Not planning to use them all together. Some, such as the Lockpicks mod, is clearly not needed with Zumb's mod, since you can actually repair lockpicks in that one, and hence run out of them much more slowly.

And I know not all skills were unbalanced. I am just trying to take a step back and look at what needs a good mod or two of balance. Hopefully it will help me and others maintain a thoroughly balanced fun game.

Well, as long as you're asking.. I've already gone skill-by-skill and come up with personal rules/mods to balance them out for my own gameplay. Here's what I came up with..

Note that I play OOO-Full, and have since forever. All my comments on skills are from the perspective of how they work in OOO-Full.

Block: Fine as is

Armorer: Underpowered because failure only costs you a repair hammer, and these are trivial to come by. Solution is to use only one hammer per day (and you can't rest more than 8 hours a day!), so people who have better armorer will be able to repair more per day.

Heavy Armor: Fine as is

Blunt: Fine as is

Blade: Fine as is

Athletics: Fine as is.

Hand to Hand: A bit underpowered even with the OOO buffs, but not so much it needs to be altered IMO

Destruction: Fine as is except you can run backwards pelting the enemy with spells with no risk. Fixed by No Running While Using Bows Or Spells

Alteration: Fine as is

Illusion: Overpowered in the Charm department, which can just about wholly replace same-level Speechcraft. My solution is to advance each Charm spell one mastery level: That is, Novice-level Charm spells now require Apprentice Illusion to cast, Apprentice-level Charms require Journeyman, etc.

Conjuration: A little funky because the enemy seems to be biased towards aggroing your summon instead of you. I think if the enemy kills 3 of your conjurations it should no longer aggro on them (since by then it would figure out that you're just going to resummon!). My personal rule is "one summon per combat" but a mod could make a better soluation.

Mysticism: Soul gems trivialize magic recharging, and even someone with 5 skill in Mysticism can trap any size soul. I made the following changes:
1. Your Mysticism skill determines what max size soul you can trap. Novice can trap petty souls, Apprentice lesser, Journeyman common, etc.
2. You can only use one soul gem per day. Otherwise there's still no point to raising your Mysticism to trap larger souls when you can just use 100 crab souls to recharge anything.
3. You cannot purchase filled soul gems. It's silly that you can buy a 800 soul gem for 100ish gold in the same mage's guild that will charge 800 gold to recharge it manually!

Restoration: Fine as is except you can run around healing yourself at no risk. Fixed with No Running While Using Bows Or Spells

Alchemy: Overpowered, the potions you can make are excellent and ingredients are VERY abundant! The fix: you can make only 8 potions per day. How many potions per battle you can use is restricted as well, see Acrobatics.

Security: It's too easy to open locks! I make it so anyone can open Very Easy/Easy, you need Apprentice for Average, Journeyman for Hard, Expert for Very Hard. The skeleton key increases security skill by 25 points rather than just opening everything. This fails to actually integrate the Security minigame, though. IMO a better way to solve the issue with Security being useless is to have the speed of the tumblers change depending on lock difficulty and security skill. Someone with 50 Security skill trying to open an Average lock should experience tumblers the way they are now. Every 25 extra points in Security and each lock level lower than Average should halve the tumbler speed. Every 25 fewer points in Security and each lock level higher than Average should double the speed. So someone with level 25 Security trying to open a Hard lock would encounter 4x speed pins! Good luck..

Sneak: Fine as is. I use it to determine how much I can burgle per day (Sneak * 0.1 weight worth of items) however Sneak is plenty useful without this.

Acrobatics: Useless. I give it two buffs:
1. You can only use one of each potion type (i.e. one health potion AND one mana potion AND one stamina potion etc) per battle. It's hard to arrange potions on your belt in places that will be handy during combat after all! But once per day for every 25 points you have in Acrobatics, you can perform an "acrobatic feat" and reset this counter, using another of each type of potion in the same combat. Very useful for emergencies.
2. I use Combat Fumbling (which can immobilize you for spending too much time in the game menus while in combat) with the following settings.. no minimum penalty, no leeway before penalty starts to accumulate, 5 second maximum penalty. The "Item menu" rate depends on my Acrobatics and the "Info Menu" rate depends on my Speechcraft. Novice Acrobatics gives me 0.5 item menu rate, Apprentice gives me 0.4, etc until Master which lowers it to 0.1. What this means in plain english is that I get much smaller immobilization penalties for browsing my inventory during combat, so a character skilled in Acrobatics can perform quick feats of weapon-changing, equipment-changing, scroll/potion readying, etc. Agility will decrease the item menu penalty even moreso (automatically done by the mod).

