Playing Morrowind for the first time in many years, and I'm struck by how expensive it is to have something enchanted by an Enchanter. An amulet with 30 points or so of Light for 2 or 3 minutes is well into the hundreds of thousands of septims! Huh?! Just wondering if it's like this in vanilla or if it's some crazy mod I've installed that made this change.

Another odd thing I don't remember: the spell Charming Touch costs over 2,000 septims. That too seems out-of-whack, but maybe that's the standard cost. Anyone know?

Yep, enchantment is like that in vanilla, as it should be. A 2/3 minute enchantment is quite a long time. It may not seem overpowered with the light spell, but stick something else on there like invisibility or restore health and you've got one crazy powerful item.

Personality, disposition and mercantile skills come into play with this. Raise your personality and use your speechcraft skill to get the enchanter's disposition to 100. Then raise your mercantile skill and you will get a better price.

Charm spells are indeed exorbitantly expensive, the best thing to do if you really want it would be to just buy the spell, and then make a custom spell that lasts for 1-2 seconds, rather than the 30 on the base spell.

If you're trying to stack multiple enchantments on an item then the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Enchanting#Compounding_Effects also matters.

Let's not all forget that some things haven't been mentioned on how to get around this legally but as we all know there are those among us that consider that either cheating or exploitive.

You are not kidding! It's not so much the money that has stumped me but the limits on what you can do with CE enchantments. I just got my first grand soul gem and off I go hasppily to the enchanter to find to my dismay that I cannot get any spell absorbtion at all for it to speak of. The highest capacity item I've got appears to be an exquisite ring at 240, and this appears to generate a max of 3pts of CE spell absorbtion. Bang goes my character development plan. I have carefully collected four pieces of glass armour so far, and to my horror I find a whole set has a total enchantement capacity of 100! My exquisite shirt, pants and belt together are worth 240, so thats a total of 340 capacity which is good for what exactly?

My intention was to develop my thief character as a serious magic user mid game using ill-gotten gains to fund the training and the enchantments. Like about 30% spell reflection + 30% spell absorbtion + some INT and WILL enhancement + some stiff resitance to magicka to stop the blighters from draining my attributes all the time etc embedded in my armour and clothes. Hah! No chance. I figured the amount of stuff you could do CE-wise must be roughly equivelent to Oblivion, but clearly it is much more restricted, particularly the stuff you really want.

I tossed up between The Lady and The Atronach for my sign for this character and plumped for The Lady partly for role play reasons, partly greed for the 25pts in endurance and personality, and partly because I thought I could sort magic defences with enchanting. Boy do I regret that now. The Atronach gives you 50% CE spell absorbtion. I've checked the formulas and seems to me that with 140 intelligence, 100 willpower, 100 mystcism and 50 luck I can make a spell to cast 30% spell absorbion for 8 secs at a casting cost of 135 & 100 success. I really can't see that working very well.

Further I've discovered that unlike Oblivion casting cost is not modified by skill or attribute, so it never goes down, and they've even gone so far as to double up costs of preceding spell effects if you put more than one effect on an item - such as weakness to fire + fire damage for example. I read they did all this because Daggerfall was criticised for overpowered magic. Well they certainly succeded in making magic a tough old trade in Morrowind.

I used to think The Lady and The Atronach were pretty much even steven as birth sign options, but I now realize to my regret that The Atronach is the only way if you're serious about magic. Hrmph! Funny thing is thet with my sneak up in the 90's and the base cost of chamelion at 1 (as opposed to spell absorb/reflect at 10) it seems I can just wander into a bunch of apparently dangerous enemies, slaughter one at will, and the rest go into a complete panic (well they have good reason I guess) so I can simply pick them off at leisure. Once a thief always a thief I guess but I am missing my magic.

Well, why not start over as a Breton Atronach? The difference in experience should take a way some of the pain of going through the beginning twice. The nice thing about a Breton Thief/Mage is that you have the extra magicka and magicka resistance right from the start. Plus the magic bonus points are enough to make magic useful even at level one. Of course your thief skills will start low but you can take stealth specialty to help that.

