your intention but I think when you do balancing you have to stick to just balancing. Aerothurgy requires new spells maybe, but the current ones are functional.

Not only that, Blinding Radiance is a 1 turn wonder, after which it begins a healthy cooldown period. If you position juuuust right, I feel like you should get rewarded for it. It also means if your character's standing in the middle of ranged units, blinding them, it's probably going to die next turn if it stays there, as all ranged units will attack the person who had Blinding Radiance on the previous turn. It used to be close to the same range as Medusa iirc, which is a WAY stronger effect that lasts multiple turns. I'll change Favourable Winds around and try out some other effects on it, but I think I'll leave Blinding Radiance close to what it is now (maybe a 1m range drop)

That actually sounds pretty cool, I might try to create a cloud removal effect on Favourable Winds on the next patch. I honestly wanted Aerotheurgy to have a nice damage buff that in the end becomes very favourable to use, value-wise. 15% damage for 4 players for that many turns easily makes up for the AP cost in the end. The only real problem I have with it at this moment is that it -feels- bad to use. I'm trying to make most spells feel a little better so they'll get used more. Blinding Radiance had the same issue, why would I ever use it if I can use similar spells that straight up stun? The blind effect is only good on ranged characters anyway, as the accuracy drop doesn't necessarily mean they'll miss.

As for Blinding Radiance I don't think damage is the issue, to me it's really the range. The base range of the spell was quite fine. Blinding automatically anyone in range whenever their magical armor is down is ridiculously overpowered because that means your allies can trigger the effect by striping down magical armors of enemies in the vicinity after your turn. And blind effect is one of the most annoying one to deal with (almost 0 range to cast spells and terrible weapon accuracy). Having it that wide is just too strong.

So far no, favourable winds should in my opinion just stay as the regular version but maybe also remove all surfaces in a decently wide area around the user or some supportive effect like that. I mean it's winds that are being summoned after all and it fits perfectly the supportive effect of having the team running fast. Now they can run safely as well. I'm really not fan of having such an effect costing 3 AP. 2 maybe if a new effect is added like the one I mentionned but it's not like running faster is OP to begin with considering all the extremly good movement spells there's in the game already.

Also note that Mosquito Swarm doesn't actually lifesteal! The heal is actually a heal, meaning it scales with Hydrosophist as well for an interesting interaction. I feel necro needed some damage in earlier spells, I have the feeling Mosquito Swarm feels much better now to be honest. I'll probably buff Favourable Winds next patch, fix Acid Spores to work properly (it has issues with it's surfaces on a friend's run for some reason) and maybe nerf Blinding Radiance's damage by 10% or so. I don't feel it's damage is really that over the top for the AP cost, any other nuke will outdamage it really. Found anything else you like/dislike? Making a list as we speak.

I did not change the damage of Bloated Corpse at all, but I raised the AP cost from 1 to 2 and reduced the cooldown to 2 turns, so it's more usable as stuff starts dropping, but you pay more AP/damage. Basically it'll increase damage per turn, but decrease damage per AP.

Well I'm not very far into the game yet, at the end of Fort Joy, but I go fast as I have done Act 1 a million times already. So far I haven't seen any super original combo mostly because my party doesn't have access to many spells. It's still interesting to see some spells with AP changed being used differently.

I find the bloated corpse extremly powerful at this moment but I don't even know if it has been changed or not. I was skeptical about Swarming Mosquitos being 2 AP at first but the improved damage output is actually quite interesting so I'm getting used to it.

That actually sounds like a lot of fun! I might try that out later. I'm going to let the mod sit for about a week before taking community comments into account to change them all, as I don't want to reupload it every single day. I've found some things myself that I would change just a little more, as expected of a v1.0. Most of the magic I'm using feels fine as it is really, especially considering I played with a friend on a bowman character, still massively outdamaging me. Magic in comparison seems much more about utility, though it does have damaging properties in some scenarios where it can really shine. Tell me what you learn from using the AI mod, I'm curious if there's combos I haven't seen yet that they can come up with!

