I think this is a big problem of Oblivion.
EXAMPLE: damage "4 points for 35 seconds. It's clear that a 5% resistance must reduce the duration to reduce the total damage by about 5%.
But the Bethesda programmers mess up the game.
The game will reduce the magnitude and so the total damage will decrease by 25%

Maybe with the right OBSE plugin Oblivion will calculate better the weaknesses/resistances.
But now you can only use some little trick.


I'm not sure but try this:

The magnitude should be reduced to 0 only with a 100% resistance.
So with a "1 point for X seconds" the magnitude should remain 1.
Maybe it will reduce the duration instead.

Test this: apply a "1 point for X second" damage and apply a 99% resistance.
If the resistance won't affect the magnitude (or if affect the duration), keep reading.

You say you use a spell "3 points for 10 seconds": try instead 3 spells "1 damage for 10 seconds" and see what happens.
If the resistance will apply separately on every single damage, good.
If instead it apply on the whole damage, bad, and I don't have more ideas.

The game doesn't keep the original value, sadly. If I tag someone with a 3dmg/20sec spell and they have minor resistance, it shows up in the debug text as 2 dmg.

I'm trying to play a Damage-over-time themed warlock, and I've discovered the game doesn't do partial effects well AT ALL. A 2 dmg for 10 second spell will only do 1 dmg/sec if your casting effectiveness is anything below 100%; likewise, if that spell was, say, "shock" and your target had 10% shock resistance, it would also only do 1 dmg/sec (10 total). Weaknesses are even worse, since the game always rounds down to the next lowest whole number; 2dmg/25sec spell cast on something with 25% weakness will still only do 50 total damage.

Basically any sort of resistance at all reduces my damage by ~33-50% (currently anyway; my current spells do 1-3 dmg/sec over 15-25 seconds)

Is this fixable? Has it been done? I know it's somewhat obscure since DoT's are not really present in Oblivion, but it'd be nice if it was possible

I think this is a big problem of Oblivion.
EXAMPLE: damage "4 points for 35 seconds. It's clear that a 5% resistance must reduce the duration to reduce the total damage by about 5%.
But the Bethesda programmers mess up the game.
The game will reduce the magnitude and so the total damage will decrease by 25%

That's a pity.... The problem here is only that Bethesda chose to use integer values instead of float to keep track of character's stats so fractional results are lost.

I have just tried this on an unmodified installation of Oblivion, and found that the game clearly does properly track fractional damage. All multipliers - resistances, casting effectiveness, and difficulty penalties to health damage - are accounted for. You can see this yourself using the 'GetAV Health' console command, which prints the decimal places properly. If you cast a damaging spell with a fractional effective magnitude (after all multipliers), the target's health and other stats are damaged accordingly. Note, though, that the Active Effects menu tab will display only integer magnitudes, truncating anything after the decimal point. This can give the illusion that the spell is not doing the correct amount of damage.


Again, a 5% resistance will only block 5% of the total damage regardless of any misleading numbers shown in the menus.


Actor values are stored as 32-bit floating point numbers. They fully support fractional values. The notable exceptions are the base values of attributes and skills, which are stored as unsigned 8-bit integers. However, the only things that operate on these base values are skill experience levelups and Abilities. Normal spells, regular damage, etc. all operate on floating point modifiers to these values. So fractional damage done to attributes and skills is almost always correctly handled as well.

EDIT: actually, the base values for health, magicka, fatigue, and a number of other stats are also stored as integers of varying precision. However, as with skills/attributes, spells and regular damage/use operate on floating point modifiers.

Hmmm. Unless my mods have screwed up the damage calculation, I don't think this is true.

Actually fixing it is far outside my experience however. Any suggestions on who I might approach on something like this?

Can we expect this to eventually be addressed in OBME, or is that plugin the official solution?

Are OBSE plugins able to edit the type of variables? (example from short to long)?
Because I think it could be useful to change the type of variable of attribute from 8-bit to 16-bit.

I don't ask because I wan't a PG with 65536 in all attribute (!!!), but because mods like AVUncapper allow them to increase up to 255 with level-ups (which is the maximum for most RPG games), but any permanent increase by abilities or scripts cause the value to exceed the maximum and restart from 0.

Perhaps it might be wise to clarify a bit on just what "base score" entails.

If I understand correctly, that is the score you would see if the player was standing there nekkid? Does that include racial bonuses? Birthsign?

I put together a http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37717 to do it. Let me know how it works.