I'm becomming increasingly amazed at the lengths the devs went to cripple magic in this game. Take this for example. Obtaining a new grand soul gem and loading it with a Golden Saint, I try to figure out what I might do with it to enchant my glass helmet (which has 15 pts capacity) with a constant effect. I find I can fortify an attribute by 3 pts, shield 1pt or resist magic by 1 pt. Abandoning that idea as hardly worth it, I look at the possibilites on cast when used options. I find I can fortify magicka 50 pts for 6 seconds with it. That sounds a bit more useful. So I try this out and sure enough my magicka goes up from 111 to 161. Great, I think. So I cast 150 odd worth of spells, the bonus wears off so I have no more magicka left. OK, I use the helmet again, and I get about 10 pts on my magicka meter, not the expected 50. Wha'appen here? Well it seems they have implemented deficit accounting i.e. if you have a base magika pool of 100, fortify it by 50 and cast 150 pts worth of spells, when the fortify wears off your magicka pool is not 0 but negative 50. Which means you have to rest the extra hours or drink the extra potions to get the deficit back before you accrue any usable magicka at all. Which makes this enachantment off marginal use at best in a single battle but useless for clearing a dungeon.

Looking into this further, I happen to have two daedric katanas, one of which I have enchanted using a grand soul gem with 25-75% weakness to fire for 1 sec and 20 - 50 pts fire damage for 1 sec. This weapon is so awsomely powerfull I don't actually use it otherwise I wouldn't increase my long blade, block or light armour skills at any sort of rate. However the point is it has a change capacity of 400 and this enchantment costs 10 pts per strike which gives me 40 hits. The casting cost of the exact same spell from a spellmaker is 28 (on touch, target would cost more) which means that to reproduce the 40 casts over a dungeon clearance would require a magicka pool of 1120. When I consider that the weapon actually recharges, that a base magicka pool of over 1000 must be all but unattainable in this game anyway, and if that wasn't enough the sword operates on a no strike no fee basis, I conclude that a character using offensive magic is at such a massive disadvantage against one who simply whacks 'em with weapon that the only reason to play one would be to give yourself an extremely difficult challenge (assuming equal difficulty levels) with the additional hassle of worrying all the time about magicka and constantly having to fiddle with the spell menu during the action.

Anyway the upshot is I have two fully loaded grand soul gems and about 10 greaters and I can't even figure out what to do with them meaningfully after realising all this. Magic in Morrowind, it seems, holds a strictly support only role (healing, flying, water walking etc) except for weapon enchanting. I can't even use chameleon for fighting because they all just run away and it takes forever to chase them down.

To be honest, I think a lot of it was probably by accident.


I'm pretty sure there are plenty of mods that amend this. But I can definitely see what you're getting at - I've never really played a mage, and I do think it would be more difficult.

Exquisite rings and amulets can hold reasonable enchantments

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Useful_Enchantments has a good list of useful enchantments.

Well, if you mean enchantments, I would agree somewhat. I only use enchantments for utility purposes except for one powerful absorb health enchantment I keep for emergencies and almost never use. I only have two CE items; a CE levitate and a CE restore fatigue. Cast magicka, however is very powerful if you have the magicka for it. I have had a few Breton Apprentice characters who were very strong right from the start. In fact (and I know many would disagree) I think that a properly built mage is the strongest possible beginning character. It is only in the expansions that a pure mage has significant problems because of reflect and will need to depend on a physical attack.

That's an interesting observation. I read they deliberately toned down magic 'cos it was thought to be overpowered in Daggerfall. They certainly beefed it right up again in Oblivion - when I've played that as a straight mage I've found myself to be so powerfull by the end I can either slaughter anything that moves on sight or avoid it alltogether, so not much challenge although the beginning is fun. Maybe they have a problem with this becasue it's a single character game rather than party based. In the BG/NWN/DA series magic becomes much more powerful than physical combat but, certainly at higher difficuly levels, it is also more or less essential to succeed, but that's OK 'cos obviously you have several characters and it's up to you how you balance and develop your party. In Elder Scrolls you're either one or the other so it becomes perhaps beyond the judgement of Solomon to balance the game so it does not favour sword over staff or visa-versa.

It all seems to come down to one little thing: magicka regeneration. In Oblivion it does, so staff is favoured over sword, in Morrowind it doesn't so sword trumps staff. Tricky one.

Cheers for the links. Yeah, the problem I find is if you enchant up items to do all these usefull things you never get to cast the spells necessary to advance your skill in the schools. I don't carry a night-eye item for example, simply to force myself to cast it in-dungeon, and also force myself to make restore magicka potions etc to keep my alchemy going up. I know you can grind up your skills by ordering a spell with 1 pt casting cost and tapping the left mouse button 100 times but for me that feels more like manipulating a spreadsheet than immersing myself in Morrowind.

Does Dispell not kill Reflect/Absorb? Or are you saying that you can't build a big enough magicka pool to both undo their defences and then kill them with cast magic? (I don't know this 'cos I've never had the sort of magicka pool necessary to try this sort of thing out in Morrowind)

No, dispel does not kill reflect, unfortunately, because it is usually a creature power, not a spell.