kryptopyr

I think this is a pretty nice idea, and I have to agree that there must be other ways available to learn enchantments then simply destroying already enchanted items. One way to approach this might be to create a new weapon or armor item, give it the appearance of a book, and add the enchantment directly to it. Then you would "disenchant" the book to learn the effect in the same way you'd disenchant a piece of armor.

I think regeneration abilities are typically controlled by the race properties, and in vanilla Skyrim, I believe that all the playable races should have the same regeneration rates. There are regen multipliers, though, especially for combat regen, which I think are controlled by special perks, so this might vary the regen rates among different NPCs, particularly if added by different mods. Actually there aren't any generic Ravage Health poisons available in the vanilla game. It's an alchemy effect that is available on ingredients, but not available as a ready-made potion (another oversight that I'd like to fix). Thanks for the help. I'll see what I can pull together for the Silence effect. I'm also a fan of having different options and tactics available, and I'm hoping to add a couple of other effects as well that will hopefully further expand the range and usefulness of the alchemy poisons.

There are a lot of things about alchemy that I feel aren't balanced very well. I've kinda been working on a mod to fix a number of those issues, so if I can come up with some good alternatives, then I'll just include them along with the other changes I'm planning to make. I actually started thinking about these poisons while looking into adding Silence as a new effect. Then I realized that the existing effects weren't really doing all that much, and instead of adding a new effect, I started thinking that maybe I just needed to rework the existing ones. I'm not sure if I'll be able to use the exact same Ravage mechanic or if I'll need to add a scripted effect to accomplish the "set to 0", but it's nice to hear that there's some support for the idea. So if Ravage Stamina and Ravage Magicka were changed to a "force to 0" effect (Ravage Health would obviously need to remain more or less as it is), any thoughts on what would need to happen to the Damage Regen effects, if anything? I feel that they're somewhat redundant if Ravage is changed to a Silence effect. While they are doing different things (setting max stat to 0 vs setting stat regen rate to 0), the end result is almost identical. The only difference is that the Damage Regen still leaves enemies with a full stat pool to burn through first before they start running into problems with no regeneration. Presumably potions of restore & fortify regen would still work to counteract the Damage Regen (though I haven't tested that), while such methods shouldn't work for Ravage/Silence. Is it worth having both effects? I do think that using Weakness to Magic poisons when accompanied by a mage follower might be a fairly effective strategy. Something I was considering given that for whatever reason I generally end up with a mage for my primary follower.

I'm honestly not sure what the best way to track enemy status is. That's one of the reasons it's been a bit frustrating to try to test the effectiveness of these poisons. I can test what exactly the effects do pretty easily (make a potion with the effect, then have my character drink it), but testing it in actual combat situations is a bit more muddled. Damage Magicka Regen seems to be the most powerful of the magicka poisons. I can definitely see a difference when using one of those poisons. The other magicka poisons seem more subtle, at least until you get a fairly high-powered one, but even then unless it's used against a relatively low-level opponent, I just haven't noticed much impact. I've been trying to do all my testing without any mods that affect enemy stats, but of course any mods that alter enemies are probably just going to make the situation worse. I've been wondering if it wouldn't be better to convert Ravage Magicka into a Silence effect. The Silence effect from Oblivion pretty much acted like a very strong Ravage Magicka effect, which instead of varying in magnitude, would always drop magicka to 0 for a scaled duration of time. This would certainly make Ravage Magicka into a much stronger effect, but I worry that this would simply be duplicating something that can already be achieved (to a somewhat lesser effect) with Damage Magicka Regen. Similarly, I wonder if changing Ravage Stamina so that it would always force Stamina to 0 and scaling the duration of the effect would be a better way to handle it? I think if Stamina is truly forced to 0, then this would prevent all power attacks for the duration of the effect. Due to the way the Ravage effect works by decreasing the maximum stamina, natural regeneration wouldn't occur while the poison was in effect, nor would foods or other potions that restore stamina or increase stamina regeneration.

