One thing that bothered me in Oblivion was the fact that a caster usually had to be wearing some armor in order to get an equal amount of enchantable equipment as a warrior or a thief, but then this brought down their spell effectiveness. Do you guys think this will be returning? Have any suggestions for how it should be handled?

Personally, I'd like to see a system where spell effectiveness is tied to your fatigue, and your fatigue drains faster based on how much/ how heavy the armor you're wearing is. Kind of a mix between Morrowind and Oblivion's systems for handling it.

Robes/mage wear, should have a very positive impact on spells and spell effectiveness, maybe something along the lines of fire robes or robes of fire that drastically increase the power of fire related spells or add a new dynamic to fire related spells.

I don't think armour should directly affect spellcasting effectiveness. It's a totally arbitrary concept, and I don't know where it comes from (I suspect D&D has a lot to answer for), but it's hardly necessary for "class balance" in TES; not least because the whole moronic class concept has barely existed since Morrowind at least, and is at last being completely removed in Skyrim.

How armour should affect fatigue is a more interesting discussion though. It's a difficult balance between gameplay-enriching realism, and gameplay-impairing realism. A subtle (but not negligible) fatigue-related penalty, affecting spellcasting effectiveness indirectly, might be good.

Ok, so the problem is that mages were encouraged to do opposing things: wear armour and not wear armour. They were encouraged to wear armour because of the enchantment benefits. They were discouraged from wearing armour because of the spell effectiveness penalty.

Personally, I don't mind the reduction in spell-effectiveness from wearing armour - although I agree with Fearless Hero that it is an arbitrary concept, and a somewhat clunky (and perhaps even redundant) way of ensuring that there's a reason to play a pure mage over a battlemage.

So I'm inclined to say that the solution is to just make sure there are extra enchantment benefits to the sort of attire mages will wear. Why not just make robes more enchantable? Of course, this would probably mean that you couldn't wear a robe and armour at the same time. I wouldn't be so disappointed with that.

The concept, while probably originally an arbitrary penalty to avoid all wizards turning into battlemages, like Srk said, still has a few feasible explanations. I'm not sure about the Elder Scrolls lore on the topic, but a classic explanation from D&D is that the metal of armour restricts the flow of magic, or that its weight and rigidity restricts your ability to make accurate gestures, which equals reduced efficiency or a chance to fail spell-casting. I think it makes sense. Trying to maintain the place of the archaic wizard is a noble goal. The real problem, in my opinion, is that there is no real options to wear something instead of armour on a number of equipment slots, like cloth gloves and hats instead of gauntlets and helmets.

In my option they should keep the Spell Effectiveness penalty related to armour, but ensure there are options for wearing cloth substitutes that provide no protective qualities but remain enchantable and allow you to customize the look of the your character. I'd even like it if they bought back the mage's dependency of Foci, such as staves, wands or totems to fuel his magical capabilities. Staves in Oblivion were all about providing offensive fire-power to non-mages or additional fire-power to mages, but if they instead were used to increase your spell effectiveness, offsetting the penalties from armour or providing a positive bonus, it might even bring back the usefulness of playing the Gandalf or Merlin type mage, with a pointy hat, robes and staves.

No reason to wear armor, clothes worked just as well, yes you had to wear shirt and pants/ skirt not mage robes as they used two slots. Downside was that you were stuck with the handcuffs and the stupid hoods who only matched robes in an unmoded game.

The spell efficiency was also only a problem with mind control spells at high level, in practise it only affected turn undead and frenzy as they was cheap, if you could command a level 25 enemy you had no need for armor as not much would touch you.

Well, either your or Oblivion's system would work for me.

Maybe there are "magic robes" made from special fabric allowing them to hold better enchantments, but you can't wear them over armor, only capes (made from simpler material)? I would consider such cloth "heavy", maybe even with a penalty to agility (same as metal armor in FONV, AG-1 as a negative effect). You get the needed 100% on casting, better enchantments, but suffer in agility.

Enchantments for the rest of us could be limited to curiass, greaves, shield, and weapon (pluss rings and amulets). There *might* be unique artifacts with enchanted boots or gauntlets, but nothing we can do ourselves. If we get plenty of armor and clothes slots, I don't want the game to turn into enchantment madness like in Morrowind. Normal clothes shouldn't have enchantments as such, only natural resistances to cold, wind, and wetness.

Another approach to the problem would be to have armor restrict the REGENERATION of magicka, not the use of it. Sure, you can cast a couple of decent spells in all that iron or more exotic protection, but then you're done.

I'd like to see it where you can't change armor in mid-combat, so if you unexpectedly enter a fight while wearing a light robe in order to recharge your magicka reserves, you're going to have to survive the fight in it. All that heavy Daedric stuff you're lugging around won't do you a bit of good if you can't change into it. That would also make "broken" armor a real threat: you can't just reach into your pack and whip out a fresh set of pauldrons, and somehow swap them out between sword swings.

Just an idea for the armour issue... Maybe they make it so that while you can multilayer clothing, including armour, only one layer of clothing for that particular slot (body, legs, feet, hands, head) can be enchanted, because of some mystic explanation like the thing how the rings can only be one per hand as the enchantments mess with each other and cause problems. This could be done either by making it so only the top layer or bottom layer could work or so that you could choose it OR that you could only have 1 layer of enchanted item equpped at a time. I vote the first, and make it the top layer.

