Redesigning Magicka in Skyrim

[aaroc]

I know the CK isn't out yet, but I figure it's never to early to start planning out the mod I plan to make. It highly annoys me that, as a warrior, gaining weapon skills, I'm constantly getting stronger and doing more damage. I can create my own weapons, find weapon upgrades in dungeons, or even just buy a weapon upgrade fro a vendor. As my weapon skill increases, my weapon of said skill does more damage, plus I can invest perks to increase that damage even further. I can improve my multitude of weapons at a grinding stone so they do more damage, and I can even enchant my armor so that my weapons do more damage, plus I can even enchant my armor so that I can improve the damage of my weapons even further. Do you see what I'm getting at yet?

 

As a mage, however, my firebolt spell does 20 damage. Increasing my destruction skill lets me cast more of them. I can invest two perks to increase that damage to 30, but can never go any higher, no matter what I do. Once I get Fireball, Firebolt is basically obsolete.

 

Does anybody else see the problem here? The goal of the mod that I ant to create is to improve Destruction spells based on your Destruction skill, rather than decreasing the cost, because, really, that's lame. What I inten to o is to redesign the Destruction school of magic so that all spells do roughly the same amount of damage, but have their uses in different situations. For example, between Flames, Fireball, and Firebolt, one would use Fireball against a single ranged enemy, Firebolt against a group of enemies, and Flames against a close enemy. And all these spells would do roughly the same amount of damage while having different resource efficiency and different situational uses.

 

If I recall correctly, this was fairly simple to change in Morowind and Oblivion because they already had a variable for effectiveness of Destruction spells based on skill, but it was set at 0 by default. Hopefully the same is true for Skyrim. I would also like to somehow make having more magicka deal more damage via Destruction spells, but on a much smaller scale than through Destruction skill scaling.

 

Of course the base cost of Destruction spells will need to be slightly reduced with this model, but I think I have a general idea for how I want the spells to work. For this I'll be using the fire spells, but the same will apply to Frost and Shock spells as well, and they will continue to have their normal uses.

 

Flames: High damage, short range, medium cost, single target

 

Firebolt: Medium damage, long range, low cost, single target (possibly switch Flames to Apprentice and Firebolt to Novice?)

 

Fire Rune: No changes

 

Fireball: Low Damage, Long Range, Medium Cost, Area of Affect

 

Flame Cloak: No Changes

 

Incinerate: High Damage, Long Range, Medium Cost, Single Target (Will basically replace Firebolt, though Firebolt will still be useful against weaker enemies)

 

Wall of Flames: No Changes

 

Master Spells: No Changes

 

I'm thinking that the damage done will be based on a percentage of your Destruction skill. For example, Fire Rune is an Apprentice level (skill level 25) spell and does 50 damage without the mod, so I'm thinking it will do double your destruction skill in damage, or something like that. Unmodded, Fireball does 40 damage and is and Adept (skill 50) spell, so 80% of destruction skill in damage seems like a good number for it. Firebolt is Apprentice and does 25 damage, so 100% seems like a good idea, and I'm not sure exactly how to work Flames. I'm thinking maybe 110% per second?

 

Hopefully I'm able to implement this as planned, but I guess we'll see. Any thoughts/comments on this idea?

Edited December 16, 2011 by aaroc

[Darksun45230]

You mean you plan to do what others have already done?

 

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2275

 

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=870

 

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=382

 

Okay, well good luck on your project. I just have a one concern.

 

Flames: High damage, short range, medium cost, single target

 

You do realize that we get Flames as our starting spell, correct? It's only going to hurt Mages early on if it has a higher cost.

[aaroc]

Yes, I do realize you get Flames as your initial spell, which is why I would probably switch Firebolt and Flames, so that Firebolt is the default spell instead of Flames, if it can be done, which it probably can.

 

I guess my mod would be closest to Balanced Magicka by mysty. I did a search on the nexus before, but I think I didn't read the whole description or something because that one actually looks a lot like what I was planning on doing. I'll still probably putz around with this mod once the CK comes out, just because I like messing around with modding in TES games, though.

