Hey all,

Just curious what you guys think of adding a feature to the combat system that allows a fighter/mage type character (like a Swordspell) to do special combos that combine both melee and magic in some way when attacking.

In the previous Elder Scrolls if you tried to do both melee combat and attack magic at the same time your character generally came out weaker (early in the game) than if you had specialized in one area from the get go.
(Of course there are exceptions to this... but that is a balancing issue more than anything.)

For example, it would be cool if a fighter/mage could infuse their blade with electricity, which would last a few hits and would dissipate if not used after a minute or so. It wouldn't replace enchanting of course, but would allow a fighter to use magic in a way that is better than swing, shoot, swing, shoot, etc.

Could also have fighter specific spells like "Shock Shield" which actually puts a magical shield around the warrior and delivers shock damage when an enemy strikes the player. This spell would only be available to characters who have high (like 60) points in both an armor and weapon skill. In general I would really like to see lots of skill prerequisite based spells that are based on skills OTHER than just the required school of magic.

I was thinking a bit about this, and I think a system like this would work really well for archers as well. In Oblivion it was near impossible to use enchanted arrows because you had to enchant EVERY SINGLE ONE. With this system an archer could link their bow to a certain spell and every arrow they shot would have that spell connected to it and drain their mana pool.

Anyone?

I would love to see somthing like this, especially for archers. Would be neat to have like a glove of frost spell that adds frost to hand to hand weapons.

I think the way to balance it may be to unlock certain abilities once you reach proficiency with the requisite skills. Say 50 in Swords and 50 in Destruction magic should unlock the flamesword ability. It's never been that fun to play a Battle Mage in any of the TES games in my experience - specialism in melee or magic and not a mix of both, has always been the way to go. I'm interested to see what they do in this department....

Well, they've done very cursory integration between combat and magic before.
- In Morrowind you could enchant a weapon, which is a more permanent implementation of what the OP suggests
- In Oblivion you couldn't enchant stuff yourself, but you could "poison" your weapons with potions which required alchemy.

I'd like to see the two of those return. I think the idea of casting some elemental effect onto a weapon during an encounter undermines the reason you enchant weapons in the first place.

would be cool with combos, I mean, like, use fire to light an arrow etc.

Yea this is a pretty good idea. And it would be fun to see this implemented especially if ur archer.

Some mods for oblivion kind of did this, but it would be cool.

That is the thing, I don't want to undermine enchants, but at the same time doing this would allow enchantments to be MUCH more rare, which I think would be a bonus.

Hm. Id like to see you enhance gloves that way, to increase your hand to hand. I cant really see your freezing your hands to do your dirty work.

Maybe a sword slash then a shield bash then a lightning spell sword goes snap crackle stab. Simple

You wouldn't freeze your hands, you would just channel a freezing spell through your hands every time a punch connects. So it's really no different than a "touch" spell, except you can actually make it useful.

I'd like to see the ability to temporarily enchant one's weapons. It would be a simple spell effect (governed by enchantment skill, assuming it comes back), that would place the desired effect upon one's weapon.

In addition, gauntlets should be able to be enchanted with "cast on strike" so that hand-to-hand users can finally get spell effects.