Custom Difficulty Tweaks
Mod Introduction
Create the hard mode difficulty Capcom forgot to include in the base game.
Link to the modInstallation Guide
Features
Adds an in-game mod menu which allows you to tweak many of the game's combat calculations to make the game harder (most can be adjusted to make the game easier too, if you prefer).
Damage taken by you and your pawns
Make enemies hit harder by increasing the damage you sustain from their attacks
Damage taken by enemies
Give enemies more effective HP by reducing the damage they receive from your attacks
Pawn damage dealt
Reduce the damage dealt by your pawns (or wandering pawns) without affecting your own damage output
Stagger susceptibility
Make it harder for enemies to be staggered and knocked to the ground
Healing
Reduce the effectiveness of healing items and spells
Make curative items heal gradually over time instead of instantly
Prevent using curatives from the Pause Menu during combat
Prevent using curatives while knocked down
Prevent using curatives while at 0 HP
Exp and Dcp rewards
Adjust the Exp rewards from quests and battles for both you and your pawn to prevent overleveling
Adjust Dcp rewards to level vocations more quickly or more slowly
Adjust your Main Pawn's Dcp rewards separately from your own
Critical Damage bonus
Adjust the bonus your critical strikes and finishers receive, to make it more rewarding when you successfully stagger an enemy
Loss Gauge
Make the Loss Gauge penalty when taking damage more or less punishing to change how often you need to rest at a campsite
Adjust the game's built-in Loss Gauge penalty when selecting "Load from Last Save" after a Game Over
Economy and items
Adjust the amount of gold dropped by monsters
Adjust the buy price, sell price, and weight of curatives and equipment
Adjust equipment enhancement costs (works well with Wild Loot)
Adjust camping kits weight and buy price, or make them break after one use to make preparation and rationing more important
Debilitation susceptibility
Make it harder for enemies to be frozen, dazed, silenced, etc.
Adjust debilitation rates for your character and your pawns, too
Adjust the rate of each debilitation independently, in case you think Freeze is too powerful but Caught Fire is fine as-is
Dynamic difficulty
Make enemies stronger at night
Quickly increase the overall difficulty of all enemies by a set amount (for example, in NG+) without having to manually change every other slider
Individual enemy adjustments
If a particular enemy is too easy or too difficult, you can adjust their health, damage, or stagger resistance without affecting other monsters
This mod will not cause pawns to become soft-banned. It works by adjusting damage calculation, not by modifying character stats. No changes are ever to character data, everything is reversible at any time.
Installation
Install REFramework and Fluffy Mod Manager
Download this mod
Drop this mod's .zip file into your Fluffy Mod Manager mods folder (FluffyModManager\Games\DragonsDogma2\Mods)
Start Fluffy Mod Manager and go to the Mod List. Enable "CustomDifficulty"
Start the game
Without Fluffy Mod Manager
[list=1]
Install REFramework
Download this mod
Extract the contents of the .zip file
Inside the zip file, find an "reframework" folder
Drag this folder into your steamapps\common\Dragons Dogma 2 folder (your OS may notify you that there is already an existing "reframework" folder; that's fine, you're going to merge them)
Start the game
Default presets
After installing the mod for the first time, it will be set to Easy (Capcom Default) difficulty and everything will be unchanged from vanilla. The mod comes included with several difficulty presets that you can try out if you don't want to mess with sliders. Here's a quick summary of each preset (there may be other changes beyond those listed).
Easy (Capcom default)
This is vanilla difficulty.
Normal
Player damage taken 1.33x. Boss damage taken 0.5x (with full party). Enemy stagger rate 0.5x. Battle Exp 0.4x.
Hard
Player damage taken 1.5x. Boss damage taken 0.4x (with full party). Small enemy stagger rate 0.33x. Boss stagger rate 0.5x. Battle Exp 0.33x.
Very Hard
Player damage taken 2.1x. Boss damage taken 0.25x (with full party). Enemy stagger rate 0.33x. Battle Exp 0.25x. Quest Exp 0.5x. Curative tweaks enabled.
This is close to what I've been using, gradually increasing it towards Nightmare as I slowly progress through the game.
Nightmare
Player damage taken 3x. Boss damage taken 0.2x (with full party). Enemy stagger rate 0.25x. Player stagger rate 1.25x. Battle Exp 0.2x. Quest Exp 0.5x. Curative tweaks enabled.
