I'd like to start a new character that uses hand to hand as her primary form of attack. I've been reluctant to use it thus far because I've never had much luck with it in previous attempts. I'm here asking for tips and tricks from people who have had success with it before. So heres your chance to convince me that this is a good idea. What I'm mostly looking for is combat strategies but any insight into my character build is also welcome. I'm not crazy about using H2H mods, I'd like to use it as it is in the Vanilla game.

Heres my character build thus far

Race:
-Breton (Female)
Specialization:
- either Magic (to support her numerous magic majors) or stealth (to support her naturaly low H2H skill. I'm not sure if I have enough stealth based skills to justify it as her specialy)
Favorite attributes:
-Edurance
-Intelligence
Sign:
-The Angel (My own creation) --Benevolence: Fortify maximum magicka 1.0, fortify endurance 25, weakness to magicka 50%-- I think that's well balanced
Majors:
-Hand to hand--(Primary form of attack)
-Restoration----(Primary form of healing)
-Illusion--------(Sanctuary as a primary form of defense and many other cool things like Chameleon for stealing and paralyze for combat)
-Alteration------(Open spells and travel spells like water walking, levitation, feather, etc for convenience)
-Alchemy-------(emergency healing/magicka restoration and a source of money)
Minors:
-Unarmored-----(Primary form of defense until I can get decent CE santuary enchantments)
-Mysticism------(Teleporting for convenience and telekinesis for theft and to replace the need for probes as well as soultrap for money and enchantments)
-Mercantile-----(Illusion makes speechcraft unnecessary but merchantile always has at least some value)
-Athletics-------(I'm just looking for fillers now)
-Unsure---------(I may use destruction to lower opponent fatigue)

I don't want acrobatics because I want it as low as possible so I can train it cheaply to increase strength. I will also train Heavy and medium armors and spear to max out endurance as soon as possible.

Any help is apreciated

I would make Unarmored a Major skill, not a Minor.
And since you're using Unarmored, I'll remind you that it is broken in the vanilla game. But the http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=19510 does fix it.

- Unarmored fix. Unarmored skill now gives proper damage reduction when you are fully unarmoured. Previously you had to wear at least one piece of armour to get any armour rating contribution.

Also of note, is the optional Hand to Hand patch it has:

- Strength-based hand to hand damage. Hand to hand damage was only based on the skill level. It now varies with strength. The damage is equivalent to original Morrowind damage at 40 strength and increases up to 2.5x at 100 strength.

I recommend an Imperial, as their racial ability to absorb fatigue is amazing with Hand-to-Hand, also look for damage fatigue or fortify attack/Hand-to-Hand effects in magic items. I'd also have unarmored as a major skill with light armor as a minor, and just wear boots and possibly gloves as well, nothing more.

I've always had a lot of fun with Monk Hand-to-Hand builds, I tend to really not like to choose magic if it can be avoided, save for restoration, because I just think of a hand-to-hand expert as one who wouldn't need to use magic, and instead train the body and mind to their maximum in combat.

I'll just go right ahead and say that hand-to-hand is not efficient in terms of damage. You will never be able to dispatch foes as quickly with H2H as with any decent weapon. Fatigue damage can be upped to decent levels and you will be able to knock out anything in a few hits, but killing them will often take more than that.

Don't get me wrong, I love hand-to-hand and I have had many unarmed martial artist characters. My most recent H2H character I've started with GCD, and her H2H is currently around 150 base, 250 with enchantments; but it still takes her longer to down a skeleton champion than a guy with 100 long blades and a Chrysamere.

I'm not trying to take your enthusiasm - on the contrary: I'm saying this to save you any disappointment over problems you might face on higher levels. The advantage of H2H is its fast advancement. You can get it to 100 in about 30 minutes of fighting and even further if you use GCD.

