General Weapon Balancing


Cyberware:

• Melee cyberware (mantis blades, etc.) have had their scaling increased to 50 and their damage increased. Should be on par with melee weapons now. Previously, they stopped increasing in damage at level 30. An important note, it doesn't matter what level you get them at, they will scale with you. They just stopped scaling with your level at 30, so people were confused.
• Projectile launcher damage increase. Pretty big damage increase to make them a viable choice over grenades.
• Tranquilizer rounds reworked. These weren't quite fully implemented in the base game. They made no sound, no difference between charged and uncharged, and weren't aoe. Now, you have a 15% chance to KO each enemy it hits uncharged, and 35% chance charged. It's AOE, does some amount of chemical damage even if it doesn't KO, and makes sound.
• Speed up for Mantis Blade finisher. Previously 3 seconds long, now 1.2 seconds, closer to the other finisher animations.
• Berserk no longer gives you infinite stamina. Berserk had two effects regarding stamina. It halves your stamina usage, and also gave you infinite stamina. It still halves your stamina usage.
• Lowered street cred requirement for blue arm cyberware. It was kind of strange that the blue and purple arm cyberware were only 5 street cred levels apart. Lowered blue arm cyberware' SC requirement to 10.

Weapons:

• HMGs have had their damage drastically increased. Previously, your bare fists could hit 100x harder than an HMG, and that's not an exaggeration. Now, when you rip one of these things off, it should be better than the guns in your inventory.
• LMGs have had their damage increased. This, in addition to a few fixes below, should make LMGs a viable weapon choice.
• SMGs, assault rifles, pistols have had their damage increased. Slight damage increase to make these guns a better option.
• SMGs, pistols have had their recoil and spread reduced. Previously they had more than an LMG! Slightly increased SMG spread based on user feedback.
• Precision rifle damage increase. In addition to a fix below, this makes precision rifles actually do damage.
• Less hit reactions from faster firing weapons. The faster firing weapons in the game have largely been looked over, and it hadn't really been noticed that when they do enough damage, the enemies will just stand there and get shot at. They had similar hit reactions to a sniper rifle. This has been reduced.
• Iconics with explosive bullets do more damage. Previously, they just weren't that strong, and I believe the explosive effect actually negatively impacts headshots. Now, that explosion effect should feel more unique and powerful.

Quickhacks:
These are customizable in init.lua, but I'll make it easier to customize next update.

• Short circuit does much less instant damage. Legendary short circuit, probably designed for destroying robots, was just destroying everything. Now it is more damage over time based.
• Reboot optics duration nerf. Why sneak when you can just turn off eyes? Duration nerf.
• Ping has reduced duration. Far surpassing every other way of highlighting enemies combined, you can just ping a microwave.
• Cripple Movement duration decrease. Being able to turn off 5 enemies ability to attack for 15+ seconds was a tad much.
• Tetratronic Rippler upload decrease reduction. The best aspect about this cyberdeck was the massive upload speed decrease. -75% at legendary. It's what made the spreading quickhacks a bit too strong, and trivialized upload speed. Now it's a 33% decrease at legendary.

Miscellaneous:

• Fix for Unstoppable perk. This perk increased your fire rate with each dismemberment by 10%, supposedly capping at 3. But the cap didn't work, and it increased it indefinitely. Now, it only stacks 1 time, and increases fire rate by 15%.
• Implemented missing street cred requirement for Downtown vendor. The L-69 Zhuo and Achilles didn't have any Street Cred requirement, while the other legendary weapon the vendor offered did. It looks like it was just a little bug.
• Toned down headshot scaling. It's rather difficult to balance the game when headshots do 5x damage at level 50 as they did at level 1, so I toned it down quite a bit. The eye cyberware has been reduced to 15% increase, and the cold blood perk to 15% as well. I haven't yet figured out how to update their descriptions, but I'll try to next update. This should also make the other headshot perks feel a bit more powerful, whereas previously the headshot multiplier was so high, perks weren't necessary. Things like precision rifles and sniper rifles still have higher headshot damage than pistols and submachine guns.
• Added street cred requirements to Legendary hand cyberware and Epic eye cyberware. These things had less SC requirement than their lower tier counterparts, which I thought was a bit strange.

