Thanks BTB, I remember reading that thread but at the time I wasn't considering GCD. So both mods together makes it really slower to get stronger, although my biggest problem is a conceptual one. As Galsiah points out, "misc skill at 20 might be much harder to increase than minor skill at 15", and that goes against one of his MOD's purpose. So were I to play with both mods on, I would reset those bonusSkill modifiers from BTB, or at least tweak misc.

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spelling fix

I used to actually have a whole chart drawn up that listed all of the spell costs from 1 to, like, 120 and the number of charges each one used at Enchant skills of 10 to 100. At 10, the spell cost WAS the charge cost per use (the flame spell I mentioned earlier would have a spell cost and charge cost per use of 15), whereas at an Enchant skill of 100 you were looking at a ludicrous 10:1 ratio of spell cost to charge cost per use.

Again, the enchant cooldown helps with this *immensely*, since there's really little else that one can do to stop a truly determined player from spamming the hell out of an enchanted item (since you can still just keep a [censored]load of soul gems handy and keep reloading after burning through your more limited charges). The cooldown is the one fix that will actually balance enchanting in a way that messing with the charges per use cannot.

Given that you have the cooldown working, you might even increase the rate of growth back a little bit since a common complaint seems to be that raising your Enchant skill doesn't do a whole lot when you're only looking at a 33% total growth over the course of the game. What I'd do to balance that, though, is lower the effectiveness of an Enchant skill of 10 rather than raise the effectiveness of an Enchant skill of 100. My initial thoughts were by a factor of ten, but that was back when we were still dealing with exponential Enchant skill growth (thus setting an Enchant skill of 100 to a true 1:1 ratio of spell cost to charge cost per use), and instant casting times still ran quite rampant, so that may be a bit too harsh.

The main point, at least from my perspective, of lowering the initial effectiveness of the Enchant skill would be to address the fact that even players who are terrible at the skill can still use powerful enchantments. Again, using the 1:1 spell cost to charge cost ratio as a guideline, you see that a player with an Enchant skill of 10 can use just about any level of Enchantment so long as she can find a big enough soul to hold it. And perhaps that's the way it should be, since you'd have to lower the starting effectiveness by a rather significant factor for its effects to be felt much at all. Still, I'd say lowering the starting effectiveness is a better idea than raising the ultimate effectiveness, if you decide to.

All in all, though, the cooldown is definitely where it's at. That's really all I have left to say: congratulations, you've fixed something that I didn't think was actually possible to fix.

Oh, and thank you



I read in your topic that you had it set to about four seconds, which seems fair to me.



Whatever floats your boat

As a few people have pointed out before, I do my best to make my readme as detailed as possible so that, among other things, it's very easy to make your own changes to mine

Here is my feedback on acrobatics, alchemy and security after having played btb 5.4 for a while.
I know you reduced the experience gain of these skill to limit abuses.
While I understand the reason, in practice it just forces you to do more grinding:
- Perpetual jumps;
- Mass ingredient stockpile with merchants to make potions. Moreover, it makes useless the use of collected ingredients for occasional boosts of your alchemy skill (eating or potions), like I naturally did before.
And for security, I think I'll never be able to unlock >60pts locks ^^'

As we cannot prevent the grinding, I'm not sure we should make it harder as it makes the training of these skills quite boring.

BTW I wonder: Would it be possible to prevent the player from jumping when he has no more stamina?

i'm pretty sure its possible to script the player to fall if he jumps with 0-1 stamina. not sure if that will stop exp gain, though.

I kind of thought this myself, too, when I picked Acrobatics as a major skill and realized how slowly it leveled. But again, even without the lack of misc skill growth, I don't see this as the sort of skill one could justify actually spending money for training in. Thus, even under normal circumstances, people would still grind it.

With my mod, you either are forced to pay for training (with it as a misc skill), or grind it (if it's a major or minor). The key seems to be making raising it less of a grind, which in turn just means I need to [censored] with the growth rates (presently, my mod slows it down).



Yeah, I totally did that, too. It took awhile for me to get used to the fact that the reason I carry ingredients around is in case I happen to need their benefits, not because I want to get a grind-fest going on up in this [censored] (though, Alchemy is a minor skill of mine, so I very well could). The same very much could be said for Enchanting - you're using Enchanted items because you need them, not because you just want to practice (again, assuming it's a misc skill).

