Why not just limit the enchant skill to 70...

That's 1,300 points of damage spewing out of your enchanted codpiece of whatever literally as fast as you can mash the "use" button. I don't care what you think, feel, or say: THAT is cheap.

I am jealous of your codpiece. It's cooler than Toki's from Metalocalypse.
..Can I touch it?

Ohai. Il Arcimaestro asked for a patch for this same issue in http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1098021-repairing-the-cogs-of-morrowind-no-20/page__view__findpost__p__16348179, and a beta release is forthcoming.

Anyway - I think your current mod enhancements make the game realistic for me...I really have to think twice before I spend my most valuable resource - septims! While I havent played Morrowind before, as I understand it septims were as common as raindrops...

You know, the skill that's so incredibly broken that even spammers think it's cheap? Yeah.

Problem is that I can balance the skill to hell and back as much as I want, and it works perfectly until your Enchant skill goes past around 70. That's when it takes off like a rocket and flies directly into cheese territory, no matter how much I gimp the charge per use GMST.

Take, for example, a 50-point fire on touch enchantment. My mod increases the base cost of fire damage to 6, so that's a 15-point enchantment. Now, let's assume that the cost per charge has been multiplied by a factor of ten. With an Enchant skill of 40, you'll need at least a Flame Atronach soul (105) to get a single casting out of it. Harsh? Yes, actually. But then you remember that enchant uses are instantaneous AND have a 0% failure rate, two advantages that an identical fire spell wouldn't have at a Destruction skill level of 40. For all intents and purposes, things are still balanced at this point.

But then take that same 50-point fire spell and stick a Golden Saint soul on it. At an Enchant skill of 40, you'll still fall just short of getting 4 consecutive uses out of it. Not too bad, given that we ARE talking about a tough soul to acquire. Once the Enchant skill hits 70, the number goes up to 6 uses. That's 300 points of damage near-instantly. It's damn nice, but worthy of having achieved such a high skill level. Still balanced.

Now set the Enchant skill to 100. Now you get 26 uses out of it. In a row. That's 1,300 points of damage spewing out of your enchanted codpiece of whatever literally as fast as you can mash the "use" button. I don't care what you think, feel, or say: THAT is cheap.

And try as I may, I just cannot figure out a way to clamp down on this aside from capping the maximum value of souls, which I REALLY don't want to do. I'm really hoping there's a GMST that addresses the exponentiality (I don't think that's really a word) of the Enchant skill, because I think it would function just perfectly if it were linear, instead. Or, hell, I'll just settle for setting a skill level of 100 to be functionally equivalent to a skill level of 60.

Any thoughts, guys?

(By the way, here's a quick chart of the casting costs for various enchant levels at various levels of the Enchant skill assuming that the cost per charge has been multiplied by a factor of ten: http://btb2.free.fr/temp/rawdata.txt)

Not sure do people use some patches or something, but I'd have enchantment skill at 100, would boost it with a whole set of clothing and armors that are specifically made to boost enchanting skill and I'd still have hard trouble with actually creating an enchantment, so destroying 5 golden saint/ascendant sleeper soul gems to create such a spell is worthy if you ask me (+ you can make ordinary spells more powerful than that, + you also have to charge the thing over again several times to be able to use it again).

The ability to self-create enchantments is even more broken than your ability to use them. You can't create custom spells, after all... so why can you make your own enchantments?

You'll notice that you're not ever very good at it - perhaps a deliberate attempt on the part of the devs who clearly didn't know any better to keep you from making things that were too awesome. Except they never counted on people cheesing fortify intelligence potions or creating fortify enchantment suits.



On the other hand, you're probably also not supposed to have to pay out the ass to have one made for you, either.

Point in case - you're not supposed to be able to create your own enchantments. At least, I don't think.

Well it would sound logical, someone needs to teach you a spell, while you can apply learned spells to your items. I don't suppose you actually think that devs are so stupid and would think that fortifying skills is something the players will aid themselves with. But even with skill over 200 it mostly fails to create enchantments.

In any case

this is ridiculous statement. If we were not supposed to create our own enchantments what's the point in having the skill at all, the only thing that raises with the skill is the chance for successful enchanting. (which is the only think broken about Enchanting). So it's there, and that means we are supposed to use the skill.

this is ridiculous statement. If we were not supposed to create our own enchantments what's the point in having the skill at all, the only thing that raises with the skill is the chance for successful enchanting.

The enchant system as a whole gets what is easily the most drastic of all the overhauls made by my mod. It's no secret that even the developers thought that the skill was unbalanced beyond repair, hence its removal in Oblivion. The "Spells" plugin already launched the first volley against this overpowered beast by denying it many commonly-abused spell effects. My continued efforts in this module remove the ability of enchanted items to naturally regain their spent charges over time, thus forcing you use soul gems for this purpose, as well as greatly increasing the charge cost per magic item use and removing the player's ability to create enchanted items on their own - or constant effect enchantments at all. However, I did make up for all of this with a few concessions, which I'll explain in detail below.

