the vampire fleet captain (Vampires) gets the normal vampire counts raise dead instead of the vampire coast drowned dead.

Righto, thanks. I'm uploading a fix now, you might lose a skillpoint in Wizard 2 if you put one there, sorry about that

So, this is a great mod, and I dearly wish something similar to it would exist for Lords as well (you always pick the red skills with lords, it's so boring). Thanks so much for making it!

The balance of some of the skills seems a little off to me though. Especially the poison skill. The very first poison gives you +100% damage and the enemy -50% DR, so you temporarily do 4 times the damage if I understand correctly?? That's just so much better than any of the other skills. I'd remove the +100% damage mod entirely and buff the other two poisons a little so it's less of a nobrainer.

In general, I almost never pick the skills that come with stat penalties. Maybe it's just psychological, but it feels bad if my hero levels and then he actually gets worse at some things. Like, the Spellsword skill seems like a lot of fun to use, but then I see the stat penalties that come with it and think "I'll probably just forget to cast spells with my hero and he'll be weaker than if I hadn't levelled him at all." Especially underwhelming skills like Berserker (I hope I'm remembering the names correctly) just don't seem worth it at all because of the downsides. It's okay in some cases, like having the sniper trait reduce firing rate while increasing damage, but why does it also come with defence skill penalties? It feels bad.

Speaking of the sniper trait, a lot of skills don't do what they see in the description. Like, the sniper trait will say that it reduces firing rate by X%, but then after I take it I see that my firing rate is reduced by a much bigger amount. I'm guessing that's because of how the skills interact with each other? Maybe it's because I previously took the skill that gave my Gunnery Wight a blunderbuss, which also affected his firing rate? Either way it's confusing, but I don't know if it can be fixed.

Overall, I'd remove about 90% of the negative skill effects, keeping only the penalties that are fun and don't feel bad (like Abomination having rampage I guess), and I'd give the underwhelming skills some buffs (Leadership skills such as Sergeant for example. Or having Hunter also give bonus vs Large to ranged attacks) while adjusting the crazy ones a bit (The ones that give huge defence/attack boosts like Champion are also really strong). But, again, I really love the mod, so please don't take this feedback in a negative way!

Hey RaveningHorde, thanks for the feedback!

The first poison is supposed to be the most powerful, it has a higher rarity to represent this. If I remember correctly all the crafting careers are like this, the first item is the most powerful. That's just to create a little variance. The -50% physical res will only strip physical res a unit already has, it won't increase damage by 50% (I just went a double-checked this by giving a unit of swordsmen an infinite version of the poison sans damage increase and making them fight a unit of spearmen, and they did just as well with or without the poison active!) so most of the time the poison is just double damage for a limited time. It's only quad damage if the unit had 50% physical res to remove which is really rare.

It's still probably too powerful though, you're right. I play with mods that slow the combat down a fair bit, so I'm probably not appreciating that 24 seconds is really long in vanilla. I'll reduce the duration a little bit for the next update.

Traits having negative effects is tricky. I know, from a psychological perspective, it can feel bad, but the reason for doing so is that it allows me to make the upside much bigger. If I removed the downside I'd have to nerf the upside too (I mean I could not do that, but I don't want to make heroes OP - the goal is just to change how you customise them, not give them a power boost). With hero units only being a small part of a battle it's hard to give them buffs that make their role feel noticeably different. If you give a hero +12 melee attack it doesn't feel noticeably more "berserkerish" but if you give it +18 melee attack AND a passive that increase damage further AND a nerf to defense, it makes the unit feel like an actual berserker - very killy but very squishy. If you think the upside just isn't worth the downside that's a different matter, and I can take a look at any such skills.

As for sniper, yeah I went and checked and something screwy is happening. With my usual setup of mods the Sniper career wasn't lowering fire rate at all and Artillerist was increasing firerate for some reason. Then I reverted to vanilla with only my mod loaded and now Sniper was lowering firerate but only by a very small amount and Artillerist wasn't increasing fire rate any more. Seems like fire rate is a buggy stat? I'll take a look at reworking Sniper to remove the fire rate debuff.

Sergeant could probably do with a buff, you're right, maybe giving a buff to friendly units in an AoE around the Sergeant. I try to avoid giving buffs to units other than the hero that weren't in vanilla, but 1 AoE buff couldn't hurt.

