IIRC Intelligence recalculate maximum magicka continuously no matter what mods you use. Keep in mind that CE Fortify Intelligence will give you magicka based on your overall multiplier, so make sure to give an amount that won\'t get too out of hand. I wouldn\'t recommend more than the 30-40 range since base multiplier is 1.0 and the birthsigns and race changes can get you as high as a base 4.5 if I recall correcty. Which is why I\'d recommend a Fortify Maximum Intelligence high enough to give you the amount you want if the player has 100 Intelligence.

Yes it\'s possible, after a fashion. You\'d either need an attached or global script which searches to see if you have the item equipped, and if you do grants you an ability. And you\'d even be able to custom name the ability since it would be a spell not an enchantment. You could look at the \'item set\' scripts form Magical Trinkets of Tamriel to see if you can duplicate anything. Or just ask someone.

I don;t really have ideas for the Snow Wolf/Bear stuff. Break up the resistance based on item weight contribution but leave out items tha tthe vanilla game doesn\'t include. Make sure it totals 100%, and then add some interesting thematic enchantments maybe? +Speed/Agility for Wolf, +Str/End for bear?

Water Walk, Slow Fall and Water Breathing might get annoying. Same for Night Eye.

Bonedancer+Boneweaver... Fists of Randagulf of course... Any enchanted items that have a thematic connection you could say. You\'re right that there aren\'t many. I\'ll probably have to look stuff up.

Perhaps include some of your cool unique retextures as an optional portion of the download. And maybe a set of Goldbrand/Eltonbrand textures that are visually different. You any good at meshes? It would be cool to see them a little longer and a little more curved...

I don\'t know, you\'d probably have to attach the script to the individual spell.

If you\'re using the AC values we worked out in the AIM mod then you do have a smooth increase between the individual armors. The formaula to determine AR for a piece of armor is BaseAR*(Skill/30) and it increases your AR euqual to it\'s AR value multiplied by the part contribution.

It looks like the top-end AR values you\'ve assigned to each armor skill are 50, 65, and 80. This means you have a smooth 15*(skill/30) progression between armor types with equal skills. That being said the goal AR for Unarmored should be 35*(100/30), or 116.6. Unarmored uses a slightly different formula to determine its AC though since it progresses exponentially.
Skill²*fUnarmoredBase1*fUnarmoredBase2, which in vanilla is Skill²*0.065*0.1 and the result is applied to each body part individually according to the usual weighting. It does apply to the shield slot (I checked).

In order to get 116 armor at 100 Unarmored you would have to change the .065 to .116

Should you do that you\'ll need to alter Bound Armor AR values since they have static values unaffected by any armor skill, which is what makes them great for mages. Altring them would be to keep them effective even when you have a high-level Unarmored. I\'d recommend an armor value about equivalent to glass at a skill of 100. I understand that that might feel quite effective, but the game lacks both pauldrons and greaves. Which means taht you\'ll be ~20% behind that number.


The stats for weapons and armor are quite playable I think. I only just started playing with the stats in place. I\'m curious as to whether the weights for the lower-level heavy armors are much higher or much lower than vanilla. Or perhaps they're quite similar?

Edit: Did you use warhammers as the basis for ratios in your weapons? I would have done Longswords for the base myself since they're one of the types of weapons that has a variant of every material. Well most materials. And then I use Steel as the base. When I was working on Weapon Integrative Modifications with you I did so much math basing it around Steel from vanilla for all the modifiers... I wonder if I could find the charts.

Edit2: Looks like I don't have the spreadsheets on my disks. I'll have to go pick them up from home and see what you think. I never did give you the final copy for them. The idea was to make any weapon within a material a sidegrade as long as it took the same number of hands to wield. If we could incorporate that stuff... Of course sometimes the sidegradedness wasn't readily apparent, and then you'd in desperation try to find a new use for it and BOOM.

Hmm... so, the only problem with regular Fortify Magicka is that the bonus magicka isn't "regenerated" if the player rests, or uses a Restore Magicka potion or spell? So, say the player normally has 100 magicka, and the fortify effect adds 25pts. The total is 125pts of magicka. So, now the player fires off a few spells, and is 45/125. If the player rests/drinks a potion, what number is the magicka restored to? 100/125? If that's the case, then it doesn't seem like it would be much of a bother to unequip and re-equip the item (and it sort of makes sense, as the reserves were 'drained'). If that (the 100/125) isn't the case, then what does happen?


Hmm, I'm really liking this idea, especially for the Dragonbone cuirass, which, in the lore, both grants the wielder protection from fire and allows the wearer to cast a fireball spell. The possibilities are so mind boggling... I could do... just about ANYTHING. I wonder if this would be a good work-around for "Cast on Strike" being useless for bows?


*snaps fingers* Brilliant idea with the fortify attribute! I'll also take your advice with the %frost resistance, too.


