Sort of a tangential response to http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1115052-why-perform-your-own-enchanting/. I did enchanting a long time ago, but I realized it just wasn't for me. I've slowly weaned myself of it entirely. I had problems with the balancing and limitations. I wonder how many people are with me on these issues...

• First, you're locked into "exquisite" clothing. There's 1 type of exquisite clothing in vanilla. Males are encouraged by the game's enchanting mechanics to wear rich, gold-embroidered skirts. You look like a foppish Imperial dandy in all those doublets and precious stones. Morrowind is a wild, volcanic island with real dangers and violent weather; an unassuming appearance would seem more sensible and immersive.
  
• And then of course, everything gets overridden by a pink-and-yellow robe that could be used to signal low-flying planes.
  
• As mentioned, Fortify Strength is unambiguously better than Feather. In addition to Feather and Burden, other "interesting" effects (drain/damage fatigue, rally and demoralize, drain skills, the elemental Shields, absorb, reflect, and resist x, et al.) also generally require huge magnitudes for their effects to have a noticeable influence in a fight. This tips the scale far in favor of straight-up damage, or, at the most, weakness + straight-up damage. However, poor effects implementation is not just limited to enchanting, but all magic in general, so it's manageable.
  
• Straight-up damage provides guarantees. Guarantees are good. Whereas pinning your hopes on the chance that you'll absorb, reflect, or resist something will eventually get you killed These things should all be cheaper, or scale differently, in order to reflect the risks.
  
• The good, efficient effects can be incredibly abusive though. Destruction items are ungodly WtFHAⅹ abominations that allow you to fire spells as fast as you can click.
  
• You can swap your active item instantly, perhaps to throw up a brief 100% resist element effect to immunize yourself against spell reflection, and just keep firing unabated.
  
• Enchanting leads the character into lots of bizarre, demented, and ultimately repetitive behavior, such as manufacturing stacks of baubles with various teeny-duration, high-magnitude fortify skill and attribute effects.
  
• Azura's quest is pretty much indispensable, as you want to be spamming dozens of such items. I'm not a huge fan of stock strategies and indispensable quests in such a wonderful, open-ended game.
  
• The only item in the game with a teeny duration and a high magnitude is the Scroll of Icarian Flight. Everything else is uses small magnitudes and long durations. This is a balancing issue. The game should favor these items and make high magnitudes pretty much unattainable somehow.

I'd like to note that Oblivion does indeed address my problems with enchanting, and is the better for it. I still love Morrowind, but it can be gamed a bit hard by this stuff.

The way I see it you have two options:


- Don't play the game if you think that's to difficult for you

- If you want to change something you can always create a mod for your gaming purposes

Thanks. That's very helpful.

Balancing is a fair point. I like to make my own balance with low-level characters, in the case of this run nudity save rings, and the higher-end enchanting abilities. Right around Bloodmoon I'm sure the game will show me what's what.

That or just do something else I do and use it to [censored] with people. Sell a Daedric Tower Shield with CE Paralyze and watch the shopkeeper equip it. Do the same with a damaging ring and marvel when you're charged for murder by an item you don't own or operate. Chameleon up with Whitewalker, a nice shield and ring, and interview vampire clans.

I'm surprised you didn't mention that the enchanting master trainer attacks you on sight.

Actually, Oblivion's enchanting is completely broken and useless, to all intents and purposes.

In contrast, Morrowind's enchanting actually works as a profession/character roleplay ability.

In answer to your complaints... in these games, you can make yourself invincible in any number of ways (100% Chameleon, Levitation, etc). The choice is yours... and that's how it should be. However, in Oblivion, there are many "restrictions" included by the developers that prevent you from choosing. That is not roleplaying.

Of course, to each their own... for me, I do not want developers dictating to my character what they can and cannot do.

Of course, I play both games and many, many others, but for roleplaying, Morrowind offers choice whereas Oblivion offers... well, not much choice, relatively speaking. Oblivion is much more of an action-fantasy game than a fantasy-roleplaying game.

I favor Oblivion's enchanting system, to be honest.

If they wanted to reintroduce it as a profession. Keep Oblivion's style, dumb down the BASE numbers, and make an Enchant skill multiply them.

Actually I thought it was kind of a cool challenge to have to overcome in order to train this powerful skill The only thing that might bother me was that you're really unlikely to find him unless you look him up in the UESP or toolset.



You know, I didn't see it that way. It's a roleplay avenue. That's an excellent point. I'm glad I made this thread after all.

I'm too used to liking Oblivion more for its balance. It forcefully preempts most of the wacky tricks in Morrowind. But... of course! You don't HAVE to use any wacky tricks. And I don't use many. Why didn't I think of this...

It's certainly an interesting way to spin a brokenly unbalanced gameplay element. :/ Not sure that I buy it, but still, I'm not gonna bash someone for trying to be positive about it.


I'm a player who doesn't have many issues with Enchanting. Granted it can be overpowered but you can always restrict yourself from taking it to extremes (same goes for Alchemy). In fact I don't even find I need or want to only enchant the most enchantable gear - Exquisite clothes and Ebony/Daedric items. Frankly, vanilla Morrowind is too easy as it stands so I find that powergaming is pointless, it just makes an easy game slightly easier. I do play with plenty of mods to make the game much harder but even so, I can get by with only using middle- or low-tier items for enchanting. I don't think MW characters really benefit from being buffed up with constant CE gear, I know I can get by with duration enchantments or even none at all. This includes the tougher parts of Tribunal and Bloodmoon.

Yea, I simply never take up Alchemy or Enchanting.