So, one of my little side projects is a personal edit of Morrowind Advanced, that at this point is beginning to function as something of a long-lost "sixth plugin" to BTB's Game Improvements. One of the biggest issues I intend to deal with when I update it is the availability of way, way too much Daedric/Ebony/Glass loot from Golden Saints and Dremoras.

This issue has been dealt with a few different ways by different people. Morrowind Advanced just gives Silver weapons to lower-rung enemies. Hotfusion's Economy Adjuster has a script that removed Daedric weapons from Dremoras and Golden Saints when they die. And then, a much, much simpler idea hit me.

Why don't we just add permanent bound equipment abilities to Dremoras and Golden Saints?

It seems to work just fine. I tried it out in-game and the bound equipment disappears when they die. Someone please tell me what I'm missing here, because I can't imagine a solution to a problem like this being so simple. It just can't be.

Well, that seems like a nice simple idea. In actuality, dont they just morph their forms to appear to have something anyway? As for making sure they dont have weapons, easy as adding the ability and minusing the loot i would imagine.

I think that they actually attack with said weapons, which is the reason that people have gone out of their way to try and give them good weapons rather than just dumbing down the loot lists entirely.

Off the top of my head:

- such a change would drastically reduce availability of such items.
- the scripts you ref sound like they already do it and probably are a perf hit
- your proposal would accomplish the same thing and might improve performance

So I'd say it would probably be good for people who want the Availability reduced. ( sadly that isn't me...i don't have the time for the financial struggle irl)

Creatures X nerfs the phat loot carried by golden saint and dremora. That's one of the main reasons I don't use it.

In other words... this will do exactly what I want it to.

I'm just having a hard time believing that I'm the first person to think of this. It strikes me as the sort of idea that somebody before me must have had and then clearly abandoned after discovering something very, very wrong with it.

True it does sound too simple to have been "overlooked" for so many years but then think how often a mod comes out with some minor change that makes everyone slap their forehead and say "why the hell didn't we do that earlier". Sounds like a great idea to me.

I will do just that, then.

Thank j00.

I work on F-15s and mod Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3/NV and Medieval II: Total war, and from all I know about troubleshooting I have to say a lot of times the answer to a long eluded question is a very simple one. And then you're just like... :banghead: .. :celebration:

One thing that I think might affect the gameplay a little is that the bound weapons are probably slightly less effective than the weapons they use in-game, meaning that the combats will be easier than they previously were. But that may well not be a major issue for many people.

And it might also mean that the less magically-adept creatures may well not use their weapons and charge in with their fists, which doesn't seem right. In order for this to work you'd have to find a way ot guarantee their spellcasting behaviour and give them enough magical ability to make casting bound weapons a certainty. Unless of course there's a way of making creatures start with these weapons, but then the duration would kick in from when the cell loads, not when combat starts, meaning that their weapon may have vanished before the PC gets to them.

The thing that bugged me about this whole thing is that the various daedric spirits had permacorpses. Why didn't they just dissipate back into Oblivion on death? If there was a way of making all daedric creaures summoned creatures rather than permanent ones it might be a better fit. But if your prime concern is just removing the cash boost, giving them bound weapons may well be a good answer, if you can get around the problems mentioned above.

As already mentionedCreaturesX deals with this problem by having levelled weapons for dremoras and unique weapons for Golden saints, so you only the dremora lords summoned from the cursed items and a few highly ranked dremoras like the flesh dremora actually have deadric weapons.
Since most people here probably use creatures, people might not see a great problem with this.
I like this approach, as it does not remove but just greatly reduce the high-level weapons you find (does your character really want to loot a 96pound dremora warhammer if it's only worth 700 gold)
Actually this gave me a different problem, since it removed the source of deadric towershields, so it wasn't available at all ( he might afterwards have given Staada one in creaturesX, I don't remember).

I'm quite sure, that the weapons are added to the damage as my experience is that I'm usually crushed when hit by a warhammer, and I'm never in doubt, when I have faced my first two-handed deadric weapon.

A problem with your approach is that the bound equipment will only be one quality, so weapon levelling is removed (or at least greatly reduced) and your level 3 charcter will face the same weapon as your level 20 character instead of a dwemer shortsword and a deadric claymore, I would see that as a problem.
I think Piratelord had a different solution with the horrors it CreaturesX, since they had weapons, but the weapons were removed when they died. This way would also allow for levelled weapons.