Yes, I was thinking that those effects, as CE, might be annoying. I know sometimes they are useful, but only in certain situations. Nevertheless, I felt a Jump and Slowfall combo on the Ten Pace Boots would be more in line with the lore than the vanilla enchantment.

Yeah, there are actually very few enchanted armor items compared to enchanted weapons and clothing. No pauldrons or greaves are enchanted either, and very rarely boots. I would like to add some more, but I wouldn't know where to start.

I don't know how to manipulate mesh shapes, no. I'm debating whether or not to incorporate the Unique Finery mod as part of the main .esp, or to leave it as an addon.

So I couldn't attach a script to a spell effect, only a specific spell? Can MWSE do it?


For changing 0.65 to .116, what game setting is that called?

And thanks for doing those calculations, I'm not sure I would have thought that out at all.... not sure where I'd find the formula either (is it on the UESP?).


Weights for lower-end heavy armor... I think they are about the same, maybe a tad heavier? I know I had to do quite a bot of tweaking so that it fit in nicely with the calculations at the bottom of the Weight tab so that armor is assigned Light, Medium, and Heavy correctly.

No, nothing is based on stuff like steel or warhammers. At the top of each property tab (Weight, Price, Enchantment, Health, Damage) are the calculations I set up for generating parts of the data. Pretty much everything is somehow derived/linked to the AR of the item. In fact, weapon damage is also linked to a similar stat - a WR (weapon rating) I suppose. At the moment, the WR is the same as the AR. Silver weapon WR is set to take the same value as Duke Silver armor AR - which makes silver more powerful. The top portion of the Ranking tab plots out the reach and speed for the weapons, and, as data for myself to use, calculates the damage per second.

Oh, hold up, I see why high-end weapons and armors have low prices. I haven't changed the inflators (the fields side-by-side with those lovely rainbow colored blocks in the Prices tab) that correspond to 10 AR point increments. I sort of left off in my work there and didn't finish it yet.

Any thoughts on the ELookups tab? The first few columns are dedicated to the spell effects and their corresponding mana costs (in column C). I wanted to tweak a few from the vanilla values - such as making Shock damage cost the same as Frost and Fire -, but I put, in column D, the vanilla value in case I changed my mind and wanted to recall what the original value was. To be clear: column D is not used, but Column C is used.

I've artificially lowered the weight of throwing weapons - do the weights seem reasonable? I wanted them to be light, but not crazy light... just light enough that carrying around a bundle didn't encumber the character as much as the vanilla values. Do the weights seem reasonable? I've never played a character that used primarily throwing weapons, so I don't know how many one needs to haul around to kill a netch or kagouti. I've also tried to make thrown weapons more lethal - do the numbers seem okay? :unsure:

You'll find some generic weapons might look like they have the wrong stats - that's because I changed all those redundant enchanted shortswords into completely different weapons, like halberds and stuff, to fill in all the weapon types for the iron and steel generic enchanted weapons. I made a few other changes, too. To keep track of that, I made a column (W) in the WEAPONS tab headed "Changed." Values or 0 = unchanged, 1 = changed. Seems my autofilter was last used on the WEAPONS tab; it's set to filter for only artifacts. Column U is used to keep track of nonenchanted (0), enchanted (1), and artifact (2) items. Makes the going easier when I need to only look at one type or another.

You do stop at 100/125 in that case, until you take the enchantment off. At which point IIRC it will TAKE AWAY 25 points of magicka in exactly the same way that using the actual spell effect for a buff does. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Fortify_Magicka

It wouldn't be of any use on bows because IIRC that's hardcoded and you'd have to attach a script to EVERY bow that you wanted CwS on. Admittedly that could just be the enchanted bows... But it wouldn't be very fair that the player can't duplicate the feat.

Thank you for liking it.

Ten Pace Boots are fine with Jump-Slowfall, it feels good on them. Keep in mind though that slowfall of any amount CE completely removes fall damage, even Slowfal 0.

Maybe we can collaborate to come up with soem more enchanted equipment. Perhaps we shall start by finishing some of the equipment that would be cool as a set. Like Therana's Daedric Armor.

To the first, that's your call. To the second I'm not sure since I don't script. I only know enough to be able to duplicate some simple stuff, if I could find a guide I could probably pick stuff up pretty quick though.

I believe the setting is fUnarmoredBase2, though it might be fUnarmoredBase1. Keep in mind that you'll have to alter the Telvanni Guards' unarmored or Medium armor falues because they may decide to ge tnaked (they did so in the AIM mod when I made those changes).


I used vanilla ratios originally, your way makes everything really easy to balance but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth at certain points (like Enchantment Value of staves, too low for my liking as well as some other weapon types). Bows because they can't CwS should have as much EP (or more) than staves IMO, that way they can make useful CE or CwU items.

AR is as much a function of design as it is material, silver is well made steel armor that' been etched with silver, ebony is actual plates of the stuff, glass makes horrible blunt weapons but edged weapons should be nearly on-par with daedric no mater the AR of the material etc Those idiosyncracies are why I individually compared all values across all weapons for my WIM tables.

