Recent update

could make it really simple - maybe make make the system work with poise and focus on your other features. You have plenty and they have a system already.

Sirgilly1

Do you know the mod flinching? While I do like the killmove system of valhalla, rather than a stagger system I think a better approach is like Dark Souls or GOW where your hits flinch the enemy for a short duration. But these flinches should interrupt enemy light attacks or flinch them while they're idle, but they should not interrupt heavies. That way enemies can still hit you if you're just mindlessly clicking. Increase the stamina drain on attacks to a reasonable level, and I think you could balance it. Though I would imagine loki's poise with substantially smaller staggers would do the trick.

Could I make a suggestion? Make this mod work better with Smoothcam... My camera constantly follows my character from directly behind instead of what my smoothcam's preset is set up to be. It also blocks the archery's "arc" functionality in smoothcam...

Laminin

use the vats off preset on VioLens

cggso

I was wondering with all the patches I had and fixes I did; why my game was still CTD lol. Man I Love your Mod so please Post the Version with the FIX, I cant begin my Playthrough without Valhalla after experiencing it :D !!

Asa Gordon

i can't seem to figure out how to get my kill cams to look like yours

Hayden D

I agree with everything in this reply, that's a really good way of looking at it.

jsr108

ok. I really like Valhalla its really awesome. As far as the stagger system I think it find. Getting knock down is pretty cool but, I do wish there was like an super armor after getting knock down for player and NPC. This would give NPC a chance to fight back.

It could be one of the cause; I might push an emergency update just to fix it.

dTRY

So was Valhalla CTD for everyone else too? I honestly thought I was doing something wrong so I didn't want to say anything.

Hey, thanks for reading my long post, lol. Multi-hit movesets were definitely something I considered when coming up with this stagger overhaul suggestion, but I still think it would work ok. In a real fight, you'd probably start by attacking the opponent with low commitment, low recovery attacks to feel out your opponent. Even the fanciest movesets tend to have pretty reasonable light attacks and that's what you would use to slowly chip away at their stamina and stun bar. Then, when you exhaust your opponent, you go all out with the fancy 5 million hit power attack you've been waiting to unleash. Also, I think even without timed blocking, the exhaustion feature and base line stagger alone would probably be enough to create a good back and forth between defense and offense. Only, the extra timed block mechanics would add some spice to that exchange.

Young Who

I like this a lot (even though personally I'm not a fan of timed blocks as, in my view, they punish the player and NPCs unduly for the simple act of attacking), you articulated things here that I wasn't able to in my own post, in a way that was methodical and clearly reasoned. I especially like your idea about different weapon types having different staggerlock "thresholds" tied to the amount of times they can consecutively stagger - imo that's pretty damn smart. The only complication I can see with stagger thresholds of this kind would be that some animations/movesets would be unwieldy with such a system, namely the increasingly popular multi-hit animations made for things like AMR/ABR/MCO. Either way, thanks for the engaging read!

jsr108

I guess if light attacks and heavy attacks stagger the same, and you could only be staggered twice in a row and then you are immune to stagger for 2.5 seconds for the player. For npcs you can make it so they can be staggered 2-3 times based on having light or heavy armor and then the npc will become immune for 4 seconds. This punishes spam but also still leaves windows for you to approach and combat. I only say let npcs be immune longer so that bosses have a clear 4 second window to do stuff, maybe make it so really high level enemies have a 5 second immunity so you actually have to be careful trying to spam them down. You can also make it so if the enemy or players first attack is a power attack, just power attack 1 is stagger immune. This would make npcs that choose this option dangerous and make you think about how the approach will go. So if you are attacking and stagger them 2 times and back off, and they choose a heavy attack, it might actually hit you to punish you as you try to re-approach without thought or caution.