Improved Early Game Scaling

The beginning of the game is where combat is most difficult. Like, very difficult. I believe some of the guns do 4-6 damage per shot at this stage in the game, while the enemies have hundreds of health (even without mods). Only at level 15-20ish does the combat actually start feeling better.


There's a few technical reasons for this: V doesn't start with any crit chance, no headshot multipliers on the guns, and also just flat out low damage. These issues have been addressed.


List of changes:


Higher base damage for weapons. They scale to the same amount as they did before, but now they start with more damage.


Introduced base crit chance for weapons. Not having the ability to critically hit anything really brings down V's dps, so now all weapons have a base crit chance. I haven't changed the crit chances that they eventually scale to.


Less disparity between weapon rarity. All weapons, no matter the rarity, receive +crit chance, status effect, headshot multiplier etc. Higher rarities have increased stats.


A little bonus from the above change. All weapons at all rarities receive all the possible effects. No more worrying about a weapon having bonus ricochet damage instead of headshot multiplier!

Bug Fix for Tech Weapon Scaling

Tech weapons had a hidden multiplier called "Charge Multiplier" that scaled from 1 to 5 as you levelled up. Except it didn't multiply your charge damage, it just multiplied all your damage. It only shows up when you've shot the weapon in combat.


So, you had a semi-hidden scalar slowly quintupling* your tech weapon damage in combat. Probably why they felt fine at the beginning of the game, but just turn into one-shot machines by the end. I have removed this scalar on all weapons.


What this results in is actually quite nice. An uncharged shot from a tech weapon hits for an almost identical amount to that of its power weapon counterpart. A charged shot is still much more powerful, depending on perks.


Bug Fix for Melee Weapon Scaling (Optional)

The damage for melee weapons is double of what its actually supposed to be. If you take a look at your crafting section, you'll notice all the melee weapons have twice the dps of the guns. They're supposed to scale to similar amounts as the guns in the game files. They have some sort of scalar that's not properly determining the dps.


Some people have pointed out that maybe this isn't a bug, but I think that the devs intended the dps they set in the files to be what it is in the game. Maybe they forgot to take into account attack speed, who knows.


This will just halve the damage of melee weapons so that they remain on par with the guns. From what I can tell from playing the game, this sounds about right.


I'll make this one optional, because not everybody wants their melee damage reduced. Download Full Weapon Rebalance - Original Melee if you don't want your melee weapons changed.


Bug Fix for Revolver Scaling
Some of the stats like headshot multiplier, crit chance, crit dmg, (but not the base dps), were being scaled twice as fast as they were supposed to on revolvers. I don't mean it was just twice as fast as the other guns, but rather it had some hidden multiplier doubling these stats just for revolvers. Probably why they felt fine at the beginning, but started getting crazy strong as you levelled up.


A legendary revolver at level 50 had +100% crit chance, whereas in the game files it is only supposed to have +50%. For perspective, other guns have around +50-65% crit chance at this range.
This mod fixes these scaling issues. After testing, this made revolvers feel much more balanced.
Thanks to JulzJuice123 for pointing this out.


Bug Fix for Missing Secondary Stats


Several guns in the game were missing secondary stats (crit damage, crit chance, etc.). This list included, LMGs, Palica, Johnny's pistol, and SOR-22. I have added their missing stats.


One other thing I did, is give a status effect to guns that didn't have one, like Johnny's Pistol or Yinglong. There was an exploit where if you put Combat Amplifier on these guns, it would give them every status effect. This exploit has been fixed, and it also makes these two weaker weapons a bit more powerful.


Bug Fix for LMG Mod Slots!!!!!!


An exclamation point for each person who's requested this. Giving it its own category. 


Previously, you couldn't put weapon mods into LMGs. Only the first slot would work, and it wasn't even working right. Now, you can put mods into all 4 slots just fine.


This fix is slightly experimental, and has a few small side effects. Enemies will hold the LMGs like shotguns, and V will hold it like a shotgun in the inventory screen. However, that's about all I noticed, and none of it was game breaking. Next update I'm going to give you an option in init.lua to turn off and on this fix so that if you don't want these side effects, you can put your mods in, turn off the fix, and play with both working mods, and no side effects.