I didn't give Hunter a ranged bonus vs large because it's just flat damage. You'll notice there's no flat damage in general anywhere in the mod and that's because it breaks balance between overhauls. +100 damage could be balanced in vanilla, broken in CTT, and useless in Lucky's Overhaul, for example, so I try to avoid it. Melee bonus vs large/small is different because it also adds Melee Attack and that's what it's mostly useful for.

I'll be doing another balance pass for the December patch that adds the wood elf dlc, so I'll take this all on board for then (I don't want to change things sooner because it could break people's saves). Again, thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated!

I’m glad you appreciate the feedback! I was a bit worried that I was writing too much criticisms at once (I tend to be a bit wordy). But since you don’t seem to mind… here’s some more. :)

First off, thanks for explaining the poison skill! I think you still underestimate it though. Remember, it enables poisoned attacks which *by itself* is almost as good as weaker skills like Marine or Scout. And then you get a skill which doubles your damage AND two other poisons on top of that. It’s crazy.

That reminds me: Apothecary is also super OP. Gaining Invulnerability for ~20 seconds OR healing to full would each be a super powerful skill by itself. Having both effects in one skill makes it just nuts. Maybe you could split these skills up like you did with the wizard level upgrades? Right now it really just feels like I'm getting two skills for the price of one.

With skills that have downsides, I don’t think it’s *only* psychological that they feel weak. Take Fanatic for example. It gives you frenzy in exchange for -30 armour. Even if it JUST gave you frenzy without any downside, it would still be incredibly underwhelming compared to other skills. The fact that it gives you unbreakable really just removes the leadership condition for frenzy (right?), which effectively makes it a boring unconditional +8 melee attack and +15% weapon damage buff, which is just less than comparable skills… while also lowering your armour by 30.

It’s not just a matter of certain skills being too strong or too weak though. A big part of the problem is actually that there’s just *so many* effects for each skill. The first time I used this mod I was overwhelmed because there were immediately 20 options to choose from, each with about 5 different positive and negative modifiers. Partially that could be solved maybe by making the stronger skills require a higher level: That way you would have new and interesting choices each time, instead of having to spend 30 minutes deciding on the first skill and then snap picking the second one because you’ve already examined them all and know which ones are strongest.

(This is also a problem with the Warhammer TW skill system in general: you’re offered the same choices each time you play the same lord/hero, which really reduces replayability. You have no incentive to pick different skills for e.g. your second vampire fleet captain than the first. I would love to see some random variation in the skill choices which are offered to your heroes, to encourage the player to pick different specializations each time, but I don’t know if that’s practical to do)

Speaking of vampire fleet captains: The starting ability which enables them to heal infinitely is super strong. I don’t think they should start with that, especially considering that my vampire Lord doesn’t even start with The Hunger. It’s a bit silly to see the heroes be that much better than the lords :P

By the way, would it be possible to explain in the mount descriptions how it affects the stats of your hero? Not your fault of course that the preview window doesn’t work, but I had to choose the mount option and then reload just so I could compare the stat differences for each hero. Turns out that the crab lowers melee attack but increases melee defence? And it… decreases your speed, I think? And then it lowers melee damage but increases armour piercing damage and armor while also giving you a ward save. It’s not exactly intuitive right now :P

One last question, if it’s not too much: Have you ever thought of expanding this skill system to Lords as well? Would probably be a ton of work so I get it if the answer is no, but it’d be a lot of fun too.

Thanks again for making the mod!

Thanks again, this is all useful stuff!

I'm possibly overbuffing poisons/potions to compensate for their limited duration. I think my rationale was something along the lines of "an average battle lasts about 5 minute, if your potions last ~30 seconds that means they're only active for 10% of the battle - albeit the most important 10% because the player decides when to pop them" and then balancing them accordingly. The other problem is that they become increasingly less powerful the longer the battle lasts vs passive skills, which makes balancing a pain, and because I know a lot of people use overhauls like SFO that increases average battle length to 10 minutes and Lucky's Overhaul's average is like 15 minutes. I'll take a review of these careers and run some mock battles to see how effective they are and nerf accordingly.

