Thematic Sith Lords 1.2

Thematic Sith Lords

Premise

Anyone who’s played TSL knows that the eponymous Sith Lords are pretty disappointing. The most hyped fight of the entire game, against Nihilus, is almost always trivial. Sion can be dangerous but rarely is, and Kreia’s floating lightsabers are almost always more of a threat than the woman herself.

Thematic Sith Lords’s purpose is not to directly address these issues, but to push back against some of the underlying problems with these fights that results in them being so boring. While examining the .utc files for Sion, Kreia and Nihilus associated with their respective fights, I found that there was surprisingly little differentiation between them, especially in attributes, and very little specialization per Lord. Worse still, many feats and powers which the Lords should realistically have had were also missing: Sion, for example, lacked Ignore Pain despite his ability to fight through and even utilize his constant pain being the core of his character!

Thematic Sith Lords, as you may have gathered, is not a difficulty mod as such. Rather, it’s a realism mod the goal of which is to increase the overall difficulty of the Lord fights as a natural result of restructuring the stats, feats and powers of the Lords to more accurately fit their physical and mental conditions, as well as their experiences and training, without making every fight harder for all characters. The goal is to make each fight with a Lord feel different, with each Lord having their own specialties, strengths and weaknesses, such that some character builds will do better against some Lords and struggle against others.

In Thematic Sith Lords, Sion, for example, has extreme STR and CON, but poor CHA and INT, and abysmal DEX and WIS. His archetype is as a bruiser, who trades taking hits for being able to dish out extremely powerful strikes with no fear of his close-range style resulting in his death—because Sion doesn’t need to worry about dying in a fight, and his combat style should reflect that. This overconfidence results in him being somewhat vulnerable to Force abilities, however, and a Consular might run circles around him while a Guardian struggles to bring him down.

The goal is that the opposite will also be true—Consulars who had no trouble with Sion might find themselves in a pickle when their abilities bounce off Nihilus, who now has even higher WIS and Will saves than he did before, and the DEX to frequently dodge the lightsabers of most Jedi not built explicitly for melee combat.

Why use Thematic Sith Lords?

As noted above, Thematic Sith Lords isn’t a difficulty mod, as most rebalances of the Lords are. The goal is to make each Lord’s attributes, stats, feats and powers a realistic reflection of their condition, and how they would actually fight. If you want pure difficulty, other mods might be for you; if you want to experience differentiated fights that are harder on average than what TSLRCM has to offer, however, Thematic Sith Lords is likely for you.

Thematic Sith Lords also has two features which other difficulty mods for the Lords often don’t: it also modifies the Sion fight on Korriban and Sion's fight with Atton on Malachor (both of which are frequently left out of other mods), and it uses the TSLPatcher to inject .utc edit data directly into module files for maximum compatibility.

Compatibility

This mod requires TSLRCM to be installed first, and NOT to be installed via the Steam Workshop, in order to install properly & function. The Workshop is very poor for mod compatibility, so if you have it installed via the Workshop, it’s best you install it via the installer version anyway.

This mod should be compatible with anything and everything else that doesn’t edit the Lords’ .utc files. Even mods that do so shouldn’t break this, they might just edit some of the same data.

Installation

1. Ensure TSLRCM is downloaded and installed, NOT through the Steam Workshop!

2. Download the file and unzip it to any folder of your choice (except for the game directory) using a program like 7zip or Winrar.

3. Run the TSLPatcher .exe and, when prompted, select your game directory (the one with the .exe file in it).

4. Click “Patch” and you’re done!

Permissions & Thanks

As with any mod I have made or will make in the future, this mod has completely open permissions: modify it, redistribute it, reupload it, do whatever. So long as you give me credit for the idea and for the balance settings if you choose to retain most of mine, go for it. You don’t even need to ask me.

Special thanks to @DarthParametric for his help with putting this together. It was my first time making significant edits with KOTORTool and creating a TSLPatcher install, and this mod quite probably wouldn’t exist without his help.

Thanks to @Pavijan357 for identifying the missing changes to Sion in 906MAL.mod, and @DarthTyren for his assistance in helping me clean up my changes.ini and apply the changes properly to 909MAL.

Thanks also to @doctoramanda from the KOTOR Discord for her help making the "preview" image.