Any Mods to make the Expansions less Anti-Mage? : III

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:48 pm

The expansions, Tribunal especially, is impossible for pure magic classes. All the Hands, Royal guards, virtually every strong enemy has like 100% spell reflect that cause mages to just blow themselves up. When playing through the first time on XBox360 I actually had to train up my mage character with Melee skills to be able to kill anything as spells were completely useless and did little more than kill myself.

Now I understand that without ANY magic defense everything would probably be too easy. You'd blow everyone up with mega spells, I get that, but there has to be a middle group somewhere. Some sort of mod that makes it possible to play as a mage and retain a challenge. Anyone know?

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:53 pm

Reiklings in particular are the worst. Try casting God's Fire on five of them and have it reflect on you completely five times over.

bliviongate: On the other hand reavers can be incapacitated by strong damage strength spells. :foodndrink:

I don't think I have ever successfully played a "pure" type of any character in Morrowind. Fighters and roughs can compensate with potions, scrolls and enchantments. Mages however can do all sorts of things without any equipment.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 4:48 am

I know it's not exactly what you are asking for but one thing that I do is get lots of mods that improve on summons. This typically only works if you are roleplaying a Conjurer or Necromancer though.

Blasphemous Revenants
Necromancy Reliasm
Useful Summoned Creatures ( May not be compatible with mods that change summons)
Enhanced Summoning ( + Creature mods for more variety in summons)

Those are just some off the top of my head.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 11:07 am

Reiklings in particular are the worst. Try casting God's Fire on five of them and have it reflect on you completely five times over.

bliviongate: On the other hand reavers can be incapacitated by strong damage strength spells. :foodndrink:

I don't think I have ever successfully played a "pure" type of any character in Morrowind. Fighters and roughs can compensate with potions, scrolls and enchantments. Mages however can do all sorts of things without any equipment.

Pure mage works fine in vanilla morrowind. It's actually very OP even at hardest difficulty. But it fails hard in the xpacs no matter HOW strong you are. In fact, the stronger mage you are the faster you die lol. Certain enemies are unkillable with magic as they have 100% spell reflect. You literally cannot use spells on them at all (and there are alot of them). Although most are optional fights (Hands, Royal Guards, etc) some of them your forced into fighting like that stupid little wood elf guy that gets pissed when you don't give him a million gold. A mage character cannot win that fight, period. And don't even get me started on Summons being useless in the xpacs either.

Edit: I might look into those Summoner mods, if anything I can just beat these guys down with an army of conjured minions. (My mage specialized in Destruction and Conjuration)

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 5:09 am

Pure mage works fine in vanilla morrowind. It's actually very OP even at hardest difficulty. But it fails hard in the xpacs no matter HOW strong you are. In fact, the stronger mage you are the faster you die lol. Certain enemies are unkillable with magic as they have 100% spell reflect. You literally cannot use spells on them at all (and there are alot of them). Although most are optional fights (Hands, Royal Guards, etc) some of them your forced into fighting like that stupid little wood elf guy that gets pissed when you don't give him a million gold. A mage character cannot win that fight, period. And don't even get me started on Summons being useless in the xpacs either.

Edit: I might look into those Summoner mods, if anything I can just beat these guys down with an army of conjured minions. (My mage specialized in Destruction and Conjuration)

I can't Wait until Westly's Summoning Mod is out. I think that spells that feature weakness to magicka, fire or whatever effect they feature might be a good idea. I would seems fair to sacrifice half of a spells damage in order to also feature a 50-100% weakness to it's effect. Hmmm... spell penetration.. :spotted owl:

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:35 pm

Pure mage works fine in vanilla morrowind. It's actually very OP even at hardest difficulty. But it fails hard in the xpacs no matter HOW strong you are. In fact, the stronger mage you are the faster you die lol. Certain enemies are unkillable with magic as they have 100% spell reflect. You literally cannot use spells on them at all (and there are alot of them). Although most are optional fights (Hands, Royal Guards, etc) some of them your forced into fighting like that stupid little wood elf guy that gets pissed when you don't give him a million gold. A mage character cannot win that fight, period. And don't even get me started on Summons being useless in the xpacs either.