[haerual]

Destruction does ridiculously good damage early on when you're working on it from 20 to 100 as your primary skill. The play style lets you focus only on one tree, where melee oriented or thief characters would automatically level up weapon skills, armor skills, blocks and the like. This means that you can end up with a relatively low level character that has maxed destruction early on, and the damage is ridiculously good considering the health pools of the hostiles at that stage of the game.

 

The problem arises when you cap destruction and start to hybridize. Speech, sneaking, restoration, lockpicking, enchanting, blacksmithing, alchemy and the like drag your character level so high and there are no ways to better your damage dealing method at this point on.

 

This is why

• One shouldn't touch the destruction tree to fix the issue, as they would create a godlike mage in the early game and you're still discouraged to level up past that point.
  
• One should look into other trees, like speech, sneaking and restoration to add perks that help improve the damage of destruction spells (Necromage, in example), as then you would have to choose which support tree to add in there and when, without being too penalized for it.
  
• The magicka cost reduction enchants are a good place to tweak things too. It's good to have cost reductions for other schools, but change the Destruction spells mana cost enchants to be damage buffers.
  

Edited December 16, 2011 by haerual

[aaroc]

One of the things I intend to do with this mod is change the Destruction Enchants to improve damage rather than reduce magicka costs. The only things that will reduce magicka costs will be the mainline perks, to bring all the costs to roughly the same cost, barring special cases like the Master, Rune, and Cloak spells.

 

The intent there is to make Staves more appealing, because as they are now, they're basically vendor trash or something you just give to your followers to improve their arsenal. Much like a Warrior might carry around a few different enchanted weapons, you would carry around a few different staves to save yourself some mana.

 

And your suggestion doesn't really address the main problem I see with Mages. Fireball does more damage than Firebolt, so as soon as you get Fireball, Firebolt becomes mostly useless. Why should I shoot a spell that does 30 damage to one enemy when I can shoot my Area Effect spell that does 50 damage instead? As far as I'm concerned, Fireball should do less damage than Firebolt, simply because it does damage to multiple enemies at once. In order for that to be feasible, however, all my spells must gradually improve in power as my Destruction Skill improves. And I'm not talking about through perks. I'm talking about through my actual Destruction Skill. Perks should improve them further, yes, but just as your One Handed Skill increases and you do more damage with One Handed weapons, without even having to spend perks to do so, so should my magic.

 

I'm actually thinking of doing something similar with a few other shcools of magic, for example Illusion and, if it can be done, Conjuration.

 

The reduction in magicka cost to cast a spell made sense in the older TES games (even though I didn't like it then either), because you could go out and create a new spell with balanced damage and magicka cost, but since you are stuck with the predefined spells of Skyrim, it just doesn't make sense anymore.

[Ghogiel]

And your suggestion doesn't really address the main problem I see with Mages. Fireball does more damage than Firebolt, so as soon as you get Fireball, Firebolt becomes mostly useless. Why should I shoot a spell that does 30 damage to one enemy when I can shoot my Area Effect spell that does 50 damage instead?

Why should you shoot fireball at all when you can cast thunderbolt for 90?

[haerual]

And your suggestion doesn't really address the main problem I see with Mages. Fireball does more damage than Firebolt, so as soon as you get Fireball, Firebolt becomes mostly useless. Why should I shoot a spell that does 30 damage to one enemy when I can shoot my Area Effect spell that does 50 damage instead? As far as I'm concerned, Fireball should do less damage than Firebolt, simply because it does damage to multiple enemies at once. In order for that to be feasible, however, all my spells must gradually improve in power as my Destruction Skill improves. And I'm not talking about through perks. I'm talking about through my actual Destruction Skill. Perks should improve them further, yes, but just as your One Handed Skill increases and you do more damage with One Handed weapons, without even having to spend perks to do so, so should my magic.

Yeah, I'm all for this. There are already too few spells to begin with so anything that makes earlier level spells more useful is good. So yeah, all the spell cost reductions should be taken away so that the magicka cost is the big thing limiting the power of major spells.

