Gospel. Someone unleash the choir and tell them its Amen and Allelujah time.

Umm.... just pointing out that I made a bit of an ass out of myself earlier because I was certain that (as it should logically be) it was impossible to gain Alteration experience by casting Open on an unlocked door.

That by way of communicating that in thousands of hours of playing the game, I've never done that, or even thought of doing it, even once.

Since I'm pretty sure that we're both playing the same game, the only reasonable conclusion is that it's not the game's fault.

Why tied? tied is stupid, it just doesnt let you do anything while waiting for the cooldown to end.
Thats why i said separate cooldowns, you can cast fireball, and while fireball is loading cooldown - use frostball. It will also drain magicka ofcurse.

I dont think anything should drain all of your magicka at one cast of magic, that would be horrible imo.

Our total magicka increases over time as we progress in level.

If the spell system is anything similar to Oblivion's there will be some spells that can be purchased or created, but cost more magicka than the player has. If you want to cast them as soon as you get enough magicka, then clearly one casting of that powerful spell will drain all your magicka.

It's fun to do this and the high magicka cost makes it more balanced against weaker spells that cost hardly any magicka points.

In a sense your magicka level already serves the purpose that a cooldown function would serve, and if you cast the more powerful version of a spell (equipping the same spell in both hands), then I imagine it would have double the magicka cost.

Not gonna lie I think cooldown times for spells is a terrible idea. There's really no need since magicka already serves the same purpose.
And if you cast a really high level spell of course it's going to drain all your magicka that just makes sens, if you don't want to drain all your magicka in one shot then you would use a less powerful spell.

Well, you didn't have to do it - it was actually a form of cheating. But you just couldn't resist the temptation to cheat - so sad :violin:

Was it really cheating? I don't think so, in most cases. If you choose to invest hours of your game time "studying and practicing your craft" and advancing certain skills that way. . . so what. Your perogative. Which is what the designers claim to want a staple of the game to be. Doing it your way, like that Sinatra song.

I fits along the lines as repetitive spells but im hoping that in this one you can actually use the practice dumbies to work on your melee combat and use that to increase your combat as well as have a person teach new things using them instead of the screen going black and then you knowing it.

How do all,

One possibilty might be base the amount of xp you gain from spells from spell cost. So you practise your spells and gain experience but as you gain those skill levels the cost of the spell lowers (assuming they do this for Skyrim like they did in Oblivion). In this way you could still practise the 'basic' spells but it would take longer than say going out and buying a higher level spell and practising that. This in turn would give your character greater experience points, giving the feeling of 'Hey I'm actually learning more from these newer, powerful spells than my older, weaker ones'. Not sure if this idea could be implemented for other skills as well. i.e. experience for combat skills greater for higher damage inflicted, more sneak experience points if there were more people / more light about whilst remaining undetected etc.

Just a thought at any rate!

That is not without reasoning, Sauron THe Maia. Lol . Not a bad call.

There are mods that do this very well.

A few ideas that work IMO:

• Different schools require different balancing (i.e. number of spells to cast to gain a skill level).
  
• You get more XP from spells that cost more magicka, but the effect isn't linear (i.e. 3x more XP for a spell that costs 4x).
  
• Most schools get reduced XP from casting outside of combat (varies depending on the school, Destruction gets 3x more XP in combat).
  
• As skill increases, more XP is required to gain the next skill level. (Don't recall if vanilla Oblivion did this, but if balanced it means you'll progress at a reasonable rate at a high level by casting expensive spells, but very slowly with cheap spells.)

I like the sound of this, however, if they did the perk system like they did FNV, i will be very dissapointed. i didnt like getting perks every OTHER level. it made me mad...