Edit: I might look into those Summoner mods, if anything I can just beat these guys down with an army of conjured minions. (My mage specialized in Destruction and Conjuration)

Yes, but there are other kinds of magic as well. What about fortifying your strength (physical) and using a bound weapon/armor? What about levitation and shooting them from above (marksman)? Or heck, becoming invisible and sneaking past? There are also mods to make potions offensive weapons. Being a mage is not so simple as Fireballing everything in sight-- sometimes you have to be (very) creative in order to get by

.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 12:42 pm

Alchemy is your friend. Train your Alchemy skill as high as you can, and get the best equipment available. Then buy and/or gather ingredients in bulk, and make dozens and dozens of Restore Health potions. When you get into a fight, drink as many as it takes so that you're healing as fast as you're losing health from hits. Either cast a Bound Weapon spell or use whatever melee weapon you're best with, and just keep swinging the weapon and drinking more Restore Health potions when the effect wears off. Eventually the bad guys will all be dead.

A few Shield potions wouldn't hurt either.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 8:29 am

I have the same problem with playing a pure mage in the expansions, most dangerous enemies have reflect (why on earth did Bethesda give them that :unsure: ), you can't levitate either in Morunhold and Hircine's maze. The summons from Morrowindare also relatively weak compared to the enemies in Mournhold, so summoning a golden saint, when you are facing three goblins, usually don't really save the day.
Strenght and health potions and bound weapons will help some, but I would guess that a typical lvl30 mage would be an instant kill for a goblin with a goblin club, and turning to melee fighting will in my opinion defeat the purpose of playing a mage anyway, and you will have to do it a lot.
So I think I would need a few mods to improve the mages in order to play one in the expansions.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 6:34 am

I totally agree. Even with my spellsword character it took me 45 minutes to kill Gaenor, and all my potions and scrolls were depleted, and my whole armor set was broken at the end of the battle.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 2:16 am

I have the same problem with playing a pure mage in the expansions, most dangerous enemies have reflect (why on earth did Bethesda give them that :unsure: ), you can't levitate either in Morunhold and Hircine's maze. The summons from Morrowindare also relatively weak compared to the enemies in Mournhold, so summoning a golden saint, when you are facing three goblins, usually don't really save the day.
Strenght and health potions and bound weapons will help some, but I would guess that a typical lvl30 mage would be an instant kill for a goblin with a goblin club, and turning to melee fighting will in my opinion defeat the purpose of playing a mage anyway, and you will have to do it a lot.
So I think I would need a few mods to improve the mages in order to play one in the expansions.

That's what I was forced to do, train up a weapon skill and change from a Mage to a Spellsword/Battlemage type class instead. I understand that it's what I'll have to do and I've done it before so it's ok. I was just wondering if anyone had come up with some Mod(s) that might make a mage's life a little less reflect-y

Edit: main reason I'm asking is because I'm going to be starting a new playthrough. I originally had the game for xbox way back in the day and poured hundreds of hours into it, now with all the awesome new mods like MGE I've decided to do it again on PC. I'm just dreading the spell reflect city that is Mournhold

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:55 pm

I wonder what would happen if one just changed the reflect spells (or at least reflect_60) to something useless like feather or light. That would take like 5 seconds to make. Or do creatures have some kind of hardcoded reflect?

Another trick you obviously know is absorb health cheese if you're not MCP patched.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 9:30 am

just curious: do you use mcp so that absorb life is reflected as well? (this is my suicide reason no 1) if not, enchant some weapon with absorb life and go your way.

reading this does not make me very happy, as I play pure mage completely without weapon and armor (don't even have a weapon skill and i use the unarmored skill).

