Norwood

Norwood is the fourth playable hero of Pascal's Wager, and the one with the most health of the five campaign heroes. He fights with bare-handed Iron Fist punches and the heavy Coffin of Chained Soul that he carries. Light punches fill a second gauge, Griminess, and every Heavy swing needs and spends it. Rage, the usual combat-art fuel, is earned by the Coffin swings and spent on Soul Shackling Eddy and on the hero-specific Liberate form. This page lists his numbers from the game's own tables: starting stats, how attributes grow them, every move with its damage and costs, and what his Lunatic state changes.

Overview#

The in-game text portrays Norwood as a relic hunter who looks for the bone coffin-like boxes that put the dead to rest, and who keeps a copper coin given to him by his dead brother. Later story text reveals that he is a Marcion and that he is the one who proposes sneaking Terrence into the Blessedland through the abandoned city of Edith (summarised from the item and quest descriptions). Between chapters he also runs a shop and a Contract in the Carriage; see Norwood's sundries. The achievement "Hand in Coffin" asks you to complete his story.

As a fighter he is built around three things:

1. A tank body. The highest starting Health of the campaign heroes (984), a guard that takes no chip damage, and a Poise regeneration rate that Terrence lacks (see Guarding#Who can guard and Poise and stagger#When Poise refills).
2. A resource loop. Light punches build Griminess, Heavy swings spend it and build Rage, and Rage is spent on the big arts. If you run out of Griminess your Heavy button simply stops working.
3. Liberate the Chained Soul. At full Rage he enters a second form for as long as the Rage lasts, with armoured punches and an all-in finisher called Revenge.

The in-game tutorial says he is "not good at dodging" and that his defence can withstand most attacks. The data agrees: his Dodging roll is an ordinary 65-stamina one, and nearly every Heavy move opens a super-armour window.

Base stats#

Norwood's starting attribute points come from HeroData row 10004. The seventh, hidden, attribute only feeds fixed stats.

Feeding those points through his rate table (see Attributes for the formula and the shared growth curves) gives:

What each attribute feeds#

Each stat is the sum, over the six attributes, of (rate x curve value for that attribute's points) / 1000, rounded down.

Strength is almost all of his Attack (with small shares of Crit damage, Defence and elemental resistance), Vigor is Health and the shields, Vitality is Defence and half of Pierce resistance, and Endurance is Stamina. Compared with Terrence he gets all of his Attack from Strength (Terrence also draws a little from Dexterity) and much less Crit damage and Crit rate.

Stat growth#

Raising all six attributes to the same value N (the curves are shared by all heroes):

The curves flatten quickly: most of the gain is in the first 30 points per attribute, and Strength alone can take his Attack to 200 (before trophies).

Weapons and style#

Norwood has no weapon in the usual sense. Light attacks are Iron Fist punches, and Heavy attacks swing the Coffin of Chained Soul. The code gives him three pieces of equipment: the coffin, a coffin-hand and a left hand. When the Liberate form starts, the coffin-hand is hidden and the left hand shown, with a looping effect around the coffin-hand's anchor, and both are restored when the form ends.

The button prompts in the tutorial describe the loop: hold Light to charge a stronger punch; Light attacks accumulate Griminess; Heavy moves, the "Coffin Shackle", can only be used while he has Griminess and they gather Rage; they hit hard and are hard to interrupt.

The two gauges#

See Rage#Gaining Rage, Rage#Spending Rage and Rage#Decay for the shared Rage rules. Both gauges are written to the save when you leave a scene and loaded again on entry, so they carry over between areas (inferred from animalbase.lua 5672 and animalbase_value.lua 105-125).

Moveset#

Button names: Light, Heavy, Special (guard), Dodge, Interact. In Norwood's talent text the Heavy button is written {21} and Light {31}.

Inputs and unlocks#

The unlock column follows the SkillTalent flag of each move row (SkillData) together with the talent that lists the move. Rows without the flag are always available.

