Wow. You're a moron. Have you even TRIED using any of the shouts? Some of them are so absurdly overpowered I can barely understand how they made it past the testing process. Try Elemental Fury; It quadruples my damage for about 10 seconds. As long as I have a few stamina potions, It lets me kill anything in the game in 4 seconds, and that's WITHOUT skill-crossed smithing exploiting.

And Storm Shout. Sure, it hits your companions, but if you dont have one, it raqes a large area excessively easily. You don't even need to do anything.

How about Become Ethereal? See that Chest over there? The one behind the five frost trolls and 2 ancient dragons, with the endgame loot in it, with you at level three? Guess what, its yours now, and you didn't even get damaged in the process.

Fire breath is likewise extremely broken...at low levels. I got it at level 3, and proceded to oneshot 3 bandits at once with it, talk about ridiculously powerful.

At level 8, i killed my first giant. I Unrelenting Force'd it, then chopped at it while it spent 10 seconds getting up. On another character I couldn't kill them for another 20 levels. Talk about overpowered!


Sure, if you think you're just going to spam them all over the place like spells, it's not going to work! They're a TACTICAL BENEFIT. I don't think they should have replaced spellmaking, but I dont think that should even be an issue here. There has never been a spell to slow time, or increase your weapon speed, or call a storm, so having a spellmaking function would have essentially no impact other than a good one.

I want both, and that is NOT too much to ask.

And people who never use shouts are stupid. Unless they're RPing, then it's okay.

yes... just yes!
Shouts are cool and all, but compared to spellmaking it's just a silly gimmick

I like shouts. I like spellmaking.

IMO it's probably consoles or 11/11/11 that caused the lack, but idle speculation gets me nowhere.

I didn't think I'd ever use more than Fus Ro Dah, but once I started experimenting with shouts I got a lot of utility out of them. My favorite is Aura Whisper, and it's hotkeyed alongside Throw Voice. Both are highly useful for stealthy dungeon crawls.

Whirlwind sprint is occasionally useful for crossing rivers while I'm on a cliff, saving me a long trek around.

Ice Form has saved my life once or twice, and in emergencies allows me to incapacitate an enemy for a short time.

Fus Ro Dah is nice to get a little distance, along with Etheral Form, Time Stop and Whirlwind sprint.

Ice Breath is... okay. It was more useful at lower levels. I haven't found the Fire shout. Or dragonrend. Or the storm call shout.

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Adding spellmaking would be a little tricky because of the different effects and animations associated with them.. Flame/rune/AOE on caster/ranged AOE/ranged--the UI design/categorization/typing is why I think consoles might be a reason for the lack.

But... Waiting for that mod to come. Hopefully it doesn't do something like add spell making, then completely 'rebalance' something I don't want it to touch.

It wouldn't be that hard. There aren't that many choices; On touch, on target, on self, and cloak(oh, and rune, I guess? You could make that a check box, actually. Would be fun to make GIANT on-self runes). Then throw in AoE as a side-bar, and you're golden.

However, I DON'T want a system like in oblivion, with the sliders. Those were awful. What I want is a system that creates an "Experimental Spell" by combining various ingredients. Using the Experimental Spell reveals what it does, or if it fails. For example, Ice Wraith Teeth plus Frost Salts would make an Ice Spike spell. Use one of each, get, say, 10 damage with a 2 foot radius. Use 2 of each, get 20 damage, 4 foot radius, etc, etc. That way, high level spells would be just as expensive, if not moreso, than making the equivalent physical weapons. However, if I tried to make a spell with fire salts and frost salts together, it would blow me up(probably not killing you. Probably.)

It would also be nice if you could upgrade your existing spells, similar to smithing. Honestly, it would be sweet if Enchanting functioned in this way, just like how Smithing functions for Warrior Types.

It certainly wouldn't be EASY to make, but it would be awesome.

I've never really gotten the 'spreadsheety' comments.

In my view, the reason there's a mages college, the reason there was a mage's guild, the reason scrolls can exist, and spell tomes as well? Magic is a science.

A warrior facing a mage might be saying 'OH CRAP HE"S THROWING FIRE!!', but a fellow mage will look at it, note its properties that can be observed, and field a reasonable guess as to what he's dealing with. It may be something he already knows how to do, it may be something he could replicate once he gets back to the library to write down the formula for the spell, and it might be something beyond his power that inspires him to dive headlong into his studies.

That time at the altar where you're fiddling with numbers is time when your character is deciding which words of power to use, how strongly they need to be said, volume needed, any hand gestures involved, and writing it down. Once satisfied with it, then comes memorization and testing. The Spellmaking Altar abstracted that, rather than turning it into an insufferable minigame where the player has to learn all of that instead of the character.

But in the end, both player and character have something new to use. And there's very little more fun than a new toy, regardless of how bizarre it is! (Like my old spell that damaged me for all but 1hp, just so I could practice Restoration spells on myself.)

I'm fine with it being a "Science", but it is also "Magic". A PC in oblivion will never fail to make a spell, or suffer any adverse effects, while in Skyrim(or oblivion), NPC's apparently screw up all the time, and fry themselves or freeze themselves, or turn themselves green or turn themselves into pure energy or something.

I want them to create a system that demonstrates this.

Sadly, the basic setup for the Shouts could have been a very interesting spellmaking system in the vein you propose, Demiser.