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:18 am

Reflection just isn't an issue if you use Conjuration. Gaenor is easy for a high level mage, just jump out of his way and drop some daedra on him. Or fortify your hand to hand (Tribunal gives you fortify skill spells) and punch him to death.

Or use racial immunities to your advantage, Nord mages can cast frost spells without worrying about reflection.

Or make a suit of Constant Effect resist fire.

I've never had any problems with the expansions playing a pure mage. I guess it's just a matter of how you play it.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 9:22 am

Reflection just isn't an issue if you use Conjuration.

Yea, I'm sure many people like to roleplay some. I know I do. For the same reason I don't always want a jack-of-all-trades Warrior/Mage I also don't want a do-it-all Mage. The game has more replay value if you roleplay a class with limitations. Like an Invoker or Wizard who specializes in Destruction magic or a Necromancer who specializes in Undead Summons, life draining, and poison magic, or a Sorcerer who specializes in Deadric summons. I could see it being pretty tough playing a pure Invoker.

Even besides roleplay it is kind of crap to have an entire aspect of combat countered so heavily especially when no other type of combat has that limitation and specifically when this game is suppose to be one where you have many different choices and options to play and complete the game. It would be like if some creatures were only immune to bows and you had to switch to throwing knives. Yea, you could get around it but what if your character isn't suppose to know how to use throwing knives. Plus that wouldn't even make sense. It's just a stupid mechanic Bethesda should have accomplished the same thing with resists only that way it could at least be countered.

I know that spell reflection has its place in fantasy literature and games but it is almost always limited to rare and powerful foes and most games that implement it usually have some kind of useful dispel magic system and some way to counter it. I wouldn't mind spell reflect at all if it were properly implemented.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 2:34 pm

I had a similar problem, myself...
My Imperial Cult Priest was excellent for any situation in the vanilla game.
(I used a special hybrid Healer/Mage, with Unarmored, Blunt Weapon, and Conjuration.)

He was really fun to roleplay, and managed to get through the whole vanilla game with no trouble.
(He even beat that pathetic Dunmer heathen-god Dagoth Ur while barely even breaking a sweat!)

The problems all started with Tribunal. It forced me to completely change my play-style.
No more roleplay, no more spell-slinging...
Just cast Bound Armor and Fortify "X" spells, swallow so many potions that it really should kill you, then play like a generic fighter. Boring.

(Finally beating Almalexia after an intense, half-hour battle was almost worth it, though... Almost. Skullcrusher FTW, at least.)

Needless to say, I didn't bother taking that character through Bloodmoon.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 2:14 pm

I know that spell reflection has its place in fantasy literature and games but it is almost always limited to rare and powerful foes and most games that implement it usually have some kind of useful dispel magic system and some way to counter it. I wouldn't mind spell reflect at all if it were properly implemented.

Well to each his own. A pure mage is extremely powerful in Morrowind, so to me it makes sense to have reflection be actually dangerous such that the mage has to use strategy instead of just blasting everything to cinders. I think it would be really boring to have Morrowind without reflection. There are plenty of ways to work around reflection, so I've never found it to be a problem. It just makes me use a more varied combat style and I find that enjoyable.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 12:05 pm

I had pure-mage characters only few times, but one of them was particular powerful, and honestly I didn't had any troubles trough the expansions.

I was mastered in most magic skills, majorly featuring Restoration + Destruction and Conjuration (tho not directly conjuration) and a little bit of Enchanting. Basically I had summoning skills equipment (for various creatures that I use depending on the situation) and I would summon a creature (if the enemy was like in example, with 100% reflecting) that uses physical damage (let's say golden saint) and would fortify the hell out of her (strength, agility, willpower etc) and restore her during the battle (if you wonder why destruction, it's for heavy stat/skill draining/absorbing but it's not relevant for this topic, just to explain

).

