Total Combat Overhaul

This mod list has a heavy focus on improving the third-person combat experience. Over the past few years, there has been an emergence of a large amount of game-changing mods in the combat/animations scene. Below you will find the notable mods that overhaul combat in this list. Some of these are regarding animations, but only for combat-based animations.

True Directional Movement

“Overhauls the third person gameplay similarly to modern action RPGs, entirely through SKSE. Move and attack in any direction. Includes a custom target lock component and an animated target reticle widget, target headtracking, projectile aim support during target lock, mount support and more!”

This mod brings an entirely new level of play to the Third-Person experience. You are able to move and attack in any direction at any time, whether you have your weapon out or not. This allows you to be very tactical with your positioning, executing attacks from angles that would not have been possible in vanilla Skyrim.

TDM introduces a Target-Lock feature that is built to work perfectly with the above movement systems. With a simple hotkey, you can lock on to the enemy nearest to the center of your screen. Your movement will then be generally centered around that enemy, similar to when locking onto an enemy in Souls games. This can allow you to perform very fun and effective maneuvers involving sprinting around your opponent, with your camera and character automatically flipping back around to face the enemy. It can take some time getting used to fighting this way, but the experience is MUCH more enjoyable.

TDM also overhauls the experience on Horseback, improving the directional movement and camera significantly. Mounted archery has also been made much easier to use, especially in combination with the above Target-Lock feature.

The mod also allows you to swim up and down with the L-ALT and L-CTRL keys respectively, without having to look up or down. These actions also come with unique animations for swimming up/down, and improve the swimming experience considerably.

Another feature of the mod is the Player Headtracking feature. Your character will automatically look in the direction you are facing with your camera (provided you’re not looking behind your character, unless you’re an owl?). If you are locked on to an NPC, your character will look at them instead. Nothing boosts the connection to your character more than seeing them look exactly where you are looking.

Overall, this mod is probably one of the best mods ever made, and is a stable in any list intent on making third-person gameplay a blast.

SmoothCam

“SmoothCam adds a frame-interpolated third-person camera to Skyrim Special Edition, with well over a hundred different user configurable options and a preset system to let you easily swap between completely different camera setups.”

SmoothCam completely overhauls the way the third-person camera in Skyrim works. Upon loading into the game, you will immediately notice that the camera now feels less attached to your character, and is “lazily” following the player and your camera movements. This improves the entire game experience most certainly, but these changes improve combat in third-person immensely.

The mod is completely configurable, with the ability to create and load other user’s presets. The mod list comes pre-loaded with my own custom preset, but you can choose between additional presets that were added to the list, or create your own!

This mod, in combination with True Directional Movement, bring the movement and camera in third-person up to modern standards and beyond.

BFCO - Attack Behavior Framework

This quote is from Distar’s “MCO” mod, however it highlights the same issue that BFCO resolves. “Skyrim shares the same mechanics for 1st and 3rd person. It doesn’t translate well and created something you never see in modern games: the ice skating combat. You move freely during the attacks, like in a top-down 2D game. Conventional mods could only limit it by reducing the movement speed…(this mod implements) Chainable power attacks, animated charged attacks, animated transitions and non linear move-sets are all available in one mod for 0 performance cost due to its behavioral nature”

BFCO - Attack Behavior Framework completely changes the third-person combat experience, and is an expansion and re-iteration of MCO with many more features. As described by Distar, vanilla Skyrim’s combat suffers from the “ice-skating issue”, where it almost appears as though the player is ice skating while swinging their weapon around. BFCO fixes this by implementing a system where animations have movement data associated with them. This means that animations can be made that will make the character takes steps when attacking, or any other number of locomotive actions. Through the use of a variety of animation packs covering every weapon type, including mod-added weapons, this mod completely transforms the feeling of third-person combat.

BFCO further expands on MCO with much improved chainability of attacks, as well as introducing a secondary “Combo Power Attack” that can be initiated by using Middle-Mouse Click. This can be chained with your normal light and power attacks.

BFCO specifically also allows for jumping attacks, and swimming attacks. If you tap your left-click while in the air shortly after jumping, you will perform a light jump attack. If you hold left-click, you will perform a jumping power attack. Swimming attacks are basic, and can be performed while in a swimming state with a left-click.

