Custom Spell Time Issue

[Striker879]

Unless you are content to wear only clothing that has zero armor rating you will have a penalty to your spell effectiveness. That penalty will go down as your proficiency in your armor type goes up (max effectiveness while wearing even one piece of armor 95%). You can achieve 85 armor rating (the maximum in the vanilla game) by enchanting clothing with either shield or elemental shield effects. For example blacksmith's pant enchanted with a transcendent shock shield sigil stone plus a dark shirt enchanted with a transcendent frost shield sigil stone and doeskin shoes enchanted with a transcendent fire shield sigil stone combined with a black hood enchanted with a shield transcendent sigil stone gives 85 armor rating plus 25% shield on each of the three elemental damages (and you haven't even touched the two ring slots yet). The bonus ... your tank of a mage has 100% spell effectiveness and never needs to repair armor while enjoying just as much protection as that paladin clanking around in all that heavy armor who can get max 95% spell effectiveness. All vanilla, not one 'god item' cheat used.

[Theme57]

So the higher my armor rank for both armors the more effective the spell is.

[Striker879]

Correct, but only up to 95% when your armor skill in any armor you're wearing is above 50% for all types of armor worn. If you wear all heavy armor (head to toe and all your fingers) then if your heavy armor skill is 51% and your light armor skill is 40% your spell effectiveness will be 95%. Put on a single piece of light armor in that example (a pair of leather gloves) and your spell effectiveness will drop (probably to about 90% with the skills above). If your skill in both heavy and light armor are 51% or more your can wear whatever you desire and still maintain 95% spell effectiveness.

 

The reason that time is effected for bound armor is because the only other alternative would be to reduce the armor rating of the bound armor. Bethesda chose to reduce the time of the spell instead. An elemental damage or health restore spell is reduced in effectiveness by reducing the damage done or healing done ( 50 points fire damage would become 47.5 points at 95% spell effectiveness ... same for 50 points healing). Even if those spell are x points over so many seconds the reduction is in points of damage/healing instead of time (time is typically a shorter amount in those spells so instead of 10 points fire damage for 1.9 seconds you get 9.5 points for 2 seconds ... which is why your restore health lasted longer than your bound spell).

 

- Edit - Correction ... according to the UESP wiki article about spell effectiveness (found here, look at the Tips section at the bottom of the page) there are no fractional values for either spell magnitude or time. Both are rounded down.

Edited January 24, 2013 by Striker879

[Theme57]

Well sounds like I should rank up my heavy and light armors haha.