Prices are NICE low, I like that I won't get stupid-rich by selling one item. Admittedly the rarer armors and weapons should be a little less accessible from a money standpoint, but combined with a merchant adjuster your value would be beautiful.

I use a customized BTB-Spells balancer, so I haven't got much to say about your values. Admittedly I need to take a few minutes to figure out just how much I increased the difficulty of making CE enchantments. Thus I haven't taken a close look at your values, since I use my own. I could give you a copy of my value assignments if you like.

I haven't encountered any throwing weapons yet. However IIRC most throwing weapons aren't meant to be carried in alarming amounts. As long as you can carry 20-40 on you it should be fine. Throwing weapons historically aren't supposed to be your major armament. Plus if you want to be a marksman you have bows.

I'm in-game testing so that's a nice heads-up that you were changing some of the redundant enchantments to filling in the weapon-types. I haven't put in your enchantment changes (I like my sanity intact) but I can keep tha tin mind.

Mmm. Seems like something that might be fixed by other means (Code Patch, or some other script patch). I think I'll keep fortify magicka effects... I don't really have that many.

Oh, and I just realized, I don't think I've set up all those 6th House Artifacts enchantments yet. Any ideas? I want to standardize them, after a fashion, and make them CE so the player can't spam the buffs (which I am guilty of :hehe: ). Any initial ideas, or should I give it a go and then submit them for review?


Agreed... hm, do you think I should give artifact bows CE enchantments, or use enchantments? There aren't many enchanted bows either. There's the Bone Biter Bow - I made that a Use on Target enchantment. The only other two are the Bow of Shadows and the Bow of Auriel - which I'm giving an enchantment (same with the shield), based as much as possible on the lore. It's really annoying how all the lore items always give fire resistance - why not some frost and lighting?

So, the magnitude of Slowfall determines how slow you fall... but the effect, regardless of magnitude, eliminates all 'fall' damage? Seems like this spell effect is a bit broken - or, not as exciting as it could be. I would have liked the magnitude to determine both fall rate and be involved in a %reduction in fall damage.


Therana's armor is a quest reward, isn't it? I'm not sure how I could work in "more" rewards without unbalancing something. The other 'set' items I can think of are some enchanted gloves that come in pairs. The vanilla effects are usually very different for left and right gloves, though. I kind of want to preserve that.

Does the Morrowind Patch Project change the Telvanni Guard's major/minor skills? As in, is unarmored removed to misc. skills? If not, then I might consider tweaking their 'class' skills so that unarmored has no possibility of being a higher value than Medium armor. Honestly, I don't understand why Bethesda included unarmored mixed with an armor skill for some classes - it is one or the other, since unarmored won't work if you are wearing armor. I wonder if, when they were making classes and whatnot, unarmored wasn't affected by wearing any armor? That's actually something I wish would happen, it would make wearing partial armor viable (aside from the aesthetics).


I can tweak bow EP ratio easily to 'boost' it's EP.

Mm, I suppose so. However, a 'spikey' glass mace would rather hurt. Still, given the lack of any glass blunt weapons, I'm not really concerned about setting parameters as specific as that. I like what I have set up now, it seems to work okay. How does the damage output related to weapon health and armor health look? In other words, I know that when a weapon does damage, that damage is subtracted from its own 'health' - I want to make sure high damage items don't break quickly (daedric, ebony). I also want to make sure high AR armor can withstand at least ten blows from a high-damage weapon.

I'm hesitant to change pricing that much. I don't intend this mod to be an economy adjuster - to do that, I'd need to also start balancing prices for potions, scrolls, ingredients, tools, and clutter. I don't know if I'd be able to do that. Also, in my mind, insanely high prices on daedric armor (for instance) doesn't mean the PC can get crazy rich, since merchants have a finite amount of gold they can offer. So, an 10k daedric item could only net the player about 1k gold at an average merchant. However, if the player wanted to buy it, he/she would have to cough up that very high amount.


Yeah, I'd be interested in seeing the numbers you are working with.

If you don't see them in game, you could check the weights in the spreadsheets, or just use the console to add them to your character. Really, I totally didn't intend the sheets to be used for in-game testing just yet, as I haven't set up everything completely to the pages that the export sheets grab data from. And I haven't fully finalized/tweaked stuff completely yet.

*shrug* I don't know much about the 6th house stuff.

I'd go use where possible, simply because it works well. As for slowfall... *shrug*

The MCP doesn't affect their skills, it's just how unarmored scales in relation to bonemold if you alter its base coefficient.

Unarmored applies it's AR to any body parts not wering armor, regardless of whether other parts are wearing armor. In that respect it's effectively your base AR, and so is useful for anyone who doesn't intend to wear a shield, or other parts of armor for RP or balance reasons (such as non-shield cheese with a 2H weapon.)

Changing bow EP coeffiecients would be OK, I'd put them on-par with staves, or a little behind.