Say, for example, you decide to use the word of power 'AO' as the base of the spell. Then you decide to try out using 'FUS' to modify it, and 'FeyN' to shape it. You end up with a spell centered around Lightning's Force, in a baneful way. Maybe you've just invented the spell to instantly kill Storm Atronachs. If you'd used a different word than 'FUS', you might have made a spell that calms the weather. If you'd swapped FUS and FeyN, so that it was baneful lightning, shaped by force, it might have been a lightning bolt spell...or it might have exploded in your face.

And god forbid you channel too much magicka into the experimental spell, and overdo it. And obviously the most dangerous spells would be ones that summon things, because too much magicka and the creature may never leave (no matter how desperately you want it to), and too little and you may fail to control it.

Both, I shouldn't have to choose... I like both... I don't want to give up Shouts... What's a Dovahkiin without Shouts? ...etc

Gimme Spells and Spellmaking!

That's right, ladies and gents, FreakLore is too lazy to type up his own responses!

That's funny, because I'm pretty sure melee attacks will always outpower archers.

Ethereal is a great shout. You also forgot Slow Time. Unrelenting Force can insta-frag even the toughest enemies if there's enough fall damage.

I want both. At the very least allow me to use dragon souls to upgrade my spells

I think of shouts as gimmicky, and I barely use them. I couldn't care less about being Dragonborn; I only care about living in Tamriel. As such, I would gladly abandon shouts to regain the depth the magic system once had, without a second thought too.

Ooops, wrong post in the wrong thread.

I would sacrifice Dragon Shouts for spellmaking, but would love if some of the effects, like Unrelenting Force or Ice Form, would make a return as spells.

I don't see why shouts and magic should be linked to eachother at all. They're completely different, regardless of their gameplay similarities. While magic is fueled by Magicka, shouts are fueled by your life essence, what the japanese would call your "Ki". They're not really made with mages in mind, which fits with the pro-warrior stance that Skyrim takes as a province.

They should be completely separate, honestly. No linking between the two of them.

I don't really miss spellmaking.

Give me useful default spells over "if you don't make your own you're going to gimp yourself pretty badly" any day. Fix the scaling issue, and gimmie combining spells for a unique effect instead.

I don't think magic was toned down because they added shouts. Magic was toned down in order to make it a bit more versatile as a system, and I think they succeeded. The absolute need to spend time creating spells in a fashion that to me only appeared as exploitative, in order to get something useful out of them, always killed the fun factor of magic for me. If shouts aren't brought along to next TES because it was supposed to be unique to Skyrim game, then by all means come up with something else that is still different from "regular magicka based magic".

And personally I find shouts (as a non magic user) very helpful to my play style. I'm also happy that magic (and alchemy) doesn't have a substitute for absolutely everything in the game, but instead managed to make things a bit more unique and complementary to other things. As much as I like numbers in role playing and feel they should be there, the spell making system went way too far with it and everything looked bland. I usually tend to prefer gameplay over graphics, but not if gameplay is improved by removing it to gain that graphics. Removed spellmaking is an improvement to me, and as a bonus we get to have better graphics supporting it. Magic back to Oblivions "pure numbers" and different glow color? No thanks.

I like dragonshouts although they are really irrelevant in the current system. Most of the dragonshouts wouldve fitted nicely in the different magic schools, such as Unrelenting Shout in mysticism as a form of telekinesis. Or storm call for destruction.

What couldve been interesting spells were completely removed and re-implemented as some crappy magic system with cooldowns.

I wouldn't need spellmaking if spells scaled properly. There are plenty of types of spells but only a few work at any given time.

I would have taken a year delay for spell creation. Its absence is inexcusable.

I agree with this. Think if we had some of these options with spell creation. Whirlwind sprint with flame cloak. Then you could mix storm call with the storm atronachs.

Not a fence-sitter. Melee and archers don't have to give up class abilities for shouts. Mages shouldn't have to either. I think shouts are important to the story, but shouldn't have been a consideration in balancing mage abilities. Pre-release I was OK with the removal of spell-making, but that was on the assumption that stock abilities would be plentiful and varied enough that two-handed casting would be adequate compensation for the loss. I also imagined much better regen, and more opportunities to increase the effectiveness of our spells. Why they thought it would be fun to cast mage armor and then watch its duration expire while we wait for our mana to replenish before entering combat, I can't imagine. Also, why they thought it was OK to starve us for mana while removing alchemy from the roster of magic abilities, I also don't know. We lose our charm spell forcing us to rely on speechcraft, our unlock spell forcing us to rely on lockpicking, and to guzzle potions manufactured using an out-of-archetype skill, and then make these skills count toward leveling. It's like their right hand didn't consider what the left was doing.

Just to be clear, I love the game and I like its reliance on perks, but they really didn't adequately consider how a number of the changes would interact.

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb319/joniscrazy/Xarnacwasright.png

Xarnac was right?

i rarely use shouts on my mage

rather vital on all my other characters though, so no. stop crying, its single player. midas magic will be out when mod tools hit

Where is Xarnac? :laugh:

I think they barely play tested magic at all in favor of shouts.
Who can't see disintegration was just copied over from fallout 3 with a recolor ? That Perk breaks a lot of quests if you manage to disintegrate the wrong person.