I've been working, ever so slowly, on a mod to overhaul Conjuration. As I see it, almost every part of it could stand some improvement:

- The bound armor set is incomplete and "broken" in the sense that they have a static AR and only count as light armor.

To fix this, I have introduced a new scripted spell called "Bound Armor." Casting it summons a full suit of armor (daedric in appearance) of the type the player has the highest skill in (heavy, medium, or light). The BaseAR has been balanced according to the player's conjuration skill and armor type while conjuration >= 30. The armor pieces each have a constant effect enchantment feather for their exact weight, making them weightless (Note: the morrowind code patch is required to fix a bug with the feather effect not working properly). The pieces have been balanced so that Conjuration skill 30 summons armor pieces with BaseAR as follows... Light Armor: 5, Medium Armor: 10, Heavy Armor: 10; Conjuration skill 90 summons armor pieces with BaseAR as follows... Light Armor: BaseAR 50, Medium Armor: BaseAR 65, Heavy Armor: BaseAR 80. These values scale point by point so all combinations of conjuration skills >= 30 (to infinity) and Armor Skill (from 0 to infinity) will provide an overall armor rating commensurate with vanilla Morrowind calculations.

- The bound weapons are simply too powerful for their meager casting cost.

To improve this situation, I increased the base cost of bound weapons from 2 to 5, making them 2.5 times more expensive. This means that the vanilla spells (Bound WeaponX for 60 seconds) cost 15 magicka instead of 6. While this is not as high as I would have liked, I did not want to create problems for npc's that use these spells or make them unavailable to player's with conjuration as a minor skill. Additionally, I've added a new starter spell, "Lesser Bound Weapon," which summons a weapon of the type the player has the highest skill in. Each of these variants has the same stats as their steel counterparts, is weightless, ignores normal weapon resistance, and has a constant effect enchantment of fortify attack 5 pts.

- Command Humanoid/Creature spell effects are too costly to be useful.

I essentially stole adjustments from Wakim's Game Improvements version 9 for this one, reducing the base cost of Command Creature to 5.5 and Command Humanoid to 7. In practical terms, these changes allow the spells to be used without becoming too powerful (IMHO). For example, commanding target creature, magnitude 4 (e.g. a cliffracer) for 20 seconds costs 33 magicka instead of 90. Commanding a target npc, magnitude 20 for 20 seconds costs 165 magicka instead of 450. Commanding a lvl 100 creature (vivec, almalexia, dagoth ur) on target for 20 seconds still costs 825 magicka (down from 2,250). I believe this brings the spell costs more closely in line with the power of the effects, making them useable but not overpowered.

- Summoned creatures really svck. Among their many problems, they...
+ stand around while their master is attacked
+ can only be summoned one per type (obviously there's only ONE dremora in all of the outer plains / Oblivion ????)
+ have pathfinding issues and can get stuck in follow mode
+ use aoe spells poorly, paying no heed to whether or not their master would get hit
+ wait for the player to attack them several times while out of combat before turning hostile
+ are balanced somewhat oddly in vanilla Morrowind. For example, what is the scamp supposed to be doing? Why does my golden saint appear before me with an unenchanted glass dagger? Why do some of the creatures have shield spells when creatures have no armor rating (thus making shield spells absolutely useless for them)? Why does the hunger have spells to diminish armor and weapons only a few points at at time? Why doesn't the centurion sphere have resistance/immunity to poison? And so on and so forth...

To address these issues, I have introduced a whole new series of scripted summoning spells. Casting one of them has an initial magicka cost and for sixty seconds works as usual. After the first sixty seconds, if the creature is still alive, it will cost the player the creature's initial casting cost divided by 60 in points of magicka per second to maintain it (in other words, after sixty seconds an upkeep system begins to cost magicka at a rate directly proportional to the creature's original casting cost). Two additional spells have been added, "Dismiss Servant" and "Dismiss All" to banish target summoned creature or all summoned creatures, respectively (only those summoned by the new scripted spells). These two spells cost no magicka (casting them still counts toward conjuration skill progression) and allow for easy management of one's summons. Additonally, warping has been added to each of the creatures. With these changes in place, the upkeep system has little downside while balancing an important new feature: you can summon as many of each type of creature as you like, up to a maximum of 12 total summoned creatures in any combination, so long as you have the magicka to summon/support them.