Light Armor: Fine as is.

Marksman: Same problem as Destruction, same solution.

Mercantile: Not strong enough, and even if it was, the gold supply is too ridiculous for Mercantile to matter. My personal rule: in order to sell an item of value x you must have (x/10) Mercantile skill. That is if I want to sell a sapphire worth 77 gold I need a Mercantile skill of 8 (to assess its price and sell it wisely). Potions of Cure Disease worth 140 gold would require Mercantile 14 to sell. This rule kills two birds with one stone: It sharply diminishes an overabundant gold supply and makes Mercantile useful.

Speechcraft: What a mess. No fewer than five changes were needed to make this viable:
1. Bribery is completely disabled.
2. You can only do one round of Speechcraft per person per day. If you can repeatedly Speechcraft someone then you can max out somebody's disposition easily just by playing the game over and over, even at Speechcraft level 5. More limited rounds makes it meaningfully easier to persuade someone if you have higher Speechcraft.
3. Illusion's charm spells are harder to cast, see Illusion
4. Fast Travel is disabled. However depending on your Speechcraft level you can "hitch a ride" from one city's stables to another. Going from one city to another in a direction towards the Imperial City takes 1 "travel point". Going from one city to another parallel to (orange road) or away from the imperial city costs two "travel points". Travel must be along established roads. Novice Speechcraft gives you 0 travel points per day (no fast travel) Apprentice gives you one (towards Imperial City only), Journeyman gives you 2, Expert 4, Master 8. Examples: Getting from Cheydinhal to Bruma costs 3 points, one to get to the IC and two to get from the IC to Bruma, so you need at least Expert. Getting from Anvil to Skingrad takes 2 points, since it's two cities' worth of travel towards the IC (Kvatch counts as a city, but you can't stop there, since there is no stables), so you need at least Journeyman.
5. The "Info Menu" setting for Combat Fumbling depends on your Speechcraft. It ranges from 0.5 to 0.1 depending on your rank (0.5 at Novice, and 0.1 less for every rank thereafter). Intelligence reduces the penalty further. In plain english, having high Speechcraft allows you to go to your spell menu and swap between spells with fewer combat delay penalties. Someone skilled in wordsmithing would be better at remembering the invocation for a rarely-used spell under pressure!

I do love engaging in philosophical debate.

To make my point from earlier I would state that I notice many of your fixes are changes to the basic game itself - thereby furthering my point that the game itself is not internally consistent and that nothing is wasted. Mods just extend this factor.

What is missing from these equations is the skill of the player and this is a major sticking point for me with regard to morrowind. It seems there is a vibe amongst plenty of morrowind players that despise Oblivion for including an emphasis on player skill as a supplement to character skill. This is a video game and I, for one, truly appreciate the inclusion of player skill (otherwise I'd just play cinematic games or pen and paper - or ack vanilla morrowind). But this player skill factor is not something that is measured in-game and therefore mods again may accentuate player skill over character skill. This I prefer, but not in all departments and I will own that one of the areas I don't want to develop that is with lockpicking. I hate that mini game. Zumbs and the newer Morrowind lockpicking are fine by me. Yet, other mods add a blinder over the lockpicking mini game which to me is like a Chinese hell. I, however, like the vanilla persuasion game and if any version of moding that Persuasion Overhaul-LITE is the way to go.

Now as for combat I want more emphasis on player skill and so Duke Patrick is for me. But even if he did not make mods I disagree on many of your points.

Block is broken in this game. Kudos that they included it with real time/player skill emphasis but the way it works is lame. Just reducing damage by a percentage and everyone recoils - no that is not how it works. Likewise with running and archery - you can perhaps not run as fast as possible but you can move and backward with a bow drawn - penalties yes, but not move at all? No.

No bribery? Why not? These seem more or less just self imposed rules to make your subjective set of impressions and player skill feel more how you think the game should be not how it is. The game itself is not objectively balanced.

And my whole point is that there is no objective argument I've seen that advocates for a 'true balance' in the game. There are, however, many many mods that can help you tweak your game to suit your playstyle. For instance the OP is listing DR (6?) as a balancing mod. What if you are fresh off the morrowind boat and key combinations and flashy moves are confusing for you? What if you like the morrowind style approach of just clicking away having your character accept whatever abuses and dishing whatever damage is fine as you passively accept whatever happens to your character in combat - then Duke Patrick would be abhorrent.

