If you get an item which can be enchanted with +1 feather, it can also be enchanted with +1 strength. The difference? 1 strength point = 5 feather points (1 strength point adds 5 encumbrance points, 1 feather point takes away 1 encumbrance point). Obviously, feather makes you lighter and might help thief players, but who doesn't want the extra damage? Does anybody here prefer CE feather to CE strength?

Holy smokes - I was just pondering this issue earlier this morning. Small world, eh?

One thing I came up with: Feather can reduce your weight to zero, whereas fortify strength can only reduce your encumbrance percentage. For example: you're a mage with a robe, a belt, some potions, some rings, an amulet, etc. You summon bound armor and weapons for weightless melee. Your total encumbrance is around 15. The highest enchantment-capacity-to-weight ratio for any armor or weapon is the Telvanni cephalapod helm - 100 enchant points for only 2 pounds of encumbrance. Using my homemade enchantment spreadsheet, I calculate that you can do a 1-39 constant effect feather or fortify strength. (Assume re-equipping until hitting max of 39). By using Feather, you reduce your actual weight to zero (with another 20ish free pounds until your register any weight). By using fortify strength, you gain an extra 195 encumbrance points, and your weight is still only 17. So, yes, you have much more encumbrance, but you're still somewhere around 2.5% - 5% of your total encumbrance (assuming base strength of between 30-100, plus the 195 additional encumbrance). If you had feather, you'd be a 0% of your encumbrance. What's the difference? Zero encumbrance means you can jump higher and run faster, somewhat negating the need to hit harder and be a tank. Obviously, that benefit disappears as you start to register encumbrance by gathering loot. It's a personal choice, and most people (that I'm aware of) will opt for the fortify strength. But at least now you know the math, and can make your own decision. Happy adventuring!

Hmmm.. Yes, feather is probably better for super light builds, but at 50+ weight, the percentages opt. greatly in fort. strength's favor. TBH, I have a seriously hard time getting builds below 40+ weight. Lemme guess, you were using unarmored and hand-to-hand? Also: Is anyone else the kind of person who likes having EVERYTHING at their disposal? If I have level 60 dungeon raiders, it seems like they almost always come out to have 800-1000 encumbrance points, and 600 lb of stuff. (You can carry a ridiculous amount of stuff with pure fort. strength armor)

Personally, I prefer the Fortify Strength effect. While 0% encumbrance will be better than 2.5%, it becomes more efficient to use Fortify Strength the greater the amount you need to carry. Furthermore, Fortify Strength will help to increase the amount of damage you do. Since I tend to carry a lot of stuff (a little bit of an understatement for my more warrior-esque builds), working with attributes is more effective. Might just be me, but it seems like Fortify Strength at least as accessible, anyway.

Also, if your Speed, Athletics, and/or Acrobatics are high enough, 5% encumbrance versus the 0% will probably be negligible. I usually have those going up constantly as part of my playing preferences. Also, Feather will become very inefficient if you need a very large effect (100 pts. Feather = 20 pts. Fortify Strength). If you are not actively working on those and you can keep your encumbrance way down, though, you might do better with Feather.

As far as temporary effects go, though, you will definitely have to choose Feather if you have Alteration as a major/minor but do not have Restoration in one of those places. Longer duration Restoration effects are difficult to cast without a fair level of skill and quite a bit of magicka, and, while it is annoying, casting one of the stock Feather spells a few times over to get to a container or vendor will be a lot easier than trying to raise your Restoration fifty times to make the other option more viable.

Or, of course, if you play the awesome mage character with access to all the spell effects you want, you can do both as needed. Problem solved.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply I'd choose Feather - in fact, one of my first pay-for-enchantment itmes was a CE Daedric tower shield with 1-89 fortify strength (many characters ago...). Thing is, I'm an engineer, and I like to find devil's-advocate scenarios in the math if I can. And, yes, the character I'm currently playing has encumbrance of 20 after unloading loot and tidying up the house. I wear pants, rings, and an amulet. All weapons and armor is summoned. I make my own potions that range from 0.05 to 0.10 lbs. Very minimalist dude.