Various other changes make the creatures more useful. As in one of my previous mods, I've scripted them to automatically attack hostile creatures and npc's without waiting. Furthermore, they will no longer use area of effect offensive spells if the player would get hit by them. Also, summoned creatures will immediately react if the player hits them with a physical attack or a destruction/mysticism spell (so long as they've been out of combat long enough). Of course, mistakes happen in combat and if you happen to damage them they won't mind, provided it doesn't happen too often.

While I generally retained the role/flavor each creature originally had, I took the liberty of tweaking their spells/abilities/stats where I saw glaring deficiencies. The overall list is fairly long, but I'll provide a few examples. I reduced the base cost for both the winged twilight and golden saint, improved the leveled item list for the golden saint with an emphasis on daedric weapons and less unenchanted lower quality ones, and added spells (e.g. the scamp now has a basic fireball spell) or tweaked them (e.g. greatly increased the magnitude of the hunger's armor and weapon eater spells and combined them into one). In some cases, minor changes were made to their stats/abilities (e.g. the centurion sphere now has immunity to poison). Finally, their soul values were recalculated to be proportionate to their casting cost, with the golden saint's remaining at 400.

In order to introduce the new bound/summon spells, I'm writing a little bit of dialogue for a few of the vanilla npc's. If the player can raise the dispositon of any one of them high enough (not very...maybe only 60 disposition), a new topic will appear that will have the npc give the player a new book, "The Conjurer's Tome." This book will tell stories of a mage's adventures in which he/she discovers improvements to the conjuration school. Basically, it helps explain the new spells in a somewhat lore friendly way. Equipping the book will automatically add "Lesser Bound Weapon," "Bound Armor," "Dismiss Servant," and "Dismiss All" if they are not already in the player's spellbook. Additionally, it will add the new and improved, scripted Summon Creature X spells if the player already has the corresponding vanilla variant in his/her spellbook. So, if the player has "Summon Clannfear" but not "Summon Daedroth," equipping "The Conjurer's Tome" would add "Summon Clannfear*" but not "Summon Daedroth*" (scripted summoning spells will be marked with a trailing asterisk to distinguish them). I settled on the book idea because I didn't want the player to have to jump through hoops to use the new spells but I didn't want their acquisition to be a jarring, immersion-breaking event either.

Vanilla spells will not be touched (except for modifications to a few of the spell effect costs) and scripts will not be attached to any vanilla creatures/npcs. Combined with unique id's for everything the mod adds/changes, this should mean it will be fully compatible with the original game and any other mods.

Currently, all of the spells (and the scripting they rely on) are finished and working properly. I'm in the process of writing content for "The Conjurer's Tome" and I still need to do more testing to try to find any more bugs and ensure game balance. It's a very strange thing. I'd intended to write this WIP post a while ago, but as I get closer to the finish line I find myself with less energy for getting it done. At least now, seeing light at the end of the tunnel, I'm starting to get some of my enthusiasm back.

Sounds awesome! I'll definitely be downloading this when it's ready =).

Sounds promising. I'm looking forward to eventually trying this out. I've always liked conjuration - my first character ever was a Battlemage I believe that used conjuration a lot. My two biggest complaints were that the stupid summons would wait to attack until you were being attacked yourself and that they usually had a hard time following you in lots of areas.

I'll certainly try this, because I use a lot conjuration and this seems very great !

:drool: I'll be waiting for this with great anticipation. I'll finaly be able to play a pure mage the right way! No more using bows to initiate combat from a distance. Now I'll be able to send in meat shields!


KF

Agreed. This sounds great. I await a release eagerly :disco:

This sounds good to me!

I would definitely give this a try - it sounds very interesting. I always play a pure mage but rarely download spell addition mods because in my opinion they tend to overwhelm my game.
I feel god-like enough at the end; no need to hasten the process.

Thanks for your hard work and sharing!

Love your ideas. I really hope that by the time you're ready to release this, you'll be so enthusiastic about the project that you'll start working on the other schools as well. Morrowind needs a Magic Overhaul badly. There are so many spells that are useless, not because the effect is bad but because it's not worth it for the amount of magicka you have to invest. Illusion comes to mind, with its Noise and Blind spells, or many of Alteration's spells which rule each other out (you don't need Swift Swim when Water Walking is so much safer and more convenient, why Slowfall when there's Levitation etc.).

