It would likely be a scripted event of some sort (not an active modder so i ahve no clue tbh on how it would be done) but basically, i'd like to be able to put a spell in the game that resembles the drain life spell from the star wars jedi knight games. Where you incapacitate your foe for a few seconds whilst draining their life energy and using it to heal your own. I can think of a number of ways to balance it in game, either by making it a greater power only or forcing to have a very high mana cost, or perhaps have the life drained and mana used based on what you currently have.

I.e:

I have 100 / 200 mana, i use the spell and let it tick away my mana (say 10/s) to drain energy and healing me (again say 10/s). So i can hold that spell for 10 seconds, getting 100 health back and damaging my foe by 100 hp. But now i'm totally out of mana.

You'd probably need to be vulnerable whilst doing this, so you couldn't get away with popping it out in the middle of a crowd of bad guys. It would be a nice finisher to the last guy in a mob, or perhaps marvellous to use when stealthing through a cave and you wish to take someone down silently.

So, is this a do-able thing? Does something like it exist already?

Absorb health is already in game, so the only difference would be being able to do it stealthily...kinda makes me feel people won′t bother, but I might be wrong. Or then I misunderstood you.

Okay, the way I get it it's like this: You have a spell that keeps your foe from moving and drains him of life while healing yourself, and you can "hold" it, so that you can drain him a little, or drain him so long that he eventually dies.

Without the "holding" part, it's actually a simple Paralyze + Absorb Health spell, or a Calm Humanoid + Absorb Health spell.
With the "holding" part, it's still the same spell, but with a script so that the duration and magicka cost increase the longer you hold down the cast button.

The latter is actually a pretty interesting concept, but it has nothing to do with the spell itself. One could make a script that every On Touch or On Self spell gets longer and drains more magicka the longer you hold down the cast button, possibly with a chance of losing your concentration (based on Willpower and base magicka cost or duration) the longer you hold the spell.
I've been thinking about making a script like that before, but I never got around to it. It's certainly an interesting gameplay change, but making it balanced could be tricky.

You know what, i totally forgot about absorb health when posting this.




But yeah, this is what i'm after, a hold and release style spell.

Plus absorb health and paralyze both work out to be bloody expensive.

If you're on PC, you can make the spell in the CS and set the mana cost manually.

Can i make it a greater power though? So i can have a nice strong paralyze + absorb health, say 4 seconds of paralyse and i dunno, 20 x 4 of absorb, but only have it once per day for balance?

Yes, but you won't be able to buy it from a merchant since they can't sell Greater Powers. You could set up an activator like a new Doomstone (or something) to give it to you. Or you could make your own http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Scripting_Tutorial:_Spell_Tome that you could buy from a merchant (or find in a dungeon).

Might be time to download the construction set again then. I'm currently doing a lets play with a necromancer and something like this works nicely for the odd mob.

Ok so i got the CS and got to work last night, as i was making the basic version of the spell i got to thinking, this works for a vampire, and can i set it up for the final stage of vampirism and have it count as feeding?

The spell i made was simple, 25 absorb over 4 seconds, paralyze yourself and the victim for 5 seconds, and i'll probably add in a calm component for 6 seconds. Is it possible to add new powers to being a vampire? And is it also possible to add a script to the spell that makes it count as feeding and thus returning you to the base stage of vampirism?

I imagine you could set that up the way you describe, but I'm not sure how. I've never fiddled with the vampirism stuff in the CS, so I'm not sure about all the things you'd have to alter. You might want to ask in the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1087887-quick-questions-quick-answers-the-22nd/ thread.

I found that the feed action works on sleeping NPCs only, but there might be wiggle room to skip that and simply set the status to has fed somehow. I'll check it out.

you could check this out: http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27746