I'm not familiar with the damage to weapon/armor health formulas and the like, so I can't say. I usually just play through and carry around a LOT of repair hammers siece I prefer glass weapons and armor anyway.

Unfortunately a PC can get crazy rich by using the bartering system over the course of several rests by taking advantage of merchant respawning gold reserves and trading items for items.

I'll see what I can do about getting you a list of my settings in the next couple days or so. Thanksgiving break will be coming up in a couple days, so I'll have some more time to look thigs over.

I'm mostly testing in game for the "how are these looking" standpoint. That and half-finished is better than vanilla. I'll take a look over the weights at some point and see how the different health values feel in-game.

Would you suggest I change the skills so that Unarmored is Misc.?


Ah, excellent, I didn't know how Unarmored work, precisely, as my character always wore armor.

Manipulating/abusing the bartering system: it isn't my job to try to foil people who decide to consciously abuse the bartering system like that. :shrug:


Thank goodness for thanksgiving.

Alright, let me know what you find.

----------------

Anyone else taken a look at the spreadsheets? What are your thoughts? If you have any questions about the sheets, forumulas, or my logic/reasoning, feel free to ask. If you have advice and suggestions, please speak up, I'm all ears!

And even if you haven't taken a look at the sheets, but want to suggest something with regards to spell costs, enchantments on specific items, and whatnot, please post!

http://www.mediafire.com/?w0y2tww3mqm, http://www.mediafire.com/?jkiiozyd0yh, http://www.mediafire.com/?mi01ndzrtw4

Those three text files can just be imported to the proper places and you can examine the effects they have on the game. Note that the GMST's alter weights for armors to allow your weights to work but I believe that the have not altered the AR of Unarmored. The GMST's also make CE effects cost 10x as much as normal to prevent my own abuse (plus it makes CE that much rarer).

In the case of telvanni guards... I believe how I fixed it was increasing their light-armor and decreasing their unarmored skills by hand. Since they wear those stupid cephalopod helms.

What are the coverage values which determine the contribution of a parts AR? IIRC it's

Shield: 10%
Cuirass: 30%
Gauntlets/Bracers: 5% each
Pauldrons: 10% each
Greaves: 10%
Boots: 10%
Helm: 10%

Correct? Bonemold under your numbers has a AR for the guards of... 29.4. Their helmet has CONSIDERABLY less AR, since it's the Cephalopod helm, at 4 AR. Using a base unarmored of 116 their unarmored AC is... 5.1. My fix would be to decrease their unarmored and increase their light armor. Of course my fix departing from vanilla would be to completely alter their armors ad weapons and make them battlemage/spellsword archetypes rather than fighters. But that's a mod for another time.

Like right now while I desperately try to escape doing homework. All the guards need their AR to be beefed up some, so that they actually come close to a challenge to those of us with brains in our heads. Even if they ALL had 100 Medium Armor they'd only be sitting at the base AC of Adamantium/Stahlrim/Royal Guard/Indoril.

Anyway, last night I was considering what to do about the LOWEST AR's available in each armor type. I got to thinking and decided "Hey! What if we made the lowest armors have the same discrepancies as the higher end armors?!" In other words the lowest light armor would be 15 points weaker than the lowest medium, which would be 15 points weaker than the lowest heavy. Though by 'weakest' I mean the most common. So I was thinking the three 'base' armors would be Chitin, Bonemold, and Iron. Though I rather like to think that Steel would make a better 'base' heavy armor. It kinda bothers me that their are medium armors with AR only on par with what I see as the most basic light armor set in the game (Chitin).

Looking at the UESP the WEAKEST armors with full sets in each category are...

Nordic Fur (Counting Leather as the last piece of that set, though there is no towershield)
Bonemold
Iron

If we were to assume that NO armor provides less AR than Unarmored would provide at 100... Then no light armor would have less than an AR of 34.8. Which is of course unfeasible simply because then the weakest Ar would be ON PAR with some of the higher end vanilla armors (admittedly I see a certain attraction to that, but I digress). HOWEVER if we were to use the values of Unarmored at 30 (the Base AR level of all other armors) we see that no light armor should have an AR lower than 10.44, if we round UP then the base AR of light armor should be 11. I most certainly don;t like the thought that light armor is at base only a 10% increase in protection over wearing no armor at all, so let's set the base AR to 12 for Nordic Fur. Netch Leather, and Nordic Bearskin would also share that AR. Cloth would have abase AC of 11. The next step up would be into medium, wit ha base AR of 27 on Bonemold (Imperial Chain would lag behind or be equal to), Iron AR would be at 42 as a base level. The changes would make an overall smoother progression within both the armor categories and between categories. Light armor wouldn't begin equaling or bettering Medium until Snow Wolf (maybe), and only Glass would grant a full set on par with the weaker heavy armors.

Obviously the changes are pretty radical, so might take some thinking if you choose (or don;t choose) to implement them.