So no it is not like saying crash bugs are inherent in the game and shouldn't be there because crash bugs are not how the game is supposed to work. The alteration vs. lockpicking vs. skeleton key is a great example because all were intended. And that is both Bethesda's gift and its curse. The idea of 'go anywhere and do anything' is great for the freedom it gives but also can result in a feeling of 'well no matter which direction I go I will win.' So that is an example where one can be a practiced thief, a mage, or have a god device (in game cheat at that).

I agree that mods that impose rules and consequences are the best kind though and have many of those in my load order, but I don't see them as correcting anything other than making my own playstyle more fun.

[edit for clarity]

[edit 2] more or less I agree with Irrational http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1091019-ooo-changes-to-arena/page__view__findpost__p__15917899. Except that I think that modders cannot rebalance what is not already balanced.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the game itself is not internally consistent", but skills ARE wasted. Security is wasted because it is no benefit to the character. Speechcraft is wasted because it is no benefit to the character. Why should a game, any game, have useless skills? To be a trap? All my fixes do is try to ensure that *every* skill is beneficial to the player to take as a major or develop as a minor.



I agree with you that the emphasis on player involvement in things like Security and Speechcraft (and combat in general) is excellent, as opposed to Morrowind where you simply tell your character what to do and watch him succeed/fail. Oblivion's style is far more immersive and I would like skills like Alchemy and Armorer to have the player involved in TESV. However, they need to hire new people to actually make the "skill minigames" because the ones that worked on Oblivion utterly failed to actually keep the skills useful while they were integrating the player.

A few of my modifications do involve player skill - in Security I outline how we can have the Security skill actually become useful while keeping the minigame. The Persuasion minigame is still the means of choice for increasing someone's disposition, and now success at the minigame is even more important because you have limited attempts. My use of the Combat Fumbling mod integrates Acrobatics and Speechcraft into combat in a way that intensely tests the player's reflexes. Even Armorer involves the player a bit more than it did because you will have to think about which items you want repaired first because your hammer could break at any moment!



Block IS a bit boring. You can just hide behind your shield all day until you're ready to strike - although at least you can't run while blocking so there's SOME drawback to it. I think one interesting change to block would be like the way it works in Mount and Blade - if you block AFTER the enemy starts to swing you'll position correctly to intercept their strike, but if you block BEFORE the enemy swings you'll position the shield/weapon at random and probably won't deflect it nearly as well. This sounds very difficult to mod though.

As for running and archery - the mod I use makes the character walk while using a bow or a spell, it doesn't stop them entirely. Basically you have to focus to perform archery or magic, you can't just run around flapping your arms. With this mod, kiting enemies to death is still quite possible, but only if you have a significant speed advantage over them, and you'll still have to at least split your attentions between attacking them and refreshing your distance-lead over them. It works quite well and is very player-engaging compared to just "run backwards and shoot".



When a sum of gold that almost any character would consider tiny can completely replace a skill that takes up one of your seven major slots, that is objectively bad balance. It's obvious that the developers intended to make major skills useful. When they turn out to be not useful that is a design failure on the part of the developers, as objectively as if I were to build a house with a door and the door doesn't open. You can't sell that as a feature. It is objectively a failed construction.



Different playstyles and difficulty levels are attractive to different people, certainly. The whole preference for "player involvement" in Oblivion vs. the die-rolling in Morrowind is a subjective preference, because you can build a balanced, solid game around both minigames and die-rolling. But who honestly would prefer a game where a large chunk of the selectable skills serve no purpose?



In this argument you make two faulty assumptions:

1. That the design to Oblivion turned out the way the developers originally intended.
2. That the developers made only wise choices when it comes to game development.

To believe in #1 you must actually think a the developers came up with Security and said "let's make a skill that looks useful on paper, but practically will be a total waste because we'll make the minigame so easy and the benefits to Security so small that it will just sit like a lump in the major skills of any player foolish enough to select it." Game developers are not perfect and Oblivion has several obvious quality control problems.

To believe in #2 you must actually think blanket level scaling is a great idea

"No matter which way I go I will win" is a fine design for a game - but the point is there should be engaging obstacles on the way to victory in each of those directions. If you go the way of the Thief you should have a meaningfully different game than if you go the way of the Warrior - yet in vanilla, the way both those characters open chests is the same, and so absurdly easy that the player is never engaged. Meanwhile in OOO, and with my rules, the Thief can open more advanced, richer chests sooner than the Warrior, and meanwhile the Warrior will be beating open chests with his hammer, after measuring the risk of alerting all enemies within a mile against the possible treasure within.

