Hi to all who are reading this.

To start with, I'm someone who bought this game and thought after the first encounter with a bandit who is bashing a heavy iron warhammer on your face: Gosh, this game is really hard.
I started on the Xbox, because I saw a friend playing and I loved the game from the start. But it was damn hard (I was just a kid) and started using the cheats like soultrap + fortify attribute. When I finished the Main Quest, I was bored. One or two years later, I bought the game for the PC and this time without cheating. After I finished the Main Quest (again) as a Telvanni mage, I saw the hyped game Oblivion in my nearby gamestore.

This time, I use a [censored]load of mods. To name a few: Service requirement, BTB game improvements, (except the alchemy overhaul), Morrowind Enhanced or something similiar, a mod what makes that your HP is calculated on both your strength and endurance stats + your level and the like. Well, nearly every mod named in BTB's modlist is in my list.

My problem now is: I can't roleplay because I need to pay every NPC with services a surcharge of at least 200 drakes, maxing out to 1500 drakes. That's not cheap, because I have a mod which fixes the traders and alike to ask GOOD prices. Also, traveling is much more expensive. A trip from Seyda Neen to Balmora costs around 130 drakes. Guild Guides, what costed before the mods at most 20 drakes, are now 60 drakes. Training is more too. To level up my destruction from 44 towards 46, is know 850 drakes.

I cannot make money, because I'm a lowly Breton of level 2. I've been killed by a skeleton in two hits. Swarmed by two cliffracers and died. Killed by a bandit with a iron warhammer in four hits. Should I go on?
My Endurance and Strength are both 35 now, and I cannot raise them because I'll get slapped around by nearly every enemy I encounter. Even mudcrabs can be lethal, if swarmed and low on fatigue and magicka to heal myself.

This is the circle I'm in. I can't make money by raiding tombs, because my stats are too low. I can't train my stats, because I don't have any money. Only the Dark Brotherhood sent me a living package of fortune, but his armor will give me only around 400 drakes, what isn't enough to maintain my money-spending habits on training. I can't make money by alchemy, also. I first would need to pay the surcharge to alchemist in the Balmora Temple of 500 drakes, and that's not handy if I ony could buy like 5 Marshmerrows for restore health potions.

If anyone could give me advise, please do so! I would murder to find enough drakes to increase my spear and armorer skills by 30 each.

Race: Breton
Birthsign: Mage (1.0x magicka, 20+ intelligence)
Class:
Magic based
Strength Endurance
Major: Spear, Restoration, Destruction, Alteration, Heavy Armor
Minor: Long Blade, Conjuration, Mysticism, Mercantile, Medium Armor (Arvil Bren style)

PS. I'm not going to tone down the difficulty slider. Never.
PPS. What happened, to Arvil Bren's writer, Tim?

Welcome to the fun of trying to balance your game

If you want to make money learn alchemy - you can then sell the potions you make - trouble is you don't have alchemy as a major or minor skill

You do have conjuration so if you can conjure up an ancestor ghost then you can attack them with your spear and use them as a sparring partner for 60 seconds or until you kill them - if you are wearing heavy armour then just go stand in the water near some slaughterfish and they will bite your armour thus increasing it - you can even play tag with them in the water with your spear.

I don't use BTB's improvements - they sound a bit harsh for my liking - however if you stick it out it might make the game more fun later on

Well, Alchemy is some kind of minor skill for me. Because of racial traits and magic based class, my alchemy is 20 (like illusion, unarmored and enchant) and I am able to make some restore health pots out of Marsherrow and Whickweat, I thought. It would help far more then those quality health potions wich restore my health 20pts for 5 seconds, when I only have 38 health. >.<\

I have disabled the Service Requirements. It just doesn't make sense. The mage and fighter's guild are for the people, but when I want to train with them, I need to pay 600 drakes, plus the normal price of like 400 drakes for one level of training in armorer.

My plan is to spend my beginning cash on training for my armorer skill and heavy armor, and increase my endurance and strength to 50 for more health. I would also have more protection from heavy armor and make it bearable. My funds are completely drained, but I could at least raid some tombs for the sake of treasure.

I must go now, see ya tomorrow.

Here's a few suggestions:

1) As stated above, learn alchemy to earn money. Potions aint difficult to make as the only thing you need is flowers, mushrooms and the alike. Once you've gained some money you can use that to buy better equipment. Atleast I think you can use flowers and mushrooms etc? Been a long time since I've used alchemy.

2) The nearby tombs and caves at the start are all really difficult to clear out at the beginning, except the very first one close to Seyda-Neen, close to the Silt strider. Be carefull with the dunmer in a robe inside that cave btw, he uses a nasty on target fire spell.