In general, if I want to carry more, I use fortify strength, not feather, for precisely this reason. It's just more efficient to use the former because since one point of extra strength gives you give five extra points of encumberbance, whereas every point of feather reduces your encumbrance by one. In the end, if you enchant the same item, say, an exquisite amulet, with fortify strength, it will allow you to carry more extra loot than feather, assuming you use the strongest effect possible with both enchantments, and the strength also raises your damage, all the feather does is reduce your weight. I've never actually taken into account that feather can potentially reduce your weight to zero before, but even that is a pretty small advantage, considering that when I use feather or fortify strength, it's because I want to carry more loot, when I want to be able to carry some especially heavy loot, what I'm usually thinking of is how to maximize the amount of items I can carry, how much a percentage of my overall carrying capacity the loot ends up taking up is not my main concern. And in any case, usually if I'm carrying enough weight to need extra encumbrance, I figure it's unlikely that I'll be able to get enough feather to reduce my weight to zero, so I'd still just not bother with constant effect feather enchantments. Now feather spells on the other hand might be worthwhile, if one were playing a character who is skilled in alteration but not restoration, and for potions I'd favor feather over fortify strength as it seems to be easier to find reletively cheap ingredients with feather effects than fortify strength.

In short, I'd say this is just one of the many balance issues with Morrowind, and in constant effect enchantments, feather is simply inferior to fortify strength. One would think that feather would be considerably cheaper than fortify strength, enough so that for the enchantment of one point of fortify strength, you can get enough points of feather that it outweighs the increaed carrying capacity of fortify strength, after all, with feather, you don't get increased melee damage, so one would think it would make up for this disadvantage by being a more efficient way to carry more loot, but that's simply not the way the game is designed.

I tend to look at it like this:

Feather(x)-------------------------normal(y)-----------------------fortify strength(z)


Let's say if you have an exquisite ring with (x) amount of feather reducing your encumberance on one end and a exquisite ring (z) amount of fortify strength on it then you have doubled the amount you can normally (y) carry.

I haven't tried this out yet to see if it's true as I don't usually use feather.

I may be totally wrong too.

The only issue with the above equation is that if it's any decent amount of weight (say 100 or so), it's off quite bit. You can rack up about 150 CE feather using the 1-x method, making your weight very low. Even so, 150 feather = 750 extra encumbrance points.

to much added strenght can have less desirable effects as well, the game gets easier,your weapons breaks sooner,you kill your enemies faster.

feather doesn′t do that,it can actually be a good thing

With several rings, amulet and armors enchanted with CE Fortify strength, I raised it at 216 pts. I can carry 1080 pts. As you say, the game is now way too easy, even with the difficulty slider at 100 :confused:

I ′m familiar with that experience, the only thing that was a bit challenging with fortified strenght way up,was some "boss-creatures",and a mod I used then,mca with more enemies add-on,who put on a good fight.The rest was meh.
Should mention I adjusted the cost for feather so it was slightly cheaper to use,so I had belt of feather,ring of feather and such,some fortify strenght,still very useful but lessened it some.

Custom made enchantments in the unmodded game are so imbalanced to begin with I don't use any. Feather potions and enchantments seem to be more frequent than fortify str (excluding alcohol). Fortify Strength probably isnt even the best ce effect. Restore Health, Sanctuary or chameleon can make yo compeltely invulnerable (or close to it).

The only down side that I can see to using Fortify Strength over Feather is that you'll have to do far more frequent weapon repairs. The damage to your weapon is directly related to your strength, so a heavily fortified Marksman character will do a number on a bow in only a few shots, since bow wear is fairly extreme.

Take Stendarr's Hammer as the ultimate example: if you fortify your strength sufficiently to lift the thing, you will break it on the first swing. I'm not sure if anyone's ever made a Feather spell strong enough to carry it, though.

Actually... if you fortify intelligence via alchemy to ~20,000 then you can easily make 1,000-lb feather potions. And they last quite a while too. Just in case you really want to use that beast...