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Stance-based Combat

Ever tire of your warriors sitting in one place, mindless smacking the same couple of enemies over and over again? Wish you could convert that unnaturally high-but-ultimately useless dodge stat on your backline Mystic into a useful stat? Ever wanted to augment your heroes’ fighting ability in a complicated but rewarding manner? Perhaps Stance-Based Combat mechanics is the mod for you.

Inspired by mods from other tactical games, this mod grants all heroes the ability to use one of four different Stances, each one providing buffs and nerfs to various, usually opposite, stats. They are:

Aggressive Stance: +1 Damage, -15 Accuracy, -30 Block

Focused Stance: +15 Accuracy, +15 Stunt Chance, -2 Speed, -15 Block

Flanking Stance: +1 Speed, -15 Accuracy, -1 Damage

Guarded Stance: +15 Block, -15 Stunt Chance, -1 Speed

Now, these very minor buffs probably don’t seem worth taking all the maluses at the same time, right? Well, this is where the fun comes in…

Every time a hero switches stances, their momentum coming out of the previous stance grants them a bonus going into the new one, a 1-turn only buff that not only counteracts part of the stance debuffs, but oftentimes provides new and exciting bonus abilities. Use Crushing Blow to Concuss your targets, Vanguard’s Defense to mark multiple targets for flanking, or Blindside to take advantage of mobility and gain huge stunt chance bonuses. There are 12 different buffs, 3 for each stance, refer to this discussion here for more info.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to each stance change buff, you can also opt to Retain your current stance, providing increases to the buffs but also increases the penalties as well.

Reckless Stance: (Aggressive) +1 Damage, +1 Incoming Damage, -15 Block

Tunnel Vision: (Focused) +20 Stunt Chance, -15 Block, Can only attack the previously attacked target, but +60 block against that target (for a net of +30).

Sprinting Stance: (Flanking) +1 Speed, +15 Dodge, -1 Damage

Stonewall Stance: (Guarded) +15 Block, -1 Incoming Damage, -1 Damage, -1 Speed

And then, if that wasn’t enough for you, care was also put into thinking about your old legacy heroes who would have their builds ruined by the new stance mechanics. For each and every individual hero, you get to decide whether or not they are allowed to use stances and stance switching, or if they are to permanently engage in a “neutral” stance, where no stats are affected. This choice can be changed on the first turn of every battle and will save from mission to mission. (Unknown whether or not it saves across Legacy though, little hard to test that) So you don’t need to worry about this vastly messing up any of your characters, just disable it for them if you don’t like it.

• Most of the stat changes were made to be equivalent to 2 or even 4 stacks of augments affecting the same stat, this might bring stat balance wildly out of control, as the author I have an innate bias to want to see the effect of stances all the time, please let me know if it feels too strong/too weak.
  
• Heroes will always enter battle in Guard Stance. I could try and make them save their previously used stance, but that also encourages weirdness at the end of battles to make sure everyone saves their favorite stance, so instead I picked Guard as it seemed the one with the most immediate benefits upon entering a fight. (I can provide a guide on how to change the default if anyone feels strongly about changing it though)
  
• Heroes cannot switch back into their previous stance at any time, this was done for two reasons: 1) To prevent constantly flipping between only two stances and ignoring the rest of the mechanics and 2) To reduce ability bar clutter, heroes only have three choices each turn, one of which is just to retain their current stance, hopefully this will simplify combat and make things easier.
  
• IMPORTANT NOTE:Choosing a stance must be done as the first action of any turn. The only ability that may be used before a stance change is Prepared Shot from the Hunter’s Ambush skill, otherwise the game will automatically assume you are retaining stance.
  
• Tunnel Vision needs to act a little weirdly in order to apply everything correctly, meaning it might sometimes break. I’ve tried to catch most edge cases, but if something gets stuck let me know. (And yes, it is intentional that it will automatically apply itself whether or not you retain it, switching to a different stance before attacking will clear it automatically)
  
• This is overall a buff to all heroes who use stances, it might also make some abilities feel useless or weak. There are some eventual plans to tweak the stances, perhaps bring in some more creative nerfs, along with a greater overall mod that will cause various abilities to react to a hero’s stance as well. Accomplishing this much took a while, however, so I wanted to get this out now, get feedback, and see how it feels before moving any farther forward with it.

Only overrides the Ex-Farmer aspect to attach stances to heroes, no other mods that I know of touch this yet so this should be fully compatible. (Also now overrides preparedShotFreeAttack effect to make sure it won’t trigger stance retaining early)

There is a lot of text and some visual effects used to try and communicate the stances, what they’re doing, and what they will do to a character, and I’ve tried my best to make sure it is all accurate and helpful. Please let me know if you find any issues or want any clarifications with how this all works. I know this is a spider-web mess of a concept and want to try my best to make it manageable.

• All of the people in #tools-and-modding in the Discord who put up with my questions and ramblings through this.
  
• The Wildermyth devs for making this wonderful game and for taking the time to help us modders out.