Yeah Fanatic could do with a buff, I was planning on replacing frenzy with another similar-but-different ability that gels better with unbreakable. I was just being lazy when I kept frenzy.

Gating some skills behind level-ups isn't a bad idea at all. I'll give that a try and see if the skills naturally fit into level grades like that, no promises but I think that'd work.

On random skills - yes, I really wanted to implement this. I wanted some really rare and powerful careers to show up randomly too, or sometimes a human wizard has access to Level 4 Wizard randomly. It's not possible though. It's almost there - traits are actually just skills that all occupy the same spot on the skilltree and are hidden from the player, and the game randomly picks from one. I thought I could use that for random skills but it didn't work. No way to do it via scripting either as far as I know. Darn.

Vampire heroes getting Hunger at level 1 was because I didn't want to put iconic hero abilities inside of careers because then they'd feel mandatory to take, so I gave all heroes their iconic abilities at level 1. It's a little dumb yeah, and it screws with balance a bit but they got those abilities relatively early in vanilla. I can't easily give them those abilities for free after level 1, without more scripting shenanigans. I might do something like this eventually, but that would probably be during a port of the mod to the eventual Warhammer 3.

Mounts actually change a hero into an entirely different hero with a different statline (sometimes the stats look the same, but they're actually a different row on the database). It can't be shown in the tooltip afaik, especially not without making it inaccurate for any overhauls that further change the statlines of every hero.

Doing lords would be too much work unfortunately. There are far more legendary + generic lords than there are types of heroes and their skills are far harder to design and balance because they change the stats of the entire army. Only doing generic lords doesn't feel worth it either, cause you don't use them nearly as often as legendary lords / heroes and because it would make them really weird/imbalanced next to legendary lords with vanilla skilltrees. I would love a version of this mod for lords too, just... so long as I don't have to make it.

Thanks for the answers! I’ve actually used this mod with Lucky’s Overhaul as well as with Vanilla, and potions/poisons felt overpowered in both. Using one or two of those skills lets even a puny hero like a goblin big boss solo the enemy lord and win me the battle, and at that point it doesn’t really matter if they're out of abilities – the battle is already effectively over.

Stacking defence skill buffs is super powerful too by the way. Going from a 60% to 50% chance to get hit is pretty good already, but going from 30% to 20% is crazily good. So I often take Champion along with two other skills which buff defence, and it’s really effective. It’s not necessarily a problem though since minmaxing is pretty in character for an RPG skill system. :) I want to try playing with a group of heroes who all have Bodyguard to stack physical resistance for the same effect, but I haven’t made it work yet.

It’s really cool that you tried to make random skills work! Shame it can’t be scripted. Hm, I do know that some skills are mutually exclusive… if a trait is just like a normal skill, would it be possible to make it so that you can’t take some skills if you have certain traits?

If not, you could always go the simpler route of giving heroes random starting traits which encourage certain career paths. For example, some heroes could randomly start with 30% physical damage reduction, which makes further damage reduction skills even better as per the minmaxing effect I mentioned above. Others could have a starting trait which drastically reduces cooldown for all abilities, making ability based skills such as spells much better. Or a higher melee + ranged base attack rate, which makes any damage buffs better, which encourages you to go the berserker or sniper route. Or you could have a trait which increases a hero’s leadership aura size to span the entire battlefield, which makes leadership buffing skills much better (not that leadership does much in WH2… unfortunately that’s more of a general problem with the game).

I think that could work? If you choose this option it would be nice if there were fewer hero variants available though. In the base game there’s always so many to choose from that I can just pick the same OP starting trait for every lord or hero, which kinda defeats the point.

I wasn’t talking about vampire fleet captains starting with The Hunger – that ability is fine. I meant the special ability they start with that restores ~500 hitpoints which they can use over and over with no limit. Sure, they have a healing cap, but it still makes them insanely hard to kill in the early game. And I’d say it’s strong enough to warrant being a separate skill which they have to invest a skill point in.

For mounts, it’s a shame that it works that way in the game, but I guess it’s better to spend time on doing fun stuff for the mod than trying to fix it. And yeah, doing the mods for Lords as well was a bit optimistic on my part. Here’s hoping that someone else is crazy enough to do it though :p

Yeh minmaxing is a thing. Melee Defense is maybe one of those stats I should be more careful about having loads of sources to stack, since it can skyrocket effective hp as you mentioned.