So, yeah, this is pretty intentional. I wanted to address those types of behaviors - things that player did for no other logical reason than to gain experience - and curb them where I could. It makes you behave in a manner more consistent with your character, since the only things you end up doing solely for "practice" are your major/minor skills.

This isn't to say that other activities end up having no benefits at all, mind you. Killing creatures, for example, using a weapon that isn't governed by one of your major or minor skills, still kills the creature. And remember that the "Alchemy" plugin largely increases the value of animal-based alchemy ingredients, so there's still quite a bit of financial incentive to go around killing [censored] (not to mention the possible inherent usefulness of the alchemy ingredients in question), even if you don't get any experience from it.



That's where enchanting comes into play. Assuming you have neither Alteration or Security as a major/minor skill, enchanting is probably your best bet for unlocking high-level locks. I'm sure you're aware that the latest version of the MCP has finally allowed for "Cast once" enchantments to be modded to cost less than just regular enchantments?

So, yeah, I'm working on a quick update of my mod to accommodate the changes made by Hrnch in the latest (upcoming) version of the MCP. But since I won't be off shift for another week, I won't have time to test it until then. If anyone here wants to give my intended settings a go (fMagicItemUseOnceMult from 1.0000 to 0.0400 in addition to the other changes in my "Settings" plugin) and report back whether this results in the 1/100 cost of "cast once" enchanted items that I am assuming it will, I would be most grateful.

(Of course, this does nothing to make access to the enchanting service any easier >.>)



Well, like I said, I think the answer in at least one of these cases is to make training the skill naturally a bit easier. Not sure about Alchemy or Security, though... they seem fine to me at the moment.



I'm pretty sure that would be crossing the line between realism and game balance. I recall testing out a similar mod back when I was still trying out Oblivion that made your character collapse from exhaustion when running out of fatigue. Let's just say it was deleted from my hard drive with extreme prejudice *very* quickly.

you could "soften the blow" somewhat. instead of a guaranteed fall at low/no stamina, you could give it a graduating chance of falling. something like <25% stamina you have a 5% chance per jump to trip and fall. at 0-1 stamina, you could have it at 25% tops. just think of it as something to discourage you from bunnyhopping from ald-ruhn to vivic with no stamina.

I didn't mean the player would collapse, but rather unable to jump until s/he recovers enough stamina.
However, such a change is useless if we cannot stop the XP gain.


I think it has to give both effects, benefits and XP gain, as any skill should do in MW.
But with the current XP gain, you only have the benefits of ingredients, and only when the action is successful, which is not efficient in early game, where you *need* to boost your skill, and thus where you would love to gain XP when using ingredients.


Slowing the growth of acrobatics or alchemy did not prevent me from grinding, it did the opposite effect: More unnatural grinding, less "natural" grinding.


I do have Security as a major skill, but its growth is too slow.
Even if I lockpick and untrap everything I find on my way, after hours of playing (char. level ~15), I can barely unlock 45pts chests using buffs and good lockpicks.


Yes, I read that, and I'm glad of such an improvement.
But I think security experts should not have to rely on scrolls.


Great news


Of course collapsing after a jump is far too dangerous for the player.
I was rather thinking of not being able to jump.

In NoM you collapse when fatigue runs out. Combined with btb which makes jumping so fatigue consuming this makes it impossible to grind acrobatics except maybe if you have a good restore fatigue spell which I don't.

Anyway I love this mod. I am playing it with GCD and I am using the original btb settings plugins which I think is a great combination with GCD. Been trying to play Iron Man mode (i.e. no reload, if you die you are dead got to start over) and I am getting owned by stuff like mudcrabs, traps, etc. Great fun


Oh yeah one thing I noticed, when you have 100 skill in unarmored your AR is 91 and not 100 like it says in the readme. My current character uses light armor so it don't matter but I noticed it and thought I'd say it anyway.

Bunnyhopping is so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of gamers today that nothing will ever discourage it. I've accepted this.