The reason I use a breton is becuase I realy like magic and I use it a lot. I do know that h2h levels up quickly so I'm thinking if I can manage to get it up to level 30 or 40 early enough I'll be able to get by without race bonuses. The absorb fatigue that imperials get is nice but I've never put much stock in powers that can only be used once a day. I can get similar affects with magic early enough. The reason that I don't have unarmored as a major is as follows: The last Melee-Mage character I used had it and didn't make much use of it. I made it about midway through before I realized that I wasn't wearing any armor (because of the unarmored bug that requires you to wear at least one piece of armor) So I had made it that far without any armor rating at all and by the time I realized it I already had CE santuary enchantments that made me almost invulnerable to physical damage anyway. The way I figure it is that by combining santuary with the fatigue draining affects of h2h I'll almost never get hit. And I'll have most likely maxed out my endurance within a couple hours of casual play anyway so my health will be more than enough to handle normal attacks with ease.

I actualy came up with the magic using premise for the character long before the h2h part. So in my mind this is primarily a magic user who uses h2h instead of weapons or destruction spells. I probably should have mentioned that from the get-go :facepalm:

That bug is fixed by one of the MCP components, so you needn't worry about it if you have that installed.

H2H is a fun skill. My current character is using it. It goes up very rapidly, so you get good at it very fast. Go kill all the mudcrabs around Seyda Neen and you will be doing fine already.

I am not one for a lot of mods....and I have never used MCP to date. My game works wonderfully without it.

I do recommend taking the conjuration skill...specifically to summon bound gauntlets. In addition to providing armor (and getting around the unarmored bug), they also raise H2H and agility by 10 pts..which is extremely helpful.

A really nice thing about H2H is that as you damage your opponents fatigue, their chance to hit with weapons or cast spells goes down dramatically. So I like to go invisible, walk right up to the target and start punching. They can almost not hit me.

I agree wholeheartedly on your unarmored comments btw.

If you are looking for filler skills...I can also suggest marksman. Its another really fun skill. If you have conjuration, then a bound bow is the way to go. Get those pesky cliff racers while the are still way up high in the sky.

You might not even want to actually pick the H2H skill, considering how fast it levels. Just use it and it'll shoot up. Your random-encounter enemies will scale up in power far faster than you will if that skill figures into your character level. It's either that, or rig up your character to have it start absolutely as high as possible, in order to minimize the number of levels you can get from it.

I know the following information is boilerplate for skill usage, but H2H gets really fiendish if you use Fortify Skill. As was already mentioned, that's your only source of extra H2H damage in an unmodded game. And H2H doesn't do much damage at 100.

I should add that you need to emphasize Agility. Agility, Luck, your Sanctuary effect, and (indirectly) the very fact that you're pounding away at your enemy's fatigue are all going to work together to make sure you don't get hit very much. That's preferable to Endurance.

really, all i can say is find a rat and get hitting... once you get to about 30 h2h (which you may start with) travel from town to town using only h2h, it will lvl amazingly quickly (though fighting is slow at first, it gets fast near the end).

I downloaded the MCP mod and I must say that there are many things fixed by it that I never even realized were missing but now that I have them I don't think I'll ever give them up. The updated h2h and fixed unarmored parts are especialy nice for my character. I went ahead and started her pretty much how I said I would and I can say that I'm now enjoying hand to hand much more than I did now that I'm actualy trying it for more than a short time. I find that it almost levels up too fast. I'm reaching new levels before I even get the chance to train my endurance based skills. If I'd gone straight there and stopped to fight everything I saw I think I could easily level up 3 times just going between Seyda Neen and Balmora! The problem for me now is how long it takes to kill things. But between High endurance (health,) restoration magic and alchemy I've been able to handle anything that's come my way thus far. Of course I'm not taking any risks either. I haven't done any dungeon diving yet. I'm going to save that for after I get a good list of custom spells sorted out. For now I'm focusing on maxing out endurance which will only take a couple more levels. Once that's done and I get my spellbook filled out I think I'll be truely devestating. I might take a long time to kill something but I'll still be devestating. It adds a degree of dificulty as well. I've never really considered lowering the difficulty slider but now I don't have to because h2h does it for me. It's certainly more satisfying to see a tiny breton girl beat a kagouti to death with her bare hands than it is to see a mighty nord whack it a couple of times with a giant warhammer and be done.

