We all know how broken some of the spells and combinations are yet the same broken spells from Morrowind are still broken in Oblivion and I haven't heard Beth indicate anything will change. I'd like to see what the community can come up with for completely rebalancing effects like chameleon without just removing them.
Here's my attempt:

Chameleon takes a second to readjust to your new background. Chameleons can't instantly change colour they need some time so it only makes sense that you only become invisible if you stop jumping around and if the enemies see where you stop then they still attack you.

Weakness can't be cast in the same spell as the damage type it's weakening the enemy against. If you want to cast 100% weakness to fire and magic you have to go through multiple casts giving them a chance to dodge before you nuke them.

Paralysis should be replaced completely by petrify, it does the same thing except it greatly increases their defence and looks much cooler.

Resist damage shouldn't stack with itself, if you have a helmet of 50% resist and a shirt of 50% resist the engine flips 2 coins if both come up tails you get smacked.

Reflect doesn't block the damage it just reflects it back at the opponent hurting them unless it reflects a spell in which case instead of dropping dead it actually reflects the blast and they have to jump out of the way.

Absorb doesn't block damage it just gives you mana from a spell.

Lightning, fire and frost shield are the only ways to get 100% immunity to an attack while resist magic gets capped at 50%, this will mean they actually get used.

Invisibility can't be cast if you're already in a fight or preferrably since Skyrim is full of snow the enemies can follow your tracks, though this will require much more dev time.

Restore health, fatigue and majicka can't be used in a constant effect.

I think that would greatly improve the thought needed when fighting with spells and prevent players from enchanting a load of gear to make themselves invulnerable.

Yes.

EDIT: A lot of people are saying no. It should be known that I didn't read the OP. I am just agreeing with the title that spells should be balanced and none should be too overpowered.

NO

No.

No way. I haven't played a mage in Oblivion, but at least in Morrowind most of the defensive spell effects you mention are difficult to cast and cost a lot of magicka in the vanilla version, so you can only get really good defense from them at high levels (or after amassing hundreds of thousands of gold and paying all of it for one or two enchantments). If they will make those effects similar in Skyrim - difficult to cast, expensive in magicka, and only REALLY awesome at high levels, when the players have earned it - then I think it should be fine.

In my opinion, once a character attains a high enough character level and skill levels, I'd say he's earned the right to cast powerful defensive spells.

However I agree with you on paralysis. Paralysis was pretty easy to come by and almost always worked (except against Morrowind Daedra who constantly had a really high Reflect % on them) At least they should make it more expensive to cast or have monsters have a better chance of resisting it.

Hmm, interesting.


Yes. Octo-camo style would be much better than "needs 5 pieces of equipment to be as effective as invisibility."


Nah. Re-balance spell costs when combining damage and weakness so that such combo spells are more expensive.


Nah.


Yes.


Erm...nah.


no one would use it then. so nah.


yes.


Yes to the snow tracking. As for casting invisibility in combat, maybe.


Hmm. Maybe.

I think they were fine as is.

Why can't inviability be used during battle? Why would something you absorb still hurt you? It wouldn't.

Plus the more powerful spells are balanced with the cost to make them

no what makes ES ES is having some of those exploits

If magic were real then I don't see why you WOULDN'T turn invisible in the middle of a fight. I don't see why anything needs to be changed just to make things more difficult or clunky. Magic is supposed to be a loophole in reality from what I can tell.

Magic in general has always been fairly overpowered in TES. I have never been much of a magic person myself (sword and shield or claymore do fine), so it wouldn't ultimately matter to me either way.

And if the AI will be all it's cracked up to be, I expect some of the enemy spellcasters to know and use the same exploits, like casting invisibility/chameleon in the middle of a fight, or casting reflect or absorb after they realize the player can use magic. That would be nice...realistically reacting enemy spellcasters.

You do see Vampire enemies in Oblivion cast Invisibility, though for some reason they never use it to flee.

or chameleon can make you completely invisible but once you move it wears off

what the OP fails to point out is that most of those exploits are such that you can't achieve those exploits until you're already a very high level.

The balance comes from the extra effort it takes to accomplish those. Those spells cost a lot of mana that only a high level character could cast, and even then probably only once in a typical battle. Enchanted items that give buffs like that either do not exist as pre-made loot or are very VERY hard to create through player made enchantments.

I think the Chameleon idea sounds good, the others, not so much.

Don't like it, Don't use it.

I never really got into alot of the magic in TES, mostly just destruction, but alot of these gripes/complaints/whathaveyou seem predicated toward making the game more difficult for its own sake. If you are reflecting something with a magic shield that you put in front of yourself no spells effects etc are going to touch you. Why? because theyre reflecting off the magic shield.
Same with absorb. You are svcking the effect in and converting it, like a plant would absorb water.

