It feels like the best mods out there always have one feature that just makes them completely stupid and awful. A while back, I had a marksman mod...Which gave cliff racers a spell that was a single spell that was both self healing and ranged damage dealing. Why on earth the author thought cliffracers needed to be more annoying is beyond me, but I really liked the Area-of-Effect arrows. Another mod from years back upped the difficulty of the game..and seemed to give every NPC a deadly multielement ranged magic attack.

My most recent mods have the same problems. One of them, im not sure which, seems to give EVERY SINGLE NPC A superduper Sanctuary spell. Every one of them has it, and they all start the fight with it. I dont know how much it gives them, but my 60 longblade + bound longsword is only enough to get in one of 20 hits. At the same time, even with sanctuary, enemies rarely ever miss me.

Why do people feel the need to make mods like this? They have a great mechanic, or a great set of challenge improvements...Then they go and make it stupidly difficult for anyone who doesnt have a superspecific spell. like, every time!

Yeah, I remember the Marksman mod. The Cliff-Racer thing was a bug, by the way.

And your Sanctuary issue *might* be the result of a Morrowind Code Patch function that lets NPCs use racial powers.

If area effect projectiles are your thing, though, I just released an updated version of the official Area Effect Arrows plugin that makes all of the new weapons not svck anymore. And if it makes you feel any better, I identified the one thing about my "BTB's Game Improvements" mod that I knew would make most players hate me and created an alternate plugin that doesn't have it

Do you have the Morrowind Code Patch?

You've probably ticked NPC AI casts zero cost powers, which allows NPC's to use racial powers, for example.
Which as you've seen, is horribly unbalanced.

If you don't have MCP, then I'm not sure. But that sounds like your problem.

I kind of agree, in that it makes it seem as though you're the only one who ever starts a fight. In a completely realistic setting you may run across someone who used their racial power only 2 hours before you got there or is fresh out of magicka even though they may be a level 30 battle mage. However, you can't fault the Code Patch for making the NPCs use something that they should be perfectly capable of using. It would make sense, however that it would work a certain percentage of the time, in order to simulate NPCs already having used those powers that day. There are a lot of Cliff Racers after-all (or in your case magic wielding cliff racers). Somebody on Vvardenfell should find those damned things annoying too, right?!

I agree there are certain aspect of mods that can be annoying
for instance in nom there is an option to turn on stamina script that supposedly causes you to have "light penalties" when actually the penalty is you fall down every time fatigue (which hence forth I shall call it stamina) is zero, realistic yes...and truefully it is only annoying if you play someone with a low athletics. but still falling down constantly is annoying.

on a side note it is totally optional so it really is no big deal.

Good morning!

It is important to remember that some of the more annoying mod-created-effects are not, in themselves, entirely the fault of the mod-maker. It frequently takes a specific combination of mods to cause some of these problems. Even gamesas has been guilty of this, remember Brittlewind?

I do agree, however, that some mod makers should pay more careful attention to what they're changing (frequently by accident), and what the long-term effects of those changed might be in a multiply-modded game. At this point in the modding history of Morrowind, there are a number of wonderfully helpful tools that can REALLY cut down on the "junk" in a mod - if the modder bothers to USE them. My own personal favorite is Enchanted Editor. Yes, it can be a little glitchy, but it allows you to see, and delete, reference changes at a very fine level, as well as by whole categories. It really should be MORE important for modders to clean their own mods, instead of leaving that up to the mod-users. BUT, remembering that this is all unpaid work, we have to allow them our thanks regardless.

The number one thing that needs to be CAREFULLY weighed is autocalc spells. Setting that one bit on a spell you add to the game effectively gives it to A HUGE MAJORITY of ALL the NPCs in the game, instantly. This was probably NOT what the modder intended to do. In my own monstrous mod list, I had to use John Moonsugar's excellent programs to weed through all my mods looking for autocalc spells, and UN-checking that option for the majority of them.

Rochndil, who tries to clean both thoroughly and carefully...

This is very true.

No one plans on making a mod with glitches. You do realize that, right?

I have chronic amazement and satisfaction with the Morrowind modders!
It seems like every day someone has a new idea planned, or screenshots of something we've never seen before.

I've made a number of posts about AI spellcasting and autocalculation from a lot of trial and error, the main conclusion is that most modders should never leave autocalculation enabled for custom spells, especially ones intended for specific actors, or even NPCs really. Especially with spells that 'always suceeds'. This is due to the fact autocalculation is highly dependant on certain GMST values, and any changes can cause a lot of unwanted effects. Like with Wakim's Game Improvements, where NPC max magicka is increased, which introduced the brittlewind bug in it's rampant fashion, made a lot of non-spellcasting NPCs now eligible to cast spells like brittlewind (an auto-calc'd and always suceeding spell).