Just because I've started the character doesn't mean that this is finalized. In fact you could think of her as my prototype. I'm taking all of your notes into consideration and I may end up retiring her early and starting her all over again with a different build. So keep the advide flowing if you can. I may have a lot of experience with morrowind but I only have a little experience with h2h.

Isn't that how we all feel after our first MCP fix.




Well, the magic and curse of Morrowind is there are no builds. At least not in the long term. Usually starting at mid levels, your main skills and attributes become maxed and then the others as well, until you become the paragon of killing and looting.

I whole-heatedly agree. That being said, I would change a few things on your base build:

Race:
-Breton (Female)
Specialization:
- either Magic (to support her numerous magic majors) or stealth (to support her naturaly low H2H skill. I'm not sure if I have enough stealth based skills to justify it as her specialy)
Favorite attributes:
-Edurance
-Intelligence [I would change this to agility, but you can leave at intelligence too.)
Sign:
-The Angel (My own creation) --Benevolence: Fortify maximum magicka 1.0, fortify endurance 25, weakness to magicka 50%-- I think that's well balanced
Majors:
-Hand to hand--(Primary form of attack)
-Restoration----(Primary form of healing) [I generally use Alchemy simply because you would have to change out of spell casting for restoration, which can give enemies their fatigue back (though slowly). Then again, you can boost your skill set with restoration. Just putting it out there.]
-Illusion--------(Sanctuary as a primary form of defense and many other cool things like Chameleon for stealing and paralyze for combat) [You can just take sneak if you want to steal too. But paralyzing may be nice...]
-Alteration------(Open spells and travel spells like water walking, levitation, feather, etc for convenience) [I would use security instead because of the agility bonuses. Recall that you will be running fast too (H2H boosts speed)]
-Alchemy-------(emergency healing/magicka restoration and a source of money) [Why this and restoration?]
Minors:
-Unarmored-----(Primary form of defense until I can get decent CE santuary enchantments)
-Mysticism------(Teleporting for convenience and telekinesis for theft and to replace the need for probes as well as soultrap for money and enchantments)
-Mercantile-----(Illusion makes speechcraft unnecessary but merchantile always has at least some value)
-Athletics-------(I'm just looking for fillers now)
-Unsure---------(I may use destruction to lower opponent fatigue) [Maybe enchant since you have mysticism?]

One thing to note is that NPCs generally require less hits to bring down than animals and creatures since they have less fatigue. You should also be very careful with skeletons since they seem to take forever to bring down (at least in my experience).

That's entirely true. Skeletons have fatigue levels in the crazy domains. Of course, they're great for practice.

If you run MGE, you might find http://adul.net/?p=dl_mwmods_opponent_fatigue_indicator helpful.

I'm thinking of being somewhat less relyant on spells so I may take this advice. I use alchemy quite regularly so my intelligence will skyrocket without much trouble.

I'm leaning this way myself. the problem is that I make a custom spell that pretty much fully restores any damaged attributes. I don't remember the specs on it but I would imagine it requires a fairly high restoration level to be used effectively. I guess you can restore stats at alters of whatever but religious altars are few and far between in the middle of the ashlands or somewhere like that. I could try going without it and see what happens.

I know that combining sneak and chameleon works very well. The thing is that if your at 100% chameleon (which I will be) it doesn't make much difference. Taking that and all of illusion's other goodies I find sneak to be somewhat redundant. Besides I won't be doing much sneaking anyway. I mostly just want illusion for it's plethora of uses.

Running fast can't make me walk on water and I can still easily run out of breath no matter how fast a swimmer I am. This is the same as with illusion and sneak. Considering how effective alteration is at opening locks combined with all of it's other perks I find security rather redundant. As far as the agility increases go I'd actualy rather have security as a misc. skill. I can use it to train with and level-spam much more easily (you know get 10 security levels to without actual leveliung up.) I'm all about efficient leveling. Also again I won't be much of a thief so I wont be needing to open as many doors (every game seems to require that I open at least some locked doors though.) I mostly want alteration for it's other spells.

[edit:]
Upon reflection I realize that security is based on intelligence not agility. (it's based on agility in Oblivion) Since I get more than enough intelligence from alchemy, I won't even be training with security.