But that's just me dreaming Starting with Conjuration is a good idea anyway.

Fantastic news ElderScroller! :twirl:

I found your earlier released 'Useful Summoned Creatures' quite useful and look forward to this substantial upgrade.

Now this sounds nice.

I think if you were to work the spells in slowly as quest rewards from the Mage Guild and House Telvanni that it would seem smoother. Or perhaps you gain them slowly as you raise in rank through them. Like secrets passed down to only members of certain ranks.

There are a few conjuration experts that offer quests in the Mage Guild and House Telvanni. You could tack them on as additional rewards to their quests. If there are enough conjurers you could add one to each.

Thanks everyone for all the kind words.


Thank you for the complement. I agree the spell effects could be rebalanced, though this has been done before. You might want to look into the modular version of Wakim's Game Improvements 9. The "magic effects" and "spells" mods address such issues and might be close to what you're looking for. You can find it http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=mods.detail&id=7382 if interested.


The main goal of the mod is to provide an alternate system closer to what conjuration should have been in the first place. Ideally, I would love to rip the guts out of the system and redo it from scratch. Unfortunately, that isn't possible so I'm producing this mod to operate alongside the vanilla system as unobtrusively as possible. While I can certainly appreciate the desire for immersive quests, making the player jump through hoops to gain access to what should have been there originally would be counterproductive. I appreciate the constructive ideas, though in this case, my vision for the mod differs.

Elderscroller, can you also implement it so that we can summon other items? Like gold or broomsticks or plates or other such trivial miscellaneous items? I mean really, if you can summon something made out of daedric, which is more valuable than dwarven or gold material of the same weight, then why cannot the player learn how to summon practically anything else? (other than the obvious "it's too complicated to put in a video game")

I can understand that. I do see what you mean, though I didn't mean any new quests.

I can't wait for the release. ^^ I might give a conjurer another try after this.

It definitely does sound promising.

Will it require a script extender?

This line was what made me curious, I don't think I'd know how to do it myself...

That's an interesting question. I suppose you could argue that it should take the same or less effort to open a portal to bring in a mundane item from this plane than a magical one from an outer plain. Conversely, it might be more difficult to pick out a mundane item with nothing to distinguish it from its surroundings, whereas a "bound" item is infused with the soul of a daedra, making it stand out? Either way, magicka tends to be quite flexible and it really shouldn't be a problem from a lore perspective. One could simply cast a spell on an object to be able to summon it later.

From a practical point of view, it would be somewhat difficult to do. I suppose I could write two spells: one to save the string value of the object id to a file and another to read it and place a copy at the player's feet. The problem with this approach is that I don't know how to remove the original. In other words, "summoning" the item would really mean making a copy, leaving the original intact in the game world. For temporary durations of permanent items this is not a problem. Consumables, items that degrade with use, etc. would be, since summoning and using them would create inconsistencies in the game world. Although I can distinguish between them, I'm not sure where to draw the line. For instance, I can tell through scripting whether or not it is a "miscellaneous" item but not whether it ever changes (e.g. soul gems or scripted objects). For that matter, objects that don't change could still be bartered or dropped, presenting certain problems for maintaining consistency/scripting. Though, I admit it would be pretty funny to "summon" gold that disappears after being used as payment to an npc. I'm just not sure I could make it a coherent feature that makes sense in the game world. The advantage of "bound" items as a coherent feature is that they come from another realm, allowing use without creating inconsistencies, especially since the "unsummon" effect is hardcoded and they can't be bartered.

Edit: Actually, I think it might be possible to do this. I'll have to play with it a bit to see.


It will require MWSE. Either the one included with MGE or the standalone version will work.

From a lore perspective, if you were smart enough in magic, you could summon anything or create/change anything.

Hmm I guess so. It's just that creating a new object presents a game balancing problem I'm not sure what to do with. Figuring out some way to move an object would make more sense to me, assuming I can get it to work across cells.