New Game+ Hard
Player damage taken 4.25x. Boss damage taken 0.15x (with full party). Enemy stagger rate 0.25x. Player stagger rate 1.33x. Battle Exp 0.2x. Quest Exp 0.5x. Curative tweaks enabled.
Completely untested, as I am nowhere near finishing the game. Please provide feedback.
Note: Nothing is stopping you from using this on your first playthrough, but it might not be very fun.
If you dislike HP sponge enemies, try using one of the default presets and dramatically boost the Critical Damage Bonus. Enemies will still be tanky and resistant to stagger, but once you do cause them to stagger you can use finishing blows for extremely high damage.
Customization
To change any of these values, you can use the in-game configuration UI. Press the Insert key on your keyboard to open the REFramework UI, then scroll to the bottom and expand the Script Generated UI section.
Per-enemy adjustments
Since enemies scale very differently across a single playthrough, sometimes a preset can make some enemies (such as Drakes) too difficult while other enemies (such as early-game Cyclopes) are too easy. You can use the Enemy-Specific Adjustments feature to very quickly adjust the difficulty of a particular monster, or a group like "Battahl Small Monsters", from 0% to 200%.
At 0% difficulty, a monster receives no effect from this mod and is identical to vanilla Capcom difficulty.
At 100% difficulty, a monster uses the standard modifiers for your current preset.
At 200% difficulty, a monster receives twice the effect of the modifiers for the current preset.
You can adjust a simple "Enemy Difficulty" to adjust their health, damage output, and stagger resistance all at once, or you can fine tune any of those individual values if you'd like.
Compatibility
As a script mod, Difficulty Tweaks should work well with most other combat mods.
✅ Fully compatible
Enemy health/damage mods
The effects will compound (enemies will have more health/do more damage from those mods and they will take less damage from this mod) but this is fine, and you can use Difficulty Tweaks to apply more granular changes to specific monsters.
Enemy HP Increase by MajDash
Enemies Do More Damage by silentverge
Loss Gauge mods
These mods have a few overlapping features. They will work together but the adjustments will compound. The Game Over Penalty tweak will become inoperative if it detects another mod has adjusted the penalty.
Customizable Loss Gauge Control by MrBoobieBuyer
No Reload Penalty by TheHodoo
⚠️Mostly compatible
New Game Plus - True Difficulty by Swizzlewizzle - Most features will work fine. Keep in mind that Difficulty Tweaks makes some assumptions about "vanilla Capcom difficulty", and after installing Sizzlewizzle's mod (which is a .pak, so it loads first), the meaning of "vanilla Capcom difficulty" changes as far as Difficulty Tweaks can tell. As a result, my built-in presets will be too difficult, and the Enemy Adjustments slider may start to behave strangely.
Damage Number by xyzkljl1 - The multiplier shown by Damage Number may be incorrect when used together with this mod. However, the damage numbers themselves should be accurate.
❌ Possible compatibility issues
Any script mod which adjusts item weight, sell price, or buy price will cause conflicts with similar features in this mod. For example:
Item Tweaks - Cost 1 Gold - No Weight - x10 Sell Price by LordGregory
Half Weighted Items (For REFramework) by KIALA
You should not use Difficulty Tweaks' shop price/weight adjustments if you are using these other mods. Multiple script mods trying to adjust the exact same parameter on the exact same item may cause unexpected results.
You can still use these mods together. Just leave the shop price/weight sliders in Difficulty Tweaks at 1.0 and let the other mods take care of it.
(The above limitation does not apply to .pak mods.)
Future ideas
✅ Planned
Nothing? The mod is pretty close to what I'd call "complete", but feel free to make suggestions.
[s]Adjust monster debilitation resistance[/s] Added in v1.9.0
[s]Make enemies stronger at night[/s] Added in v1.9.0
[s]Overall Difficulty slider for easily scaling everything up in NG+[/s] Added in v1.9.0
[s]Adjust Stray Pawn damage, to prevent OP world pawns from killing bosses for you[/s] Added in v1.8.0.
[s]Make healing curatives apply over several seconds instead of instantly[/s] Added in v1.7.1.
[s]Localization (zh-CN, ja, ko MTL first)[/s] Added in v1.7.0.