And limiting the effectiveness of things like physical resistance etc kind of veers away from the canon of TES. Magic exists there that can do most anything. It would be possible there to make yourself effectively invulnerable or immortal through the use of powerful magics and artifacts. I mean its not like you can make yourself invulnerable when you're fresh off the boat in morrowind (well you can if you open the console but that's not the point) or oblivion. You have to work up to it, doing adventursome things that would kill any NPC on the map (assuming you didn't make a program that would autocast spells of a certain school and rest when you ran out of mana, but again, thats not the point). You're suppposed to be able to become a great and powerful *insert cool title here*. Archmage fits in that slot

You might be better off just making a mod and rebalancing them yourself. Come to think of it, I'm sure someone else will make a "hardcoe mode" mod or something like it.

Question: rebalance with what? If you are suggesting rebalancing with 'sword and board' play, then I would say no need since it is already balanced nicely.
In Morrowind OR Oblivion, regardless of whether or not the changes you suggest were effected, all it would take is a fighter type to connect with a single 2-handed weapon to put you into the stagger two-step. Another swing or three and a lower level mage is dead. One of the reasons why mages can do all the wonderful things you listed above is because they CAN'T go toe-to-toe in battle. Although, I have to say that some of your suggestions are pretty good. I especially like the petrify suggestion. Sort of like a poor man's paralyze. It would need to cost a hefty amount of mana though to prevent it from becoming the de facto escape plan.

Edit - SS

Chameleon is just a name. Real chameleons can't do more than just change to a few different colors (and usually as a territorial display, not camouflage), so that throws the "it takes a few seconds" argument out the window. The whole point is that, with invisibility, you can't activate objects. With chameleon, it's harder to achieve but if you can enchant all pieces, you can move around and do stuff. If you want it to be harder, then ask for them to lower the invisibility effect so that it requires the character to wear more chameleon items simultaneously. I'd agree that to be fully or nearly invisible, the game should at least make it so that all your armor is chameleon enchanted (not just five pieces).

Weakness should be able to be cast alongside its corresponding damage; after all, you are limited by a set magnitude, and if you are adding weakness to the spell you are doing it at the expense of increasing damage.

Petrify instead of paralysis? Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Resist should be stackable. That's the point.

Absorb should remain as it was in Oblivion.

I don't get why you say lighting/fire/ice shield doesn't get used, compared to magic resistance. If anything, enchanting an item with lighting/fire/ice shield was an exploit that I used all the time because the game mechanic allowed your general shield percentage to go up. I think that exploit should get fixed.

I think you should be able to cast your invisibility spell whenever, but I do think it's a good idea that if you're walking in water or snow, that smarter enemies would follow your tracks. If it can be done, it'd be neat.

It's hard to be skilled enough to make a constant effect that regenerates magic, health and fatigue all at once. If you have the skill for it, I think the game should let you do it at a low enough intensity that it provides thorough protection from all but the worst foes.

I like to enchant my gear, and I never really played mage characters, so I don't want enchanting to change. Not playing as a mage, it took a long time to get highly skilled enough in magic to be able to enchant my gear with worthy spells. Since I didn't want to use pointless spells or have very good soul gems until well into my games, I wouldn't enchant my best gear for a long time. By the time I had good spells to use and good soul gems or sigil stones... I deserved that awesome enchanted gear.

No thank you. I like the spells as they already work. I see no reason to advocate making things harder for myself.

thats called bad game design.



The spells are fine, the problem is how easy it is to get 100% chameleon, absorb, and sheild..resulting in God-Mode.


I hope its fixed.

Not really, because they aren't exploits. They are things you can do within the engine that happen to be highly effective. It works within canon, so long as you are well versed in magic.

That makes it even worse game design. It takes less than an hour to get 100% god-mode effects from enchanting..

This, basically. It's the payoff for being so effin weak early on. You eventually become potent and can use all manner of different tricks. It isn't an exploit, it's being an effective spellwright.

I would nix chameleon entirely and leave it to invisibility and invisibility true.

I never understood why they have weakness to damage type spells. You can kill them with one weakness cast and two damage casts, or three damage casts. What does the weakness spell add to the game?

That would be cool. It would give them a reason to be frozen in place instead of slumping over.

How is resist different from the shield spells?

Reflect is great the way it is.

I totally agree, it's too much of a catch-all otherwise.

I agree.

It needs to be something of a ritual spell that takes time to cast.

Totally right.

Honestly, I think the whole point of being a mage is to become an all powerful, almost invincible badass. I hate how in popular culture they are so flawed, because they actually should be damn near impossible to kill

and besides, invisibility during a fight, well that's pretty much the use of it. mages aren't barbarians: they prefer more refined tactics than to just take the enemy head on