In anticipation of Skyrim, I started replaying Oblivion as a mage and one of the most annoying things about magic users is having to constantly watch the spell timers to refresh spells like Feather, Light, Night Eye, Armour, Detect Life, every summon, and every single stat buff spell that only lasts 20-30 seconds (which makes them impractical in combat since you lose a lot of time and magicka re/casting them when you could just blow the enemies up). Given how the leveling system is, I can see why these spells were designed to be constantly recast but I think it's time to move on from this antiquated spell system.

Perhaps these kinds of buff spells could be turned into toggles such that, instead of recasting every 30 seconds, they drain a certain amount of magicka per second. Now, to provide a bonus to people who specialize in magic, you could make the basic spell be the timed buffs that they were in Oblivion but have perks that turn them into toggles. One could even limit how many toggleable spells can be active at any given time but have perks that increase that limit or have the limit based on character level. This buff limit, however, may not be necessary given a magicka drain since having tons of buffs active would eventually lead to a negative magicka regen rate. One could also have the toggled spells contribute to spell skill by having it count as having been cast every 30 seconds.

Not only would this system remove a huge frustration for magic users, it would also reward players for specializing in magic. A toggled system would also reduce the amount of hotkey swapping/menu searching a magic user would need to do. Instead of having to cast 3-5 different hotkeyed buffs at the start of a battle, players could focus on which offensive and debuff spells to cast, especially given the new system of choosing between bolts, flamethrower-like sprays, etc.


TL;DR - Recasting buffs is annoying both in and out of combat, makes many of them fairly useless in combat, and dissuades players from using them even outside combat due to inconvenience.

I like this. Basically you would "equip" the spell effect instead of casting it repeatedly.

I'd like Bethesda to implement as sustained system similar to Dragon Age's. E.g. if you had a shield spell that costs 20 magicka, and your total magicka is 200, then that spell stays active for as long as you want, but sort of reserves 20 magicka for the duration of the spell. So, for the duration of the sustained effect, you only have 180 magicka, until you disable it, then your magicka returns to normal.

Good idea, but not on the top of my list.

For one thing, most of the spells that you would want extended time duration are things like feather (for heavy loot), life detection (for hunting enemies in caves), and nightvision (for really dark caves). Those things, however, are useful only in special circumstances, and you could equip an item enchanted with that spell for unlimited duration for those instances.

For combat buffs like strength/health/defense, you could craft spells to combine them into just one spell to cast before the start of combat. You shouldn't need them while walking around the forest.

OOH, nevermind, I like this guy's idea better!

So, with a Fortify Speed spell that costs 20 magika active, you would simply only have (your_magika-spell_cost) available to you? Fantastic.

Here's a list of Oblivion spells off the top of my head that could be implemented as toggles. This would also remind my fellow magic users out there of some of the annoying times you may have had recasting these.

1) Armour - Being a spellcaster in just clothing means you can take a ton of damage if melee close the gap unless you have your armour spell up. This wasn't so bad in Oblivion since running backwards was just as fast as forward (making kiting the best strategy) but, since this is changing in Skyrim, casters will inevitably end up in melee. Having to recast this while getting staggered/knocked around in melee would be terribly frustrating.

2) Light/Nighteye - Purely for convenience. Generally cast in dark caves where they don't get much brighter over time, thus I generally keep it up throughout a dungeon.

3) Stat buffs - Bonuses to Str, Wis, Speed, etc. These always seemed like they'd be useful if they generally weren't so short in duration. You can fix this once you get access to making your own spells but, until then, they were useless.

4) Chameleon - ... but not Invisibility. Chameleon was only effective if you were sneaking, even at 99%, thus was useful for stealing things (out of combat) and for getting that first sneak attack off (also out of combat). Once detected, chameleon was useless. Obviously, if toggleable, it should be limited to 99% and below to avoid exploitation. Due to these mechanics, having chameleon as a toggle wouldn't be imbalanced since it only really affects non-combat and first strike.

5) Summons - Really annoying to have your zombie/scamp/atronoch that was keeping one enemy occuppied mysteriously disappear without losing much health. As a toggle, the summon would stick around until killed and make a warlock/pet-based build possible (ie. focussed on healing and buffing your pet - maybe make targetted buffs also toggleable, which might be a bit more complicated but certainly doable)

6) Summoned armour and weapons - Useless in combat, ESPECIALLY weapon summons since you have to sheathe your normal weapon and draw your summoned one... and then it disappears just when you needed to block!