In a sense morrowind with its lack of player skill being involved could be said to be more objectively balanced because it does not account for player skill and player skill does not matter as much. With more measurable and quantified the idea of objective can be made more substantial.

Well I've grown fond of Mount and blade and after doing the demo went and got the warband expansion (hearing it had many improvements), but they got block wrong too. Why wouldn't you be able to shift your blocking? In Oblivion you can do that but unmodded all it does is reduce damage and that makes no sense and is therefore not fine as it is. Blocking a wooden club with and iron shield and all it does is reduce the damage based on block skill? Then they added in the recoil - as if being blocked you should go flying back totally exposed. No that is not right - what they got right is the player's ability to move the block and to have it be a dynamic part of combat experience. As stated I prefer Duke's older mod in that it makes blocks actually block most damage and no recoil. Even with that mod the block skill is needed to block almost all damage, but the block skill and how well the player can block matters a lot more - yet the player skill aspect is not measurable yet still is in play. It has effect on the parts that are measurable. This makes blocking a very fun and interesting game dynamic. It also makes player skill something to develop. The block skill still grows and I use that with Choices and Consequences to rise in ranks and get new quests. Duke recently made an argument that armor skills are pointless in that there is no real world correlate - there is no heavy armor training. You would move and dodge and avoid being hurt anyway, armor just helps or hinders in that regard. So just because Bethesda included a skill does not mean that it is a meaningful skill or that it is balanced in relation to other skills.

Yep, as stated above Morrowind could make a claim to be objectively balanced but even so both it and Oblivion (and F3) are only balanced (or not) in terms of a game and a game defined as having rules that must be adhered to. What rules you choose just because they make nonsensical rules - are just subjective impressions of what you think the game should be like and I've yet to see that anything resembling an objective argument is being made. Objective in that it is true no matter what and applies in all directions.

Well no. my point is that they did not succeed in making an internally consistent game and therefore mods that extend or reduce any of these mechanics are based purely on the players subjective idea of what objective means. With no source of what is objectively balanced then to say that one had balanced the game is an exercise in more subjectivity. I understand that you are trying to be objective but since some skills don't even make sense and only exist to be a game rule then you are extending that shortcoming and extending or reducing one set of rules in favor of another. OK for game theory but far from objective.

Philosophically speaking finding objective truth has been one of the most elusive pursuits humans have ever engaged in. The whole enterprise of science is generations of objective truth finders being exposed as subjective idealists. I'm not saying that there is no objective truth - of course there is. Your just likely to not find it in a video game - and one that is not already balanced as is. What you will find is that modding only increases subjective preference. Think on it the original game is not balanced by the rules you make for yourself - you then make rules for yourself that others may not agree with. Therefore these rules are just preferences and are therefore subjective and not objective.

Now to be fair my only sticking point has been the statement that balance can be objectively found. Other than that I think we agree on many points.
Nor do I think that this thread is a waste of time - just that the focus might be better if it were slanted toward 'what mods strike a better subjective sense of balance - or what mods feel right together.' Or even better what mods suit a playstyle better and with that then having themed playstyle lists makes a bit more sense.

I mean how is conduit magic really that objectively balanced? Plus mods are included that aren't even compatible (Combat Archery and Marksman's Challenge) ... Crossbows of Cyrodiil? Does that really bring balance? Fun, yes!

Blade > Blunt because of enchantments; faster is better. That's why I was comfortable letting L.B.O. favor Blunt.

Willful Resistance isn't the only thing that makes Willpower better; nGCD separates magicka regeneration from the size of your magicka pool, making high Willpower but low Intelligence no longer pointless. It also (by default) makes Personality a third magic stat, counting in a smaller proportion toward both pool size and regeneration.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=26288 addresses (wait for it...) Armorer.

I agree with the Charm vs. Speechcraft problem, and that's something I'm addressing with my upcoming magic overhaul.

@Tamalak - I strongly recommend checking out all the mods Fiore1300 listed above. They provide some really good solutions.

(off-topic @Fiore1300 - Goblins is awesome. )

Ah, I shall add it to my list. Seeing as it is more comprehensive, I will probably replace Realistic Leveling with nGCD. I'll have to test it out to see how it works with Dynamic Skills. I don't think they should conflict, but you never know with these things..





