Deadly Combat or Duel - Combat Realism?

[Deleted3765355User]

Which do you prefer, and why?

 

Keep in mind that I plan to utilize Skyre and Dynamic Difficulty.

 

I personally like the idea of locational damage in Deadly Combat, but I was wondering if Duel had some pro's that outweighed Deadly's.

[Deleted3765355User]

Anybody?

[DemongelRex]

There is a mod called locational damage that you should try in conjunction to duel...if you decide to use it.

If that is the case, then you go with Duel - Combat realsim

BTW the locational damage thing is very buggy and very overpowered for npc's because they will pretty much rape you with skyre perks.

So go with Duel. Honestly, locational damage isn't really all that yet but to each his own

[Deleted3765355User]

Thank's for the info. Anyone else care to share their opinion?

[aoxer]

Thank's for the info. Anyone else care to share their opinion?

 

I have tied pretty much all the combat overhauls on Nexus. Duel works great and for a vanilla game and makes a huge difference. The changes to AI are noticeable and the stagger changes are blocking changes are the most obvious. If you run a character with a shield, Duel is right up your alley.

 

Deadly Combat can actually be used with most of the other overhauls if you're careful with your load order. You can use it to make combat a little faster mostly by increasing weapon damage. On its own, it doesn't feel like so much of an overhaul as an upgrade, though.

 

ASIS will really add a challenge if you're just looking to make things harder for yourself. It allows enemies to gain access to perks and spells that are otherwise off limits to them, lets them use potions and heal each other, and can also increase spawn rate. It seems to play nicely with most other combat mods, but the increased spawns can sometimes cause some issues.

 

SkyRE has its own combat module and it's actually very similar to Duel. If you are running SkyRE already, I would just use the SkyRE combat module since it has great synergy with the perk overhauls (perhaps with Deadly Combat or ASIS for even more challenge). If you go into your reproccer stats.xml and halve the base armor values, you will have a very fast paced and challenging combat experience with SkyREs native combat.

 

However, the most realistic combat overhaul by far is Duke Patrick's Heavy Weapon Combat. But it may actually be too realistic for most people. All the other combat mods are great fun, but they still 'feel' like Skyrim combat. Skyrim combat is fast and flashy with lots of power attacks, etc. Duke Patrick's is neither and it feels like an entirely new game when fighting someone. Against a similarly powerful opponent, you could literally be circling each other for a couple minutes, trading blows against your shields and retreating to get your stamina back, before someone feints and gets their enemy's shield to lower and then changes direction and lands a head shot. It reminds me of Mount and Blade if you ever played that.

 

There's no video I can find of Duke Patrick's mod, so it's hard to understand what it changes unless you actually play it. Basically, it adds locational damage and huge stamina costs to every action so you absolutely cannot spam anything, from attacks to holding your shield up endlessly. It also adds feints that let you aim an attack at someone's feet, for example, and then change direction and hit their head for a bonus once they've lowered their guard. It also adds momentum bonuses and takes the physical size of everything into account. A dragon will knock you off your feet if you don't block it, or block it poorly. A small wood elf with a dagger trying to block a 2-handed hammer attack from an orc is going to have problems. Actual weapon length (meaning the length of the 3d model itself) is what determines weapon size, instead of a number in the Creation Kit. A dagger is extremely short and you have to be right up next to someone to hit with it. If you play with a mod that adds spears, a spear can hit someone much further away than a sword even if it uses sword animations. And you can't carry 400 arrows around anymore (it's 20 standard in your quiver, although you recover every arrow you fire unless it breaks), and if you are weak, you can't even draw the string back on a heavy longbow.

 

It is extremely, extremely frustrating when you first start out because your habits playing Skyrim are so ingrained — run in and spam a power attack! Except now your one power attack bounced off a shield and drained you completely of stamina. So now you're stumbling backwards out of breath, unable to even swing your weapon or raise your shield, and then you trip over the body of the bandit you just killed. You opponent head shots you while you're on the ground and then you stare at your computer screen in shock. You feel much weaker than in normal Skyrim and it will irritate you. But if you stick with it, eventually you start to feel much, much more powerful than in regular Skyrim because winning a fight means you played it with skill (feinting, blocking correctly, circling and waiting for the moment to strike, taking someone's legs out from underneath them by getting beneath their shield, etc).