Edit: Some spells were given to NPC's which previously didn't sell them. In all cases I duplicated what BTB does in his balancing mod, and taking a look at that may be agood idea.

edit2: Your total EP ratio ignoring shields is a 1.44 multiplier. Admittedly that's quite interesting to ME, but I think that you should try to get everything into multipliers of 1 total (excluding shield) if only to make putting in EP or Weight master values more transparent.

Edit3: Fixed armor weightings toward AR. Is there a way to later this to make shields something more necessary?Or rather more useful. Providing only 10% AR is kinda lackluster. I'd like to see it at 20-30%. Plus it would make a shieldless character slightly more interested in Agility and sanctuary.

Edit4: With the changes you're making to certain weapons and arrow/bolts... You may need to alter some leveled lists and/or merchant inventories... But that's just a thought.

Interesting... Some of the values I disagree with, such as making Resist effects cost even less than vanilla. I'll have to pour over them some more. In general, though, could you tell me what areas of spellcasting with vanilla values you found to be unbalanced? Are the vanilla costs for elemental damages too low? Are the costs for Summoned creatures too high? How about Shield, Sanctuary, and Chameleon - are vanilla values too low?

I'd definitely agree that swift swim should cost less, as well as Slowfall and Feather. I also feel that the Detect enchantments need to be lower than vanilla values, given their extremely limited usefulness. Then again, all you need is a 5 sec enchantment, because all you have to do is hit the inventory menu to pause the game and look around the map. Hmm.... do you think I should include http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=5282, and utilize the new enchantment effects on enchanted weapons, armor, and clothing?

If you have an Altmer with 100 INT and the Mage Birthsign (or whatever one gives that large INT multiplier bonus), how many times could he cast "summon dremora lord"? I guess what I need to know is how to scale the magicka cost such that mage characters aren't totally drained of magicka after a few simple spells. Am I making any sense?


Hmm, I see (I think). What are your thoughts to increasing the Telvanni helm's AR? I wouldn't be opposed to slightly increasing bonemold's AR either. Medium armor simple has so few armor sets, it is difficult to get an even spread. I don't want to depart from vanilla values too much, because that would through off the leveled part of the level lists, you know?

Weight ratios are slightly different than that.
Cuirass | 0.30
Boots | 0.12
Greaves | 0.10
Gauntlet | 0.05
Helmet| 0.05
Pauldron| 0.07
Shield | 0.21
TShield | 0.23

I wish I could make TShields heavier, but there is just one GMST for shields, so I run into the problem of the shields getting assigned the wrong armor type based on their weights. :shrug:



Hmm? I don't see how the edits that will come from the exported spreadhseet data will cause NPCs to have different spells. :confused:


I'm not sure I understand.


I'm not quite sure what you mean. AR for regular shields is the same as it is for the other armor parts. AR for towershields increases by 2 for AR values up to 40. AR 40 and above, Tshields have a +5 increase.


I know. I think the leveled lists for ranged weapons, in general, are messed up even in vanilla. It's impossible to find marksman weapons in meaningful quantities in loot and in merchant inventories. (well, except for arrows and bolts, those are plentiful. Not so much the throwing weapons, though).

You should note that I multiplied the CE costs by 10x, which means that any of the lowered costs that I didn't simply disable outright are no less costly as a CE enchantment than they were. Or marginally less costly.

I don't have much of an opinion on Enhanced Detection.

It really depends on what mods you use. In vanilla you'd have about 400 magicka at best, which means you can cast it 4 times in vanilla. Or summon a golden saint twice.


My issue with the lowest end armors in vanilla is that Chitin, Chainmail, and Iron ALL have the same AR, they're all the most basic equipment of their type. Actually Iron has less AR than the other 2 and nothing to make it BETTER. Thus my proposed 'wild' change, making each armor actually an upgrade in terms of AR at the lowest levels, because to be quite honest it makes more sense right now to pick Light/Medium armor and just keep the heavy armor on a few pieces at a time so that you level it up until you get to the higher end stuff.

Take a look here http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Base_Armor

In vanilla the armor you're going to acquire easiest of each type (barring bonemold... apparently they decided to think that one through) is all sitting at 12AR. Except Iron which is at 10. IMO the armors should have the same discrepancies at base as at max, it wouldn't hurt the LEVELING of the game, it would only make choosing any particular armor skill more meaningful at the beginning. If you choose heavier armor you really WILL be more protected instead of just changing how you're getting protected.


I was aware that weight ratios and AC contribution are different. I dislike the way they handled contribution though.


Importing my exported spell list doesn't tell you anything about any spells I may have given to people to sell/use. Only what changes I did to the spell itself. So I was saying taht some of the spells were given to people so taht you could learn the actual spell.


The first I was just suggesting that you rationalize main body equipment (i.e. non-shield armor) to use a total weight/EP multiplier of 1.0 in comparison with your master weight. It would just make scanning master weight and EP values much easier since you could just put in the total value you want the armor to have (sans shield).

