Skyrim Rebalancing

[agburanar]

Because of how reductions scale, a 10% reduction provides 11% more spell casting; a 20% reduction provides 25% morespell casting. Eventually at 50% reduction you hit 100% more, at 75% you hit 300% more, and finally at 100% you reach infinite. It's a curved graph, 1/(1-x). Capping or reducing the magnitude would have a very large effect. Halving the max bonus would quarter the amount of casting. Capping at 75% would allow for 400% casting, which still seems a bit high. Somewhere around 65% would be nearly 300% casting, which seems to be a nice balance.

 

One other way to limit it without removing it - making the reduction effects stack as multiples instead of additions. So two 25% reductions gets you a 45% reduction, three gives you 59% reduction, four gives you 68% reduction, etc.

[ZeroTorrent]

That would seem to solve both issues. The lower levels would still stack decently, while the higher levels don't get out of hand. I'll definitely keep that in mind. Thanks.

[ubergrover]

I am a part of the general consensus; The current system is exploitable and once you reach level 20, it becomes easy-mode. Sure, being powerful is nice, but when I run through every stage of the civil war without caring about my health and one-hitting everyone... and that is without exploiting smithing. (even changing the difficulty isn't a sufficient fix).

Most importantly you said "over 9000" in your post.. nice.

 

I agree with your suggestions, so I'll try and streamline what it seems has been suggested thus far and include my own extensions of your ideas

 

Armor/Weaponry/Perks

In addition to nerfing upgrades, making gear tiers more significant, and adjust smithing/enchanting/heavyarmor/weapon perks, I would make it harder to get smithing/enchanting recipes, either by making it so you have to do quests to learn forging recipes, or you must encounter gear and break it down in a forge (mods are being created to disassemble gear for components) to learn the recipe. As of now it is hard to believe that certain blacksmiths/mages in Skyrim are any better than others since all one needs to do to become the richest, most powerful warrior in Skyrim is to build 100s of iron daggers, enchant them with fear, sell them, and repeat.

 

These concerns can be combined with other mod proposals and will have to be. Most urgent would be for a change in scaling and limiting the maximum potential. The other issues will be sorted out piece by piece, and the more I think about it the more it seems that this mod will have to end up as comprehensive as OOO.

[satsujinka]

One thing I've been thinking about in regards to balance is to remove shops from selling anything higher than orcish. Instead, give blacksmiths the ability to take orders for higher grade things (then you pay them either a large amount of money, or bring them materials and just pay for the labor.) This would give the opening dialog when you enter Whiterun between the blacksmith and the Battle-born some context. Plus it would explain why iron and steel are common and even the Legion just uses steel based stuff, despite how apparently easy it would be to create ebony gear (because in later levels you can make dozens of the stuff without any trouble.)

 

Also on the topic of blacksmiths, while not a rebalance, I think each blacksmith should have their own style of weapon. That is, sure they all have steel swords but they might look slightly different and have different stats. Arguably, forges would also produce different results as both the fuel and the coolant used would change the composition of the metal. In real life, blacksmiths closely guarded the composition of the liquid they used to cool blades, they also stamped their blades with a mark identifying them, and there was always regional differences in the styles of sword made on top of that.

[thefinn]

Rebalancing / Completely Rewriting the character creation/modification is such a good idea. It's almost like Bethesda were just concentrating on the engine and put about 5% into the story and character building. The engine is awesome though.

 

For me I've rerolled so much I've barely got a character past level 40 but the game either seems way too hard or way too easy for most of them. All my stealth characters are so overpowered it's ridiculous. The Mages seem to be the most reasonable where the warriors with 1 handers and shield seem to really hurt a lot when it comes to clearing out the vampire cave in morthal for instance, it is nigh impossible.

 

I'd again.. like to see less emphasis on making one's own armor and enchants also, so as to keep the game balanced for people that don't particularly wish to be blacksmiths.

 

The gameplay seems to leave a bit to be desired coming out of the box. I'll follow your thread and hope something comes of it ;)

[Lekill]

yet another way of dealing with school enchants could be to limit it to less pieces of apparel