Please note that most of this in Morrowind/Oblivion could be fixed once you had access to item enchanting. Doing this, however, often cost a lot in terms of captured souls and gold especially if large magnitude and multiple spells were being enchanted, thus all of these spells were a real pain to use while leveling up. Having them toggled would not only remove the inconvenience of casting these spells but would still provide a bonus for enchanting items with, eg. armour, due to the magicka drain or magicka cap imposed by sustained spells.

Sounds nice. Although I would prefer that sustained spells would limited to lower boost/higher cost than recasted spells.

For things like Khajiit Night Eye definitely. I used a mod that made Night Eye a toggle, since it really doesn't make much sense as a spell.

While checking to see if a mod has already fixed this for Oblivion for my current play through, I found this one called Mighty Magick:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5746

It has both toggled spells that incur magicka drain and other changes that are modules (ie. you can pick and choose which features to implement). I haven't tried it yet but I will tonight!

yes to Dragon Age type sustained spells :thumbsup:

That would be interesting. Maybe the same way damage spells will come in different types, the same thing could work for shields. So you could have a sustained spell reflect that you can keep on for a long time but only has like a 15% chance, or one that's only active while you're holding down the button and drains magic rapidly, but has a high chance to work.

I second the Dragon Age-style constant spells.

Edit: However, Invisibility shouldn't be a constant spell, for obvious reasons.

I'd like it if they were like WoW buffs. They cost a reasonable amount of magicka and would then last for a fair amount of time. (Most buffs on WoW last 1 hour, so Skyrim buffs could be 15 minutes maybe?)

"Sustained spells" is a concept I would like to see in Skyrim.

Certainly sustained spells are convenient, but it makes for more passive play when you set up your buffs/summons in advance. Having to decide whether to spend my time/magicka to replenish a buff, summon a new creature, or cast a heal or an offensive spell increases the number of choices I make during a fight. It's understandable that a party-based game like Dragon Age needs to simplify character management a bit, but in TES we only play one character.

Yeah, I was kind of really sick of always having to recast night eye in Oblivion... Especially when I was playing a Khajiit, I mean seriously I have kitty eyes and I have to cast a spell to see in the dark? I'd very much so would have enjoyed a sustained effect. (Nighteye wouldn't cost anything for Khajiits IMO since they are kitty-cats and should be able to see in dark regardless, while other races would have to cost magicka for sustainance). It would also be a cool idea to have sustained battle abilities that reserve fatigue, something like better sneak, increased attack, defense and so on.

The problem with this approach is that there is no real negative associated with keeping the buff up, no trade-off. This would mean that you wouldn't really have to specialize in magic to buff yourself to some extent (unless they really nerf the magnitudes of lower skill level versions of spells). On the flip side, magic specialists would be too powerful if they could cast every buff on themselves and go into combat with full magicka and no penalty to regen.

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Concerning the list I made, I forgot about spell reflects and absorbs. Those could probably be toggles if either the magnitudes were capped at to some moderate percentage or if they incurred a fairly severe regen or magicka penalty. I would favour the latter to make it more of a conscious strategic choice to either defend against melee or magic attacks. The armour spell could have a similarly steep penalty as well to facilitate this.

On the flip side it would make dispel far more useful when fighting magicians (or far more of a threat if you are a magician).

I am not against the sustained spell but I think there should be some downside to it.

eg. Yes you can toggle sustained spells on and off but your skill in that school does not increase at all while the toggle is active, only when you first start the sustained spell.

This could be easily incorporated into the game, and the little we know about spells and spell making then this could be one of the forms that spells take, to add to the types already suggested like for Destruction - Bolt, Rune/trap and Flamethrower well we could have short time, long time and sustained for passive spells.

I agree,sustained spells ala Dragon Age would be cool. :goodjob:

Ah, but in this system, you would still have to make those decisions since you have a trade-off for sustaining spells. Want to do more dps because the enemy type is low hp but high damage? Deactivate some buffs to free up regen/magicka so that you can cast more offensive magic. Battle is long and you need magicka to heal? Toggle off. Fighting spell caster monsters instead of melee? Deactivate armour and turn on spell absorb/reflect. You still have to make these decisions as you go along but now it's more convenient and you have an incentive to scout ahead so that you can prepare the appropriate buffs. Previously, there was little advantage to scouting since you'd cast the buff before the battle but usually it would run out halfway through (unless you had created your own long lasting spells with high magicka costs). With this system, you could assess the threat and prepare buffs appropriately.

To me, recasting does add a layer of complexity as you said, but it's not the type that I find fun. It would be like if they implemented a hunger/thirst system. Surely, you would need to think more about how far you're going to travel, how long it will take, whether you should leave a dungeon early to get out for food, maybe you would have to scavenge to find food, but none of this is actually fun (for me) to do. It's tedious and doesn't make me feel like an awesome hero (which is one of the whole points of video games - make me feel like I'm awesome).

