Considering doing a comprehensive rebalance of some base melee weapon stats, need info

First off: End result would be a comprehensive rebalance to clean-up some imbalances and oddities that have cropped up since the last time someone did a pass of the stats. It would include just to-hit and damage, but for every equippable item. Changes would be strictly json edits. The aim is to avoid explicit meta shifts if at all possible, and more or less just make sure everything is internally consistent, although any extreme inaccuracies would still prompt major changes (This will of course include making the legendary Japanese katana the best weapon in the game, as it’s blade has been folded over 6,000,000,000 times and is capable of cutting through other swords like butter :smirk:). These stats are essentially subjective, so my primary consideration will be adhering to realism first and foremost, and informing the stats with pop-culture “consensus” and “fun” where realism is not applicable (Your “nano-molecular” blade might not work as well as you’d like in real life, but that’s not reason for it not to be fun in game!) I will probably not be touching any special weapon traits like “Reach” unless it is absolutely necessary.

Anyways, I have a firm grasp of how the combat in-game works in general (Or at least I would hope I do) but any information on these topics would still help in avoiding any irregularities in my results:

The actual damage calculations for unarmed, blunt, cutting, and piercing weapons, including bonuses for damage type and special weapon traits.

The to-hit and damage calculations for throwing

Any other esoteric damage calculation knowledge or advice that might be of interest to me!

Not much to say (at the moment at least) but I hope if you do decide to have a go at this you’ll avoid falling into the trap of making a weapon better simply because it’s rarer or harder to make.

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Aside from what crazykid said (have seen some mods that just make powerful weapons and they try to balance them with the difficulty to find or make), If you are having “realism” in mind, you should take into account the enemies on the game too.

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It’s a tough subject to approach from a design perspecrive, tbh. As a “game”, you want to reward players for investing time into leveling up their skills, and if you make many of the best weapons like, as an example, long swords, halberds, ect. available at Fabrication 7 or 8, it gives very little incentive to level up your fabrication to 10 to unlock the Warhammer of Zillyhoo or what have you. This does bring up the point though that any comprehensive pass might also require a check of, at the very least, the skill level required to fabricate these weapons to make sure they are consistent as well.

If the game is going to place realism above gameplay it needs to strive to do it in all regards, not just when it inconveniences the player. If there is a weapon that is easy to make and effective IRL you shouldn’t make it hard to make or weaker to use “just because”.

This is exactly the trap I was talking about, if the skills are out of line then that is a whole different issue from rebalancing weapons and should have zero affect on said rebalancing.

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