Alright . . .

I've been working on this for the last week or so. Basically, I've discovered that if you're using Forgotten Magic Redone (FMR) and SKYUI together (I'm actually not sure if FMR can be used without SKYUI), for some reason it will cause the dual casting of illusion spells such as fury not to work at the magnitude they're supposed to. Instead of the effect being amplified (I believe it's supposed to effect creatures 2.1 levels higher than the base single cast), it just does the same thing as the single cast for more than double the mana.

I have talked to the mod author Sward66 about this and he's replicated the bug in his game. After a lot of testing done with the fury spell, my findings are as follows:

• Just SKYUI: Double casting fury works 100% of the time.
• Just FMR: Double casting fury works 100% of the time.
• Just SKYUI and FMR: Double casting fury works roughly 5% of the time. When it does work, it works only once that play session and then never again.
• SKUI and the rest of my load order (a lot of MCM mods in here) EXCEPT FMR: Double casting fury works 50% - 75% of the time.
• SKYUI and my entire load order, including FMR: Same results as described above for Just SKYUI and FMR.

The message I get when the spell doesn't work is always something along the lines of "That enemy is too powerful to be affected by this spell." This problem does not affect self-cast mods like invisibility, just illusion mods that affect npcs. Dual casting for other schools of magic seems to work fine (tested it with destruction so far).

Sward66 believes this is some kind of timing error caused by the spell having to run through all the extra behind-the-scenes perks FMR adds once the fury spell hits its target to see if it needs to apply some kind of effect to that target. I should point out that I've looked at my papyrus logs, and I can't find anything for scripts being run on the NPCs I'm testing this with in there. However, I'd like to test the theory. Does anyone know any way to modify the Papyrus or SKYUI settings to open up the window of time that the spell has to run through the possible effects it's checking for? I've seen a lot of Papyrus tweaks on here but I'm not sure which of them apply in my situation.

Also want to again note that even without FMR installed, using fury spells with SKYUI and the rest of my load order installed is not a sure thing. It seems like there's something happening where some of the other MCM using mods I've installed are having the same effect as FMR, but on a much lesser scale. With just SKYUI installed, everything works fine. With SKYUI and the rest of my load order, getting a dual cast fury to have the intended effect on a target within the proper level range is a bit of a crapshoot. With SKYUI, the rest of my mods installed, and FMR, it's a losing bet almost every time. However, removing everything else from my load order doesn't solve the problem between FMR and SKYUI.

I've tried reinstalling SKSE and SKYUI. I have tried downgrading SKSE to the last stable version (was using the alpha). I have tried downgrading through a couple versions of FMR. I have reinstalled Skyrim multiple times on two different SSD drives. I have turned off overclocking on my PC. I can consistently reproduce this with just Skyrim, SKYUI, SKSE and FMR.

The only other thing I have to add is that whether or not it worked seemed to partially depend on what cells I had passed through. If I used Alternate Start - Live Another Life and the "New Member of a guild" Companions starting option, I could have FMR and SKYUI installed and effectively dual-cast fury on Skjor in Jorrvaskr 50% - 75% of the time. He was a good npc to test on, as he starts at level 10. The base effect for single-casting fury is up to level 6 npcs, and the double-casting level cap should be around 12-14. However, if I used the "Camping in the Woods" option with live another life and ran to Jorrvaskr, double-casting fury would barely ever work on him (roughly 5% of the time, same as the situations I listed above). If I started the game normally in the cart to Helgen, it would also barely ever work.

*Whew*

If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd appreciate hearing them.

Let me just go ahead and rule out the possibility of the problem being from SkyUI for you. SkyUI is strictly a UI mod (the plugins do not even reference Skyrim.esm, conflict is impossible), it offers no game play changes aside from Favorites Equipment Sets, which are by request and are not passive changes.

Edit: You've also neglected the scenarios that do not include SkyUI except for the case with only the said mod.

It's more likely to be a problem with the mod itself, the mods MCM, or pretty much any other mod in your load order.

Yup, I've run them through TES5Edit, couldn't find any conflicts. That being said, I can reproduce this everytime with SKYUI and FMR loaded. If I unload SKYUI and just keep FMR loaded, everything works fine.

Previous to this, I found that if I used Trade and Barter and FMR together, without SKYUI loaded, it had the same effect on illusion dual casting. I haven't tried it with any other MCM dependent mods, but I will over the weekend and let you know what I find out. I'm not saying it's a direct incompatibility with SKYUI, it seems more like.... maybe something that SKYUI draws on from SKSE, or some SKSE coding inherent to SKYUI mods, is causing some kind of really core-level conflict. Like I said, I can reproduce this 100% of the time with a totally pristine game with just SKYUI, SKSE and FMR loaded up. Take SKYUI or FMR out of the equation and the problem disappears.

Most MCM configs don't work without the core scripts to SkyUI, it seems more like an issue with the associated MCM to the mod, not SkyUI itself.

Like I said, I can reproduce this using a pristine install and just SKSE, SKYUI and FMR. There may be other mods in the load order I use that can create a problem, but they were not part of the testing process for this. I wiped the whole game completely from my computer, redownloaded the game and did a test with just SKSE, SKYUI and FMR once I had it narrowed down. The other situation under which it seems it might conflict is when something else using the MCM is installed WITHOUT SKYUI being installed.

Update

These mods will work together, I believe, if Forgotten Magic Redone goes BEFORE SKYUI mods and any mods that use SKYUI in the priority list. For some reason BOSS, which I'd been using in all my tests, has all of this mixed up and tells Skyrim to load Forgotten Magic Redone after SKYUI. Going to reinstall my whole mod load order, but I think this is the case. Will update after I try it out with a much larger load order.

Are you using Mod Organizer? And if so are you letting it do it's dynamic BSA loading?

I was using mod organizer and I believe I was using BSA loading. I was not unpacking the bsas, if that's what you're asking. I basically stripped everything down to Vanilla to see if I could isolate this problem a couple days ago, so I don't have any mod manager going right now. Like I said in the post above, I think I have it figured out, so I'm going to reinstall MO and see if I can get it to work.

The dynamic BSA loading feature has been reported to cause timing problems like you describe and unpacking BSAs is definitely not a good idea. So if you run into the problem again with MO tell it not to monkey around with the SkyUI and FMR BSAs and see if that helps.

Thanks, good to know. I took a quick look for this in google and couldn't find anything specific to dynamic bsa loading. Don't suppose you could tell me how to tell it specifically not to monkey with those?