BFCO also adds special bow and crossbow bashing behaviors, which we have locked behind the “Ranger” perk in the Archery skill tree with this mod list. With a bow, holding down power attack to bash will unleash a flurry of lighter-power arrows after a power bash. With a crossbow, an acrobatic maneuver if performed, where you continuously move forward and stab with a bolt.

If you don’t have the “Ranger” perk, holding down power attack for one second will perform the first part of the power bash still.

Through the use of the other mods, which you will find further in this list, these animations are utilized by enemies!

BFCO Animation Packs

The below mods are animation packs that were originally created for the MCO framework, but are converted for use with BFCO in this mod list.

Elden Rim Moveset Collection

An animation pack designed for MCO. This animation pack covers Fists, Swords, Daggers, War Axes, Maces, Greatswords, Battleaxes, and Warhammers. It also contains unique dual-wielding animations for Swords, Daggers, War Axes, and Maces. This animation pack serves as the base for our combat animations. Their style is based on (if not copied) from Elden Ring.

Edgemaster Animations

Another MCO animation pack. This pack also covers similar weapons to Elden Rim Moveset Collection, but those are overridden. We are using this animation pack to fill in some of the missing weapons. These include Rapiers, Claws, Scimitars, Katanas, Spears, Pikes, Halberds and Quarterstaves. These weapon types are all added by our weapon mods, and they utilize the animations added by this mod.

ER Katana

This mod adds a unique moveset for Katana weapons when they are one-handed, overriding animations from Edgemaster.

ER Rapier

This mod adds a unique moveset for Rapier weapons when they are one-handed, overriding animations from Edgemaster.

Skypia Aramusha Dual Katana Moveset

This mod from Skypia’s “For Honor” series adds a Dual Katana moveset stylized after the “Aramusha” class in For Honor.

Nobushi I Spear Moveset

This mod adds spear combat animations for MCO. These will apply to Halberds, Spears, Pikes, and most other polearm weapons.

Mixed Scythe

This mod adds scythe combat animations for MCO. Some of our weapon mods add scythes, and they will utilize this animation.

SCAR - Skyrim Combos AI Revolution

“SKSE plugin that brings up the modern (action) game‘s combos attack AI into Skyrim…The vanilla Skyrim game engine does not have the concept of combos attack at all, except the right to left and left to right swing attack…SCAR introduces a dynamic and highly customizable AI attack system to the game…NPCs would check the range of distance and angle as well as other conditions before every strike, pick up the attack action that meet the criteria, then perform it.”

In short, this mod allows enemy NPCs to use the movesets from BFCO - Attack Behavior Framework, and to use them in smart and intelligent ways. You will find that enemies will now combo the fuck out of you! Enemies will intelligently use any BFCO moveset that they can use based on their equipped weapon. All of the BFCO animations that we are using in this list fully support SCAR, and you will see them used by the enemy.

Dodge - MCO

This mod is arguably the smoothest and most well-integrated dodge mod that exists. It adds a step and roll dodge, which can be used by pressing space or double tapping space respectively. These dodges give you invincibility frames the moment they are used, for a very short time. This way, you can dodge most any attack with good timing. The default animations are the best in my opinion. Most of the animation packs I found had far too much of a recovery delay after dodging, making them almost unusable.

The downside to this mod, is that it does NOT work in first person at all. Sorry first person players.

No Saving in Combat

This mod is very simple. It prevents you from saving manually or with F5 while you are in a combat state. I have added this mod to this list mostly to curb my save-scumming behaviors. I believe that if you suffer from save-scumming as well, this mod can help you to. You can safely disable this mod BEFORE starting a playthrough, but it is NOT advisable to remove it during a playthrough. Do so at your own risk!

Wildcat - Combat of Skyrim

“Wildcat is a streamlined, yet full featured combat overhaul. It makes combat more dangerous and visceral by increasing lethality, adding injuries and context sensitive stagger and making combat AI more responsive and aggressive.”