To the second, I was griping about how the AR distribution weightings of armor are set up. It's unrealistic for a shield to only be 10% of your total AR. I wish there was a setting I could change to make Pauldrons/Boots/Greaves less AR contributive and shields MORE AR contributive. So instead of a shield being 10% of your AR it would be 30%, while Greaves/Boots/Pauldrons/Bracers would combined only be 30% of your AR. And head would remain 10%.


That may be something to balance as part of this, of course that would also make it a fairly good idea to turn this into a master file... Not that I have ANY idea how to go about doing that. Until then a leveled list merger might be necessary if you intend to fix the stupid lists.

:shrug: Makes sense to me. The AR is modified by the player's skill. Someone with low Heavy Armor and high Light Armor would find iron armor less useful than chitin.



Yes, I'm aware of this. However, if you cared to look at the spreadsheets at all, you would have noticed I increased Iron to 12AR.


Are you refer to vanilla, or my spreadsheet calculations? Please try to be a bit more clear, it is rather confusing for me.

I'm still confused. I'm not using ratios in the manner in which I think you're thinking of. Enchantment is actually based more on health, with several further modifiers that adjust the numbers for each item type. Then, another constant is applied, depending on the item's "ranking" (Armor Rating, and the Weapon and Clothing equivalents), with Light armors getting a noticeable boost to EP, medium armor getting a slight boost, and heavy armor not getting any boost at all.



A shield isn't very useful unless it is used to block. A successful block takes all the damage. I know, I wish I could change those numbers too, but they are hardcoded and there is nothing I can do about it.


I think I asked advice regarding whether this should be an .esm or not, and I think .esms are just too complicated for me at the moment - I don't understand the conflicts it may or may not create with other .esps and .esms. Esp conflicts I understand much better.

Ever get the feeling that you're having two entirely separate conversations as you speak with somebody? According to your spreadsheets Iron armor has the same AC as Chitin, but more weight and LESS EP. Which is unrealistic, and just doesn't work for me.

Thus my first instinct is to make it so that NO medium or heavy armor has AC equivalent to such a weak armor as chitin. As it stands the OPTIMAL armor to choose for the first few levels is Medium, and it remains fairly optimal. It has better AR than steel, better EP than heavy armors, and generally is balanced. Heavy armor is FAR from optimal as a starting armor because, for the most part, you pay MORE for less protection.

Thus my whole tangent on making large-scale changes to AR progression both within an armor type and across armor types. The overall effect would be to give the idiot who wants to wear daedric some armor that actually feel BETTER at protecting than them than a lighter, and cheaper armor of a different type. Of course I could always just figure out your spreadsheets and play around and produce something I like for personal use, but if you're trying to produce something that doesn't give people logic-headaches I can only try to help.



Cuirass 0.4
Boots 0.18
Greaves 0.2
Gauntlet 0.12
Helmet 0.12
Pauldron 0.15
Shield 0.4
Tshield 0.5

^Ratios for EP distribution.^

Cuirass 0.300
Boots 0.120
Greaves 0.100
Gauntlet 0.052
Helmet 0.052
Pauldron 0.070
Shield 0.210
Tshield 0.230

^Ratios for weight distribution.^

Each taken directly from the master values at the top of their respective spreadsheets. I have a personal preference for individually balancing each statistic, to remove interdependence and allow more room for variability but that's a completely different discussion for another time. Anyway, adding these ratios up and excluding the shield you get...

EP: 1.44
Wt: 2.076

IIRC you use master values to determine a sets overall feasibility, derived no-doubt from AR given your predilections. I was referring to creating more Master->Derivative transparency so that it would be possible to determine EXACTLY how much total EP a suit would grant it's wearer without typing it into a calculator. It's just a streamlining thought, it hasn't got a whit to do with balance.


I figured AR weighting is hardcoded, and I'm not much use figuring out .esm's or even .esp's really.

I'm developing a growing dissatisfaction for how I'm setting up the values for enchantment magnitudes. The piece I'm missing is the conversion between spell cost and how many EP points are taken up.

1) I need to know how much of the soul gem's "soul points" are being consumed as I set the spell effect parameters.
2) I need to know how much of the item's Enchantment Point capacity is being consumed as I set up the spell effect.

By knowing these, I can set up realistic enchantments that the player can duplicate - or not duplicate, in the case of artifacts. I also want to play with how many uses an item has before running out of "soul" charge. That way, I could have items that deliver a powerful enchantment but can only be used a few times, versus items that have a weaker spell effect, but can be used many times before running out of charge.

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@Autocthon: I disagree that chitin is necessarily worse than iron armor. Iron is the bottom of the pile for Heavy armor, whereas Nordic Fur is the bottom of the pile for Light Armor. Iron svcks, but Chitin is, relatively, much better than at least two other sets of Light armor (Netch and Nordic fur). :shrug:

I still don't understand why you are adding up the ratios for Weight and Health and why the sum has any effect on EP.