Every dremora lord or golden saint pulling out a daedric longsword is a bit worrying, especially a weightless durabilitless one (okay, I probably wasn't going to use disintigrate weapon on something with reflect, but at least normally the large weight slowed them down a bit (I won't usually use burden on such creatures due to the risk of reflection, which would kill me rather quickly)).

It seems a very good idea, this way you can rid of scripts, if I got it right. But I think I'll stick with HotFusion method. The reason? That way I can give Dremoras and Golden Saints random daedric equipment, and it's really funny to see them with a claymore one time and with a longbow another time.

But maybe you can have the same results with bound weapons?

You aren't I made this for my mod, tho I thought people wouldn't be interested in not being able to get the weapons from the creatures so I restricked it to the mod itself :shrug:

You hit it on the nail. There should be always a chance to get a daedric weapon. Giving them a bound weapon spell and a leveled daedric item won't solve the problem. You're not sure which one will be chosen and you could end up fighting a dremora equipping ,for example, an iron longsword. Or they could cast the spell but when it's over they could switch to a weaker weapon (if the deadric equipment drop rate has been sensibly lowered in the levelled list) or even hand to hand.

I have done something very similar for personal use. Dremora Lords have permanent Bound Longsword + Bound Shield, plus a (very) small chance of Daedric drops, only Daedric - why would they use Dwemer equipment? Haven't really played with it, though.

For Golden Saints, I'd use Westly's replacer and chop a 0 from the weapon prices.

What about http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Dispel spell?

I don't really get what you're saying, but nope, there could be a workaround. The bound spell is permanent on the creature, so it doesn't expire until the creature dies. Basically BTB could make another pair of those 2 creatures that would use daedric weapon leveled list that would start appearing after higher PC level and reduce the chance of weapon appearing.

Adding both would not work either because he would have to make different daedric level list depending on what weapon is bound on the creature, or we'd have to bare with fighting against spear only to find a sword inside inventory.

Bound spells don't expire on creatures? This changes everything. Forget my previous posts.

It does if it's an ordinary cast spell, but you can set it up as ability. In that case it's constant until the creature dies, then it disappears.

Since I like solving things with scripting, here's my proposal based upon the concerns mentioned in this thread:

Attach a script to each of the dremora you are concerned with. It will first do a random calculation and determine if the creature will have an actual weapon and armor (perhaps different calc for each one) or if they will be bound. Secondly, it will also do a random calculation to determine if the creature will remain as a corpse upon death or disappear back into Oblivion. That will thoroughly randomize the possibility of getting decent equipment or getting nothing.

I firmly believe that random equipment spawns is the bread and butter of a decent RPG.

This can pretty much be done without any scripting. Not as detailed as what you had in mind, but same effect of bound/random equipment.

How would you determine whether or not they disappear upon death, and make that happen, without a script?

A few things...

One, I guess I should have been more clear, I wanted to be told why this was a bad idea from a technical standpoint, not a balance one. Balance is the whole reason I'm doing this, after all... I just wanted to be sure it would work

Two, as has sort of been pointed out, I've added these as permanent abilities, so things such as spell expiry and dispel are not a concern.

Three, as this is an edit of Morrowind Advanced (which seeks to make the game harder), I really have no problem with every Golden Saint busting out a Daedric Longsword on me. Only higher-level Dremoras are given Battle Axes, though (the rest are given Spears).

Four, scripting is always an option for someone who wants to add more variety (as Fliggerty pointed out, a script could on rare occasion give an actual weapon to the creature in question while removing the bound one). Again, this isn't really a concern for me, since I am of the belief that Daedric equipment *should* be rare and very hard to find. While I *do* agree with Fliggerty on the concept of random drops, I would want to restrict that functionality to equipment that 1) cannot be found by any other means and 2) thus have their values set extremely low so as to not break the economy if you manage to acquire a whole mess of them.

Re: The topic title itself -

Just because nobody thought of a simple thing before doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Just look how long everyone said it was impossible to remove enchantment glow without breaking bumpmaps - The Forgotten Shields even has a second, scripted version of itself to try and kludge around the problem - before Pluginless NoGlow happened, and it's nothing but a texture replacer!