Damage#

"Raw attack" is the figure that enters the Damage formula: Attack stat x rate, plus the move's flat power, rounded, before the target's Defence, crits and other multipliers. All of his moves deal Physical damage. 58 is his starting Attack; his Strength can raise it to 200, and 180 is shown for comparison with the other hero pages.

The game stores each charged move as several rows: hold phases, a release hit and sometimes a second hold and release. Only the rows that can land a hit are shown (the release rows). Which of them hit, and how many times, is set by the animation, so the real count can differ (inferred). Revenge's first row has flat power 0 and is only the start of the move.

Costs and side effects#

How to read it:

• Rage gained / Griminess gained are per hit that connects (the RageAdd and PowerAdd columns). Trophies and talents can add to them.
• Griminess needed is checked when the swing starts; spent is taken when it triggers. The Heavy triple needs 20 for each swing and spends 25, and a swing that finds less than 25 presumably just empties the gauge (inferred).
• Armour is the temporary super-armour (Toughness) the move opens. Quick Iron Fist punches have none; every Heavy and art has at least 74. Compare enemy hits of about 51 Poise in Poise and stagger#Super armour (armour pools).
• Guard Break 999 cannot be blocked. See Guarding#How a blocked hit is resolved.
• Poise and Resilience damage: see Poise and stagger#How a hit is resolved and Weakness and execution#What drains Resilience.

Interrupt values (counter)#

Several of his moves can beat back ("interrupt") an enemy attack that arrives at the right moment. The value is the strength of the enemy attack the move can answer; see Parry and counter#The priority numbers.

Combo flow#

From SkillChainData:

Only Coffin swing family 1 and the Heavy triple are flagged as moves that can start from idle; the other three swing families are reached through the animation controller (inferred), and the data does not show the rule that picks between them.

Talents that change moves#

See Norwood talent tree for costs and layout.

Lunatic state#

In the Abnormal state (Sanity at or below 70%, and therefore also when Lunatic at 50%), Norwood changes in four ways. They apply in both stages, and no move of his is locked or replaced (none of his move rows carries a Sanity restriction). See Abnormal state#Effects by hero, Lunatic state and Sanity.

The Berserker Instinct bonus applies to the charged parts of the Coffin swings (combos 3 and 5 of the four families, the dodge swing and Furious Griminess: Poised) and to the charged release of the three Iron Fist punches and the dodge punch. The Heavy triple, Furious Griminess, Eddy and the Liberate moves do not have it.

