Conservative Weapon Rebalance
A more vanilla-friendly, conservative weapon rebalance with main goal to fix most glaring issues that break player expectations and immersion, while making sure that average damage output remains close to vanilla values, so you can use your favorite difficulty/mutant balance mod but still benefit from more satisfying (hopefully) weapon stats.
After checking out several weapon rebalance mods I’ve noticed that most of them focus too much on trying to have “realistic” weapon stats, while ignoring other aspects of the game that suffer when going for that approach. Namely upgrade system, which is inherently unrealistic, yet vital as the main money sink in the game. If you make weapon stats too realistic, all weapons become super effective to the point of making upgrades (mostly) unnecessary. On top of that, if you do choose to upgrade, since they change stats in relative terms, you will end up with unrealistic values again. So to keep up with that, you need to remove those upgrade altogether… Remove upgrades – you remove your reason for doing quests, hunting for artifacts, etc. Largely removing the major progression aspect of the game, making it less fun.
So instead, I took Better Ballistics as my starting point. Then every penetration/damage value (as well as some other stats) has been manually rebalanced to achieve overall damage close to vanilla, but with values more in line with player expectation. This achieves “realistic feeling” weapons without breaking (hopefully) the progression and quests.
I’m planning to update the mod with better stats to bring it closer to stated goals above, as long as I’m playing the game.
Notable features:
On average, damage output values are close to vanilla
Intermediate cartridges have higher penetration, but lower damage compared to Pistol/SMG
.45 trades pen for dmg compared to 9mm, similar story for 9×39
Dmg/pen modifiers for different ammo types adjusted to work better with new weapon values
Shotguns: slightly more damage, less spread
12ga ammo has more realistic weight (~2x vanilla)
NPC weapon settings follow this new balance but with a 0.5x damage multiplier (for reference vanilla has something like 0.3x while BB is close to 1.0x)
Bullet speeds adjusted to better reflect realistic speeds (e.g. faster 5.45/5.56), while still leaving room for weapon upgrades to push it higher
Increased damage/range of grenades
APM has fire mode selection (no sound/animation, uses “burst” icon for single shots – this is done for save game compatibility)
Notable departures from realism for balance reasons:
Pistols have slightly higher or the same damage as SMG of the same caliber – to keep pistol slot useful
“High tier” SMGs and AR’s have higher penetration – to keep up with armor Strike protection scaling and to keep somewhat in line with vanilla balance
Bullet speeds are still slower than IRL by 25-50%
Installation:
Unzip pak file into your ~mods folder as usual.
Uninstallation:
Can be safely removed at any time, just delete the pak file.