Such questions as posed in my previous post have been answered by the wonderful and knowledgeable folks in the CS Forums. :icecream:

- I've added in some columns in my EMaker sheet which calculate the Cast Cost of the enchantment. I can then compare this with the item's enchantment capacity to make sure the Cast Cost is less than or about equal to the enchantment capacity. This means there won't be crazy enchantments that a player would not be able to replicate on his/her own with an enchantment-making NPC. I gave myself a bit of leeway with some items so as to preserve their vanilla enchantments. Needless to say, artifact items are not bound by this consideration. :hehe:

- I've reduced most On Strike items that Paralyze to a 5 second maximum (although some items may have 7 or 10 seconds). I figured higher durations were worthless since they just get replaced the next time you use the weapon and hit your target. Likewise, I've reduced On Strike Soul Trap to a similar time frame. Do these durations sound reasonable, or should I make them longer?

I'm re-setting up the enchantments again for weapons, armor, and clothing. I feel more confident about making them streamlined and consistent.

I've also been liberally tweaking the spell costs for certain spells. For example:
- Absorb Health cost = .75 * (cost of Restore Health + cost of Damage Health).
- Bound Items cast cost has been increased from 2 to 4. It's way too easy to get bound items, which are very powerful.
- Elemental Shield cost = cost of Resist Element + (0.1 * Element Damage cost). Elemental shields grant resist element, and also do damage. I divided the damage by 10 to reflect that, in vanilla settings, every 10 pts of elemental shield correlates to 1 pt of damage.
- Blind is now 100th the cost of Paralyze. 100% blind is about the same effect as not being able to attack at all (0% chance to hit is the same as not being able to attack at all)
- Similarly, Sound is 100th the cost of Silence
- All the {blah blah} humanoid/creature spells are 0.2 in cost. Command Humanoid and Command Creature cost have been reduced from 15 to 10.
- shock damage now costs 5, just like fire, frost and poison.
- Water Walking increased from 3 to 5. Shield increased from 2 to 3. Feather decreased from 1 to 0.3, Burden decreased from 1 to 0.2, Swiftswim decreased from 2 to 0.75, Slowfall decreased from 3 to 2. All Detect spells are 0.5

If you have any suggestions for the cost of summoned creatures or other spells, and/or advice regarding the changes I've made (e.g. No! Your changes are horrible and will make things too easy/hard!) let me know.

EDIT: I will be adding scripted enchantments to some items so that I can have a CE effect and an On Strike/Use at the same time. Pretty cool, huh?

Also, I'm going to use scripts to add the resist frost to the Snow Bear/Wolf armors, which means that (hopefully) players can then enchant these higher-end armors with their own enchantments as well.

I'm avoiding Fortify Health and Fortify Magicka effects, due to their general ability to accidentally kill/maim the player character. Fortify Magicka will be replaced with either Fortify Max Magicka or fortify Intelligence. Fortify Health will be replaced with Fortified Endurance, so those with mods that cause Endurance to dynamically alter max/min health will benefit from this.

What the hell, this is my mod, right? I'm going to incorporate a few things I've been working on, and some more "radical" changes.

- the gang in the Mournhold Sewers, some of their darts are going to be Adamantium (yes, I have a model for it)
- The Blessed Spear is changed from Ebony to Adamantium.
- Erur Dan's Spear is changed from chitin to Glass (yes, I have a model for it)
- Enchanted Rings like "sparkbolt" and whatnot have been renamed with names from Battlespire - http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Battlespire:Hints/Tips. I thought the vanilla names were boring. Now you'll see things like "ring of blistering fire" and "ring of sulphurous death" or "ring of riven stars" instead of bland names.

You know, some feedback would be appreciated. *hint hint*

I'm trying to decide what to do about the Holy/Blessed/Veloth shields - restore health 1-10pts is so boooooring. Due to the awesome power of the CS, I could actually change some of these into other armor parts (cuirass, greaves, etc). What do you think, should I go for broke?

Not to rain on anyone's parade or nothing but...

I don't like on strike enchantments with paralyze period, but that's me having a fit over the enemies with jinkblades.


Bound WEAPONS are powerful, bound armor is much more debatable. It sets your AR to a flat 80 no matter what you have for armor skills (in theory with a full suit) which is really QUITE low.

I like my settings more. ;P I just like that it actually something more than resistance in an appreciable amount.

Unless I'm making a mistake I believe blind actually alters your roll. It's basically inverse-sanctuary. 100% blind IIRc does not make all attacks automatically miss. As for sound... *shrug* I prefer sound to silence half the time anyway, sounds good.

You remembered to recalc all the spell costs I hope? IIRC they don't always alter to keep up with changes to the settings.

Sounds cool on the scripted effects thing. Though I think if you enchant a scripted item the script attached to it might throw a tantrum. But that may be my imagination.

