The disappoitment of Ennodius Papius.

[InDarkestNight]

To me, the dark botherhood questline has always been the most underwhelming. Its pretty much nothing but radiant quests. Go here, kill this, come back. Reminds of the type of quests you saw in Oblivion. At least they improved on the daedric quests I guess. Then again, it is an improvement over what the darkbotherhood was in oblivion. Despite being an assassin guild, it was surprisingly rare you got to just sneak up to someone and stab them like you would expect. I think the latter half of the question was just you partaking in open combat in the middle of cities.

 

That said, to me the most disappointing quest is the one for Ennodius Papius. When I first go that quest, my immediate thought was 'ooo, a paranoid guy, this is gonna be fun!'. Now, what I was expecting when I found the guy was to find him holed up in a house or something filled with excessive traps and monsters that I would have to get through just to get to him. The reality turned out to be much different. I found him sleeping out in the freaking open dressed in freaking rags. My thought upon seeing this was 'really, you couldn't have made this easier?'. I sneak-attacked him with my bow, looted him, then went on my way.

 

If I was to re-make this quest myself, I would turn it into what I expected to be. I would move him to am abandoned house somewhere in Eastmarch filled with traps and a troll and w/e else I could think of ending in a final showdown with him dressed in full armor with some potions and enchanted gear and w/e else he could've reasonably gotten his hands on to give himself the best chance possible. I guess someone like me could do that, though I haven't had much luck moving npcs in the past (I tried to make a mod once that changed Sofia's spawn location, but the thing never did anything for some reason, in fact opening it up in xEdit it was completely blank, despite my change still being present when I opened in again in the Ck, wtf?) Long story short, I got a bugged creation kit where half its features don't work. I've since managed to deduce that I'm missing multiple files that it should come installed with. That, and the camera controls in the stupid thing are the worst I've ever seen in my entire life. Simply making that one world edit was a freaking nightmare, and it didn't freaking work anyway. Oh, and someone else made the same mod, did the exact same thing I did, and it actually works for utterly no reason. That's great yes, but it still makes no sense.

 

I actually played with the Dark Botherhold of Old mod hoping it would make the questline actually worth something, even if it makes no changes to whats already present. Of course, I never did play through it and I uninstalled it rather quickly because it was giving me all sorts of glitches due to how script heavy it is (I'm the type of player that plays with frostfall and survival mods all the time, and I was running a lot of otther super script heavy mods back then too). I still kinda wish someone would overhaul the darkbrotherhood targets. I realize they can't be given new dialogue, but surely someone could fix it so they're not just hanging out in the middle of the open completely unguarded. Ennodius is probably the most unguarded target you're sent after. At least Lurbuk has that innkeeper watching over him, and most of the targets are in the middle of major cities surrounded by potential witnesses. I mean, even Anoriath was a more worthy target than the supposedly 'paranoid recluse' that is supposed to be Ennodius. Wow he sucks, in a quest line where pretty much every quest sucks. The only reason to do it is for the freaking gear with unique enchants, that's it.