I've played with characters who were fairly strong in alchemy, but I've never really focused much on creating or using poisons. Recently I've been looking at some of the different alchemy effects, and I have a few questions about poisons. I'm hoping I can get some feedback or suggestions from some of you who might have more experience using these poisons in the game. If you're familiar with these effects and understand how they work, then you can ignore the next few paragraphs (in fact, I'll just stick them in a spoiler for tidiness). However, since there does seem to be a fair bit of confusion online about how these effects actually work, I'll go ahead and take the time to clarify them before going further. Balanced properly, the four different poison effects seem okay with regard to Health: Damage Health deals permanent damage over a short duration (modded to add duration); Ravage Health decreases max health instantly but only temporarily; and Lingering Damage Health does permanent damage over a longer stretch of time (modded to increase duration and magnitude). My question mostly concerns the Damage, Ravage, and Lingering Damage effects as they apply to Magicka and Stamina. Is there much difference between these effects as they apply in game? Does a Lingering Damage Magicka or a Lingering Damage Stamina poison have any noticeable effect on enemies? Even with the slightly higher magnitudes and longer durations that I see in some mods, it just seems as though most enemies are going to make up for this with their normal regeneration rates and, at best, the Lingering Damage would simply counter their regeneration (making it essentially another Damage Stamina Regen poison). What effect does Damage Staimina and/or Ravage Stamina have? Given that in the vanilla game power attacks only require 1 point of stamina, partially reducing an enemies stamina seems fairly pointless. Even with some of the combat mods that adjust the way stamina works, it seems that unless you really manage to seriously ramp up the magnitude of this poison, it's not going to have much noticeable effect. Likewise Ravage Magicka seems like a weaker counterpart to Damage Magicka, neither of which seem very useful unless you stack several of the higher magnitude versions. Theoretically, both of these should be limiting the number and/or type of spells that enemies are using, forcing them to use fewer or less powerful spells until their magicka recovers. I'm not sure I've ever noticed this in game, which might be more of a reflection on the limited number of spells that most enemy mages are given. Anyway, I'm hoping someone can shed a bit of light on these effects. Maybe I'm not using them correctly, or haven't found the right situation for them. However, after playing around with the effects for a bit and figuring out exactly what they do, I feel that there's a lot of redundancy and ineffectiveness in these poisons, and I'm wondering if there might not be a way to rework these effects to make them better and more useful.

I can certainly understand the desire to avoid conflicts, but I don't think creating duplicates is generally a very good practice for doing this. Can you imagine if every mod author did the same thing to try to avoid making conflicting changes to the vanilla records? Sure, it would probably reduce the number of patches, but we'd end up with, for example, 20 different iron armors, many with slightly differing stats, keywords, names, etc. And this sort of thing isn't nearly as easy to resolve with TES5Edit or other tools. At any rate, it is what it is. Fortunately, there aren't many modders that have chosen to take that route.

The additional racial support was my first thought, but why not simply add the new armor addon records to the existing armors? This would have avoided duplication, the need to create all the new tempering recipes, and would have made patching for other mods much easier. Actually, I can probably answer my own question: this would have made patches more essential, since SIC would be directly overwriting changes to the armors made by other mods, so I suspect it was probably done to avoid this. Still, it makes patching for consistency's sake much more tiresome. I think ipmlj's suggestion to flag most of the armors as non-playable is probably the easiest solution for patching, particularly if many of the armors are already flagged this way (I didn't think this was the case, though). Armors for ghosts and specters are almost always marked as unplayable in the vanilla game (since the armor is supposedly spectral as well, and it would lose this appearance if dropped), and armors for goblins and other odd creatures could conceivably be too mis-shapened for the majority of the playable races to wear. If many of the new armors are being used by humainoid skeletons, though, then this still isn't an ideal solution.

Does anyone know WHY he did this? I assume there is some reason that necessitated it, but even beyond all the patching this requires, I find it a bit annoying to have all those duplicate items in the game.

I have permission to edit and upload replacement esp files, but not replacement meshes.

I'd like to see the with/without moles and scars options. I haven't really tried the scars, but I definitely prefer the texture without the moles. I think the moles look good, but when every female in the game sports the exact same set, it seems a bit weird.

I wasn't aware of the "resetinventory" command; good to know. You can also use "disable" then "enable" in the console to reset NPCs.

@redirishlord In your case Immersive Armors might be overriding the changes that AMB-CA makes to Jon. This wouldn't necessarily show up in TES5Edit since IA uses scripts to make a lot of its changes.

Couriers? I'll have to check what outfit they use, but off hand I didn't think that any of my files touched on the courier. Jon Battle Born could well be due to the AMB Content Addon not having the proper tags, though. That could also be why I haven't noticed any problems in my game since I've added the tags to my current working version. Edit: does MFG Console also detect changes made to an NPC via script or through the use of a quest alias?