Wildcat has been a staple combat mod in load orders everywhere for some time now. Even with the tidal wave of new combat mods, it still has features that we can utilize in this list. Injuries can be applied to you or enemies when you take a hit, giving you a small debuff that pertains to the injured body part until you have reached full health. Wildcat also improves the enemy AI through combat styles and game settings.

We are also utilizing some extra features such as Attacks of Opportunity, boosting damage if you strike while an enemy is attacking. Features such as Timed Block and stamina consumption on normal attack are disabled, in favor of the features implemented by the next mod on our list.

Valhalla Combat

“Script-free timed blocking, projectile parrying, stun and execution, and non-intrusive stamina management to push Skyrim’s combat to modern standards.”

Valhalla Combat is a newer combat overhaul, that is focused on bringing some modern Action-RPG combat concepts to Skyrim. We are utilizing the Timed Blocking and Stamina modifications from this mod instead of Wildcat. You will completely change the way you manage your stamina with this mod. If you run out of stamina, you will enter an exhausted state, where you deal half as much damage. This state will end once you have fully regenerated your stamina.

Blocking has also been overhauled, using similar mechanics from the mod author’s original blocking mod, Shield of Stamina. Performing a Timed Block will now deal you no damage, as long as you have enough stamina to tank all the damage. This incentivizes you to use a shield much more than vanilla, where you cannot block all damage even at 100 block will all perks.

Successful light attacks that hit an enemy no longer deplete your stamina, they regenerate it, incentivizing you to perform long combo chains using our new combat framework, BFCO. Power attacks will still deplete your stamina, and missed light attacks will also do so. Your stamina will regenerate 5x faster by default, helping you maintain a healthy combat state.

Elden Counter

“Elden Ring has a lovely guard counter system. Pressing power attack key shortly after blocking an attack, you do a “guard counter” that deals additional damage. This mod brings its mechanic to Skyrim.”

As it was very simply put in the original description, this mod adds Elden Ring’s guard counter mechanic to the game. You can perform this action by power attacking immediately after a successful block. This adds another layer of complexity to combat. increasing the options you have when dealing with enemies.

Simple Weapon Swing Parry

“Between a weapon swing’s animation and hit frame, an attacker enters a blocking state, parrying any attacks against them.”

This simple mod allows you to “parry” attacks, by attacking into an attack. Basically, you and your enemies weapons will collide if you attack at the same time. This can serve to break up combat in tight situations, and can certainly be used offensively with a faster weapon.

Dual Wield Parrying SKSE

“Lets the player parry/block with a new key, even if they’re holding a second weapon (or a spell or a staff) in their left hand.”

Because of the combat setup we are using, we need a way to block without our right-mouse click. This mod allows you to block with any arbitrary keybind, even in times when you could not in vanilla.

Cancel Attack

This very simple mod allows us to cancel an attack by pressing the R key mid-swing. This can allow us to quickly block an attack if you timed your swing wrong, as well as quickly recover from previous attacks to continue attacking. This is a very powerful mechanic, but it requires quick thinking and reflexes to make use of this feature for good results, especially in the presence of a lot of enemies.

Spellsiphon

“Experience gameplay focused on combos and synergy. Lessen the need for menus or hotkeys through a system where swapping spells and weapons is streamlined and rewarding. Continue the fight at 0 magicka by using new spell types. Enjoy a plethora of new sounds and visual effects. Grow in power by playing skillfully, not just from levels and gear.”

Spellsiphon is, at it’s core, a Spell mod. The spells it adds, however, act under an entirely different set of rules than other spells. You are able to cast these spells with no Magicka, instead taking “essence” from the Land, Dead, or Living to choose your element and further cast your spells. The mod also comes with a load of extra mechanics that complement this basic “Draw” and cast from elements. This mod contains far too much content to cover in a description. As such, the mod includes a rather in depth in-game tutorial that you can initiate at any time by reading the “Spellsiphon” book added to your inventory on a new game.

Ghost Mechanics and Shaders Restored

“Ghosts just became your worst nightmare…I restored a cut mechanic to all ghosts and familiars which makes all normal weaponry and spells ineffective against them: When you hit a ghost with an unsuitable spell or weapon the ghost will fade out and turn invincible for 3 seconds. You can still damage them with normal spells and weaponry but only every 3 seconds.”

