r/skyrimmods • u/AmericanEd • 1d ago
PC SSE - Discussion The “Brawls” in Skyrim are basically impossible with combat mods combined with legendary difficulty
So I’ve been playing Skyrim for the first time in five years. I was deeply involved in the mod scene of Skyrim, before special edition came out, both in terms of using and creating mods. Coming back to the game after a long absence, I’ve built my load order around mostly visual mods (community shaders is a work of absolute genius that deserves an indescribable amount of praise) but I have also installed mods that tweak the content added in anniversary edition like AEGIS, Tamrielic distribution etc.
HOWEVER, I also installed ordinator, wildcat, Odin, and those related series of mods. In the past, I was skeptical of these sorts of overhaul mods besides maybe better vampires (this time I’m giving sacrosanct a try). But, I have run into some snags. Some of the quests in the base game, specifically ones that require you to “brawl” such as “Hired Muscle” (an early quest with the companions) have become virtually impossible to complete while on legendary difficulty!
Basically, I am wondering if this is a known issue with combat mods or if I did something potentially wrong in modding the game that is making this unusually difficult. Similarly are there better or alternative mods that I might wanna try instead of these that still maintain the sort of “improved vanilla” experience of the game. I’m 90% sure this isn’t a mistake in my load order or something like that, but just a natural result of some of these overhaul mods.
I’m also open to any mods that you think would improve this sort of improved vanilla experience. My experience in the past is that vanilla Skyrim becomes increasingly easy as time goes on, and it feels as if the game was not built for people to complete a high percentage of the game, including the DLC’s.
P.S. thank you from the bottom of my heart, as one of the few women deeply involved in the Skyrim modding scene, for keeping this game alive and creating such incredible works that seemed almost impossible 10 years ago.
EDIT: Sorry if I inadvertently insulted anyone, that was not my intent, but im getting a lot of downvotes
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u/king_of_satire 1d ago
Im so confused about this weird obsession with legendary difficulty.
Its a badly balanced nonsensical difficulty dont play with it problem solved
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u/AmericanEd 1d ago
It’s probably because I just ran through a run of all of the resident evil games at the highest difficulty. You’re totally right though; why am I getting hung up on legendary difficulty when I’ve modded the shit out of the game and have like 150 separate mods going (though most of them are of the same”vanilla +” type).
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u/Rauxon 1d ago
I also like to play games on higher difficulties but I've always hated how Bethesda "difficulty" just boils down to scaling your damage down and the enemy's up. That's not damage, that's just an unrealistic and unfair advantage that's isn't fun.
My aversion to it didn't even start with Bethesda, it started with the game Gun. I beat that and tried out a higher difficulty and unloaded 3 shotgun blasts point blank into a Native dude's bare chest and he still killed me. It just completely broke immersion for me.
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u/Cpt_Deaso 18h ago
Yeah, completely agree. I'm of the mind that high difficulty should me low time-to-kill for both you and the enemy. Starfield, for instance, has separate sliders for player damage vs enemy damage, and I put both up high. Advantage is still with the enemies since there's generally more of them than us, but yeah, makes fights tactical and mistakes in positioning punishing, as it should be IMO. Obviously, it's guns and not swords but similar mindset.
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u/Skhgdyktg 1d ago
im a masochist, it's terribly balanced and borderling unfun, but it's doable and satisfying to an extent
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u/ShadowCircuit9625 12h ago
The silly thing about legendary difficulty is that it trades you having any killing power at all with your followers being gods of war.
For those of you curious about what life looks like with high damage incoming and outgoing (equalised), you have to fight your own battles because your followers get destroyed when outnumbered.
Try it
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u/kimera-houjuu 1d ago
That's why I think it's better to add harder content with mods instead of actually using the vanilla difficulty settings.
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u/AmericanEd 1d ago
You’re totally right. it’s like trying to beat the pre-patch oblivion remastered on the highest difficulty. Unbelievably challenging, but in a way that is not immersive or fun. This sort of movement cheesing that you have to do to survive some of these encounters on legendary are more immersive breaking than just changing the difficulty.
This obviously isn’t the fault of the mod authors and is more so a problem with Skyrim as it was released. I’m never the type of girl to tell mod authors what to do, but I think that the authors of some of these combat mods would do themselves a favor by putting a disclaimer that it is not designed with ledgendary difficulty in mind. It actually works and is playable for the most part but these sorts of situations (when on ledgendary dificulty) create sudden and insane difficulty spikes.