You called? I haven't experienced the issue myself, but I know that it can sometimes be a problem with mods altering NPC outfits. I didn't think it occurred with new games, though, so I don't have any immediate suggestions on why that would be happening. My first thought would be to carefully check the bashed patch to make sure that all the related clothing/outfit lists are getting merged properly. AMB Content Addon doesn't have bash tags (it will when updated) so that might be causing some problems. Which NPCs are appearing naked? If it keeps happening to the same handful of NPCs, then that would help narrow the search and strongly suggests it's a specific conflict.

100% in favor of the combined patch. Even if they freeze development on the separate patches, those patches already contain fixes for the more serious bugs, so anyone who doesn't have all of the DLC will still be able to benefit by using the current versions of the separate patches. It sounds like some of the larger bugs that still exist can only be addressed by creating a combined patch. As the DLCs/Skyrim Legendary continues to be on sale an ever increasing majority of players will be using all of the official content, and the unofficial patch would best serve the community by fixing the bugs that are present when using all of the official content.

You might take a look at https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/54375/? and https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/54378/? I haven't personally tried either of these in game, though at some point I would like to do so. I have taken a look at the script from PRUFEI, and I think the method the author is using looks really promising. The downside is that it takes a bit more work to add all of the necessary conditions to the recipes.

The circlet meshes included in CCF are simply copies of the fixed meshes from USKP. I'm pretty sure that the Gemling Queen circlets also use those fixed meshes as a base, so you aren't losing anything by overwriting CCF with the Gemling Queen meshes and you're gaining Saerileth's beautiful gemstones.

I don't have any idea where they sourced the dialogue from. I assume all the dialogue is using existing assets, but I don't know if the lines were used somewhere else or not.

Thanks for pointing out that Serana mod. It doesn't have any conflicts with what I've done. From what I can tell, it focuses on adding more follower and world reaction comments to Serana, whereas I've just restored existing quest dialogue. No overlaps whatsoever, but it was worth checking.

"Lad of the Lake" is actually correct. This is how the location is listed in the Prima guide.

Force me to? Well, not exactly. AFAIK, all of the changes were fairly minor, non-critical, things so I don't feel like I need to rush new updates out in order to fix some sort of game-breaking conflict. But there were a number of changes that do create conflicts and really should be forwarded, so I suspect I'll be updating them all again soon.

Thanks. Oddly, it's not something I've really had requested, which I find a bit strange given it's really one of the worst offenders in terms of being forced along a specific path. It's certainly bugged the hell out of me for awhile now and prevented me from ever trying out the vampire side of the Dawnguard quest. I've actually resurrected a lot of existing dialogue that was either cut due to the way the quest progressed (dialogue where Tolan meets Serana after you bring her back to Fort Dawnguard), or just wasn't set up correctly (an entire branch of the dialogue tree when you first encounter Serana was missing). So even if you play through the quest like normal, there's a still few nice dialogue additions for you.

I know, I know. *hangs head in shame* Here I finally get a bunch of my mods updated, then a week later they decide to update the unofficial patches. Gah.

Which weapons from the AMB Content Addon conflict with True Weapons? Also, I'm not sure the conflicts are as serious as you think. You'll mainly end up with inconsistencies, but as long as the other mod's author properly balanced their mod, then that balance should remain intact. This is because every weapons mod that I'm aware of that adds weapons to the leveled lists (I'm sure there's probably a few exceptions, but I have a fair number of mods installed to compare to), does so by adding weapons to the primary LItem... lists, not the Sublits. If they add the weapons to the primary LItem lists then this won't create any imbalances. What you'll end up with are possible inconsistencies, though. For example, Immersive Weapons adds a new Orcish Greatsword. It gets added to the leveled lists at Lvl 6. Presumably, this orcish greatsword has been given stats consistent with a vanilla orcish greatsword, which means it's significantly weaker than the WAF True Weapons version. However, it will still show up at Lvl 6 because that's where it was placed in the leveled lists, so even though it's stats might be inconsistent with other Orcish weapons, it will still be balanced according to those stats. Immersive Weapons and Heavy Armory are the two major mods that I'm aware of that add in variations of the existing weapon types. There's already a True Weapons patch for Heavy Armory, and I'm working on building one for Immersive Weapons. As it currently stands, with IW and WAF-Complete Plus/True Weapons there will be some inconsistencies, but no real imbalances.

Yeah, I had completely forgotten that there was an articles tab on the front page. If there are articles listed for a mod, then I'll often read them before installing/updating, but I've never really paid much attention to those on the front page.