Well I've already started a run actually. But I think I'll actually start one from scratch with only this mod activated and no other.
Before I was using my True Companions mod which turns any ally you want into an AI during battle, and funnily enough your mod makes drastic changes in some cases to the AI since the AI is decently clever and take into account many things such as AP cost, damage calulcation etc.
For example the AI knows the exact range of the new blinding radiance and uses it to its fullest potential and uses the electric touch a lot more often. Beast on the tutorial fight is a serial killer with blinding radiance and his touch spam for example.
I'm not sure yet if I use my AI mod or not in conjunction with yours, as I quite like to see how the AI react to the changes as well. They have very creative use of some spells sometimes.

Also, I would love some help on these, I'll make a Discord for the project as soon as I find a few people! I think it'll be a lot of fun and I'm sure there's many ideas unexplored that could be explored together. I'll let you know when I'm setting it up! Thanks again for the insights and let me know when you try a run out, I'm curious to what you think of the changes!

The reason for me to do the project now is to mess around with a lot of the skills and see if my insights compare to the ones Larian Studios has in mind for defnitive edition and because I want to get practice in modding. I honestly love the game to death and I want to be part of the community on this one. I feel like there's a lot of non-viable builds that would be really fun to play and I hope I can make that happen, even for a few months. Once definitive edition is out, I'll redo the mods for those, change stuff according to what feels right to me after reading Larian's patch notes, and hopefully revamp more and more of the game in a healthy, balanced way.

Hey there, thanks for the comment! The reasoning behind making some skills that already seemed strong a little bit stronger, is because of how it matched up to physical damage. I wanted to bring Magic on par with it and the only way I see how is by adjusting the numbers to what the regular resist rates are for nearly every enemy. I've nerfed some skills a little because their potential was in my opinion gimmicky at best and cheese at worst. The reasoning behind Blinding Radiance is because it makes the skill stronger early game when there's not much hard CC on mages yet, but it falls off later on since blind is a soft-cc and the damage isn't all that great. The damage per AP ratio on that skill is only good when you start hitting a lot of enemies, but that means less focus power which is how fights are usually handled.

After going through most of the patch notes I'm surprised by so many changes. I may not be the biggest min-maxxer though so my surprise may be from lack of experience with the most optimal builds. But some spells I always found strong are getting buffed while the ones you seem to consider strong are the spells I would never use.

Also I find it a bit risky to go through such a big project right before the definitive edition is released as it will most likely includes such rebalance all around. I would have waited and see how the definitive edition goes first while thinking out the rest of the balancing in the meantime. But I have a lot of respect for your hard work!

I absolutely love the idea of your mod and I would love to help if you're looking for help and feedback. I'll give it a proper try I'm starting by reading your "patch" notes. So far I'm a bit skeptical about some changes (Favourable wind sounds a lot worse than it was before, blinding radiance is absurdly op on paper).

Though I hate you because I'll have to re-start a new savefile again to properly try it out haha :D

The reason I nerfed Deploy Mass Traps is because it was 3 AP 1 SP for 500 damage multiplier in an area of effect when paired with skills like impalement. The explosion it caused overlapped very easily, and 500 damage for 3 AP 1 SP was way overtuned. It's still 375 damage as it is now, since it does require some setup to pull off, which is still really, really high. I changed the single trap skill to make it more usable in a minefield kind of way, but less so in a 125 damage for 1 AP kind of way. This way it could be more fun to set things up with, while not making the skill way too strong.

Thanks for replying and let me know if there's anything else you have questions about!

Thanks for the compliment, I'm glad you like it! The reason I went for Magic first is so it makes it easier to me to balance both Warfare and Polymorph since I know which numbers I'm working with now. I will generally hold into account that the minimum resist rate is 20% on magic schools, so I will change the non-magic skills according to that logic.

Nicely done! I see you've put a lot of work into this mod.
Though IMO, it would be better if you'd start rebalance not from magic, but from physical skills, especially from Warfare. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it.
Also, some nitpicking, not sure why you've nerfed both of the trap skills. I think they were pretty fine.