Creating New Dragon Breath attack in CK

[guerillamoderno]

Completely new to this here, trying to navigate the CK is like trying to read Greek for me. My goal is to change the damage of Odahviing's fire breath so that it does significant damage to enemies on higher difficulties. Basically, I've gone into the CK actor tab and found Odahviing's entry, then looked at his actor base, which is for "lvlMQDragon." Looking at the actor base of that brings me to a leveled list for "MQLCharDragonFire" with 4 different entries for various fire dragons. It seems that each of these has a different shout for their fire breath attack. These shouts then reference a specific spell.

 

For example, "EncFireDragon01," an standard dragon, has a shout called "DragonFireBreathShout01," which consists of three words, each of which reference the spell "VoiceDragonFire01." When I go into "VoiceDragonFire01," it looks like I'm finally into an area where I can change the damage values of the attack. What it seems like I should do (I'm coming here before I do anything because like I said I have no experience with this) is make a copy of this spell, name it something different like "OdahviingFire," greatly increase the magnitude value, and then trace it backward, making similar renamed copies of the other entries referenced in the path to Ohdaviing's new fire breath attack. My primary uncertainty is whether I can change the ActorBase in his Template Data to my copy of "EncFireDragon01," which I would name something like "Odahviing01." Is this the correct way to do it? Would skipping the "lvlMQDragon" entry be ok? I don't really understand what it does other than determine how to scale Odahviing when the PC initially encounters him. It's the fact that that particular entry appears to branch off into 4 different dragon entries that makes me unsure of what to do, so I'd like to eliminate the problem entirely by skipping the step and redirecting to a specific premade dragon type instead of a leveled list.

 

This mod would only be used in post-MQ gameplay. Obviously changing the stats on his fire breath so that it does significant damage to enemies on master or with mods like Deadly Dragons enabled means that he would almost immediately one-shot the player's pathetic ~500 health at that point in the story. I think the whole reason that Odahviing is so weak in the first place is that he uses the same breath attacks that dragons who are designed to be balanced to the player's low health use. This mod would attempt to fix that and balance Odahviing to be extremely powerful on high difficulties and swing fights tremendously in your favor like a true dragonbro should.

 

So yeah, if anyone on here has experience with creating custom dragons and dragon breath attacks, I would really appreciate any guidance you could offer. Obviously this is nowhere near as ambitious as creating completely new dragon attacks, I'm just looking to tweak some parameters. After I got it working I would post it here and we could all enjoy having an Odahviing that can roast bandits in one blast and take significant chunks of health off enemy dragons as they fly through the sky instead of being essentially purely cosmetic like he is now.

Edited August 5, 2012 by guerillamoderno

[guerillamoderno]

UPDATE: Success! I just tried the process I had described and it worked! I placed it last in my load order, went to a Warzones area in the middle of the map, called Odahviing, and he was roasting high-level enemies by the dozen, while friendly NPCs took no damage.

 

However, the one problem I've found so far is that if I accidentally hit him with any attack, he now aggros on me and immediately destroys me with his uber-breath. Something in the renamed EncFireDragon01 actor base must override him treating me as an ally. I tried going into the relationship tab of his actor page and creating an ally relationship with player as parent and Odahviing as child, but Odahviing doesn't show up! It must only include humanoid NPCs. Can anyone see a way around this? It appears to be the only thing I need to fix, the damage changes were extremely easy to implement.

 

EDIT: Added PlayerFaction and CurrentFollowerFaction to "Ally" status in OdahviingFaction. Fixes the aggro problem. I did however notice in the subsequent battle that one of his moving strafe breath attacks killed me. The ones on the ground or while hovering never do damage, and I'm wondering what makes this different. I'm not sure if it happens every time as it's difficult to be standing in the path of the strafe flames. I'll continue to play around with stuff, but this mod might be ready to go up as a test build before anyone even notices it, haha.

Edited August 5, 2012 by guerillamoderno