[s]Economy tweaks (gold drop, consumables cost, gear shop cost, gear enhancement cost)[/s] Added in v1.7.0.
[s]Reduced modifiers for certain tedious or very tanky enemies (ghosts, dullahans, drakes)[/s] Added in v1.6.0.
[s]Preset system, with user-created presets and a few built-in ones[/s] Added in v1.5.0.
[s]Adjustable critical hit bonus[/s] Added in v1.3.0.
[s]Loss gauge damage modifier[/s] Added in v1.2.0.
❓ Maybe
These might be possible, but are not trivial to implement.
Monster Knockdown Recovery tweak
Monster Attack Speed tweak
Dynamic monster scaling based on level/location
[s]Separate modifiers for Vermund vs Battahl[/s] Added in v1.6.0 (kinda).
[s]Adjustments to healing consumables[/s] Added in v1.5.0.
❌ Not planned
These are either not possible, or are out-of-scope for this mod.
Adjustments to individual vocations or skills
Out-of-scope. Please use a vocation rebalance mod for this.
Enemy spawn variety/density adjustments
Challenging to do via script, out-of-scope. Deserves to be its own mod; I believe a few people are working on something like this
Increase monster aggression
Spent a lot of time looking into this without much luck. If you decrease stagger rates, this becomes slightly less of a problem (bosses still stand around too much though).
Acknowledgements
- Praydog for the REFramework toolkit, which provides a incredibly well-polished Lua scripting environment, SDK, and Object Explorer that made it shockingly easy to cobble together something like this in a couple evenings after work, even for a moron like me.
- MajDash ("Enemy HP Increase" author: https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonsdogma2/mods/130) for initial idea and pointers on how to get started with DD2 modding.
Reporting an issue
Post here on Nexus or message @talimity on the RE Engine Modding Discord (https://discord.gg/modding-haven-718224210270617702).
Please include a debug log when reporting bugs with specific skills, mobs, or situations.
You can find this log at "/reframework/data/CustomDifficulty/log-xyz.txt", which is located wherever you installed REFramework (usually your steamapps folder).
Adds an in-game mod menu which allows you to tweak many of the game's combat calculations to make the game harder (most can be adjusted to make the game easier too, if you prefer).
Damage taken by you and your pawns
Make enemies hit harder by increasing the damage you sustain from their attacks
Damage taken by enemies
Give enemies more effective HP by reducing the damage they receive from your attacks
Pawn damage dealt
Reduce the damage dealt by your pawns (or wandering pawns) without affecting your own damage output
Stagger susceptibility
Make it harder for enemies to be staggered and knocked to the ground
Healing
Reduce the effectiveness of healing items and spells
Make curative items heal gradually over time instead of instantly
Prevent using curatives from the Pause Menu during combat
Prevent using curatives while knocked down
Prevent using curatives while at 0 HP
Exp and Dcp rewards
Adjust the Exp rewards from quests and battles for both you and your pawn to prevent overleveling
Adjust Dcp rewards to level vocations more quickly or more slowly
Adjust your Main Pawn's Dcp rewards separately from your own
Critical Damage bonus
Adjust the bonus your critical strikes and finishers receive, to make it more rewarding when you successfully stagger an enemy
Loss Gauge
Make the Loss Gauge penalty when taking damage more or less punishing to change how often you need to rest at a campsite
Adjust the game's built-in Loss Gauge penalty when selecting "Load from Last Save" after a Game Over
Economy and items
Adjust the amount of gold dropped by monsters
Adjust the buy price, sell price, and weight of curatives and equipment
Adjust equipment enhancement costs (works well with Wild Loot)
Adjust camping kits weight and buy price, or make them break after one use to make preparation and rationing more important
Debilitation susceptibility
Make it harder for enemies to be frozen, dazed, silenced, etc.
Adjust debilitation rates for your character and your pawns, too
Adjust the rate of each debilitation independently, in case you think Freeze is too powerful but Caught Fire is fine as-is
Dynamic difficulty
Make enemies stronger at night
Quickly increase the overall difficulty of all enemies by a set amount (for example, in NG+) without having to manually change every other slider
Individual enemy adjustments
If a particular enemy is too easy or too difficult, you can adjust their health, damage, or stagger resistance without affecting other monsters
This mod will not cause pawns to become soft-banned. It works by adjusting damage calculation, not by modifying character stats. No changes are ever to character data, everything is reversible at any time.