I think having skills locked by not having traits would get messy, cause you'd have loads of these skills cluttering the skilltree that you can never take. I don't think it'd work anyway, iirc skills have to be adjacent to one another to act as a requirement.

Custom traits was something I wanted to tackle at some point because it's another source of rpg fun, and as you pointed out it'd incentivise building heroes differently. It's again something I'd probably add in the port to game 3, it feels too late now. Knowing my luck I'd add custom traits and then Warhammer 3 removes traits as a mechanic from the game or something.

I can't get rid of hero variants, in the database those are just entirely different heroes that happen to look similar and have similar/identical skilltrees. I actually have to duplicate the same skilltree like 8 times for every empire wizard, and duplicate all the places those 8 skilltrees plug into other parts of the database. There's some mod that changes legendary lord spell schools dynamically so it's maybe possible, I haven't looked into how it's done but I imagine there's lots of complicated scripting involved.

Ahh immortal will, I see the problem now. Vampire Counts can get that ability at level 6, so I was like "oh if they get it that early I'll just stick it on the vampire skill all vampires have at level 1", which included Vampire Captains. Except Vampire Captains never get that ability in vanilla. I'll make a separate version of the vampire skill for Captains that doesn't include immortal will for the next update. Thanks!

Hey! Thanks for the great update. I’ve finally found some time to test it, and as you might have guessed I’ve got some new feedback. :)

Overall I think skills are much better balanced, based on the fact that I’ve had a hard time deciding which to take. It’s very cool for example that Sergeant is now worth taking! Though 30m radius is maybe a bit small. Other abilities like Scout are still a bit hard to justify. Skills really need some kind of tangible power boost to be worth it IMO, because speed really isn’t very good if it just gets the hero killed faster. Maybe make it give +15% missile resist?

I still think conditional abilities are still a bit underpowered. For example, Zealot gives +12 melee attack vs Chaos, while duellist gives +12 stats all the time (plus preventing enemy heroes from moving which I think is better than magic resistance. All the preferred enemy abilities seem a bit underwhelming. Or look at monster hunter vs. fanatic. Fanatic gives + 8 attack for 70 seconds, then -10 defence for 20 seconds. So about +5 stats as well as + 11% damage on average (unbreakable is kinda irrelevant). But Monster Hunter *always* gives +20% damage in addition to +20 attack and +20 damage vs. large targets. If you send the hero up against large targets even just 25% of the time, that’s already strictly better, and Monster Hunter doesn’t come with a speed penalty and has a lower level requirement.

Wizard level upgrades are also a bit lacklustre. Taking level 2 for my elven fire mage really only gives her Burning Head (I don’t use overcast much). Don’t get me wrong, Burning Head is a great spell, but I already have fireball, flaming sword of ruin AND firecloak on level 1: I already have great ways to spend my mana, and I’ll choose increased power over a little extra flexibility any day. This also makes Student a little less appealing.

Perhaps the solution is to make level 1 wizards a bit weaker? You could move the lore attribute to level 2, though I guess that’s not very lore friendly. Or you could make it so that each wizard level reduces the cost of spells from the previous level slightly, like some lords currently do in vanilla. Or you could just add a small winds of magic reserve buff to each wizard level upgrade.

Exorcist seemed really cool combined with the Big Loud Exciting Miscasts mod, but I guess it only increases the overcast miscast chance by 30% (so 0.5 * 1.3) instead of adding 0.30 chance? I thought it would make it so that even basic spells have a chance to miscast. I was looking forward to seeing the enemy Skryre warlocks blast themselves all over the place but they just blasted all my units to shreds instead without ever overcasting. Shucks :(

(The text description for Exorcist is red by the way. Unless I’m misunderstanding it should be green)

I like the new clarity offered by the level requirements, though some of them are a bit counter-intuitive. E.g. why do I need rank 20 for Scribe, but only rank 10 for a Sun Dragon? I’d make a regular horse available on level 1, keep chariots on 10 and move monstrous mounts to level 20.