In hind sight I can just use absorb fatigue instead of damage fatigue so I don't need destruction anymore. Enchant may be an option. It's uses are somewhat limited because I won't be using any weapons and everything else will have CE enchantments which I can't make on my own anyway. But then I had an idea. Maybe I could make her use enchanted items instead of spells. I could have an inventory full of magic rings and amulets that have all of the cast-on-use effects that I want from from my spells. Of course if I did that I would have to rewrite the whole build. Not to mention that I've never use cast-on-use enchantments all that much and I don't know if I can make them powerful enough to match spells. For now I'll stick to magic but you never know what the future might hold.


As I stand right now my final product will look something like this:
Race:
-Breton (may be subject to change, I just like them for RPing)
Specialization:
- Magic (still covers a majority of my most used skills and I don't need stealth to boost h2h it's fine on it's own)
Favorite attributes:
-Endurance (I love endurance)
-Agility (Everybody says I should use it, I know the benefits I was just unsure if they outwieghed those of other attributes. I still considering strength because of MCP's tweek on h2h)
Sign:
-Unsure (I've decided to use less magic now so I don't need the max-mag-fort from my angel sign. Maybe I'll just use the stock lady sign for it endurance)

Majors:
-H2h (duh, what are we here for?)
-Alchemy (Healing and money)
-Illusion (Santuary for defense, Chameleon for stealth/stealing, Charm/frenzy instead of speechcraft, paralyze work wonderfuly with h2h, I'm sure there are others.)
-Alteration (I like open better than security and it's other more travel related spells are very helpfull.)
-Mysticism (many usefull spells. Teleportation strikes me first but as mentioned earlier telekinesis acts in place of security's probes. Soultrap is also good for making money. Filled soulgems are worth a LOT more than empty ones.)

Minors:
-Unarmored (I still like sanctuary for defense better. I need an armor rating early on but after I get santuary the way I want, I have no need for armor. Honestly it's more like a filler now.)
-Mercantile (No need for speechcraft with illusion but this is still somewhat useful. Just a filler though)
-Athletics (Filler. Doesn't really level up fast enough to be much else.)
- (it's late I can't think anymore)
- (it's late I can't think anymore)

I'm still going to keep playing with the "prototype" that I already have. I'm mostly using her as a way to practice with h2h and get a good idea of what is needed to keep her going. For now I'm just using trainers to level-spam for the sake of speed. When I get down to playing the finalized characeter I'll only do everything myself. But I don't have her yet so keep it coming.

H2H is not usually a skill that most players use or train, so the first time I fought the silly Nord at Raven Rock, it took me an increase from skill level 8 to level 26. That was tedious and the only time I ever crossed a picket line in my life. Never again!
Similar with beating up Ondres Nerano for House Redoran, You don't have to kill him but you do have to beat him up and with a low H2H, bring your lunch or train up.

I have noticed this. I'm hoping the MCP will help with that without unbalancing the skill. I haven't trained my strength enough yet to know. I've also noticed that battles get significantly more dificult when you get teamed on. I got attacked by a kagouti and two wild guars and almost got killed. I had to run back to town so the guards would save me, chugging healing potions the whole way. A level 6 character would normaly be able to handle a couple of guars and a kagouti. I must admit though, I find the added chalenge to be refreshing.

So wait, am I the only one who really has trained it??? My 1st char, who I still play, has a h2h in the 90s... its kind of fun to punch things to death...

Nope. I have a Nord who trained in it for kicks once he reached level 25 or so. He's happily punching fool bandits to death now. I also used H2H for my vampires with VE. It's ridiculously unbalanced once you join the Berne Clan as well (120+ h2h? Consider yourself screwed.), but it's pretty funny to down someone for a whole 15 minutes, then have to save/reload to get them back on their feet again. >:} (I've done it a few times before...)

Best round of Morrowind I had ever played was by training Hand-to-Hand "by hand," so to speak. Roleplayed a monk working for the Temple. Worked up to Disciple rank and from then, made continual assaults into the ghostfence using "Fortify H2H" and lots of punches. Cleared out the whole region a couple of times, going back to Ghostgate & Vivec to chill for several weeks before the next attack.