Well, after reading your post and thinking on it over a hot cup of coffee, I finally decided what I'm going to do in the next update of my mod. Once again, I think it's time to let the readme speak for itself:

The skill progression rate changes, or at least the ones that have changed the most, have all already been discussed in detail above. This includes alchemy, which was mentioned earlier in the description of its own plugin. The approach that I've taken with the skill progression rates in general has evolved a lot throughout the history of this mod (as a quick glance over the version history file will no doubt reveal), but the ultimate goal remains the same: to discourage the spamming/grinding of skills as much as possible while promoting their growth through regular use.

The crossroads that the above statement brings us to is the not-so-fine line that separates the skills which see plenty of routine use from the ones that generally don't. Those that fall into the latter categore are the ones most prone to being spammed, often because spamming them is the only realistic means of raising them. These skills - Sneak and Security, for example - are the ones whose growth I've hastened with the aim of reducing their "grind time". This functions solely as an AFF (Anti-Frustration Feature) and doesn't make the game any easier since raising these skills generally doesn't make you any more effective in combat. Rather, they will cause you to level up (see my discussion about misc skill growth above) and thus make combat more difficult as the game levels up with you.

On the other hand, the skills which do get used frequently are frequently used because they are the ones that make you more effective in combat. These are the skills whose growth needed to be slowed down for a number of reasons, the primary one being that they in many cases tend to grow a whole lot faster than you want them to. All weapons and armor now level more slowly than before, with the sole exception being Marksman, which now levels faster. Athletics has been set to level up slower on land, but faster while swimming, hopefully making its cancer-like growth rate a bit easier to manage.

So, yeah... I'll need another day to decide on the exact values, but I'll be raising the growth rates of a few skills in 5.6.



It should be 100. Are you using the Morrowind Code Patch?

Ok, here's a tentative changelist for the next version:

? Added edit to Sirollus Saccus' Hammer value.

? Added edit to fMagicItemUseOnce GMST, which an upcoming release of the Morrowind Code Patch will allow to reduce the cost of paying for "cast once" enchantments to 1/100 of the original cost.

? Added edit to experience gain to speechcraft skill per successful persuasion (from 1.00 to 2.50).

? Raised experience gain to acrobatics skill per jump from 0.05 to 0.20.

? Raised experience gain to acrobatics skill per fall from 1.00 to 5.00.

? Raised experience gain to alchemy skill per create potion from 0.60 to 1.00.

? Raised experience gain to alchemy skill per consume ingredient from 0.40 to 0.60.

? Raised experience gain to enchant skill per "cast on strikes" use from 0.20 to 0.50.

? Raised experience gain to enchant skill per magic item use from 0.50 to 1.00.

? Raised experience gain to enchant skill per magic item recharge from 2.00 to 2.50.

? Raised experience gain to security skill per pick lock from 1.00 to 2.50.

? Raised experience gain to security skill per disarm trap from 10.00 to 25.00.

Looks wonderful this way
XP gain from acrobatics skill per fall looks high, though.

Now that using charges of enchanting items will have a delay, could you consider to restore the automatic recharge per second of such items? Maybe half of the original value, in order to be enough to get most items recharged when entering a new dungeon, but not enough to use them through the whole dungeon. Then characters having Enchant and Mysticism as major/minor skills could use soul gems to continue using these items to finish the dungeon.

'eh, not really, given that the default value is 3.00. I needed the value to be high enough that it was a lot more attractive option than bunny-hopping.

The one value I'm worried might be too high is the disarm trap one. I figure it gets a pass due to the finite number of traps in the game, though.



Nope. The reason that I turned this off was to prevent wait spamming and to make recharging items the primary use of filled soul gems, not because of the balance issues. Bear in mind that you can just stockpile filled soul gems to a similar effect, but you actually have to work for the soul gems.

Granted, this means that you'll pretty much need a decent skill in Mysticism if you want a decent skill in Enchant, but that much was already sort of a given.

...though, alternatively, I could just add a restocking supply of those nifty new Soultrap arrows I made in the "Equipment" plugin to certain merchants. I should probably make soultrap scrolls a lot cheaper, too, come to think of it.

I'll have a look into doing that.

EDIT: Actually, what would be even neater, would be a service where you could pay for an item recharge. I wonder if that's doable.

So, this is actually a pretty typical thought process when updating my mod...