This mod adds some spice to combat against any type of ghost enemies. Unless you strike them with a weapon or spell that is suitable for fighting undead, you will only be able to hit them every 3 seconds. This mechanic forces you to be prepared for this type of enemy, or suffer from a rather large handicap. On top of this, the mod enhances the ghost shaders quite a bit.

Better Power Attack Direction Control

“In vanilla Skyrim, the direction that player character would pick when doing power attack is not decided by the real input of your device (gamepad or keyboard). Instead, it decided by the movement direction and movement speed of the player character at the moment the power attack action start…with this mod the power attack direction will decided by the real input of your gamepad or keyboard”

Simply put, this mod makes power attacks respect the input you are giving with your keyboard. Without this mod, all sorts of wonky things can occur during combat if you attempt to power attack right after a dodge or sprint, potentially throwing off the combat experience quite a bit. This mod remedies that problem.

Precision

“Physically accurate, true Havok collisions for melee. Procedural, physics-based hit reactions. Weapon trails. Hitstop and camera shake. Recoils when hitting certain materials. Supports both first person and third person, as well as other NPCs and creatures.”

This mod does away with the cone-style hit-box that comes with vanilla Skyrim. Instead of simply hitting all enemies in a cone in front of you when you swing a weapon, this mod adds real hit-boxes to weapons, that actually encompass the size of the weapon. This means that weapons will only hit things that they are physically touching in the world! This enables you to perform a wide variety of new maneuvers in combat, including jumping over or ducking under a swing! Beyond that, it increases immersion immensely to have weapons with true hit-boxes, like a modern game.

The mod also includes a few other features that enhances the reactivity of the character when hitting things with their weapon and being hit by weapons.

Precision Creatures

This addon to Precision adds true hit-boxes to the attacks of Werewolves, Vampire Lords, and Draugr. This makes fighting these enemies (especially Werewolves…) much more realistic, and inline with humanoid NPCs.

For Honor Power Attack

This very simple mod changes the Power Attack functionality to be used with your Right Mouse-Click, instead of holding your Left Mouse-Click. This makes it much more smooth to combo from light attacks to power attacks. The mod completely removes blocking functionality from RIGHT-CLICK.

When you have a spell equipped in your non-weapon hand, you will still power attack by holding Left Mouse-Click, to allow you to still use both hands.

Vanguard - Bash Behaviors Updated

“Changes how most of the Bashing work, NPC bashing have been completely overhauled to be more telegraphed instead of being too fast to give room to dodge or parry without the use of scripts…Players also get different types of bashing depending on equipped item, not just a visual change but the movement and the speed of the bash now varies to give variety on the approach of certain weapons”

Completely overhauling the power bash, this mod introduces a set of unique behavioral animations that will replace the power bashing animations for all weapons and shields. These animations will have movement data, and behave much like a typical weapon attack. This not only increases variety in your own combat routine, it allows you to more easily avoid enemy bash attacks. In vanilla, these attacks are almost instant, and enemies do them all the time. Each bash animation is unique, with only a select few weapons sharing the same animation.

This is an updated version of the original mod, with many fixes and improvements.

POISE - Stagger Overhaul

“A near complete gutting of the vanilla stagger system for something more inspired by traditional fighting games…Vanilla stagger mechanics are quite literally RNG based. Which makes sense when you consider that Bethesda’s original idea for combat was a very fast paced, free-flowing, strafe based hack and slash. However, in 2022, everyone seems to have adopted more modern mechanics in the modding community, and fighting games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and even those terrible fucking Souls titles, have always meant alot to me.”

As Loki eloquently put it, Skyrim’s stagger mechanics sort of made sense for it’s original combat, but that is not what we have anymore with this list. POISE overhauls the staggering system in the game completely, adding four tiers of “stagger” that you will reach progressively as you get hit, losing your poise.

Your and your enemies current poise is determined by a number of features including your equipped weight, and your weapon. With higher poise, you will be able to endure more hits before you are staggered.