3) If you head up to Hrisskar (or something like that, he's a nord) In Arille's trade house, he'll give you a quest to discover fargoth's hiding place, this will allow you to either keep the 300 gold you find, or give him the 300 and only keep 100, a nice way to make abit of starting gold

4) Turn down the difficulty in the menu. I know, I know. You said you wouldnt, however It aint necessarily a cowardly thing to do, it's just to adjust the game to your skill, thus making it more fun and playable.

5) When you head out of Seyda-neen and across the bridge, take the road to your left, and keep going until you see (And hear) a bosmer falling to his death. He drops a magic sword and some scrolls. Sell them to earn some money.

6) Just stand there, and cast restoration, destruction and alteration spells at a wall. This will increase your skill as it would when fighting an enemy.

Hope this helped! And remember to try haggle quite abit. Chances are that you can sell a bunch of stuff for 100-200 more drakes than what you're offered.

They are a bit harsh, when combined other mods to lower economy values. Once i put them together, i just see i would have trouble just trying to make any money at all, alone with getting caught for trying to pick a lock. Although his improvements do fix a few skill values a bit.

Plus BTB's basically destroys the chance of you being an enchanter.

The services one is intended to add a surcharge. As in the readme, it's intended to simulate the need to be in the guild and at a certain level to qualify for the services, since he is right that joining guilds is almost pointless since you have access to most services even if you don't join.

Recommended: Identify your major skills that don't require combat that are easy to level. All schools of magic, Alchemy, Armorer (takes a while), ect. If you mostly have weapons and armor as your major skills, then get yourself what armor you can that qualify under those and go to a nearby mine, and right with kwama forgers. They won't do much damage to you, and you can train your skills. Then come back to other quests when you get to about level 4-5. If you have a restore health spell (Hearth heal is pretty cheap i think) and you need to train your armor, you can just stand there with 2-4 of them surrounding you and attacking you, and just restore health a few times until you get the skills or get bored.

For the all schools of magic, i've made a simple spell that covers all 6 disciplines, only costs 2 mana, and i think 20-40 gold? So training your magical skills isn't too difficult. But it only gives one of your schools the credit per casting. (Random or rotation, i don't know)

BTW: If you add Area effect arrows, (and another one i think, Clean arrow additions?) the magical arrows will usually be on skeleton archers, making them ten times more deadly.

Be more selective about the mods you use. If there's one that's causing an affect that you don't like, don't use it.

i'm a tightwad myself. i raise my skills through use. not much advice i can give that hasent been given. you might run around the ascadian isles killing mudcrabs and small slaughterfish, while collecting alchemy ingredients to either brew up or sell. you might even make a lucrative "career" out of soultrapping these things in common or petty soulgems and selling those.

i'll agree that BTB's mods are a bit "fiendish," but they are not insurmountable. there are, after all, many more ways to get money aside from tomb raiding.

you could also travel the cities and get a few points by reading the skill books available. just beware of cliff racers.

1) I already have the master equipment, thanks to my fellow colleagues from the Caldera Mages Guild.
2) I cleared that one out without being touched by that guy. Just dodge the first spell and he will use touch spells, which are no match for my trusty iron spear.
3) I already did that one, too.
4) I'm not going to do that. Never.
5) It's the first thing I always do on a new save. Just cast a levitate spell when you're starting to falling down. Does the trick.
6) It doesn't increase my health, and that is my problem. I can be the most awesome much with 130 intelligence, 100 willpower, 100 destruction and 100 restoration, but I would be killed in one hit with my 38 health...

I always try to get a few more drakes for my items. I'll try to be more aggressive though.



First, why does BTB ruins my game as an enchanter? I like to level it a bit to have less spell cost for my enchantments. Secondly, I used the training spells a lot in my first playthrough on the PC in Morrowind and Oblivion too. I didn't think about kwama mines as places for armor practice, though. As for the AE arrows, I will add them to my modlist when I can handle them.




Yeah, I thought about that and deleted the Service Requirements + Wacky game improvements. Now I don't have to join the temple, imperial cult, legion and fighter's guild for training, intervention spells, alchemists and bartering. Bought mark, recall, intervention spells and ingredients for alchemy immediate.




I did that for some time, I spent one hour on increasing my spear for two levels. The thing about soultrapping is that BTB lowers the prices a LOT. the grand soul on the desk of the bosmer enchanter of the mages guild is now only worth 7.2K drakes...

