Vampire stat boost remover?

[Necrolesian]

Short version: Is there a mod like Level Up Birthsign Remover for vampire attribute/skill gains?

 

Longer version: Okay, so in vanilla Morrowind birthsign attribute boosts (like The Lady's +25 Endurance) are implemented as permanent abilities. The downside of this is that the boosted attribute can only be raised to 100, so if you get really powerful, the boost is essentially wasted.

 

The mod Level Up Birthsign Remover solves this problem by temporarily removing the ability upon level up. This allows you to increase the base value of the attribute to 100, so, for example, your max Endurance with The Lady would be 125. This way the birthsign boosts are never wasted even at high levels.

 

Vampire attribute/skill boosts are also implemented as abilities, with the same downside as the birthsign boosts. For example if becoming a vampire boosts your Strength from 60 to 80, you can only increase the boosted value by leveling a further 20 points to 100, which means that at high levels the attribute gain was wasted.

 

A workaround to this is to wait to become a vampire until all of the attributes and skills that will be boosted are at 100 (and so for example Strength would then be boosted to 120), but that's a long time to wait, especially if you want to play through the game as a vampire, and if you don't plan on curing your character, you'll end up wasting the stat boosts.

 

Is there a mod that temporarily removes the vampire stat boosts on level up, like Level Up Birthsign Remover does for birthsign boosts? If not, I might be able to figure out how to do that in the Construction Set, at least for attributes (skills are a different matter).

 

There's a mod called Vampire Curse that takes a different approach by making the vampire stat boosts curses instead of abilities, but this has additional downsides. And Morrowind Code Patch can uncap attributes and skills generally, but this is pretty unbalanced I think.

 

Also, the skill boosts are an additional complication. The permanent abilities increasing the skills have the result of significantly reducing your maximum level, if any of the skills are major/minor skills. And of course the max for the boosted skill value is 100, unless the skill was high enough when you became a vampire that it's over 100 afterwards (in which case it can't be trained anymore). I don't know if it's even possible to make it so that you train skills as though they were at their base value, but they still have their permanent ability boost.

[Necrolesian]

Okay, I did some more investigating on this issue. That Vampire Curse mod solves the problem (allows me to raise skills and increase attributes on level up as though they were the unfortified values, rather than the fortified values), but it adds a new once a day spell for vampires to restore all attributes that I think is pretty unbalanced.

 

The only reason Vampire Curse adds that new spell is to compensate for the fact that you can't fully restore a damaged attribute that's also being fortified. Morrowind Code Patch (mostly) fixes that problem, so I thought I could just edit that mod and remove the new spell and scripts that it adds so all it does is make the vampire abilities curses.

 

But nope, that doesn't work. That MCP fix works when an attribute is under a constant effect fortify enchantment from equipment, for example, but it doesn't work when the source of the fortify effect is a curse. In that case, it's still not possible to fully restore the damaged attributes.

 

Can anyone think of a way around this problem? Right now all I can think of is to use the original Vampire Curse mod with its unbalanced restore spell, or not use it and let the vampire boosts remain abilities (with the problem regarding raising skills/attributes described above). Grr!

[Necrolesian]

Okay after yet further poking around, it's possible to basically do what I want after all. The skill gains can be changed to curses, allowing training to work based on the base value (and the player is almost guaranteed to never be subject to a damage skill effect unless a mod adds it). The attribute gains can be left as abilities, but a script similar to the one in Level Up Birthsign Remover can remove them on sleeping and readd them after, so base attributes can be raised to the cap. Phew.