Damage Penalty

[JCarter426 1,215]

I'm trying to reduce the damage an item does, without changing its base item type. So far I have tried:

• The actual Damage Penalty property: No effect.
• No Damage: Surprisingly works, but still lists the original damage values in the equipment screen.
• Damage Bonus, but with a negative value: Crazy town. Item description implied a crazy high bonus, but still listed the original damage values in the equipment screen. Likely a rolling over 0 issue.
• Enhancement Bonus, but with a negative value: Same as above, but with the attack modifier too!

The only thing I can think of that I haven't tried is Attribute Penalty. I suspect that applying a strength penalty would work, but I'm afraid that wouldn't have the effect I want.

 

Has anybody gotten something like this to work? Seems like it should be such a simple thing... but I'm out of ideas.

[Box 8]

Wow.

 

I didn't believe you on the first bullet point. Partly because the contoured grips use that property in vanilla. I went and tested it though and yeah there are some weird results.

 

Well it does seem to have some effect. It did seem to cancel out damage bonuses from the enhancement bonus property, I think, not from other damage bonus abilities though.

 

 

 

Attribute penalty combined with attack bonus seems like it would work, almost. It would look weird in the item description and would also affect DCs on Power Attack and Critical Strike feats. I don't think that there are any Strength checks in dialogue or other events though.

[Fair Strides 509]

JCarter: The reason why none of those affected the damage shown on the Equipment Screen is because the Equipment Screen display takes the base damage from the baseitems.2da row, and modifies it by any upgrades on the weapon itself. But since the game doesn't try to debuff weapons (ie, what you're trying to do), it probably has code in it that ignores or simply doesn't process negative buffs.

[JCarter426 1,215]

Wow.

 

I didn't believe you on the first bullet point. Partly because the contoured grips use that property in vanilla. I went and tested it though and yeah there are some weird results.

 

Well it does seem to have some effect. It did seem to cancel out damage bonuses from the enhancement bonus property, I think, not from other damage bonus abilities though.

I hadn't thought to test if it negated other bonuses. That's good to know, although unfortunately it wouldn't do what I want.

 

Attribute penalty combined with attack bonus seems like it would work, almost. It would look weird in the item description and would also affect DCs on Power Attack and Critical Strike feats. I don't think that there are any Strength checks in dialogue or other events though.

The attack bonus thing is tricky because DEX is applied instead in certain cases. And it would reduce the character's physical damage rather than the item's damage type. And it would stack if you wield two of that item. So I really don't want to go that route.

 

JCarter: The reason why none of those affected the damage shown on the Equipment Screen is because the Equipment Screen display takes the base damage from the baseitems.2da row, and modifies it by any upgrades on the weapon itself. But since the game doesn't try to debuff weapons (ie, what you're trying to do), it probably has code in it that ignores or simply doesn't process negative buffs.

 

Yeah, I suspected that... but I was checking the damage in the combat log too. So even putting the equipment screen weirdness aside, it's still not applying the right effects.

[Box 8]

I did a bit more testing. I'm pretty sure that the damage penalty cancels out damage from the enhancement bonus but you can't give net negative bonuses and they don't stack. It doesn't even take the maximum of both damage penalty properties. Different parts of the UI break with different combinations of properties but the result is what I've described.

 

So uh, yeah in order to use the damage penalty property you have to make sure the item you're using it on has an enhancement bonus property on it and that you're sure that you won't use more than one damage penalty property at a time.

 

What a bother.

 

 

 

 

Edit: You know I didn't actually test this with actual upgrades attached to weapons. I should probably try that. There's a small chance someone did a hack somewhere to get damage penalty to work with upgrades.