But also by default, anything not in a black gem is not a mortal soul. How can using, for example, a troll's soul, a mindless creature that will viciously kill anything that comes near, be necessarily evil?

Point taken, but there is also one other difference between ammo and souls, trapping souls increases a skill you may not want to increase, picking up ammo does not. It′s rather silly that all of my friends who play Oblivion have a high mysticism skill yet only one of them actually took it as a major skill intending to use it. Really enchants can be a pretty big part of the game and they run out fairly quickly. Yes you also have to take armorer to keep your armor in tact but you can often finish a whole dungeon crawl without having to fully repair your armor. But viewing it from that perspective it may be silly to be fine with armoring but not mysticism but I′ve always found it weird that I ended up as a master of Mysticism by casting only one spell, it′s like becoming a master of alteration by casting your basic shield spell yet being better at casting water walking than a near master of alteration that honed his skills casting both water walking and a basic shield spell. With armorer it′s a little different since you only become better at repairing but nothing else.

Perhaps it would be possible to have a limit on how high you can level whatever skill soul trap will fall under ?

Hmm, interesting. I always just enchanted a weapon with Soul Trap. Never had Mysticism higher than ~25.

Seems likely that soul trap will fall under conjuration, which pretty much will require slowing the rate at which that levels, I think it was the fastest of all in OB. Personally, never used soul trap much (except on Necromancers, oh the irony), as I said earlier I seemed to find a constant stream of lesser to common filled gems.

how is slowly recharging items any different than slowly recharging magicka? Or how bout waiting outside a dungeon for an hour to restore your health? None of that is any different... And making a spell to recharge weapons will just add a step, so instead of 1: find a safe place. 2: wait for an hour. 3: go kill more stuff. its going to be 1: find a safe place. 2: cast spell 3: wait to recharge magicka 4: go kill more stuff.

Making recharging a spell makes the process no different.


Enchantments should recharge slowly over time, having recharge rate increase depending on your enchant skill like mana recharging depended on willpower in oblivion.

At level 44 one of my Oblivion characters has 81 Mysticism skill all from soul trap, honestly never used a single other Mysticism spell on that character whose focus is alteration, restoration and conjuration spells, along with armorer, heavy armor, blunt weapons and block.

By level 50 I could easily have 100 Mysticism since I actually didn′t use enchanted weapons so much for the first few levels so I′ve gone from 25 (think I started with 10 or 15 but had to use trainers to be able to use soul trap) skill in Mysticism to 81 just by casting soul trap for maybe the last 35 levels or so.

I avoid magic weapons in oblivion. The enchantments were so short lived that I'd end up using an empty weapon for two thirds of a trip through an ayleid ruin.

I would like the item's enchantment strength to be a lot higher, drain rate to be slower, and recharge on it's own by drawing power the same way my character recharges magicka.

I also think the difference between a weak, low level weapon, and an extremely powerfully enchanted weapon should be way more than a lousy eight to ten percent. I also think our armor rating should be greater than a vulnerable 85%. At some point I would like my defensive capability to match my other options. Nothing like being mostly immune to everything but a simple melee attack.

.... :blink:

This is something I wouldn't mind. Recharging magical items in OB did get a bit tedious to me, although Morrowind wasn't really any better in that regard. Hopefully they'll have some new system in place rather than just kill a creature and steal it's soul to feed your weapon.

Azura’s star and Umbra solves the problem, Umbra is also nice for sneak attacks.
Later add soultrap for two seconds to weapons with high level enchants.
The spell soultrap for two seconds+ drain health 100 for one is also nice for finishing monsters.
You can run out of charges then fighting bandits, bring some extra soulgems for recharging or summon and trap something.

This one is quite easy. If being trapped in a soul gem is suffering, then it doesn't matter the intelligence of the creature. It's suffering all the same. The same logic that could be used to trap a troll could be used to say it's okay to soul trap the mentally disabled. Each is as sinister as the other.

That's the reason I made up my own reasons for it. I wasn't going to totally ignore such an integral game play mechanic due to the lore. This topic is making me want to look up the lore behind this now.