The Poisoner skill has been severely weakened, which is probably for the best, but now that it’s on level 20 I’m not sure I’d want to take it over the apothecary skill. Apothecary still has *two* extremely powerful abilities (the fact that +50% charge bonus is the weakest one says a lot). I’ll have to test this more.

Anyway, I think that’s more than enough feedback for now. Thanks again for updating this great mod!

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

I looked at scout for a while, but it's in an awkward place because it's a freebie for the scout classes and already has the longest tooltip of any base career. I think it'll be relegated to being a niche skill for people who want to mess with making sanic speed heroes or something weird involving vanguard

Conditionals aren't great yet I agree. I want to something a little more extreme with them at some point like perhaps give aoe buffs when fighting specific enemies to help out the regular troops but we'll see

Wizard levels are clumsy because their tooltips are already huge and I don't want to bloat them further if I can help it. I think everyone is going to have different complaints about what each level gives, because some people never use overcast versions while some people only use overcast, some find early spells useless and just wanna cast the big vortexs, etc etc. Eh, they don't seem horrible to me as they are right now, I might tweak them

The way CA made the game if a spell doesn't have at least a 1% base change to miscast it can't have it's miscast increased at all. It's like that in vanilla, if you use trickster's shard to increase an enemy casters miscast it will only work on overcast spells. It's a shame. I'd be tempted to change every spell to have at least a 1% miscast chance but you've got to overwrite the unit_special_abilities table to do that and that means making the mod incompatible with any mod that overhauls spells

All mounts have to be the same level otherwise the AI would just pick the first mount that unlocks, never getting the higher-tier mounts

Thanks!

Thanks for the reply!

I'm not convinced the miscast increase works the way you assume. When I googled it, people said that it increased the base percentage, so even if you gave every spell a 1% miscast chance it would still only increase it to 0.01 *1.40 = 0.014%. Not really noticable.

In fact, I went ahead and made my own mod that gives every spell a miscast chance. It works great by itself, but... the Exorcist skill doesn't seem to do anything at all. Even if I change the % miscast increase of the Exorcist skill to 1000%, it doesn't seem to increase the chance beyond the base rate: I set warp lightning to 10% base miscast chance for the test, and the enemy warlock engineer miscast one in ten times despite my having a mage with exorcist.

Admittedly I'm using an existing save game to test it, but it does say 1000% increase in the tooltip for the skill, and yet it has no noticeable effect. So unless I missed something, the skill doesn't seem to work as intended.

I don't really like the all-or-nothing aspect of the racial-hatred skills TBH. It feels bad when a skill does nothing most of the time. Personally I'd go the other direction and make it so the skills are mostly good by themselves, but with an added benefit if you go up against your preferred foe. Vanilla WH:TW2 does this too, and probably for the same reason: If Prince Imrik takes his hates chaos skill, he gets a %damage boost which is doubled vs. the Chaos races.

For the mount thing: Perhaps you could make it so that taking the dragon mount requires you to take the basic horse mount first? A dragon is sufficiently powerful that paying two skill points for it isn't too unreasonable, plus you'd still get the passive speed buffs etc. from the horse skill. If upgrading your mage to wizard level 3 takes two skill points, surely having a dragon as a mount should too.

Once all the most powerful skills have been nerfed though, I think it'd be really cool to have a few more skill points to play around with. The mod is a ton of fun to use, so why not add a skill point on level 15 and 25? In general I agree that there can be too much of a good thing, but going from 1 skill point per level in vanilla to 1 per five levels is already a huge reduction. When you don't get any points for 10 levels straight it can feel a bit like you're not interacting with the mod at all.

Yes, you're right the miscast chance is multiplicative, not additive. I don't know why I had assumed that. I just tested it by giving teclis' starting loremaster +40% miscast chance and a regular and overcastable copy of spirit leech. The regular spirit leech had no miscast chance and the overcast version had 70% (base 50% * 1.4 = 70%). Well that makes sense. It's still the same result though, if a spell has no base miscast chance increaseing miscast won't do anything.

I thought maybe I could turn exorcist into an ability, because abilities can have additive or multiplicative effects, but the effect for miscast is called scalar_miscast_chance so no dice. When set to "add 40% miscast chance" it just added 4000% to the base miscast chance of 50%, becoming 2050% miscast chance. There was also a stat_miscast_additional effect, that isn't used anywhere in the base game, but sure enough it gave the non-overcast spells a miscast chance! On their tooltip, it didn't actually make them miscast at all. Damn.