Totally. Kin was just so happy in the last update. Had to make her mine. :hugs: It was one of those few genuine happy moments of the comic. A relief from the bloodbath at the end of the last book.

I love Willful Resistance...

What about http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27947? I think it's an interesting mod and it's configurable, I love .ini files.

Better Blocking is great. I wouldn't play a melee character without it. The only negative is that I had to edit the script so that blocking doesn't reduce fatigue below zero because otherwise NPCs will constantly fall over. Aside from that I'm very happy with it.


Kuertee's damage mod does something similar, FYI.

Of the mods listed, the only one I'm really impressed with so far is Better Blocking. It just has solid design and thought put into it from start to finish and doesn't severely modify the difficulty of the game. However:



How did you do that? I'm having the same issue.

I edited the script. PM me your email address if you'd like the edited plugin.

So it seems like you need to edit a line in the better blocking token script, perhaps the itemholdfatigue equation? I am confused as to how to proceed could you perhaps provide details or just email me the esp? I pmed you my email. Don't know how better blocking hasn't gotten more attention, great ideas towards a crucial aspect of the game.

nvm, I figured it out



There are three places in the token script where it modifies the actor's fatigue ("actor.modav2 fatigue xyz"), before every one of those you have to do this:

set curFatigue to actor.getav fatigue
if (curFatigue <= (0 - xyz))
set xyz to (0 - curFatigue)
endif

That basically tests if xyz will bring the actor's fatigue below zero, and if it will, sets it to exactly the amount that will bring it to zero instead.

Thats true now, with modern weapons we really are supreme, one man with an Elephant gun wins, but it was a different story a century or two ago. Humans went out to the woods at night rarely & with trepidation. A wolf pack or a mountain lion was a very serious threat & humans were often killed by wild animals. It's still true even now in some parts of he world. In a game with Bows & swords, the woods should be dangerous & wandering into them at night should be downright foolhardy.

someone explain to me please why i keep seeing ppl claim that magic in oblivion in weak if anything i find it overpowered compared to melee

seriously these ppl should l2p

100% chameleon | basically tgm
100% reflect dmg | melee tgm on steroids
100% resist magic | magic tgm

just in case someone missed this those are magic spells and there is no need to cheat to achieve em

feeling like annihilating someone?

fire/shock spell doing 200, then 800, then 1800 on 3 applications, easy to do once you paralyze the enemy for only 3 sec > every npc, creature, etc, dead.

so while ppl may claim other things vanilla magic is not underpowered my archmage was darn chuck norris on oblivion sometimes i just felt like rampaging a city and did not take more than 1 min to do it and that because i couldnt summon everyone in a spot and kill them all in 10 sec.

There are a hundred ways to trivialize the game, from 100% chameleon cheese to running backwards while spamming arrows to chain-chugging potions while hitting the enemy with a hammer. It's not class-specific, it's just terrible overall balance

And that's what this topic is here to address!

So is this thread revived? I haven't been around this forum much for a while, and I'm curious if anything new has been released (as pertains to combat balancing)?

Hah, I guess not. In any case, I think I'll have to add http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1138687-req-weaker-resist-magic/ as a resource, along with the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1086758-wip-alternative-oblivion-magic-system/, http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1107578-duke-patricks-combat-magic-ii/, and http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1109470-advanced-magecraft-v2-beta/.

what did u edit to fix this? or add to the script? i personally much rather have just made it STOP regenerating fatigue while blocking is enabled than a flat number... but ur probably talking about the mitigation when successfully blocking causing it to go below 0?

I was also thinking about adding these:
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14917
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20303
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1075687-relz-applers-passive-birthsigns
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=32651
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29485
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1113475-relz-bfgs-enhanced-armory-realism-bear/

And, as you can probably tell from the above possible additions, I was thinking about turning this into a more de facto list of sorts going beyond combat balancing to include just balancing the game in general and getting rid of possible abuses by the player.

There is no "Weaker Resist Magic" mod, it`s just a name of a thread. The right name is "AV Uncapper" by JRoush: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34841.

^ Ah. Thanks Klaus. I'll make sure I'll provide the correct link/name when I update the original post.

@ Fiore1300

Are you going to update your list? I would be interested a lot in a updated list on mods that balance the game, make it more challenging and fix potential exploits. I also liked the discussion here.