[pantherfern]

The idea I originally had after playing for a bit kind of ties in with this. Skill increase should be represented by, shockingly, an increase in that skill. Currently somebody at 100 destruction does the same firebolt damage as 20 skill, which makes zero sense. My initial thought to remedy this is a mechanic where the skill level is added as a % to the damage.

 

So at 20 skill your firebolt does 120% base damage and at 100 skill it does 200%.

 

The same idea could be carried across other schools so conjured things, "-flesh" armors increase by more, illusions last longer, healing is more potent.

 

I don't know if it would require the CK or not but I wouldn't imagine that base % increase across the board in each school would be terribly difficult. But, not being a modder I could be wrong.

[aaroc]

My basic idea is to, if I can, make spells do a certain percentage of your destruction skill, for example, at skill level 15, firebolt would do 15 damage and cost 10 mana or something, but at skill level 100 your firebolt would do 100 damage and still cost 10 mana, preferably more.

 

The thing is, I want you to invest in the perks, so someone with an unperked destruction skill would do much less damage with their spells than someone with a perked Destruction Skill. Balanced Magicka by mysty does this already, in a way, but as far as I can tell, without the natural increase in damage through destruction skill. It's all through perks.

 

Someone with a Destruction Skill of 100 with no perks should definitely do less damage with worse mana efficiency than someone with 100 destruction fully perked. I want all spells to be viable at 'end-game' because they all have different functions and situational uses, but at the same time, I don't want to trivialize the cost of the spells. You should still want to invest your level-up stat into Magicka most of the time. Also, I want the higher level spells to be not feasibly cast by low skill players. For example, since Fire Cloak is an Adept Level spell, you shouldn't be able to just travel to the north coast where Yisra's burnt corpse is and take the Fire Cloak Spell book there and be able to cast it effectively at skill level 15, with no perks.

 

I think to combat this, I could make the Apprentice through Master Level spell cost a whole lot, but investing into the perks leading up to Master Destruction will reduce the cost of them to something manageable. Maybe instead of decreasing the cost of spells, raising your destruction skill will not only increase the potency, but the spell cost as well, but by a smaller margin or something, and spendig points in the Master Destruction line of perks will reduce the cost of spells, thereby increasing a Pure Mage's resource efficiency. Maybe something like this:

 

Flames, skill level 15, no perks: 7 damage per second, 12 mana per second

 

Flames, skill level 100, no perks: 50 damage per second, 30 mana per second

 

Flames, skill level 100, master Destruction: 50 damage per second, 15 mana per second

 

IN this case, the base mana cost of Flames would be 10, and that cost would increase by 2% per Destruction skill (for a total of 200% increased cost at skill level 100) and it would deal half your destruction skill per second. Investing in the Master Destruction line of perks would ultimately reduce the cost of flames by 50% (base 5, plus 2% per level, or 5+10=15 at skill level 100). This, of course, is just a possible model. Basically, I want to increase Damage, mana cost, and mana efficiency as skill level increases, and then improve mana efficiency further with perks. IN addition, I think either increasing the mana cost or decreasing the damage done while wearing armor is a good idea.

 

For Illusion Spells, since they also have different functions, Like Fury is long range single target, Frenzy is Long range Area of Effect, and Mayhem is Area of Effect around the player, I want to scale the levels that they affect, rather than their duration or magicka cost based on Illusion skill. I'm not sure how easy/difficult this would be. Alteration, I think, would remain largely unchanged. I actually really like mysty's model for Destruction spells in her(?) Balanced Magicka Mod

[dem0nz]

This is already done, apart from the damage normalization between novice to master spells to make them situational. Take a look at Auto Magic Scaling. Damage scales to the level of Destruction and you can customize how other attributes affect the damage of Destruction by adjusting the weight of each attribute. Which pretty much means you will continue to gain damage when leveling other schools of magic (or any other attribute in the game). This fixes the damage being poor later in the game or when going hybrid from the get go. Pure low level mages however are more powerful than vanilla.