I did add some base effects to the racial careers this patch, like vampire hunter's flame attacks are now universal, revenant got discourage contact effect at all times, ratcatcher got non-ap melee damage, etc. I'm not sure about skewing it further, they risk just becoming the same as the non-racial skills with minor racial fluff bonuses attached and I'd rather just make new non-racial skills if I went down that path (which I might do eventually anyway, racial skills don't seem too popular and I rarely take them myself).

Yeh the dragon requiring a horse makes enough sense, I can change that in the next patch cycle. In general I want to avoid that because you have precious few skillpoints as it is without "wasting" them on mounts you won't use, but I think the fire mage is a good exception.

When I'm feeling less lazy I can add some mct options for additional skillpoints at certain levels, but I'd rather not add them to the base mod. If careers feel too weak relative to how few skillpoints you get I'd rather just buff the careers than give more skillpoints. I'm a fan of RPG systems where you're always thinking "damn, if only I had a few more skillpoints!" than ones where you can comfortably pick everything you want, because if you can pick everything you want it just becomes busy-work instead of an interesting decision.

I remember now why I thought miscast chance was additive and you needed 1% base miscast chance before it did anything - one of the effects does work like that. It's the effect that gives -15% miscast chance on some vanilla skills. It is additive, not multiplicative, and while you can give it to the base spells it won't make them miscast despite what the tooltip says. I just tried giving 100% miscast to spirit leech this way and it said it had 100% miscast but I cast it 3 times against those rats outside teclis's starting city and it wouldn't miscast.

Good to know modding hasn't driven me completely insane yet, only halfway there.

edit - actually I was still wrong, it's not that base spirit leech has 0% miscast chance, it's that it has no miscast explosion in it's unit_special_abilities table. Would've been nice if CA could've put one in there. Again, not really possible to add one without overwriting any changes that other mods make to spells.

Another excellent mod. I've loved using this. I do feel a certain extra attachment to my heroes now, as I build them for specific roles and can never afford to treat them as expendable (they are never immortal!) Really brilliant.

I also find that the power levels of abilities scales fairly well. Generally, heroes are more powerful early on than in vanilla (especially spellcasters), and grow in power more quickly, but this is compensated for by the drawbacks of certain skills, the lack of trait maxing builds from vanilla, and the need to specialize. I always hated how my max level heroes were all identical in vanilla because you end up with enough skill points to (nearly) pick everything. Now I have one shaman who spies, one who collects magic objects, etc.

Obviously, there's room for more synergy with the trait system, but I think it works nicely from an RP perspective. If I get a Goblin big Boss with a combat trait like "Strong", I spec him has a fighter/duelist. If he gets a leadership buffing trait, I go for bully, bodyguard, etc. It's a nice synergy already.

I haven't really encountered any glaringly obvious balance issues. I generally don't mind NOT min-maxxing for the sake of an RP pay-off: i'll pick scout for fun, or throw a weird combination of skills together, just to build a character, and the mod let's that happen. And while spellcasters grow in power more quickly, I like that some of them (like the goblin shaman) lake access to arcane conduit: makes sense from a lore perspective (why would goblins channel winds super well?) and also indirectly changes the way combat plays out. Strangely, I found myself actually using previously underused spells, like Nightshroud, because I wasn't in the mindset of min-maxxing my winds for damage spells and the most efficient buffs. Excited to try this with other factions.

The one area I'd like to see built out more is more race specific skillsets. I acknowledge this is time consuming. The work you've already done to give flavor/character to each skill is so top notch it's incredible. But I have the awkward fact that my goblin shaman can become a "Heretic" or my Black Orc Big Boss can become an "Outlaw", neither of which make much sense for greenskins. The tooltips mostly skew heavily towards "humans." Vampire Counts have some amazing unique skills available to their heroes (like Death Knight, Revenant) and just seeing more of those for other races would be phenomenal.

It's not really a balancing issue, just a roleplaying one for an RPG mod! Otherwise, great stuff.

I don't have any modding skills, but heck, I would happily help with skill ideas/write the tooltips for race specific skills.