I'm being remarkably stupid. Who would want to cast a spell merely to move an object they would normally pick up? Ugh... my "summer break" consists of working and taking summer classes and this is what happens when I don't get enough sleep. I'll come back to this later, when I can remember my own name and figure out what 1 + 1 equals :facepalm:

Now this definitly sounds interesting. I have never used conjuration much becase I always thought it was way too limited in what could be acheived. This would definitly go a long way to making conjuration a feasable thing to use. An interesting thought on something more to this, perhaps the more creatures you summon, the greater the chance they might disobey you and turn on you? Cross reference this with the summoned creatures level and how high your conjuration skill is. I remember that poor guy in that cave who summoned a scamp and it tricked him and his friends(who then became food) and he was eventually made to wear a dress and got locked in a little cell. I also think I remember a book that described something of conjuration and how the person who did it needed to exert a little bit of themselves in the process to keep the creature bound, imagine, more creatures, more exertion(not just magicka(I always kinda wish they just had called it mana))

I second that, Tarius. My character is a sorceress and conjuration is the school she least studies. If you were writing a fantasy novel, you could have conjuration summon all sorts of things, both ethereal and mundane. But it's easy to do it in a story; not so much in a computer game.

Couldn't you just script a spell so that like, OnCast player->additem "misc_com_spoon_01" 1 or something like that? It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to do. I'm sure Fliggerty could figure out a method for doing something like that.

I may have read way too much into people's posts. I thought I was being asked for a single spell the player could learn to summon multiple different things on different occasions, or perhaps for the ability to teleport the exact same unique item from one cell to another. No offense, but it didn't occur to me that someone would want a single spell, like "Summon Spoon," that exhibits no value in use. I could make one, though the only purpose for it I can see would be for the player to try to abuse it to sell to a merchant. Is there something I'm missing here?

The way things are shaping up, I plan to focus on redoing the original conjuration system for the initial release. However, once it's out and I'm confident of a solid base moving forward, I'd be happy to add new spells to do completely new things that people may want in later versions. I could certainly use suggestions for what they should be but please try to be descriptive. I'm caught up on my sleep but no less confused. If you want a spoon, is it because you want to use it somehow or was it just an example to show how a custom spell could summon anything?

Time for an update.

After some thought, I've decided the new spells should be added automatically. All a player need do is acquire the vanilla variant, such as "Summon Skeletal Minion," and rest. Upon waking up, the player will find "Summon Skeletal Minion*" (the new scripted spell) in his/her spellbook. The original, vanilla variant will remain in place. Using rest as an event to trigger the addition of the new spells makes it easy to script without an fps loss while remaining as unobtrusive as possible.

Although Conjuration Overhaul isn't really a graphics mod, here are some screenshots of it in action anyway. The textures/meshes are the work of others.

Bound Armor screens:
http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/2407/ba1h.jpg
http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/8495/ba2i.jpg
http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/6281/ba3n.jpg
http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/6987/ba4b.jpg
http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/1852/ba5w.jpg
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/5347/ba6a.jpg
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/3411/ba7vs.jpg

Summoning screens:
http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/6439/summon1.jpg
http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/8521/summon2.jpg
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/1828/summon3e.jpg
http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/2978/summon4.jpg
http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/3760/summon5.jpg
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/1073/summon6.jpg
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/645/summon7.jpg
http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/4320/summon8.jpg
http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/5682/summon9.jpg
http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/2627/summon10.jpg

Banishing screens:
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/5530/bts1.jpg
http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/4720/bts2.jpg
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/5388/banishall1.jpg
http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/7755/banishall2.jpg
http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/4424/banishall3.jpg

Lesser Bound Weapon screens:
http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/4899/lbw1.jpg
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/2792/lbw2.jpg
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/9846/lbw3.jpg

There are other features fully developed that are harder to show in screenshots, such as atronachs no longer casting aoe spells when the player is too close. There's still some balancing work and maybe a little script tidying to be done, but the project has come along quite nicely. I hope to have it finished in the next 2 weeks.

Excellent!

I rather like the Banish feature, by the way. Very handy.

Looking good ElderScroller! I like how you're handling bound items. And I agree with NMZmaster about the ability to dismiss summons. ^_^ :thumbsup:

Out of curiosity, have you tested whether the banish will affect NPC summons? IIRC, that might cause problems with targeted scripts for those types of summons.