Still, thanks for all the replies from all of you. I have a few things, like the kwama foragers as armor practice and that most people here find BTB too harsh. Thank god I didn't used the option to let NPCs use their racial powers. An Orc with a big hammer ain't a good friend of mine, especially with Berserk on. Instant Death. This Breton can save his [censored] from now on by training armorer and spear in the fighters guild until I'm level 5.

BTW, does anyone know what happened to Tim, the writer of Arvil Bren? I have read all his journals, but it stops when he is Redoran hortator, Hlaalu hortator and is nearly or also Telvanni horator. Please PM me if you know more.

BTB's modifications in his readme, states the difficulty for making ANY enchantment becomes so difficult it's almost not worth it, even for the simplest of enchantments. The only thing you can do with the enchant skill, is build it up (by using items, even weapons with on-strike), and recharge items. That's it. Making enchanted items you need to pay for it, and it's still a huge amount, not quite as big as before.



If you use MCP, the price of soulgems is already dropped. Most expensive gem at that point (Grand with golden saint) is about 8k. And a rat in a grand soulgem is still only worth about 20. Originally you could trap a rat in a grand soulgem, and sell it, making 200x20 = 4000 drakes. With tribunal and other mods making grand soulgems easily available it becomes unbalancing.

Kwama foragers are also great for practicing hand-to-hand. In one fight with plenty of healing magic to keep you going, (enchanted ring of healing anyone?) you can bump your skill from a lowly 5 (if it's that low) to 22ish before you can hit it and kill it consistantly. Done that more than once. if it's a major skill, you can level up a few times along the way.

The easiest way to make some gold is to join the Mages and Fighters Guilds. Each guild has a chest of free items that you can use at Balmora, Ald’ruhn, Wolverine Hall and Vivec. I don’t know about your setup, but if you use the Creeper in Caldera, you can sell the items for over five thousand drakes total and you can do this every month, as the chests refill.

For a quicker influx of easy gold, just raid Morvayn Manor in Ald’ruhn. You can trap the souls of the three Corprus Stalkers and two Lame Corprus in the lower level and they spawn every third day. I levitate, cast soultrap on target for 20 seconds from an item and then cast fire damage on each one until they are trapped. They can’t even fight back.

Finally, my personal innovation is to summon a Golden Saint for 20 seconds so that she is standing knee deep in a pool of lava (like the one east of Arkngthand and south of Nissintu) and then cast soul trap as above, except that you don’t even have to attack her. She will stand there taking damage from the lava until she expires. You get her soul and if you levitate you usually can grab a pretty good weapon and shield, too.

I've done all of these at first level.

When i first started playing like 10 years ago i got my insides chewed up and returned to me by a lone Nix Hound and i thought WOW this game is impossible, im not guna play it now and i sulked at being a noob and naturally after getting over it i recall eventually finding new things out, developing skills (both ingame in an in Rl! ) and eventually you get the swing of things.

The game isnt hard necessarily, its just that its not easy yet for you

Me, id recomend stealing everything in sight (as long as your not in sight of another person) ive discovered that the spell telekinesis is very good for this because you can stand at the far end of a halway out of sight of a merchant and steel the stuff on the counter right next to them. Then once your inventory is full go to caldera and sell everything you can to the creeper (the scamp uspstairs in the ?grack? (or something like that its a orc name that starts with G) manor if your walking from the mages guild not towrds the castle you see a turn with a little ally leading straight its the building on the right of this ally) the creeper buys (and sells) everything at full price unless its damaged in which case you should run to the smith next door and repair it all then run back and sell it all full price (the creeper does not buy cloths or alchemy stuff besides that he buys pretty much everthing including keys for 300 each jsut buy them back for 300 gold when you need them think of it as a loan) if you have something thats worth more than 5000 gold sell it to him and buy back stuff till th price is below 5000 then wait 24 hr then sell him all the bits and peices you just bought.

I think I know why your game is hard.

Ok, serious reply time...

First of all, my mod was made from the perspective of somebody who knows how to find weaknesses in games and exploit them. For anyone unaware of said exploits, a lot of what I change can seem unreasonably harsh.

Moving on, then...



This, actually, isn't a half-bad idea. It makes the game easier, but not by making it cheaper



Well... yes and no.

One, the enchant skill was broken to hell and back, so I had to do a lot to fix it.

But, in the most recent update of my mod (6.0), I did a lot to make the skill easier to raise again.



1/4 the value, actually. And now, with an upcoming change in the Morrowind Code Patch, we'll reduce the charge for "cast once" enchantments to 1/100.

And, as you pointed out, there's really not a whole lot I can't say here that isn't said very loudly and clearly in my readme (which, again, was rewritten a bit for the 6.0 update, where I raised the progression rate of several non-combat skills, as well as Enchant).

So, yeah...