"All right, time to take care of the enchant process. Hrnch went ahead and gave the tools I need, so all I need to do is make sure that it stays balanced here in my mod and report back to him."

"Hmm, what if a character isn't good with Mysticism? I need at least one other fairly-reliable way to soul trap. Ooh, I know! I added Soul Trap arrows to the 'Equipment' plugin! Let's just use those. I'll add them to some merchants."

"Hmm... I wonder if those arrows are cheap enough to be worth buying. Yep, they are. Hmm, I wonder if they're *too* cheap, and if adding a restocking supply of them to merchants would be imbalancing. Oh, crap, I forgot these things have a huge dispel effect on them. I wonder how much the dispel effect costs..."

"Holy crap! Why is it so expensive? 15 magicka for an on touch spell? 30 magicka for on-target? Yeah, I need to make this effect a lot cheaper to make the spells not svck and so that I can justify charging 5 gold for an arrow that carries one of these effects at full blast. I wonder how useful it even is, anyways. It's not like creatures tend to buff themselves, anyways."

"Hey, wasn't Hrnchamnd working on a list of spell effects that NPCs use in battle? Some of them were buffs, I think. Oh, and I think summoned creatures count, too. Dammit, now I need to go bug him again. Wasn't I supposed to be testing out his Enchant changes? I wonder if he'd believe me if I told him that I'm technically working on it right now..."

I'VE GOT IT! I'll add a restocking supply of various FILLED soul gems to the same merchants who now have empty ones. This way, characters with crappy mysticism skills can still pay to recharge their magic items (I had no idea how close I was back at that idea of paying for recharge services), and I don't have to worry about any balance issues caused by adding dispel/soul trap arrows to merchants.

Of course, I went and edited the effect cost of dispel and the cost of all the spells, too, since they were still way too damn expensive. Self Dispel, in particular, needs to be really cheap, since the added time it takes to cast it makes it a much worse alternative to a potion.

Oh, God, it's genius. Ideas like this are better than six. And such these changes now mark a very distinct change in philosophy and approach, this upcoming version is being promoted to a full version number (6.0).

EDIT: here's a revised, still-tentative changelist:

GENERAL UPDATES:

? Added information about issues with Morrowind Comes Alive mod to the "conflicts & compatibility" section of the main readme.

? Removed edits to fMajorSkillBonus, fMinorSkillBonus, and fMiscSkillBonus GMSTs from the "Alternate" settings plugin, thus omitting the original's major, minor, and misc skill growth edits entirely rather than presenting a modified version of them.

"SPELLS" PLUGIN:

? Lowered effect cost of dispel from 6.00 to 2.40.

? Lowered cost of Self Dispel spell from 6 to 3.

? Lowered cost of Touch Dispel spell from 15 to 6.

? Lowered cost of Dispel spell from 30 to 9.

? Lowered cost of Almalexia's Grace spell from 30 to 12.

? Lowered cost of Purge Magic spell from 45 to 18.

? Lowered cost of Strong Open spell from 36 to 30.

? Lowered cost of Great Open spell from 45 to 42.

? Raised area of Blessed Word & Blessed Touch spells from 25 to 50.

"SETTINGS" PLUGIN:

? Added restocking supply of various filled soul gems to the merchants who had been given a restocking supply of empty soul gems so as to to provide characters who lack a decent skill in mysticism (or the Soul Trap spell) with an alternate means of recharging enchanted items.

? Added edit to fMagicItemUseOnce GMST, which an upcoming release of the Morrowind Code Patch will allow to reduce the cost of paying for "cast once" enchantments to 1/100 of the original cost.

? Added edit to Sirollus Saccus' Hammer value.

? Added edit to experience gain to speechcraft skill per successful persuasion (from 1.00 to 2.50).

? Raised experience gain to acrobatics skill per jump from 0.05 to 0.20.

? Raised experience gain to acrobatics skill per fall from 1.00 to 5.00.

? Raised experience gain to alchemy skill per create potion from 0.60 to 1.00.

? Raised experience gain to alchemy skill per consume ingredient from 0.40 to 0.60.

? Raised experience gain to enchant skill per "cast on strikes" use from 0.20 to 0.50.

