I recently stumbled over a nasty bug when playing The Witcher 2 with FCR (the Full Combat Rebalance mod). The symptoms are that all of a sudden your vigor is stuck at zero and does not re-generate anymore. If you look at your character attributes, you will find that vigor regeneration has indeed changed to zero both in and outside of combat.

There are other reports of this problem to be found in the internet, but surprisingly enough no one seems to have found a solution other than going back to the most-recent saved game that does not have the problem.

After some investigation, I believe I found out what is happening and how to work around it.

FCR changes the definition of the "block" action (triggered with E) to also invoke the Quen sign. While Quen is hold, vigor re-generation stops (otherwise you'd be able to stay in Quen forever and be effectively invulnerable). Now, I think what happens is that sometimes there are issues with this "double action" of the E key that result in the effects not being properly reset when E is released. This seems especially likely to happen if you only briefly depress E (as opposed to holding it).

So how can this be fixed? Well, theoretically it is enough to simply enter blocking stance / cast Quen sign again by holding E. When you release it, your vigor regeneration should be back to normal.

There is just one problem with this solution: typically, when you notice the problem, you don't have any vigor, so you can't cast Quen in the first place.

Solution 1

The first workaround that I found is to temporarily cheat to get your vigor up again. The Deviatted Trainer (unfortunately the site requires registration to download) works nicely with the most-recent game version (at least as of today). Start the trainer, start the game, press F2 to activate the trainer and then 3 on the numeric keypad to recover your vigor. Now you should be able to cast Quen again by pressing E, and afterwards your vigor re-generation should be fixed. At this point you don't need the trainer anymore.

Solution 2

If you're hesitant to run cheat programs from dubious internet sources (as I would normally be, but I'm playing games on a throw-away Windows installation), I believe there is a second solution. I did not test this one myself, but I'm pretty sure it will work. As a bonus, this solution should have the advantage of also making sure that the problem will not occur again.

The trick is to modify some game files such that vigor re-generation while casting Quen is not completely turned off, but just very slow. This will still not help you in combat, but if you now run into the bug, you can simply wait until your vigor has regenerated and enter blocking stance to reset the re-generation.

To modify the game files, download the RED tools and use them to extract the contents of your CookedPC\z_fcr2_data.dzip file (in the game installation directory) into a temporary directory. Now you need to edit the abilities/gerald_basic.xml file and look for the definition of the QuenBuff ability. It should look like this:

<ability name="QuenBuff" >
    <!-- Some lines removed -->
    <endurance_combat_regen mult="true" always_random="false" min="0" max="0"/>
    <endurance_noncombat_regen mult="true" always_random="false" min="0" max="0"/>
</ability>

What this tells you is that while Quen is active, endurance (aka vigor) re-generation is multiplied by 0. So if you change this to e.g.

<ability name="QuenBuff" >
    <!-- Some lines removed -->
    <endurance_combat_regen mult="true" always_random="false" min="0.1" max="0.1"/>
    <endurance_noncombat_regen mult="true" always_random="false" min="0.1" max="0.1"/>
</ability>

Vigor re-generation will merely be reduced to 10%. Once the change is done, use the RED Tools again to pack all the files back into a .dzip file, and replace the z_fcr2_data.dzip file with it. This should fix the issue!