Balancing Skyrim - Improtant stuff

[galzohar]

I know there is already a thread about balance, however from what I've seen it went completely overboard, with everyone ignoring the truly game-breaking balance issues.

 

I really thing this game a lot of potential but its balance is absolutely broken (ex: free cast spells, 100% resistances, extreme armor stacking, extreme +damage enchant stacking, mutual skill buffs that stack to infinity) and if fixed it could make the game much much better and more challenging on master difficulty.

 

I think this deserves its own topic because I am seriously considering making a mod that will address everything that I succeed addressing. While I have no modding experience with Bethesda modding, I have some basic modding experience from other games and some basic programming skills, so as long as the tools aren't a nightmare to use, I think I'll be able to actually come up with something that works.

 

 

I'll start with a list of stuff I think are absolutely broken and must be fixed ASAP, then proceed to stuff that are not as important and not as easy to fix.

 

 

% reduction to anything works in a terrible way. This applies to armor, resistances and spell cost reduction. This one is easy to fix after enough tweaking.

 

For armor and resistances, learn a lesson from Blizzard here, and go linear. This have been a great thing from warcraft 3 (RTS), to WoW and they kept it for Diablo 3 too. That means armor and resistances will not add direct % damage reduction, but instead add to the amount of damage you can take before dying in a linear fashion. This means that if it takes exactly 10 hits to kill you, and with 10 armor it takes 11 hits to kill you, the with 20 armor it'll take 12, and with 40 armor it'll take 14. No matter how much armor you stack, you never reach a maximum value, and never become invulnerable even though there is no cap. Resistances work the same way.

 

After that, it is also possible to make armor less effective as you level, so that you will need to upgrade armor to keep the same multipliers. That means that the resistance item you find at level 5 that doubled your ability to survive fire damage, will not double your ability to survive fire damage at higher levels. But again, that's a "further down the line" sort of thing. Initially the formula itself needs to be fixed so that armor/resists don't become better the more armor/resists you have.

 

For spells, something similar can be done, but since spell scaling is already quite broken, I have a better idea here. Instead of spells improving by making them cheaper, just replace all those stats/perks with stats/perks that deal more damage (and maybe a slight cost reduction for the perks), making spells scale more like melee attacks do, and mana efficiency scale only with +mana and +regen stats which is more than enough. Additionally, possibly fix the problems with mana efficiency, making higher rank spells more similar in efficiency to the lower-rank ones, and make dual casting more efficient as well, while nerfing the stagger perk to compensate.

 

 

Next issue is crafting skills. Those are so terrible that they should probably not exist without a major overhaul. For starters I would say that any "fortify X" stat for crafting skills needs to be completely removed from the game, and improvement and enchantments need major nerfing.

 

Potions and alchemy also need major nerfing, such as limiting potions on a 2 minute cooldown which will not expire until you exit combat - You have to wait 2 minutes, then wait until you are out of combat, and only then will you be able to drink another potion.

 

 

Of course, there is probably much more that needs to be done, especially in the player/enemy leveling departments, but I think this is more than enough for a start.

 

If you make suggestions, please don't suggest anything crazier than what I already listed. The other thread got crazy pretty fast with suggestions about tiny and almost irrelevant things that should be far down on the priority list. Please keep this for only the most critical stuff that need fixing badly. For example, if you know of any other major ways to abuse and break the game that I haven't addressed with my suggested changes, please point them out.

 

If you do have past experience in modding Bethesda games, it would be nice if you can say how feasible such changes would be for someone new to modding their games.

[deama]

disagree on some points. I completely utterly hate the idea that armour becomes weaker as you level and you have to improve it so it stays the same, I hated it in dragon age 2 and I will always HATE IT!

 

I like your first idea though...

 

and I like the spell idea too!

 

I hate the crafting idea, no I don't want them removed, I personally either want the crafting skills uncapped, then I would be happy for them to be removed; otherwise I don't see much point, if the enemies scale with you, you would eventually hit a point where you'd be really weak no matter what you do...

 

The potion does make sense... but if you'd like to apply that idea then I think it would be best to improve the effects for them.

[galzohar]

Potions are already very powerful. But of course each and every potion will be considered for overhaul if a global potion cooldown is implemented, as currently some potion types are obviously stronger than others.

 

The main point is to make armor linear, so having more armor doesn't make more armor better, and prevent the "how do I hit the armor cap" discussions. Caps are bad, and massive % damage reduction is even worse. Avoiding them both is important IMO, and linear armor/resist system does just that.

 

 

Making it weaker as you level is something I would still look into, though. Currently you basically have % damage reduction based on your armor regardless of level, which makes it impossible to balance enemy damage for both armored and unarmored characters. Without armor becoming weaker, either high level enemies deal much more damage to compensate and unarmored characters are screwed, or they don't so unarmored characters take reasonable amounts of damage and armored characters become invincible. Armor providing a smaller effective HP multiplier as you level means unarmored and armored characters can remain balanced through the whole game. Same goes for resistances.

 

If you want a heavy armor character to take 1/4 the damage of an unarmored mage (assuming both have gear appropriate to their level) and keep it that way across all levels, then armor must scale down so that someone who upgraded his armor to match his level will still take 1/4 the damage of a mage. Overall I don't think it hurts the feel too much, since in the end when you level up and fight higher level enemies you take more damage anyway, and to manage that extra damage you generally upgrade your gear, and this basic principle doesn't change with such a system.]

 

 

Why don't you like removing stuff that buff your professions (nobody ever uses those stuff in combat, so they're pretty lame and not fun)? And do you disagree that weapon enhancements and enchantments are way too powerful? I mean just watch some youtube videos with guys killing dragons in a couple of shots with a crazy bow, and he didn't even abuse the possible infinite synergy between alchemy and enchanting.