Removing the player's ability to create their own enchantments is probably the one move that'll make players squawk the most, so I suppose I'll start explaining there. Let me just say this: you should not be able to create enchantments by yourself. Period. You can't make your own spells, so why in the name of Odin would it make sense for you to be able to make something infinitely more useful? There's a very good reason that, even with maxed-out stats, you're still very bad at enchanting [censored] without resorting to blatantly exploiting flaws in the game, which is likely the exact same reason that paying to have it done costs an arm and over nine thousand legs. These are obviously the half-assed attempts of the game developers to balance a system that even they knew is so broken that even spammers think it's cheap.

But since I've done what I consider to be "fixing" the enchant system, there's no longer any need to, shall we say, "compensate". Executed properly, the payment requirement for enchantments should only be such that it remains balanced versus the magicka and alchemy skills (as opposed to balanced against itself). I've lowered the cost of enchanting services to a quarter of its original value, or two and a half times the cost of spellcasting, which should hopefully shut most of you up. And for those of you that it doesn't... well, there's always chloroform.

The removal of homemade enchantments actually ended up killing two birds with one stone. The Morrowind Code Patch raised some balance issues (and a few eyebrows) a few releases back when it started allowing players to enchant projectile weapons. As it turned out, this was a rather game-breaking feature due to how much more powerful it rendered your long-range combat abilities. Requiring players to pay for all enchantments, on the other hand, turned out to be just the equalizer I was looking for. I didn't even need to adjust the enchantment capacities for projectiles as the MCP suggests, as the highest values are all conveniently restricted to the highest-quality/rarest ones, and none of them are really high enough to warrant any concern. So, the cash requirement alone is enough to keep things nice and balanced.

Next up is the magic item charge cost per use increase, which serves two purposes. The first is the somewhat obvious intent to balance the skill by limiting the number of uses you can get out of a magic item without having to recharge it. Remember that enchanted items have both a zero-percent failure rate and an instant casting time, meaning that the only limitation to how fast you can dish out the pain from your enchanted codpiece of hellfire is how fast you can spam the "use" key. Many players don't really seem to appreciate the monumental significance of these features except by universally crediting them for the fact that the enchant skill essentially replaces spellcasting about an hour into the game.

The second motive behind the charge cost increase is to make the enchant skill behave more like the magicka skills and less like your one-way ticket from ridiculous to ludicrous. A character with a skill level of 5 in Destruction, for example, has absolutely no chance in hell of successfully casting God's Frost, so why in the hell shouldn't a character with an enchant skill of 5 be equally inept at casting the exact same spell from an enchanted item? The argument that any player good enough to acquire the necessary items and souls to pull off such enchantments deserve whatever they can make out of them is [censored], because even a level 20 character is still going to svck at whatever skills he or she hasn't put any effort into developing. The primary (and, as far as I'm concerned, only) purpose of raising your Enchant skill is to become better at using enchanted items, and this plugin now greatly reflects that purpose far moreso than ever before.

The magnitude by which my mod increases the charge cost per use (10x) results in enchant skill level requirements slightly more prohibitive than the respective required magicka skill level to cast an identical spell, which makes sense given the inherent advantages that enchanted items have (see two paragraphs above in case you've already forgotten) over spellcasting. It also results in a balanced casting cost vs. spell cost ratio - how many charges a magic item expends per use with regards to the size of its enchantment - up until an enchant skill of about 70. Beyond that, there's absolutely no way to balance the skill due to the exponential nature of its growth. So, now it's up to the Morrowind Code Patch to step in and finish the job. And as of this writing, a fix is already in the works.

One interesting effect of all of the changes thus far combined is that paying to have paper enchanted into scrolls becomes a viable, or more specifically, your only option for achieving spell effects that are too far beyond your skill level to otherwise use. I've raised the enchant capacity for paper so that the only (reasonable) limit to what you can get out of it is how much you're willing to pay for it.

As for the fact that magic items no longer recharge on their own, a lot of players will probably also see this as yet another harsh nerfing due to the relative scarcity of soul gems with which to recharge them manually. In response to this, and because I also felt that soul gems were a pain in the ass to find, I've added a restocking supply of them to various merchants throughout the game. These are the same merchants to which I've added several new spells in the "Spells" plugin, mainly because I didn't feel like editing a whole new set of them, but also because their distribution across the map seemed rather appropriate. Most of them are located in either the Ascadian Isles region (Ebonheart and Vivec, specifically) or on Azura's Coast. And none of them are any further north than Fort Buckmoth/Ghostgate, at least until you go as far east as Vos, so be sure to stock up before heading out to West Gash.

