The Drain Health 100pts for 1s spell was a big exploit though. And putting it in combo with Weakness to Magicka 100% for 1s was double combo exploit bonuses. The exploit here is that those two spell effects were grossly underestimated when put on a 1s duration.

Paralyze at 1s duration was the same, as is a very short Invisibility spell or short Charm for easy mode persuasion replacement. Or a 1s fortify mercantile before talking to a merchant etc...

Nor do I, it's a ridiculous concept. Menus are not fun, they break up the action, break immersion and are just tedious busywork. That's not what I want to do in my leisure time, which I'm having less and less of. Forcing the player to constantly enter various menus during gameplay is bad game design, it's as simple as that. It's not engaging and severely detracts from the experience.

Ok ill be more blunt.

a weakness to magic 100 for 3 seconds combined with damage 50 1 second..

First hit 50 then 100 then 150 then .... in a few shots your doing 500 plus damage..

I think the magicka regenerated fast enough in Oblivion. At least when you were at high levels ^^

Use pots with a hotkey as well.

In real life you won't be packing a thousand items in a backpack either, but what you'll looking for will be (fairly) instantly available. A real backpack can be packed tactically, you don't put things in by alphabetical order. See where I'm getting at?



I *really* don't want to cut all ties with turn based where everything becomes real time, due to role playing traditionally being *heavily* turn based. Morrowind had dice rolls for success, Oblivion always succeeds. Nice "progress" If everything becomes realtime and minigames, all is lost for me... I'm sorry but that's just a horrible way to design "time pressure" as different players will have different skills, when during role playing it's supposed to be your *characters* skills that matters. Even Larry, which I used to love back in the day, is now an action game based on reactions, and thus completely unplayable for many players. It narrows the userbase, probably not in the best interest of BGS.

Magic was partially overpowered in Oblivion. At low levels it was fairly weak, but mastery meant unstoppable. Mastering stealth or combat didn't make you invincible. Invisibility for 5 seconds and damage health 5 seconds did. You restored your magicka before the spell ran out.


"Sir, may I see your driver's license and registration?"
>>"Yes no"

Yeah! The way it should be!

This shouldn't be too hard to mod for those who want either faster regeneration or a bigger magicka pool, i suspect mage lovers will quickly turn on a re-balancing or in some other's view an over-balancing mod.

When i play as a pure mage i only want to survive of my casting and alchemy skills, however I think being unarmoured should allow you to have the old 'sanctuary' effect from Morrowind which improved your ability to dodge, I don't mind getting extra damage if i don't have a shield spell up I just don't want to be downing a crate of potions every fight - it becomes just another war of attrition as to who has the most potions vs health or magicka pool

I decided to test this theory and hopped on my 360 so I could play vanilla oblivion for the first time in a while. I selected my level 15 Mage and see if this had any credence. 20 minutes later I had killed everything in Bruma using only; a 10% sheild spell; a damage over time tri spell 60 total damage; a weakness to fire spell; the defualt tuturial healing spell and one of a bit greater magnitude; a tri spell that does 45 damage; and my fists backed by a whopping lv 10 hand to hand ( was 18 when I finished ^_^); and I only used o e or two restore health potions. So I don't see what the complaint is. I hated the system because it was bland, boring, and repetitive, which is the primary reason I'm running a SM-Lame setup on my computer in the first place. If you are by chance thinking I got lucky or had too much freedom to move, I also decided to do the serpent pass quest and I don't think anything even touched me once >.>

As pointed out by others it becomes an exploit because you are putting short duration stackable effects into your spell design. Awesome you broke the game, good for you. If you find that fun, hey that is great. But I don't think keeping things like that in the game is good game design. In Morrowind I went the other route long duration low damage attacks, specifically a absorb health style. You became invincible. While an open ended spell design system is great and I don't want it to change they hopefully will take into account more things this time, stackable effects being one of them. On the other side of things,(making invented spell more powerful) the spell effect is what should determine the spells max and min power and duration. Fort strength and feather both having a 100 power is lame IMO. I don't expect them to remove every spell design exploit, because the only way to do that would be to remove spell design. But obvious exploits that have been found in previous games should be dealt with. Not that I am a big fan of 3e D&D but in this case they had named effects and effects with the same name would not stack, only the most powerful would apply. It is a good idea, certain effects like say dmg probably would not be named in this regard. But lets say, feather, fortification effects, chameleon, shield, weakness to effect. Also per effect each spell should have a minimum duration cost so you can't cheese low duration effects, not just weakness to X, but like say feather.(though that exploit was more of a fast travel exploit and I want fast travel gone)

If quaffing potions to maintain magicka reserves is so lame, maybe they should go back to old-school RPG roots: You have so many "slots," and can learn one spell (as in one casting of that spell) in each slot per day. Once you've used up your daily allotment of spells, you have to rest to recharge them because now it's just you and your staff/dagger.

Yeah, I bet after about an hour of that potions wouldn't seem nearly so "lame."



On the one hand I agree with you- but on the other, given the overall direction things have gone since Daggerfall, I think you and I might be best served by preparing ourselves for the eventual and possibly inevitable arrival of "TES VI (or VII, or VIII): The FPS." :sigh:

Based on the recent GI article about the menus in Skyrim, you can no longer hotkey things on the d-pad, instead you have to go to a "favorites" menu to access stuff quicker than going the the normal menus. So now, playing as a pure mage, I'll have to pause the game during most fights because I'll have to use magicka potions during most fights... super.

Depends on the quality of the restore magicka potion your are chugging, whether your are draining or absorbing magicka from your opponent, and whether you chose wisely in matching a class to ethnic perks.

I know I found it a worthwhile challenge in MW to have my character choose a career that challened their ethnic bonus.

Let's face it, it's a mixed bag. Good game design will prevent exploits. But a fully free system can't do it. A GM is able to recognize and counter the playing style of an exploitative player, but no computer can ever hope to achieve this. I don't mind limitations to freedom, in fact I think it is utterly needed. It just have to be presented in a way that "makes sense". For path channeling, there is a difference between never being able to reach that cliff top, to being magically denied at the top by invisible barriers.

I agree. My main point is when you have a exploit that has been discovered in past games and there are fairly obvious solutions that do make sense you should put them in. It makes perfect senses to say spell effects don't stack. Two 100% weakness to magic spells keeps you at 100% weakness to magic at best it refreshes the duration.

One thing to note.. because potions are likely to have a certain weight to them this time instead of mixed potions often weighing nothing at all in ob... the devs only have a limited supply of options they can assume a mage has.. so most fights cant requiire a potion.