Path of Sorcery - Magic Perk Overhaul (WIP)

[Plowbat]

Thief player question : will midas touch work on hp bastions such as dragons? *new house planned*

Having a Alduin statue could prove to be quite nice.

 

Your "spell mastery" perk is genius. I really like it a lot.

 

For the "careful preparation", does the self-recast happen every battle during 8 hours, or is it effective only on the next fight that happens in less than 8 hours?

 

Good work as always!

[steelfeathers]

Thief player question : will midas touch work on hp bastions such as dragons? *new house planned*

Having a Alduin statue could prove to be quite nice.

 

Your "spell mastery" perk is genius. I really like it a lot.

 

For the "careful preparation", does the self-recast happen every battle during 8 hours, or is it effective only on the next fight that happens in less than 8 hours?

 

Good work as always!

 

No, Midas Touch doesn't work on dragons. Dragons are annoying from a modder's perspective - it's hard to give the player new ways to deal with them besides straight-forward damage because they are so heavily scripted, and trying to do weird things to them will break soul absorption.

 

(Also, Midas Touch doesn't turn the target into a gold statue - it turns them into a literal pile of gold coins that can be collected.)

 

For Careful Preparation, the re-cast occurs at the start of every battle during the next 8 hours, but it won't work for master-level spells. (Although now that you've got me thinking about it, I can see how that would be overpowered...I might want to restrict it to just one battle, after which it will need to be re-applied)

[avallanche]

Seems really good.

Just a few thoughts, hope you dont mind...

Conjuration:

One of the things that always bothered me in the conjuration tree is that you can raise only one dead / skeleton at time... two with perk. I get the reason for that as more than that can be too crowded and OP, but you rarely get the feel of being a powerful necromancer... I really think that it would be interesting (and different) to see a perk that functions as the ritual stone, giving you a spell or lesser power to raise 4-6 weak / average skeletons as some kind of personal horde. Gives you the option to choose between the usual 1-2 strong summons or a few weaker ones. Mutual exclusive... one or the other. They could even benefit from the same perks actually, Feel No Pain, Plague Carrier and stuff. A few weak ones instead of one tough.

I dont know how to best implement this... maybe just raise the cap while decreasing all status in a mass summoning spell, maybe just spawning the skeletons with fixed stats. Probably at 30-40 near Necromancy so you can use throughout the game. May seems a bit pointless but is something that vanilla and most perk overhauls lacks.

One other thing is about the bound weapons... they usually are too op in early game and too weak at late, even with perk, as their damage dont scale too well.

"Mystic Weapon (20) > Bound weapons do more damage." Is that a fixed value? I think it would be nice to add a secondary effect here to make it increase x% as conjuration level to make it scale better throughout the whole game.

Destruction:

"Ward Breaker (60) > Elemental spells are 50% more effective against resistant targets and 200% more effective against targets casting ward spells."

Isn't that a little OP? Most enemies have resistance and most casters use wards. "Wardbreaker", I get it, but with all the other buffs isnt it a little too much transforming a small advantage into a huge disadvantage just with a (60) perk?

Just a thought but wouldn't it be better if instead of amplifying damage, give another kind of advantage... mana leak for example... when you hit a ward they lose mana faster as they keep it up?

Anyway...

This mod seems very promising. Looking forward to it. Good luck.

Edited September 13, 2015 by avallanche

[steelfeathers]

Thanks for the feedback! You raise some good points.

 

I agree with you about conjured minions...which is why you can create as many skeletons as you want. :) There's no limit on how many you can have at a time. For balance, that benefit is offset by the fact that they don't spawn with weapons (you have to provide their gear), and you have to invest materials in order to create them.

 

I'll definitely look into adjusting bound weapon damage through Mystic Weapon - it's a flat increase at the moment, but I can see how it would be important to have damage scale with player level.

 

To clarify about Ward Breaker: The bonus damage only applies if you use a fire/frost/shock spell against a target that is resistant to THAT element. (Also, I needed something offset the fact that most enemies in Skyrim are resistant to frost damage, which makes it very hard to play as an ice mage.) But I'll think about nerfing it, if it turns out to be too powerful.

[avallanche]

Glad to know... for some reason I thought the cap was applied for bonecraft as well.

About the damage in Ward Breaker, correct me if I'm wrong, but a small vanilla spell like icy spike with a 25 base damage... if we get only 50% buff from destro tree alone, +50% +200% on a nord ice mage casting a ward (quite common) we would get more than 400% base damage in a very fast, spammable spell... right? Then 5 hits would be enough to kill a vanilla boss cryomancer without dual cast... and that's just a apprentice spell. I dont know... maybe my math is off but seems quite a lot.

[steelfeathers]

Hm...thinking aloud here, I don't think Ice Spike would end up being quite as powerful as you fear. With both Augmented perks, plus Ward Breaker, against a Nord mage casting a ward, gives you +400% damage, which for Ice Spike would result in a base damage of 100. BUT you have to take into account that this damage will still be offset by the mage's frost resistance and their ward, so it's not going to do a straight 100 points of damage. Nord blood takes off 50%, which reduces the damage to 50, and the ward blocks 40 of that, so you end up with 10 damage getting through all the defenses.

[avallanche]

You have a point. Sorry.

[steelfeathers]

Nothing to be sorry about. Good questions keep me on my toes.

[Plowbat]

Thanks for the answers!

Indeed turning dragons to gold would cause problems, i was just a little too hyped about this perk.

Also, if in the end you make "careful preparation" one-battle use, make it a lesser power maybe? Or restrict the recast spells to adept or lower, since it's a lvl 25 perk, and let it run indefinitely/longer than 8 hours for every battle (would cause problems with brawls though, you would have to cast the power, then brawl, then cast your spell again. and creating a second power to stop the effect would be tiring).

 

 

I like bound weapons too, and it's true that their damage is generally lacking in late game, but it's because you can't better them at a grindstone. But, with all the bonus applied to it (life/mana/stam leech, bind soul, %armor ignore*, %current mana bonus damage* [*in the overhaul i'm using]), the base damage does not neet to be as high as a godly-smithed weapon, and should not be either.

The scaling you introduce ont your other schools of magic would do just fine for their base damage, i'll take the bound sword as an example : 8+8*0.0075*conjuration level =8-14 base damage (iron to daedric weapon, since dragon is 15 base, and Miraak's sword is 16). Since you can still enchant your gear and level up one-handed mastery, it should be balanced : 8.9 damage lvl 15 conjuration, 11 at lvl 50, 12.5 lvl 75, and finally 14 lvl 100.

Edited September 14, 2015 by Plowbat

[steelfeathers]

Careful preparation is already a lesser power, FYI. You can cast it as often as you want. Edited September 14, 2015 by steelfeathers