» Fri Mar 04, 2016 11:35 pm Hello fellow Elder Scrollers. I’ve recently revisited Oblivion looking for a hardcoe difficulty experience. After installing the full Fcom package and investing many hours into the game I’ve found that the whole Fcom experience is far too easy for my liking.
A summary of the important mods and my settings:
Spoiler
Fcom
Quest Award Leveller – Since the difficulty is somewhat static, you shouldn’t be punished for managing to do quests earlier on.
Oblivion XP – who wants to become the greatest warrior in Tamriel by sneaking into a wall? One of the slower levelling equations was set. Attribute points per level reduced to 10. Skill points per level reduced to 24. Skills allowed to train per level reduced to 2. Experience from all miscellaneous activities reduced to 0.
Difficulty slider – all the way to the right
Even with all these settings I’ve found the difficulty too easy by discovering the following techniques:
Spoiler
1) My first character was a summoner type mage with Conjuration as the main skill. The problem with Conjuration is that summons are too powerful. Because their damage is not affected by the difficulty slider they deal considerable amounts of damage to enemies. Even more so when you get to summon the badass daedra and other creatures at 100. Summon – sit back and watch.
2) My second character was an Altmer mage with destruction and alchemy as the two main skills backed by the Atronach birthsign. Destruction is OP – far more than conjuration. With spell stacking most enemies fall. It doesn’t matter how tough your foe is. Spell stackan element and then cast a spell of that element. Moreover, OOO makes casting AOE spells cheaper. Although it costs a bit more mana, it’s still very easy to AOE spell stack on groups of daedra, goblins and bandits. After AOE spell stacking you hit with element in a small AOE to send groups of enemies to their doom. While there are some enemies with high spell absorption and resist magic that will give you trouble it’s nothing a poison can’t handle.
3) Having discovered that poisons are also not affected by the difficulty slider I restarted with an Argonian stealthy archer. With Alchemy as one of my major skills I was hoping to play a Witchunter/Agent class. Poisons turned out to be the most OP damaging mechanism. I was able to take out the Orge near the Winged bow and level 1 with 15 damage health poisons. The game doesn’t award you the experience from killing with poisons on many occasions so it becomes annoying to sneak in a last hit with a bow or spell. But anything will die to poisons – they do more damage than any spell will. Poisons are also subject to weakness to poison/weakness to magic spell stacking and the most potent poisons with damage health/fire/shock will bring down any enemy in the game.
OOO also claims to remove many of the exploitable effects from Vanilla – but this is not the case (I did not use any of these). Some of the exploitable effects that still remain include the following:
Spoiler
1) Drain speed – Adding drain speed 100 points for 1 second to any weapon stops enemies from engaging in combat completely. Slash/bash away with impunity while your enemy sheathes/unsheathes their weapon.
2) Resist magic – This has not been disabled at the enchanting alter making it easy to create full 100% resist magic gear.
3) Chameleon – Probably the most broken effect has not been disabled at the enchanting alter. Grand soul gems grant 25% chameleon each. Very easy to reach 100%. Moreover, at 100 illusion a spell exists that gives u 75% chameleon alone. It remains quite easy to achieve 100% chameleon.
4) Calm – This effect makes a task like spell stacking simple. Add a 1 or 2 second calm to your spell stacking spells and enemies will remain stationary waiting for you zap them into oblivion.
I was looking for a hardcoe difficulty challenge but was left disappointed. I was wondering if anyone else out there has had similar experiences with the whole Fcom package.