Instead of babysitting my buff bar, I want to be thinking about who my enemy is, what they're weak against, direct damage or AoE?, positioning, equip weapon or all-out spellcasting?, play defensively (save magicka for healing) or all-in? I don't want to get into battle and keep glancing at my buff bar. The Elder Scrolls series consists of real time games without a true pause system like Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age. It is an action RPG and, as such, should have a focus on keeping the pace up and not being bogged down by watching timers up in the top corner of your screen while all of the interest effects and action happen in the middle.

Even when action (ie. combat) isn't happening, why do I need my exploration, that is, my admiration and inspection of the often beautiful handcrafted landscape put together by the devs, to be interrupted by constantly checking to see when my Light/Feather/Speed spells will wear off?

To me, all of these inconvenience take away from the game rather than add to it.

Wow, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, that would be a huge buff to the importance of dispel magic because you or the enemy caster would need to spend time reactivating your buffs or resummoning. They may need to rebalance dispel to cost a lot so that it can't be spammed (or implement some kind of cooldown - either the spell itself or give an immunity buff to whoever suffered the dispel). In Morrowind and Oblivion, normally I'd just let enemy buffs just run out since they either weren't a significant enough buff to care for or they would only last 20-30 seconds, over which time I would run away and heal.

Personally, I'd be against the penalty you suggested since this would still mean consciously spamming the spell to increase your level (which is something I also hated about Morrowind/Oblivion - nothing like running around spamming your cheapest Light/Armour/Detect Life/Restore Fatigue spell just to level your skills! I agree, however, with leveling destruction through use since this is something that you should be doing anyways to defeat enemies... although you could still create a low magnitude Damage Life Self spell early in Morrowind to vastly outlevel the content).

The ones that I and others have suggested, of either a magicka regen penalty or lowered total magicka through reserve, would be a sufficient penalty such that, if you have lots of buffs up, you compromise your ability to cast other spells. I would suggest that percent skill ups be applied every 30 sec or some similar time. This is not inconsistent with the current system since people could sit around spamming these types of spells anyways for skill ups... except that it would be less boring.

I like this idea. I'd love to see a system where you could bind spells (or, better still, groups of spells) to hotkeys, similar to how augs work in Deus Ex. That way it could also be easily used for very expensive duration-based spells, which drain your magicka faster than it regenerates. If you need spell absorption, you could just quickly tuggle the hotkey to activate it during a section of a fight and watch your magicka bar drain away, then turn it off again when you've killed the spellcaster you were fighting.

Not only would sustained spells make a lot of the buff spells more useful (e.g. using a sustained speed buff when exploring without having to constantly recast), but it would also be a fairer way of gaining skill in those schools of magic.
Oblivion suffered somewhat from almost requiring you to spam cast cheap spells to get your abilities up to the level needed to actually do something useful with them - for example, constantly re-casting detect life until you got enough skill to cast the spells you actually wanted to use, like spell reflection. A system of sustained spells would let you not have to waste your time worrying about skills and let you get on with your adventures. Plus, having skills increase on a timer instead of on every cast would make it harder to artificially raise skills and give them a truer use-based progression, similar to how destruction spells in Oblivion only give skill when they are actively used on a target.

I agree that skill ups from sustained spells based on time sustained rather than per cast in many ways brings spell casting more in line with the progression for melee and bow users since most of their combat-related skills only increase when they either hit a target or are hit for armour skill. I do see one problem with your augs-like idea in that, if single buffs had such significant drains on magicka that even if just that one buff were enabled you had negative magicka regen, you would seriously diminish your ability to use damage-dealing spells. This is why I suggested drains where only if you have a bunch of buffs active would you start having negative regen such that you aren't severely penalized for minimal buff usage (1-3, still positive regen but slower) but would suffer ever increasing penalties for heavy buffing (4+) until you run out of magicka from the negative regen. I would suggest that, when you reach 0 magicka, all of your buffs should drop off since you can't sustain them. This would impose a danger to overbuffing while expending magicka since you'd not only be out of magicka but you'd have to spend time rebuffing.

Of course, some buffs are worth more than others such that one could weigh the magicka drain/reserve according to how valuable they are. Personally, I would make Armour and Absorb/Reflect Magic fairly costly to force mages to choose between physical or magic damage reduction. Light and Nighteye would be fairly inexpensive since they are more for convenience (instead of holding a torch) whereas Detect Life be perhaps moderately costly since it does give a bit of an advantage in terms of scouting and seeing the enemy in poor visibility conditions. Buff magnitude (amount of armour, range of light, etc.) would have to play into the cost accordingly.