So technically you would still be pure mage, the enemy would be killed by physical means, true, but it's your summon that did the dirty job, you still had to cast spells in battle

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:22 am

I just remembered something. I haven't used these plugins in awhile, so I nearly forgot about them.
(It's been a long while since I've done a serious play-through of Morrowind. Mostly due to spending alot of time modding.)

The "Mage Friendly Plugin Series", by Eisenfaust.
It can be found here, along with a link to the original "Mage friendly daedra and less annoying bonewalkers", by Nightblade_Y, and NPC Enhanced, by Horatio:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6550

The description:

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Mage Friendly Plugin Series
v1.0
Author: Eisenfaust
Required files: depends on file(s) loaded (first two plugins should be self-explanatory, but see below for others)

Contents
1. Plugin Changes
2. Installation
3. Playing the Plugin
4. Possible Incompatibilities
5. Save Games
6. Credits and Usage
7. Changelog

Plugin Changes

This plugin series expands on the "mage friendly daedra" plugin by Nightblade_Y. This series of plugins was meant specifically to make reflect less available to NPCs. In abilities and potions (NPC Enhanced) providing reflect, I have converted reflect to spell absorbtion (magnitudes remain the same). Anyone who has played as any type of caster using destruction should know what all the fuss is about with reflect, so this is for all players who were ever annoyed with it showing up too frequently for the fact that it normally meant a one-hit kill if activated. Included in this set are:

Mage-Friendly Tribunal:

Elimintates all sources of reflect on creatures and NPCs (replacing it with spell absorbtion) added by Tribunal, except for those given by worn equipment and actively-cast spells (Salas Valor had armor that was meant to have reflect anyway).

Mage-Friendly Bloodmoon:

Same as above, only it removes the reflect effects (again converting them to absorbtion) from creatures and NPCs in Bloodmoon that shouldn't logically have been given them (it never made sense how the riekling and boar by themselves didn't have reflect, yet they gained it when the riekling mounted the boar.) Like in the Tribunal Edition, only ability-based reflection has been touched.

NPCE Mage-Friendly NPCs (Requires NPC Enhanced):

Contrary to what the documents of NPC Enhanced tell you, all NPCs above a certain level (not just the mages) spawn with reflection potions (sometimes with magnitudes greater than 50). To remedy this issue, the reflection potions have been converted to use abosorbtion instead, therefore successfully limiting reflect to NPCs who explicitly cast a reflect spell (why would anyone want to spend time learning a decent reflect spell if just any idiot could access a more powerful one with a potion anyway (...))

PCL Mage Friendly Creatures (Requires Piratelord's Creatures):

The reflect ability that is used for monster stats has been converted to use absorbtion, as in the other plugins, again relieving the one-hit kill experience for destruction users.

Installation

Simply extract the contained esp files to the C:/.../Morrowind/Data Files folder (where "..." is the series folders in which "/Morrowind/" is contained inside).

Playing the Plugin

Select whichever plugins in the set you want to use from the launcher (or Wrye Mash, if you have it).

Possible Incompatibilities

Anything that changes the monster abilities providing reflect will conflict. Please make sure these plugins load after the conflicting ones or you'll possibly lose the changes.

Save Games

These plugins should not invalidate your save games. Just load these plugins and you should be able to continue with any of your save games, even the ones lacking these as masters. Wrye Mash is more efficient with savegame master management than the standard launcher, so you might want to get it if at all possible (removing plugins does have problems unless you have this tool).

Usage

You have full permission to use these plugins in your games.

I would strongly recommend using these plugins as addons to Nightblade_Y's Mage Friendly Daedra plugin, as these are meant to build off that one.

Credits

Nightblade_Y for the original mage friendly daedra, which inspired me to create these addons

Bethesda for creating Morrowind and the Elder Scrolls and adding funky @#$% to their games to keep me busy correcting it (...)