Note that, for compatibility reasons, this plugin also contains the same edits to the new soul gem merchants that the "Spells" plugin made to to them (i.e. the new spells it gives them). Using both the "Spells" and "Settings" plugins together will have the latter override the former by default, and will thus result in both sets of changes being made. Just don't [censored] with the default load order of my plugins (like I just know that some [censored] will go and do, anyway) and everything should be all gravy.

Soul gems, while definitely related to the subject at hand, are also something of a separate category. I had previously tanked their values due to an unrelated issue where their recalculated values when filled with souls completely [censored] the game's economy. Once again, the Morrowind Code Patch came to the rescue by making the value of filled soul gems no longer depend on the value of the gem itself, leaving me to set their values to represent their actual worth rather than how broken Morrowind's economy is. It also allowed me more freedom to re-adjust their holding capacities for better balance and to make the higher quality gems more expensive while allowing the lower-end ones to remain cheap.

Lastly, there remained the issue of constant effect enchantments. No amount of making them harder to acquire could really erase the fact that most constant effect enchantments players ever come up with are incredibly cheap and often blatantly exploited inherent flaws in the game. After I quelled such douchebaggery in my "Spells" plugin by removing enchanting privileges from the absolute worst offenders, it was ultimately pointed out to me that constant effect enchantments became, as a result, not really good for anything. And, quite frankly, I agreed. So instead, I've simply removed the ability to create constant effect enchantments altogether, which thus allowed me to reinstate the enchanting option for several effects from which it was removed solely due to rampant constant effect abuse.

The enchant skill progression rates also received a bit of tweaking to better reflect the whole mess of changes mentioned above. Experience can now be gained by fighting with "cast on strikes" weapons, and the experience gain per magic item use has been increased due to the extra effort that now must go into recharging them. On the other hand, I've lowered the experience gain for straight-up recharge spamming. I felt no need to edit the gain for magic item creation because - go figure - you're not allowed to do it anymore. It's probably also worth mentioning that, in addition to soul gems, Arrille now also sells the Soul Trap spell, so it should now be a whole lot easier to raise your skill level right off the bat.

Do you mind posting exactly which GMSTs you are changing, what they do, and the effect of the change? Or at least including that info in the readme? I'm a fan of your mod, but I only use some of it, and I've customized the parts I do use a bit to suit my tastes. I think I'm not the only one who would appreciate the mod documentation helping people along the path of customizing what you're doing with Enchant.

ENCHANT SETTINGS:

iSoulAmountForConstantEffect 2000 (instead of 400)
fMagicItemRechargePerSecond 0.000 (instead of 0.050)
iMagicItemChargeUse 50 (instead of 5)
fSoulGemMult 2.0 (instead of 3.0)

? Disallows constant effect enchantments by making the soul requirement higher than any soul in the game
? Prevents magic items from recharging on their own (you will need to use soul gems for this purpose)
? Multiplies the charges expended by magic items to ten times the normal amount per use
? Sets holding capacity for soul gems to 2x the value of the gem instead of 3x the value

(SKILL) PROGRESSION RATES:

0.20 per "cast on strikes" use (instead of 0.00)
0.40 per magic item use (instead of 0.10)
2.00 per magic item recharge (instead of 5.00)
*5.00 per magic item creation

*This is only listed for reference, since this plugin disallows the action listed

SOUL GEM VALUES:

Petty Soul Gem 5 (instead of 10)
Lesser Soul Gem 15 (instead of 20)
Common Soul Gem 50 (instead of 40)
Greater Soul Gem 100 (instead of 60)
*Grand Soul Gem 300 (instead of 200)
Azura's Star 1,000 (instead of 5,000)

*SOUL GEM CAPACITIES:

Petty Soul Gem 10 (instead of 30)
Lesser Soul Gem 30 (instead of 60)
Common Soul Gem 100 (instead of 120)
Greater Soul Gem 200 (instead of 180)
Grand Soul Gem 600
Azura's Star 2,000 (instead of 15,000... not like it really matters)

*These values are calculated from the fSoulGemMult GMST and are listed here for reference.

*SOUL GEM VENDORS:

Petty/Lesser

Arrille
J'Rasha

Petty/Lesser/Commmon

Aunius Autrus
Diren Vendu
Elynu Saren
Ervona Barys
Melie Frenck
Solea Nuccusius

Lesser/Common/Greater

Aldaril
Fanildil
Nelso Salenim
Saras Orelu

Common/Greater

Amarie Charien
Ferise Varo
Malven Romori
Ulmiso Maloren

*For compatibility, this plugin also makes the same edits to these NPCs as the "Spells" plugin.

SCROLL ENCHANT VALUES:

*Paper 900 (instead of 50)
Rolled Paper 1500 (instead of 100)

*This includes both identical items in the game named "paper".