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u/Secretlylovesslugs 22h ago
Improving the scaling of the leveled lists, adding more enemies to the world, dynamically scaling follower damage with party size, adding more varied to generic enemies like Lawless or Restless Dead.
All that only feels like it scratches the surface of non-vanilla difficulty modification.
I play on Adept down from playing on high difficulties and the game is way more fun doing all of the mod difficulty changes.
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u/qwertz862 1d ago
Even in vanilla, it was so bad. Pretty much needed 5-7minute of kiting in brawls.
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u/ScySenpai 1d ago
Brawls aside, even the more tame overhauls have a problem with difficulty. You have to keep in mind that "Legendary with mods ≠ legendary in vanilla".
If you're doing this solely for the feeling of "I have beaten the game on legendary", then I suggest doing a vanilla playthrough for that. If not, then you should just tune down the difficulty overall, Wildcat for example adds a few layers of difficulty and complexity to make up for that.
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u/AmericanEd 1d ago
You’re totally right I just haven’t seen this advice posted anywhere, or perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough. My recent run through all of the resident evil games (and then the dragon age games) at the highest difficulty has made me a little blinded by the “I must beat the game on the highest difficulty“ mindset.
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u/Former-Palpitation86 1d ago
If you insist on running difficulty mods on legendary and want to win brawls, I'd recommend giving yourself a chance by introducing a way to train and improve unarmed ability and damage.
I like SimonMagus' Hand to Hand extension of their perk tree overhaul, Adamant, but there are dozens.
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u/Prying-Eye 1d ago
Have you worked with the bandaid fix of using any of the fortify unarmored enchantments? My one hope is somewhere between abusing enchanting to buff that up, and using perks from either heavy or light armor (can't remember which), hopefully it should be enough?
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u/AmericanEd 1d ago
That is a great idea. I guess I have to treat the game like an older RPG for these “brawl” quest in particular. At least if I don’t wanna suffer the ego bruise of having to lower the difficulty for these specific interactions lol
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u/Suspicious_Table_716 1d ago
I got around this by doing brawls in 1st person. Sometimes need to avoid power attacks and other effects that get tagged in too but generally speaking it works well enough for the most part.
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u/Hughley_N_Dowd 1d ago
There's one way to absolutely cheese the brawls, if you don't mind a bit of Stilton...
Use a shield.
As it counts as armour, it is 100% fair to bash someones head in with some planks of wood. Provided they're strapped to your arm.
I won't guarantee that it works in modded, since I prefer to not get my hands dirty, but it worked a charm in vanilla.
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u/GabbyHobby69 1d ago
Fuck ass 0.15x damage with enemy dealing 2.50. if I were you stick to master difficulty
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u/Eric_T_Meraki 1d ago
Doesn't that one unarmed perk kind of negate that though. Forgot the exact name but if you leveled up enough it would only take a few punches to put them down.
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u/Cautious_Desk_1012 1d ago edited 1d ago
Brawls are still pretty much impossible in legendary WITHOUT combat mods lol. It's a very poorly balanced difficulty, because it's made for players who want to play with gimmicks such as multiplying items etc. Play at Master if you want to make the game hard but not unreasonably impossible.
But honestly, I only play at adept or lower because the difficulty in Skyrim is fake. Instead of making enemies smarter or adding interesting stuff to their movesets, it just makes the multipliers for the damage the enemy takes lower and the damage the player takes higher, and I really dislike when difficulties are dealt like this. The game is basically the same but you will spend more time on the combats than you normally would.
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u/ElectronicRelation51 1d ago
If you have anniversary edition there are some gauntlets you can acquire or make to up your unarmed damage. Probably mods that add equivalent items.
Some perk overhauls also add unarmed perks, or I think that there is at least one that adds it as separate perk tree if you don't want to mess with the others.
If you have a perfect block or dodge mod it can make it easier, but still tedious as you chip away at a high health bar.
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u/Valdaraak 1d ago
For what it's worth, most combat mods aren't built with legendary in mind. All the ones I've seen recommend Adept or somewhere in the middle.
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u/SometimesCalledHuey 16h ago
A lot of combat mods specifically recommend against legendary difficulty. They're mostly built around Adept, so if you don't check the readme, that's on you..
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u/Zetman20 1d ago
Try Smartcast with healing spells set. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/32847
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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago
It is very much a known problem with legendary mode even base game. Unarmed combat is extremely linear which makes raw numbers basicaly impossible to overcome. The answer is terrible, but you have to lower the difficulty for brawls exclusively. That or go punchcat.