Changing Follower Support Abilities

During your travels in the Jade Empire you'll gain a diverse group of companions that will aid you in your quest. These distinct individuals will contribute their unique skills to your cause.

Through some simple changes of a few 2da files you'll be able to change the support abilities of your favorite companions to something more suitable towards your playstyle. This short tutorial will show you how, in addition to trying to explain the logic behind the steps. All you will need is a plain text editor such as Notepad.

To provide an example of what is possible, this tutorial will carry out the steps required to modify Dawn Star's support ability to that of Abbot Song's; during combat all stats will regen instead of just chi.

Guide
The first step of course is to find the 2da file for the henchman you want to modify. A file named des_hench.2da contains the file names for each henchman under the prefix column. To accelerate the process or for those lacking the aforementioned 2da file, the following table contains the names of the relevant henchman 2das. As you can see, Dawn Star's 2da file is named dstar.2da. This file contains the stats and abilities Dawn Star will possess as you level up. The supporteffect column is the first thing you will want to look at. The number here (46) corresponds to her support ability in the effects.2da file. Opening effects.2da, you will see that the label with ID 46 is EFFECT_MODSTATOVERTIME. This will point you to the 2da file with additional information on the various support abilities with the same effect; health regen, chi regen, focus regen, and regen all.

The second column of interest in dstar.2da is supporteffectparam column. The value in this column specifies which effect in modstatovertime.2da the character will have as a support ability.

Dawn Star has a value of 2 in each row for supporteffectparam in dstar.2da, which sure enough matches a label called RECOVERCHI_1 in modstatovertime.2da. This file also contains columns for health, chi, and focus regeneration amount. These amounts can be also be modified to provide a faster, or slower regeneration. You can also create your own effects by adding another row to the 2da with the same layout as the existing rows. As an example you could create an entry called RecoverChiAndFocus that provides chi and focus regeneration but not health. label              duration    period  health  chi     focus   drunk   heartbeatvfx    largebeatvfx    creatorvfx  name    heartbeatanim   creatoranim soundset    additionalstatus    bosseffect  bosseffectparam bosseffectduration  bosseffectfeedback 5   RecoverChiAndFocus  -1          1       0       10      10      0       ****            ****            ****        ****    ****            ****        ****        ****                ****        ****            ****                0        health. As you can see in the file, recover all stats has an ID of 4. If you open Abbot Song's 2da file you can see he has a value of 4 listed in the supporteffectparam column which confirms we have the correct effect. To give Dawn Star the same ability, replaced the number 2 in each row under supporteffectparam with 4.