Contact

If you have any questions/comments/concerns/what-have-you, you can find me either on Planet Elder Scrolls (under screen-name: Eisenfaust86) or by e-mail at:

mike025@ameritech.net

Changelog

v1.0: First Version

And for "Mage friendly daedra and less annoying bonewalkers":

mage friendly daedra - allows mages to cast destructive spells on to daedra without the spell being reflected. All daedra and some dagoth creatures now have spell absorbtion instead of reflection.

less annoying bonewalkers - makes the bonewalker's dread curse last for five minutes instead of permanently.

I don't use NPC Enhanced myself, but I've heard that it's good.
It's usable with the mods mentioned above, but neither NPC Enhanced, nor those require each other. Using either is up to you.
Here is the description:

NOTE 1: this mod contains Wakim's tweaks to NPC Flee AI. These values were taken from Wakim's Game Improvements. A fantastic mod. It will cause NPCs to flee when badly injured.

NOTE 2: I highly recommend using Morrowind Comes Alive (MCA) and PirateLord's Creatures mod with this plugin. MCA gives you a lot more random NPCs to fight and Creatures adds all sorts of Dreamer NPCs to Sixth house strongholds making them much more entertaining. Pretty much any mod that adds NPCs to fight works great with this.

1. OVERVIEW: The purpose of this mod is to make combat with NPCs in Morrowind more interesting and challenging. The mod does this by giving NPCs new items (level based potions and marksman weapons) and abilities (hearing, sneaking, weapon switching).

These changes will affect any NPC you fight. Including those added by other plugins. But only the vanilla NPC races are affected. Creatures are not affected.

V1.2

* Final version. i'm wiping morrowind off my HDD. too much of a timesink.
* Fixed a bug with combat scripts occasionally not working if you have a companion with you.
* Hopefully fixed a bug with VE where hostiles you had "embraced" start attacking you. i don't use VE, so who knows?

Note: NPC Enhanced requires "MWE" or "Morrowind Enhanced", an external program that was used before MWSE was developed.
MWE was notoriously problematic, and has long since been superceded by MWSE, or the "Morrowind Script Extender", which is now the accepted community standard.
Thankfully, CDCooley made a replacement plugin called the "NPCs Enhanced - MWSE patch", which uses (obviously) MWSE to acheive the same effects.
Here is it's description:

This is a simple script replacement patch to override the MWE based scripts in Horatio's NPC Enhanced with their MWSE equivalent.

This is designed to work with NPC Enhanced version 1.2 and needs to be loaded after NPC Enhanced so that it can replace the original scripts.

With this loaded you don't actually need MWE to run NPC Enhanced but you will need MWSE version 0.9.2 or higher.

The link can be found here:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7981

These mods alone might not perfect your mage experience, but they will make it a great deal less annoying.

Sorry I didn't remember till now. I've been rather busy.
I hope this has been helpful. ^_^

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 8:29 am

I just remembered something. I haven't used these plugins in awhile, so I nearly forgot about them.
(It's been a long while since I've done a serious play-through of Morrowind. Mostly due to spending alot of time modding.)

The "Mage Friendly Plugin Series", by Eisenfaust.
It can be found here, along with a link to the original "Mage friendly daedra and less annoying bonewalkers", by Nightblade_Y, and NPC Enhanced, by Horatio:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6550

The description:

And for "Mage friendly daedra and less annoying bonewalkers":

I don't use NPC Enhanced myself, but I've heard that it's good.
It's usable with the mods mentioned above, but neither NPC Enhanced, nor those require each other. Using either is up to you.
Here is the description:

Note: NPC Enhanced requires "MWE" or "Morrowind Enhanced", an external program that was used before MWSE was developed.
MWE was notoriously problematic, and has long since been superceded by MWSE, or the "Morrowind Script Extender", which is now the accepted community standard.
Thankfully, CDCooley made a replacement plugin called the "NPCs Enhanced - MWSE patch", which uses (obviously) MWSE to acheive the same effects.
Here is it's description:

The link can be found here:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7981

These mods alone might not perfect your mage experience, but they will make it a great deal less annoying.