Hidden mechanics#

• Heavy attacks cost Griminess to even start. The first row of every Heavy swing requires 20 Griminess and the release spends 25. The Heavy triple needs this for each of its three swings. Without Griminess the Heavy button does nothing (the "not enough Karma" tip is the internal name for the gauge). A full cycle of three charged punches (20 + 25 + 30 = 75 Griminess) pays for three swings.
• Perfect guards refill him. A block whose block parameter is above 1 (the animation's tight timing window, which I take to be the perfect guard; inferred) gives +12 Griminess and 30% of max Stamina (the stamina ratio BlockAddEnergy 300 per mille), so guarding well is a Griminess source as well as a defence. See Guarding#Perfect guard.
• Liberate is a timer, and the timer is Rage. Entering needs a full 100 Rage. From then on Rage drains by 5% of the bar per second (his RageDecrement is 50 per mille, so 5 Rage per second), meaning 20 seconds if you do nothing. Each punch start costs 20 Rage, each blocked hit with the Rage guard costs 10, and Revenge spends everything. The form ends the moment Rage reaches 0 (Hero10004_Value:Update). The punches themselves give no Rage, so fighting does not extend the form (talents such as Craze can still add Rage).
• The Rage guard falls back to the normal guard. The Liberate guard has strength 1000, far above any attack, but each hit it blocks costs 10 Rage; at 0 Rage the code swaps it for the ordinary guard (75).
• Revenge is a counter and a finisher. Its first row has armour 999, Guard Break 999 and an interrupt value of 10, with 50% damage reduction while armoured (DamageSub 500; every Liberate punch has the same 50%, as do the two potion-drinking rows). The text says the damage increases significantly when the coffin blocked an attack; no multiplier for that is visible in the data, so it presumably comes from the animation (inferred).
• Intercepting rewrites the move. When a Coffin swing (any of the four families, the dodge swing or Poised Furious Griminess) is hit during its first part at the right time, the game plays a short freeze, jumps straight to the recharge-and-release combos, plays the "stinger" audio and applies status 10082, named "Norwood invincible" in the data, for 1.5 s. This happens at most once per swing and the talent is what enables it (inferred; hero10004.lua 72-91).
• Soul Shackling Eddy gets cheaper and weaker at the start but not at the end. The three parts cost 30, 10 and 10 Rage and their opening hit shrinks (flat power 79, 59, 39) while the closing slam stays 229 flat at a 136% rate in all three. Their stamina drops from 65 to 35 for the follow-ups. Chaining all three costs 50 Rage and 135 Stamina.
• Coffin swing 3 is a Rage jackpot. One release of swing family 3 gives 50 Rage, almost three times family 1 (18), and it also has the highest flat power (132) and rate (212%) of the four. Which family fires is not visible in the data (see Combo flow), but one swing plus its recharge hit would pay for Eddy several times over.
• Backstab and Execution are weak for what they are. His Backstab uses a x1.25 rear multiplier where Terrence's uses x2 (see Backstab#Damage), so it hits for about 63% of what the same row would with x2. Execution has a tiny 8 Poise damage and no stamina cost.
• Execution: Deterrence is a second hit. The talent triggers a sphere (radius 3 m, lasting 0.1 s) using a separate move row (SkillIndex 1108: 150 flat at 136%, Guard Break 999) around Norwood that skips the executed enemy.
• Resistances are halved a second time by traps. In the Lunatic state non-physical trap (environment) damage first uses the already reduced resistance and then halves it again, about -75% in total for Fire, Poison, Arcane and Shadow (Pierce is not reduced by the lunatic stat change, so Pierce traps only get one 50% cut; inferred); non-physical status damage (Burn, Poison and so on) uses the base resistance and subtracts 50% once. Enemy attack damage uses the reduced stat only once (inferred from animalbase_value.lua 1935-1950 and statusbase.lua 312-322; see Damage formula#Traps and hazards).
• Counter move 105 is the strike after a successful counter. The data holds a "parry" row pair (SkillIndex 105, flat 95 and 292 at 250%, 100 Rage). No talent unlocks it and no SkillChainData row links to it, because the shared hit code switches any hero into move 105 when a counter window is hit (animalbase.lua 7346-7354), and the Furious Griminess windows are such windows (see the interrupt values above and Parry and counter#What the counter does). Revenge is a "keep" window instead: it turns into the counter without restarting (inferred from animalbase.lua 7349). Whether the 100 Rage cost blocks the switch when he has less is not visible in the data (unverified).
• Only Liberate drains Rage, and Griminess never decays. Norwood's Rage only drains while he is in the Liberate form (Hero10004_Value:Update checks the form first), and his Griminess has no decay or passive regeneration; the Power-decrement stat is only used by Elena's code. Outside a saved story run, the start-of-fight code fills Griminess to its maximum while Rage starts at 0 (inferred from InitProperty).
• Poise regeneration works for him. He has 240 per mille regeneration (24% of the pool per second), unlike Terrence, so any Poise gained from Casual mode or the +10 Abnormal-state bonus refills in about four seconds when not being hit. See Poise and stagger#When Poise refills.
• Casual difficulty adds Poise to the player on top of this; see Difficulty#Casual in detail.