But, I hear you protest, a robe is a one piece clothing set. It only has limited enchantment capabilitie sand is thus useless to have on top. The solution is this. A robe has enchantment value for every part of your body it covers, so if it covers legs, body and arms, you get 3X the enchantment of a normal sized item. You will however, need 3 grand soul gems to take advantage of this. Although maybe a dragon soul will be even greater than a humans and there will be a stronger soul gem anyway.

What do you think?

Agreed, if you don't have a high armor skill you get tired (lose stamina) if you're wearing heavy armor. Low fatigue means low skills overall.

High level robes should have huge enchantment potential as well.

Maybe it could also be linked to magicka, the more spells you use the more exausted your mage potential with magicka becomes till it comes back.

Definately make lightening a mages enemy.

Huh. I like that actually.

Anyway, going off the OP, the problem is simply that warriors got more pieces of equipment to enchant than mages, well that's an easy fix. If we were looking at a repeat of Oblivion's equipment slots, then they just need to add cloth gloves, and make it so robes only take up the chest slot (taking up both chest and legs was absurd anyway, why would we be going commando under our robes?).

If we get back some layering, then just limit it a little. You can have a cuirass and tunic, or a robe and tunic, or a cuirass and robe, but not all three at once. This gives diversity, while giving everyone the same number of equipment pieces.

There could be the asumption that the mage is capable of casting a resistance to fire (or whatever is needed) spell when the situation arises and as a result does not need to rely on pre-enchanted items. The non-mage needs to stock up. Unfortunately, unless you are role playing a character that doesn't have acesses to certain abilities, the swordman will have access to almost as many spells with the bonus of all the enchantment slots as well.

Well they got yelled at LONG and loud over all that after ob came out.. One has to assume they noticed;/ The question is did they understand?

It's impossible that the entire system has been removed from Skyrim, it's only been removed from Character Creation. You evolve into your Class. The reason is can't be gone is that the Devs have to have a way of quickly grabbing an NPC enemy of a certain class to throw into a dungeon or a battle scene without having to manually tweak millions of settings, sliders, and stat points in order to manually create their chosen enemy class to confront you with on non-random dungeons. The Class system is still there, for Devs using the Creation Kit at the very least. And as the player, you evolve into a Class, which I'm sure at some point does show up in your character sheet. By say 30th level, if you've been practicing destruction magic the most, you'll be called a Wizard. Or if you practices Summoning magic most, you'll be called a Conjurer. If you are warrior who crafts magic items, like your own sword, you may be called a Spellsword. But that would be later, once the system has a full understanding of the way you are playing.

It would be impossible to develop this game quickly without those pre-fabricated templates hard-coded into the system at some level.

I would like to think it was an attempt at making mages act more like mages, instead of encouraging them all become battlemages. I mean, if you can cast spells just as effectively in Daedric or Glass armor, what reason is given for a mage not to wear it for protection? Especially considering that mage robes are practically all one-piece which seriously restricts the number of available enchantment slots.


I like those ideas. Though personally, I'm in the camp that magicka regeneration should be seriously cut back as it is (not encessarilly removed, but enough that you can't rely on it for battles; give those Restore Magicka potions some proper use). Perhaps instead, it could cut the total amount of magicka you can use (like an automatic Drain Magicka effect, except working on percentages instead of absolute points).

Uh, this is The Elder Scrolls game right? I mean the whole point of these games is that you can be anything you want, go anywhere you want, have any skill you want. Any type of restrictions for this type of game (especially a TES game) are a game killer. Plus, this series was specifically intended to be modded. Mods are the only reason why these games last as long as they do.

There is also the whole "lore" thing going on with magic users that wear armor. Most, if not ALL, of the original classes in Morrowind and Oblivion not only encouraged you to wear armor, but it was built into the class system. Battle Mages could wield armor and cast destruction spells, Crusaders were like Paladins.

Now all of a sudden they get rid of the whole "class" system......and you actually want restrictions? If you don't want your character to wear armor, then don't wear armor. It's as simple as that. This is not an online game. Enchanting is IN the game. Enchant a robe. I distinctly remember both of my characters in Morrowind and Oblivion coming across robes that were not only enchanted, but obviously intended to be used as armor.

Try to to stray to far from the core essence of TES games, and that is the ability to do whatever you want as soon as your prisoner PC is free. I am looking forward to creating a character like the Battle Mage or a Paladin.

But not without consequence or penalty. In Oblivion, you could wear heavy armor, but you were encumbered, or you could wear light armor for less encumbrance and less protection. In fact, IIRC, Todd mention that "unarmored" was supposed to work in Oblivion by not having the penatlies of armor (though the overpowered perks ruined that by removing the penalties with the armor, which made unarmored not as viable a choice).


Of course you can still play mixed classes. But they need to be balanced so pure mages are just as viable as Crusaders or Battlemages.. that means restricting your mage abilities when using non-mage skills. A Battlemage isn't going to be as good of a mage as a pure mage, nor as good of a warrior as a pure warrior.

Balance is still important in a single player game, otherwise the whole system can get out of hand and devolve into punishing everyone except for those using a select few play styles.