Installation
REFramework is required.
Fluffy Mod Manager[list=1]Install REFramework and Fluffy Mod Manager
Download this mod
Drop this mod's .zip file into your Fluffy Mod Manager mods folder (FluffyModManager\Games\DragonsDogma2\Mods)
Start Fluffy Mod Manager and go to the Mod List. Enable "CustomDifficulty"
Start the game
Without Fluffy Mod Manager
[list=1]
Install REFramework
Download this mod
Extract the contents of the .zip file
Inside the zip file, find an "reframework" folder
Drag this folder into your steamapps\common\Dragons Dogma 2 folder (your OS may notify you that there is already an existing "reframework" folder; that's fine, you're going to merge them)
Start the game
Default presets
After installing the mod for the first time, it will be set to Easy (Capcom Default) difficulty and everything will be unchanged from vanilla. The mod comes included with several difficulty presets that you can try out if you don't want to mess with sliders. Here's a quick summary of each preset (there may be other changes beyond those listed).
Easy (Capcom default)
This is vanilla difficulty.
Normal
Player damage taken 1.33x. Boss damage taken 0.5x (with full party). Enemy stagger rate 0.5x. Battle Exp 0.4x.
Hard
Player damage taken 1.5x. Boss damage taken 0.4x (with full party). Small enemy stagger rate 0.33x. Boss stagger rate 0.5x. Battle Exp 0.33x.
Very Hard
Player damage taken 2.1x. Boss damage taken 0.25x (with full party). Enemy stagger rate 0.33x. Battle Exp 0.25x. Quest Exp 0.5x. Curative tweaks enabled.
This is close to what I've been using, gradually increasing it towards Nightmare as I slowly progress through the game.
Nightmare
Player damage taken 3x. Boss damage taken 0.2x (with full party). Enemy stagger rate 0.25x. Player stagger rate 1.25x. Battle Exp 0.2x. Quest Exp 0.5x. Curative tweaks enabled.
New Game+ Hard
Player damage taken 4.25x. Boss damage taken 0.15x (with full party). Enemy stagger rate 0.25x. Player stagger rate 1.33x. Battle Exp 0.2x. Quest Exp 0.5x. Curative tweaks enabled.
Completely untested, as I am nowhere near finishing the game. Please provide feedback.
Note: Nothing is stopping you from using this on your first playthrough, but it might not be very fun.
These presets are all just suggestions. You can modify them at any point.
Most of these presets will make enemies fairly tanky, because that's just what I prefer.
Most of these presets will make enemies fairly tanky, because that's just what I prefer.
If you dislike HP sponge enemies, try using one of the default presets and dramatically boost the Critical Damage Bonus. Enemies will still be tanky and resistant to stagger, but once you do cause them to stagger you can use finishing blows for extremely high damage.
Customization
To change any of these values, you can use the in-game configuration UI. Press the Insert key on your keyboard to open the REFramework UI, then scroll to the bottom and expand the Script Generated UI section.
Per-enemy adjustments
Since enemies scale very differently across a single playthrough, sometimes a preset can make some enemies (such as Drakes) too difficult while other enemies (such as early-game Cyclopes) are too easy. You can use the Enemy-Specific Adjustments feature to very quickly adjust the difficulty of a particular monster, or a group like "Battahl Small Monsters", from 0% to 200%.
At 0% difficulty, a monster receives no effect from this mod and is identical to vanilla Capcom difficulty.
At 100% difficulty, a monster uses the standard modifiers for your current preset.
At 200% difficulty, a monster receives twice the effect of the modifiers for the current preset.
You can adjust a simple "Enemy Difficulty" to adjust their health, damage output, and stagger resistance all at once, or you can fine tune any of those individual values if you'd like.
Compatibility
As a script mod, Difficulty Tweaks should work well with most other combat mods.
✅ Fully compatible
Enemy health/damage mods
The effects will compound (enemies will have more health/do more damage from those mods and they will take less damage from this mod) but this is fine, and you can use Difficulty Tweaks to apply more granular changes to specific monsters.
