[LE] Best way to Balance Enemies?

[saintgrimm92]

So my mod seems to be fully working now.

But I'm trying really hard to make this mod balanced. I normally make the enemies pretty difficult with loads of HP and damage capability, but this time I'm trying to give the player a different type of experience.


I was hoping to copy the vanilla lvl'd mobs' stats to make them on par with vanilla difficulty. However, vanilla seems to not actually "use" leveled NPCs.... I looked at the leveled Draugr NPCs. They point to a template, which picks "enc" enemies depending on the player's level....

Vanilla process:

NPC: LvlDraugrAmbushMelee2hMale
Template: LCharDraugrMelee2HMale

LevevledCharacter: LCharDraugrMelee2HMale
Level 1 > SubCharDraugr01Melee2HM
Level 6 > SubCharDraugr02Melee2HM
etc, etc.

LeveledChatacter: SubCharDraugr02Melee2hM (Player lvl6 from previous LeveledCharacter)
Level 1 > EncDraugr02Melee2HHeadM00
Level 1 > EncDraugr02Melee2HHeadM01
etc, etc.

I've already placed all the enemies, they're all leveled actors that level up with the player... I don't want to redo all that in the fashion the vanilla game does, I'm already too far past it. I want to keep the enemies I already have, which level with the player, I just need some type of guide or something to read so I can get a good idea of what balanced stats look like. All my "common enemies", for example, have the same stats, but some of them are super weak and others are a little over powered still - So obviously there's something I do not understand about balancing.

My Feral Vampires have the same stats as my Ancient Skeletons. Both level with the player. Both have the same minimum/max level. Both have the same HP/MP/SP offsets, yet the Feral Vampires hit harder and seem to soak up more damage or have more HP or SOMETHING that's making them more powerful.

I've been googling for "balancing guides" for the past hour and found pretty much no info at all. Everything is relating to questions about people trying to change the stats of vanilla NPCs, not match them with new leveled ones.


EDIT: Or can someone point me in the direction of a vanilla NPC that uses the "PC Level Mult" checkbox instead of a leveledchar that just places enc enemies depending on players level?

EDIT2: Ferals were tougher due to an ABSpell I put on their race lol. Write that up to user error. But I'd still like a vanilla NPC or something to go off of so I have some kinda idea without hunting down vanilla bosses at different levels to count how many hits from a daedric sword they can take b4 they die and using that as my comparison lol

 

EDIT3: FINALLY FOUND ONE!!

Harkon. But I'm not sure how much help this is going to be. His calculated health and max level is closer to my common enemies than my bosses... And my common enemies die easy af against a level 53 player, so idk what to base my levels/offsets on.... Guess it's just gonna take a lot of tweaking each NPC until it doesn't feel too easy/hard for me. (And I thought this last step would be a quick easy one lol)

Edited November 15, 2022 by saintgrimm92