annotated

Edit: My comment got deleted for some reason, so sorry if this gets double posted For the stagger mechanics, it seems like it's really hard to balance because the game was clearly not designed to work with modern action rpg behaviors and conventions. Trying to emulate the stagger system of other games like Dark Souls, imho, just doesn't work because those games were designed from the ground up with those mechanics in mind. Enemies in Soulslikes are hyper-aggressive with varied movesets and slower more telegraphed attacks. Skyrim, on the other hand, tends to favor quick, minimally telegraphed attacks from enemies, which is why I think timed block mods are so popular in combat overhauls. Timed blocks work well with Skyrim's design. Because the game has such limited options and the enemies attack so quickly, it sort of pigeonholes the player into leaning into blocking, a reaction based, on the fly defensive option that also happens to integrates itself well with other mods and perk overhauls. The very first suggestion I would make is to include an option to opt out of whatever stagger mechanic you decide to settle down on. I don't know if you already planned to do this anyway, but the way I see it, if someone wants to use a different stagger overhaul, might as well give them the option to do so. With that out of the way, and based off of what I said earlier about blocking, I think stagger and stagger overhauls should serve the following purposes (especially within a combat overhaul). 1. Punishing careless and mindless attack spam. Combat should be thoughtful and have a constant ebb and flow between offense and defense. 2. Accentuate and reward players who make use of the mechanics within a given combat framework (in this case, timed blocking, stamina management, and stance breaking) 3. Give a feeling of impact and satisfaction to attacks dealt and received by the player. Now that I've said that, here's my suggestion for a total stagger overhaul. 1. Baseline Stagger Both players and NPCs stagger from normal and power attacks and all attacks deal stamina damage and stun damage. However, after a certain number of hits NPCs and players enter a state of stagger immunity for a short while. This number can change depending on the weapon type or the actor (e.g. wolves might take multiple hits to stagger someone because of their poorly telegraphed attacks). This ensures that attacks are always satisfying and meaty without falling into the perma stagger trap. 2. Timed blocking Timed blocking no longer staggers the enemy. Instead, after succesfully performing a timed block, the enemy loses a bit of their stamina and their stun bar depletes. Conversely, (i don't know if this has been implemented yet), the enemy can also perform timed blocks, draining YOUR stamina instead. If the player or NPC continues to attack thoughtlessly and their stamina reaches 0, they enter an exhausted state. 3. Exhaustion If the player or NPC has their stamina depleted to 0 as a result of an opposing timed block or successful hit, they get full body staggered and enter an exhausted state. In addition to all the other effects exhaustion has, both the player and NPC (when in an exhausted state) unconditionally stagger to all clean hits (i.e. unblocked hits), lose all stagger immunity, and attacks from exhausted actors no longer stagger. Also, power attacks will completely break an exhausted actor's guard. To balance this, the exhausted actor's stamina bar slowly regenerates regardless of what state the exhausted actor's is in, after which they gain a brief period of stagger immunity. The purpose of this feature is to give the player and NPC moments of power and vulnerability, giving either side the ability to turn the tide of battle to their advantage and capitalize on the opponent's weakness. That's my take on a stagger overhaul. Let me know what you think.

Young Who

Finally, ya back now im waiting for AE test build!

DJLegends

First of all thank you dTRY for this informative update. Since you let us to give some of our suggestions or ideas, maybe I'd like to participate :) Frankly, I do love the whole combat system in The Witcher 3 as I'm noticed you ask for the stagger system. Well yeah, the stagger system in TW3 kinda well balanced for me (maybe only for me). I'll list for you : 1. As i know, In Vanilla there are 2 types of stagger (Medium and Full stagger). For the full stagger, there is a mod called Large Stagger Animation that do a great job by making the full stagger longer. So maybe you'd want to faster the duration of medium stagger so they keep it balanced for point number 2 (next) 2. Actors would stagger in medium^ when being hit by melee only, since there are perk for that in Archery and Destruction. Yeah maybe make Bash useless. 3. Balanced staggerlock-ing actors (npc/player). Npc/you can staggerlock-ing opponent. But to prevent exploiting, maybe you want to adding a stagger resistant spell to the victim for specified duration after the first stagger. So here's the formula for what i've been thinking, Victim : first stagger -> start timer -> after 4 second, addspell stagger resistant for 2 second -> refresh command So that's my ideas share, hope u like it :) Sorry if i ask to much

Darmawan КПЛ

When it comes to stagger systems, I think it's best to err on the side of simplicity: I don't know how transferrable this is to Valhalla, but Immersive Impact Redux has a customizable consecutive staggerlock limit, and I at least personally found that pretty fun! If you're interested at all in experimenting, something that hasn't been done a lot is tying stagger to stamina - maybe stamina-percentage based stagger could be interesting. For example, maybe if you're over 50% (or maybe closer to like 75% since stamina comes back really fast in Valhalla) stamina, your normal attacks will stagger enemies, but otherwise only power attacks do so. I think connecting stagger and stamina management is pretty cool, but that's just me.

jsr108