Enemy HP Increase by MajDash
Enemies Do More Damage by silentverge
Loss Gauge mods
These mods have a few overlapping features. They will work together but the adjustments will compound. The Game Over Penalty tweak will become inoperative if it detects another mod has adjusted the penalty.
Customizable Loss Gauge Control by MrBoobieBuyer
No Reload Penalty by TheHodoo
⚠️Mostly compatible
New Game Plus - True Difficulty by Swizzlewizzle - Most features will work fine. Keep in mind that Difficulty Tweaks makes some assumptions about "vanilla Capcom difficulty", and after installing Sizzlewizzle's mod (which is a .pak, so it loads first), the meaning of "vanilla Capcom difficulty" changes as far as Difficulty Tweaks can tell. As a result, my built-in presets will be too difficult, and the Enemy Adjustments slider may start to behave strangely.
Damage Number by xyzkljl1 - The multiplier shown by Damage Number may be incorrect when used together with this mod. However, the damage numbers themselves should be accurate.
❌ Possible compatibility issues
Any script mod which adjusts item weight, sell price, or buy price will cause conflicts with similar features in this mod. For example:
Item Tweaks - Cost 1 Gold - No Weight - x10 Sell Price by LordGregory
Half Weighted Items (For REFramework) by KIALA
You should not use Difficulty Tweaks' shop price/weight adjustments if you are using these other mods. Multiple script mods trying to adjust the exact same parameter on the exact same item may cause unexpected results.
You can still use these mods together. Just leave the shop price/weight sliders in Difficulty Tweaks at 1.0 and let the other mods take care of it.
(The above limitation does not apply to .pak mods.)
Future ideas
✅ Planned
Nothing? The mod is pretty close to what I'd call "complete", but feel free to make suggestions.
[s]Adjust monster debilitation resistance[/s] Added in v1.9.0
[s]Make enemies stronger at night[/s] Added in v1.9.0
[s]Overall Difficulty slider for easily scaling everything up in NG+[/s] Added in v1.9.0
[s]Adjust Stray Pawn damage, to prevent OP world pawns from killing bosses for you[/s] Added in v1.8.0.
[s]Make healing curatives apply over several seconds instead of instantly[/s] Added in v1.7.1.
[s]Localization (zh-CN, ja, ko MTL first)[/s] Added in v1.7.0.
[s]Economy tweaks (gold drop, consumables cost, gear shop cost, gear enhancement cost)[/s] Added in v1.7.0.
[s]Reduced modifiers for certain tedious or very tanky enemies (ghosts, dullahans, drakes)[/s] Added in v1.6.0.
[s]Preset system, with user-created presets and a few built-in ones[/s] Added in v1.5.0.
[s]Adjustable critical hit bonus[/s] Added in v1.3.0.
[s]Loss gauge damage modifier[/s] Added in v1.2.0.
❓ Maybe
These might be possible, but are not trivial to implement.
Monster Knockdown Recovery tweak
Monster Attack Speed tweak
Dynamic monster scaling based on level/location
[s]Separate modifiers for Vermund vs Battahl[/s] Added in v1.6.0 (kinda).
[s]Adjustments to healing consumables[/s] Added in v1.5.0.
❌ Not planned
These are either not possible, or are out-of-scope for this mod.
Adjustments to individual vocations or skills
Out-of-scope. Please use a vocation rebalance mod for this.
Enemy spawn variety/density adjustments
Challenging to do via script, out-of-scope. Deserves to be its own mod; I believe a few people are working on something like this
Increase monster aggression
Spent a lot of time looking into this without much luck. If you decrease stagger rates, this becomes slightly less of a problem (bosses still stand around too much though).
Acknowledgements
- Praydog for the REFramework toolkit, which provides a incredibly well-polished Lua scripting environment, SDK, and Object Explorer that made it shockingly easy to cobble together something like this in a couple evenings after work, even for a moron like me.
- MajDash ("Enemy HP Increase" author: https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonsdogma2/mods/130) for initial idea and pointers on how to get started with DD2 modding.
Reporting an issue
Post here on Nexus or message @talimity on the RE Engine Modding Discord (https://discord.gg/modding-haven-718224210270617702).
Please include a debug log when reporting bugs with specific skills, mobs, or situations.
You can find this log at "/reframework/data/CustomDifficulty/log-xyz.txt", which is located wherever you installed REFramework (usually your steamapps folder).
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