? Raised experience gain to enchant skill per magic item use from 0.50 to 1.00.

? Raised experience gain to enchant skill per magic item recharge from 2.00 to 2.50.

? Raised experience gain to security skill per pick lock from 1.00 to 2.50.

? Raised experience gain to security skill per disarm trap from 10.00 to 25.00.

Wow, great work BTB.
I really like the solutions you found and the new game settings you propose.
I think I'm finally ok with the "no item recharge", as you offer other ways to catch souls and buy filled soul gems.
I feel it can be really better than the original system.


There is already a great variety of enchanted arrows, but very few useful throwing weapons.
Why not apply this enchantment on the latter ones? It could even be added to leveled lists of bandits and containers.

Is that possible? (outside of scripting)
I think you can only fill a soulgem in the CS when it's in the Render Window, so you wouldn't be able to get it in a Levelled List. (I dunno... it's 6am)

Provided I can find a way to pull it off. I presume that it's quite doable, but will require scripting.



Well, it's mainly because I didn't so much "add" soultrap arrows as I retooled two existing enchanted arrows into soultrap enchantments, instead. I found no suitable candidates under the thrown weapons category... though I have to admit i didn't look.

Yeah, I just figured that out.

I don't need it in a leveled list, though... just in the inventory of an NPC. Any ideas?

BTB - just wanted to say thanks by providing to newbies like myself regarding your BTB recommended mod list - I was able to play up to around level 25-30 until money wasn't as much of an issue for me anymore. Morrowind was most enjoyable due to the limitations imposed by implementing your mods - highly, highly recommended to any new player. Thanks again for a most enjoyable first time 2 month adventure through Morrowind...

Updated to 6.0. Sorry about the delay, but scripting those restocking soul gems was a royal [censored].

And I'm glad to have obliged, Chaka.

Of course, it looks like PES's cache still has the old version of the file... damn thing always seems to take forever to update.

Well, in the meantime, you can always get it from my site:

http://btb2.free.fr/files/morrowind_btb.zip

STILL got the old version up there now... this is really starting to irritate me.

EDIT: tried to fix it, and now the download link isn't working. The guys at PES are looking into it.

Hmm... I thought I had gotten my script to work where you can buy more than one filled soul gem at a time.

Apparently, I did not.

So, yeah, I need to go and reduce the number of soul gems carried by each merchant back down to 1 each so people don't get CTDs.

I play a pure Mage with all your mods and GCD, as well as Service Requirements v1.4.3 (sorry, I don't use your edit, I like Destruction as primary in Mage's Guild). So it's rather harsh but makes the game far more interesting and immersive. I feel like my character is doing what he is best at, best and not "cheesing" his/her way through the world like it was before. Basicly I finally feel like my character is a "real" mage now. Good job and would highly recommend your mods to everyone!

On a balancing note: I've tried both with 100 point and 500 point spell caps with MCP and I'm torn, I use Scripted Spells and Elemental Magicka, so they both add powerful spells that can far exceed a 100 pt anything but they are hard to acquire if you don't know about them and equally hard to cast. So for now I'm sticking with 100 point cap and leaving the "real power" up to Elemental Magicka's additions.

Can you or anyone comment on the balance implications of the 500 pt cap with MCP throughout the game?

Taken directly from my mod list:

More of a gameplay tweak than a bug fix, this raises the spellmaking and enchanting magnitude limits (not just spellmaking, as the name suggests) from 100 to 1000. The - albeit reasonable - justification for this is that there are many spell effects (Burden and... um... Burden) that are somewhat worthless prior to hitting triple digits. The rather obvious drawback here is that there exist many more spell effects in the game that are plenty powerful when confined to the magnitudes of mere mortals, and they become criminally apocalyptic under the anarchistic rule of this so-called "fix".

BTB's Game Improvements deals with this issue by adjusting most of the game's pre-made spells to be no longer useless, setting many of them well over the 100-point magnitude cap. More importantly, it does this without opening the floodgates for a 999-point fireball of flaming world destruction. Personally, I feel like my mod loses something when you're able to duplicate the effects of its spells on your own. I'd say to go ahead and use my mod instead of this fix, but I suppose that it would be like handing a child a nuclear weapon and then telling him that he can't play with it.