Trivia#

• His internal names are Chinese: the Heavy swings are "heavy charge triple", the Light punches "light charge triple", the Liberate punches "ultimate light fist" and the Rage guard "ultimate block". The talent text calls the Heavy moves Coffin of Chained Soul attacks.
• The game ships an enemy-style AI script for Norwood (attack10004.lua) that uses the guard, Rage guard, Furious Griminess, Eddy, counters and potions, and a "trick group" for him (trickgroup10004.lua). These are presumably used when Norwood is AI controlled (inferred).
• He has a single outfit, "Norwood (Default)", listed in the skin table (see Skins).
• The achievement "Hand in Coffin" (quest 75054) is awarded for completing his story. See Achievements.
• Parts of his story appear in the tutorial tips as "Norwood 1" and "Norwood 2", which are the Iron Fist and Griminess explanations.
• Terrence's summoned or AI copies are mentioned on Terrence; Norwood has a similar death hook that notifies The First Messenger when a summoned Norwood dies (hero10004.lua 271-281; inferred to belong to the First Messenger fight).

See also: Characters, Norwood talent tree, Rage, Guarding, Lunatic state.

Sources#

• Data: es_herodata.lua HeroId 10004 (Attribute_1-7, HpAddNum 2, MpAddNum 4, GuardEnergyRatio 0.45, GuardDamageRatio 0, UIRageMin 30, UISanityDescription); es_heropropertydata.lua PropertyId 1-42 for HeroId 10004 (rates; property 9 RageDecrement = 50, property 14 = 240, property 42); es_heroattributedata.lua AttributeId 1-6 (curves); es_skilldata.lua HeroId 10004, _id 346-455 (all move numbers, costs, SkillGrade, SkillTalent); es_skillchaindata.lua HeroId 10004; es_herotalent.lua HeroId 10004 TalentId 14101-14410 (names, conditions, Type, Value); es_statusdata.lua StatusId 10082; es_achievement.lua AchievementId 10014; text sections HeroData (10004), HeroTalent (14xxx), StoryTutorial 1051-1054 and 1058, UIQuest 10511 and 10707-10708, ItemData 10044 and 10050, StorySkin 4000.
• Code: logic/player/hero10004.lua 8-34 (equipment), 36-70 (OnBlock: Rage guard cost, Griminess and Stamina on perfect guard), 72-91 (OnBeatBack, Intercepting), 101-115 (CheckBlock fallback), 166-224 (Liberate trigger, Execution blast), 257-269 (AddGrade/ResetGrade), 287-299 (IsSanSkillWeakness); gamedata/playerdefine/hero10004_define.lua (DefenceUseRage 10, SanToughnessAdd 10, SanResistSubRate 500, BlockAddPower 12, BlockAddEnergy 300, execution blast constants, CounterAttackSuccessStatusId 10082); logic/playervalue/hero10004_value.lua 11-23 (Rage drain and form end); logic/playervalue/animalbase_value.lua 105-125 (Rage and Power saved), 237-250 (start values), 420-445 (lunatic changes), 471-556 (talent-scaled diffs), 792-806 (DamageSub with talent), 905-930 (UseSkillRage/Power), 1586-1592 (DecrementRage), 1660-1690 (sanity bands), 1925-1950 (trap damage), 2149-2200 and 2744-2780 (Rage and Power gain), 2405-2425 (Berserker Instinct); logic/player/animalbase.lua 4199-4256 (grade, talent and Sanity gating of moves), 4260-4300 (Rage and Power requirements), 8520-8530, 8596-8604, 8654-8662 (broken guard in the Lunatic state); logic/status/statusbase.lua 312-322.
• Verification (re-derived from the kit and code): build/wiki/scripts/verify_norwood/ (stats.py, moves.py, req.py, tal.py); logic/playervalue/animalbase_value.lua 2745-2775 (Rage and Power gain on hit), 1738-1766 (attack base), 1812-1820 and statusbase.lua 356-364 (defence base for traps vs statuses); structdata/fs_herodata.lua 575-608 (property formula); es_herotalent.lua TalentId 14101-14111, 14203-14207, 14405-14410; es_skillchaindata.lua HeroId 10004.
• Scripts and extracted data: build/wiki/scripts/norwood/ (stats.py, rows.py, tables.py) and build/wiki/data/norwood/; earlier extractions in build/wiki/data/characters_b/. Raw attack values are round(Attack x BaseRate / 1000 + flat Attack), which matches the formula shown in Damage formula.