reflect damage.....

[billypnats]

those of you that use mods such as FCOM and have a melee character will surely find this "balancing addition" to be quite a nuisance, although I can't speak for all of you, I'm sure that there are those times that you JUST want to go into the CS and delete the evil known as reflect damage. For those of you unfamiliar with how reflect damage+FCOM works, heres a scenario:

 

You wander in the woods and some red goblin (fallen ones) starts to attack you, you slash them once and you notice that 1/5 of your health is gone, for those of you that are not so keen and fast (like me ;D) you only notice that when you die after slashing them a couple of times. The gray prince is even more of a nuisance! I ran up there in the arena, and agronak starts telling me how he wants to die, sure w.e. right? but wait! here's the catch! everytime you damage him with a melee weapon, you lose like 1/3 of your health! Not only is this very annoying, but this also defies the laws of physics (when you turn up the difficulty), depending on the level of difficulty it is, the damage that is reflected back can be anywhere from 2-6 times the "supposed" damage! What happened to conservation of energy?!

 

Well anyways, here's a place to share your thoughts on these things and tell me how I'm supposed to get over these "reflect damage creatures which is everywhere is the oblivion world"

[Vagrant0]

Unfortunately, due to how the game's skill system is setup, you can't really have anything which is remotely hard to kill without a fair amount of reflect damage and reflect spell, in addition to the usual shield, and elemental resists. Although you could give things 4000-8000 health, the downsides to that is just an enemy which takes longer to kill, but provides no challenge. Even still, obscene amounts of health don't do anything for those pieces of godly modded gear, or deadly reflexes. Reflect is really the only solution to making things harder that works with most mod setups.

 

There is however a right way and a wrong way to do it. Damage reflection should never be above 15 or so on any broad range group of opponents, and never above 30 on those opponents that are specially designed to be reflective, and never above 50 for any bosses. Non-bosses that have reflect damage should also always have something to make them weaker in another area, such as an elemental weakness, slow speed, ect. Bosses with damage reflect should always have one or two elements which they can still be hurt by. Afterall, the purpose of reflect is to make people adopt different tactics for different opponents, thus making each encounter a bit more difficult as you try to find out what method works best.

 

In short, don't play a pure melee character, learn to use a bow, or spells. Having a low base damage weapon with a high elemental damage enchantment is also suggested. (rusty) iron daggers are great for this. You lose so much of your health because you are using a high physical damage weapon.

[billypnats]

I'm trying to lower a lot of the reflect damage states on the CS, but it doesn't work because (i think) Im loading the wrong set of data files, its kinda hard to differentiate between which files to load when trying to successfully edit clanfears or atronach, etc. Any help ?

[thePhilanthropy]

I'm trying to lower a lot of the reflect damage states on the CS, but it doesn't work because (i think) Im loading the wrong set of data files, its kinda hard to differentiate between which files to load when trying to successfully edit clanfears or atronach, etc. Any help ?

Well, what you do is this: you take a look at the creature in the CS, lets say one of the Clannfears. What you want to look at now is the SpellList-tab. In there is something called "abClannfear". Every Clannfear has one of these. So, what you have to change is the spell/ability "abClannfear".

Open that ability and lower the magnitude of reflect damage.

The same goes for atronachs. Look at one of their spellLists, inspect the abilities (always of the syntax "ab...."), change the ability.

 

Hope that helps.

[billypnats]

Yea I did that before, but because I'm using FCOM, I don't know whether to load OOO, or francesco's or cobl or other esps that edit clanfears. A could try to load the entire FCOM mod group but for some reason the CS crashes when i save =/

[thePhilanthropy]

Just do it for vanilla Oblivion. Save the esp, and put it to the bottom of your load-order (after all the FCOM stuff). Only the stuff you changed will be overwritten, not the entire FCOM installation. Theoretically.

[billypnats]

k thnx, will try that