Sorry I didn't remember till now. I've been rather busy.
I hope this has been helpful. ^_^

This is EXACTLY what I wanted. I don't want to make it ez mode for mage, it's just auto-killing myself with spells isnt fun. Spell Absorbtion is way fairer. This pretty much solves everything, thanks.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 6:01 am

I just remembered something. I haven't used these plugins in awhile, so I nearly forgot about them.

Very nice find Gaius thanks for that. That plugin set does seem very familiar now that I see it, I can't believe I don't have it. It's much more comprehensive than what I proposed but I do see that it does what I recommended doing and changing reflect_20 and reflect_60 (which I guess is what mage friendly daedra did before Eisenfaust's comprhensive mod)

Again, great find.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 4:13 pm

Interesting mod, that. I see it includes a Piratelord's Creatures version too, any idea if it's up to date? IIRC the reflect ability on Nix-Hounds was added in Creatures 9 or X...

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 5:49 pm

A quick look in the CS shows that, despite if it is up to date or not, it takes care of plx_reflect10 which should prevent weak little monsters that weren't intended to have reflect. (like nix-hounds, they have plx_reflect10) It should overwrite that spell even if it wasn't made for the newest Creatures.

What that plugin doesn't do is change a series of powerful Dremora reflect lines for Creatures specific Dremora. The reflect series scales and some of these Dremora are quite high level so it may be realistic to allow them to have reflect. The thing is if you change the other reflect spells then normal Dremora no longer have the reflect ability so it isn't exactly consistent. Maybe it could be reserved for only powerful Dremora or maybe you don't want it at all.

If you don't want it at all then the following spells all need to be changed:

plx_Dremora1_AB
plx_Dremora2_AB

etc
etc

I don't think the intended effect of the Mage Friendly mod is to remove all of the reflect abilities but rather the ones that are on unworthy creatures. It says something like that in the readme, even though it removes most all of the ability type reflect in the game but I think it's mostly because those abilities are assigned to dumb creatures. Also CreaturesX is intended to be a difficulty enhancing mod I believe. Changing them would make the game more consistent but I don't know what should be done. I could make a plugin that includes them I guess if anyone wanted it.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 2:24 pm

You're welcome, glad you like the info.

(To Vharlak: Yeah, you should definitely make one. It would complete the setup nicely.)
Edit: You could post it to PES, and provide a "Related" link to Eisenfaust's plugin package.

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 5:59 pm

Ok, made it. Changes the spells that weren't changed by the Mage Friendly plugin to make it more consistent with the rest of the changes in those mods. Note, that CreaturesX is suppose to be a difficult mod and now many creatures have spell absorbption that didn't have it in Vanilla Morrowind but at least they don't have reflect now. Ie. Nixhounds have spell absorption now. If you have used CreaturesX before this is nothing new. If you don't want CreaturesX changing stock creatures just open that mod up in an editor and delete all the stock creatures from it. I don't think that will cause any problems but you will lose the random creature scripts that mod uses. Even if you do that this addon mod will make your game more mage friendly as it removes reflect from CreaturesX Dremora.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XYYVISXO

» Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:34 pm

Ok, made it. Changes the spells that weren't changed by the Mage Friendly plugin to make it more consistent with the rest of the changes in those mods. Note, that CreaturesX is suppose to be a difficult mod and now many creatures have spell absorbption that didn't have it in Vanilla Morrowind but at least they don't have reflect now. Ie. Nixhounds have spell absorption now. If you have used CreaturesX before this is nothing new. If you don't want CreaturesX changing stock creatures just open that mod up in an editor and delete all the stock creatures from it. I don't think that will cause any problems but you will lose the random creature scripts that mod uses. Even if you do that this addon mod will make your game more mage friendly as it removes reflect from CreaturesX Dremora.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XYYVISXO

Thanks for this!