Yah, I gallavanted off for a bit. Stupid laptop decided it wanted to crash, and then finals and then... I always have an excuse. But I think I'm back now.

Edit: we all know I'll be playing with the settings on mine to make it look the way I want it to anyway. But feedback's good, no?

The mod isn't dead, it's just sort of.... stuck...

I keep biting off more than I can chew. The most immediate issue is that of tweaking the spell cast costs to reflect their actual usefulness in-game.

To that end, I need feedback from you folks who've played spellcaster characters, and know how useful spells are (or aren't), how much magicka your characters have to spend, and the like.

I took the relevant sheet from my big ol' spreadsheet thingummy, and turned it into an .html file. You can download it http://www.mediafire.com/?hymbzazatyh. The COST column are my new costs, and Vanilla Costs column reminds me what the vanilla costs were. Cast Type, Range Type, and CE Multiplier stuff isn't relevant to spell cost calculations (but are used for another part of my spreadsheet).

Uh, I'll try to remember everything I've done, and my reasoning. I'm completely open to changing this stuff, it isn't set in stone.

Feather: the cost of Fortify Attribute (Strength) divided by 5 (which you can see in 'Str to feather'). With vanilla costs, it is cheaper to fortify strength to increase carrying capacity. STR also affects melee, which makes it more useful than feather. So, feather should be less expensive to cast because it isn't as useful.

Elemental Shields: cost of Resist Element * (0.1 * cost of elemental damage). Elemental (Fire, frost, shock) shields provide basic elemental resistance, and also cause proximity elemental damage. In the vanilla game, each 10pts of Elemental Shield magnitude translates into 1pt of damage - hence the 0.1 multiplier.

Swift Swim: 0.5 * cost of fortify attribute. My thinking: swift swim makes you move faster in water, which is like fortifying your speed. However, it's only half as useful because your speed increase is for water, not water and land.

Damage Attribute: 1.5 * Damage Health. I forget why I did this, but probably has something to do with damaging an attribute (permanent damage!) seems powerful. But, I could be totally wrong about its usefulness.
Drain Attribute: 1.5 * Drain Health. Again, I sort of forget why I did this. >.<; I think I was in the middle of tweaking these before I got side-tracked.

Drain Fatigue: same as the cost as Fortify Fatigue. It's just the opposite of fortifying fatigue, so I figured it should cost the same. Inherent increase in cost if you want it to be a ranged attack.
Drain Health: same as the cost of Fortify Health.
Drain Magicka: same as the cost of Fortify Magicka.
Drain Skill: same as the cost of Fortify Skill.

Stunted Magicka: same as the cost for Fortify Maximum Magicka. They are opposites? :unsure:

Weakness to [X]: same as the cost of Resist [X]. Again, the opposites thing.

Blind: 0.01 * cost of Paralyze. My thinking is that Blind is not as useful as paralyze, and it will inherently cost a lot because it needs both a magnitude and a duration. Blind doesn't prevent someone from attacking, but it could certainly be very useful - if only it was affordable to cast a high % for more than 5 seconds! I don't know if the 0.1 makes Blind too inexpensive, though. Any thoughts?

Sound: 0.01 * cost of Silence. My thinking is that you need 100pts of Sound to equal the effect of Silence (effectively, no enemy spells will hit you). Is Sound too powerful now?

Absorb [X]: .75 * (cost of drain [X] + cost of fortify [X]) rounded to the nearest tenths place. Absorption drains an enemy's attribute/magicka/skill/health/fatigue, and fortifies your own. Instead of making Absorb Attribute the full cost of these two spell effects, I gave it a 25% discount in cost (hence the 0.75 multiplier) to make it more feasible than simply making a spell that Drains and Fortifies.

Fortify Attack: cost of Chameleon. My general thought is that Fortifying Attack increases your % chance to hit, whereas Chameleon acts to decrease % chance of getting hit. I'm not sure if I've made one or the other too powerful: it all depends on the cost of chameleon, which is a rather potent effect, but requires both magnitude and duration (which really jacks up spell cost quite quickly!).

Fortify Attribute: 1.5 * cost of fortify health. Yeah, here again, I forgot my reasoning.

Restore Attribute: 1.5 * cost of restore health. I really do think I was in the middle of working on this before I got distracted. >.< Sorry....

All the other changes are arbitrary (don't depend on other spell costs) based on my sense of a spell's usefulness. I could be totally wrong though, which is why I'm asking for your help and advice. I haven't played a pure spellcaster before, so I don't know how easy it is to burn through magicka, or how potent spell effects are at certain magnitudes.

My goal is to have spell effect costs be logical, consistent, and reflective of their usefulness in-game. I am completely open to having high magnitudes/durations be unachievable (as in, cost way more magicka than any player could hope to have) if half-power magnitudes are potent enough (for instance, 50% blind might be too over-powered, let alone 75% or 100%).

Please share your ideas, advice, and feedback! You can post here in this thread, or you can contact me via PM.