 

There is nothing cheap about the mod. Everything in the game has had its health capped, so challenge is added by actual fight difficulty and not arbitrarily adding 1000 HP to bandits. If you get a clean headshot on someone with a 2handed axe, you will kill them. If they get a clean headshot on you, you die. Put an arrow through the back of someone's neck from 100 yards away, they are on their way to Sovngarde, not running towards you yelling insults with a sliver of their health gone. Enemies are treated the same as you are — their stamina will drain the same as yours does, and they will back up and circle you warily to wait for an opening instead of mindlessly swinging at you while you helplessly wait for your green bar to refill. When you come to understand that they have the same handicaps and challenges that you do, you start to trust that the mod is not trying to add challenge by making you fight by rules that no one else has to bother with.

 

Fights will be slow and tactical and if you don't adjust to that, you will spend every fight out of stamina or on the ground. It's absolutely not for everyone and I hated it when I first played with it, but now I feel like it is the deepest, most fun combat mod available by leaps and bounds. Playing this with the Pit Fighter mod on Steam is just about the most fun I've ever had with Skyrim — it's long, five-minute duels against other champions, both of you warily facing each other waiting for that opening. It's so different from what I was used to playing Skyrim, even with other combat mods.

 

Word of warning, though. Duke Patrick's mod uses scripts for just about everything, so it doesn't always play nice with SkyRE and can require some setup to get it to work without any issues. I recommending playing it with some of the ACE modules instead (not combat, melee, or archery).

 

If you like the combat in Skyrim and are using SkyRE, I'd go with with the native combat module. Change your values in your reproccer for base armor, though (I generally halved them). It makes a big difference. If you find that you still need more challenge, add Deadly Combat or ASIS.

 

If you want something entirely different from vanilla combat, go with Duke's. Give it time before judging it. It may or may not be the type of thing you find fun, but give yourself a chance to adjust to it before deciding.

 

This was a huge novel and I apologize for that! I see a lot of people asking advice about combat mods and no one every seems to mention Duke's, likely because there's no video of it and the mod author only discusses it on the Bethesda forums.

[Deleted3765355User]

Talk about in depth! Thank you very much for all that information. It's going to help me decide greatly upon what I choose. I plan to use ASIS, so I may just give the ASIS + SkyRe duo the first test run.

As for Duke, I'm seriously interested. I read about it a bit on some other forums, but you've really made me curious about it. I will definitely give it a try. I believe like you, I'll appreciate the depth it adds to the combat system.

[asoyland]

Thank you and kudos aoxer! I greatly appreciate that you took the time to provide such in-depth information - precisely what I was searching for.

Edited March 21, 2013 by pa2k

[urboyfriend]

I am much more interested to what mod gives the most responsive AI of all. I tried skyre. and it is basically a mindless hack and slash hoping the enemy would kill you. I tried duel, it is pretty good. units know when to block and somehow knows how to ddodge power attacks. but still exploitable because AI cannot recognize longer hitbox. I have yet to try dukes and deadly combat but locational damage turns me off. I tried the singular locational damage mod and fights are cheap. just aim for the head, it does not matter how powerful your bow is and if you are even an average cod\cs player you can tell it is cheating.

[Simeonz]

For some reason Asis makes me crash, so I used a few optional pise files, I chose deadly combat and love it that all enemys can seriously hurt me and so can I, its fast paced kill or be killed.

 

Since I play 3rd person I dont really hit the head as much as I want, but its still not to see enemy archers hit you in the head also.

 

As for duke, never tried it, it didnt seem all that popular but I may now.

[l0new0lf331]

Wow Aoxer nice post!! I'm just now building my patch with Duel.I remember Dukes from Oblivion.It was good but I didn't give it the time needed.I think I'll try it out for Skyrim now that I've got a computer that runs it well.