Poisebreaker - Addon for POISE

“Poisebreaker is a rebalance and partial rework of Loki’s Poise mod to better integrate into the rest of Skyrim. This mod is intended for players using modern ARPG combat frameworks such as MCO: in conjunction with such mods, the Poise system serves as a punishment for missing attacks.”

This mod makes quite a bit of tweaks to the POISE mod’s settings and the way it works in general, to make it work a bit better with some of the other combat mods we are using.

Stagger Direction Fix

“A skse plugin that fix the character’s wrong stagger direction bug when the stagger triggered by spell, shout and range weapon…In the vanilla game, When a character trigger a stagger that caused through a ranged attack, including spell, shout, range weapon and less power. The playing stagger animation direction won’t be correct when the attack is come from the target’s backward…Character’s body will fall backward still instead of fall forward, which is obviously against the normal physical principle…This mod is aimed to fix this issue, now after installed this mod the character will stagger forwardly when it received stagger-causing attack come from its backward.”

Due to the way MCO and our other combat mods work, this vanilla issue is exacerbated quite a bit. Now, enemies and the player will *always stagger in the correct direction.

*POISE’s Tier-4 stagger animation moves you quite a bit, and this can potentially be sent in the wrong direction if it is triggered by a Wildcat injury.

zxlice’s Ultimate Potion Animation

This mod adds an animation that plays whenever you drink a potion, very simply. This animation allows you to continue walking while you are drinking the potion, but you cannot run. This forces you to think about when you will drink potions in combat, as it will leave you vulnerable or a short time, without completely locking you in place.

Enemy Magelock - NPC Magic Casting Commitment

“A really simple mod to switch up combat rhythm especially for those who love enemy spawn mods and spell distributor mods, Enemy Magelock, Commits the NPC in place when they cast magic animations to avoid them cheesing at you by closing you down or running away when Casting, they are now fully committed to there cast to encourage skill based gameplay.”

This (potentially controversial) mod prevents NPCs from moving while they are charging up a spell. NPCs have a habit of charging into your face casting a concentration spell, which can end up being just plain annoying. You may find that enemy mages can stand still out of your sight, never letting loose their spell so they can search for you. If you find that this mod is not for you, it is possible to remove it by disabling the mod, running nemesis, and updating the Nemesis Engine/generating new animations. In the future, a more succinct guide will be provided to remove potentially unwanted mods such as this one.

New Creature Animations

New Creature Animation Mods from stuxjr

This collection of Creature Animation mods adds a variety of new behavioral attacks to a variety of creatures. These animations truly do spice up combat with these creatures. This set of mods covers Frost Atronachs, Trolls, Werewolves, Falmer, Giants, Lurkers, and Rieklings/Goblins.

Dragon Combat Animations

“The goal of this animation replacer is to make fair attacks for dragons, because in vanilla some attacks are instant (like wing attacks) some attacks are too slow (bite attacks) some attacks are cheesy (get behind dragon and you’ll never see his face again because he will be in constant loop of tail ground slams)”

This mod greatly improves melee combat with dragons with telegraphed motion-data attacks. There are a variety of new attacks that dragons will use in the right situation. This makes these fights more exciting, and fair.

DNFA Wolves Combat Behavior

“…wolves (and, occasionally, death hounds)…now they behave more like wolves from DS games: chain their attacks, dodge from you.”

This mod adds fantastic motion-data animations to wolves. These attacks allow wolves to lunge, and quickly snap at you multiple times. Multiple other attacks are added, and the wolves will also dodge away quickly in a similar fashion to dogs in Souls games. All of these attacks are telegraphed, so you can dodge/respond to them unlike vanilla wolves. A huge improvement to combat with these often-encountered enemies.

Comprehensive First Person Animation Overhaul

“Adds thousands (yes, I checked and it is actually in the thousands) of first person animations that overwrite the janky and outdated vanilla ones. Includes unique animations depending on weapon type (so axes, maces, and daggers are no longer used like swords)”

This modlist is geared around 3rd person gameplay, but I’ve included this mod to help make the 1st person experience a bit better. This mod completely overhauls every single 1st person animation in the game, bringing them more inline with a modern 1st person combat game. These animations are the best that exist for 1st person.